• Sure it’s a Cool Business Card, but try fitting it in your wallet? The Guardian U.K.
• Embrace The ‘Dwight Schrutes’ In Your Office For Better Performance Science Daily
• UFOs Spotted in East End on Google Street Views The Sun U.K.
• Murtha:“If I’m corrupt, it’s because I take care of my district” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
• Driver of Motorized Bar Stool Crashes in DWI News Talk 610 WTVN
  

These are symptoms of OMD, obsessive mobile disorder, and the dread disease CPA, continuous partial attention, in which victims come to believe that life via mobile might be more interesting than life right in front of them.

The article tells the story of Adam Ward, a 24-year-old postgraduate student from London, who was afflicted recently when he started going out with a new girlfriend. “Yep, it’s true,” he said. “We went out on a date and I decided to update my friends every few minutes about how it was going.”

Using his Blackberry, Ward regularly posted his thoughts and observations to his Twitter account as the evening progressed. Didn’t his date notice or object? “Nobody knows you are Twittering, you could just be writing a text,” he said, as if the latter were normal romantic behaviour. “And to be honest, I’m pretty much on my phone every few minutes anyway.”*

As phones offering calls, texts, e-mails, internet and more proliferate, OMD and CPA are spreading like flu. “When I first got the phone, people were really annoyed,” said Ward. “I’d be sitting at dinner and it would keep going off. I had to put it on silent because even if it was on vibrate it was annoying for others.

But as more people get them, they’re not so bothered. It’s becoming the norm – “sorry, can you hold a minute, someone’s messaging me.” It is only when you are repeatedly on the receiving end of OMD or CPA that you begin to understand how infuriating it can be.

Read the complete article here: Can’t Talk, I’m on the Phone

* In case you’re wondering how Adam’s date worked out … despite his constant attention to his Blackberry, apparently they did make a connection.  In the morning he Tweeted: “Success!”

BizSpark provides fast, easy access to current full-featured Microsoft development tools and production licenses of server products; professional technical support from Microsoft; and connections to a global community of business experts who can help guide you through the hurdles of growing your business.

Participants must be privately held, in business less than three years and have less than $1 million in annual revenue.   Companies that want to participate in BizSpark are required to be sponsored by Network Partners, such as Two Degrees.

For additional details on the program, visit http://www.microsoft.com/BizSpark. Please feel free to contact me at bizspark@2-degrees.com if you would like an enrollment invitation.

Related articles

• Microsoft BizSpark: 12,000 Startups and Growing (blogs.msdn.com)
• How Microsoft BizSpark Is Doing With Startups – And How It Can Do Better (xconomy.com)

Click here for the FriendFeed.

Click here for live conference from CNET.

You can find more CNET iPhone news coverage here.

Here’s a live blog and pics from AppScout.

Click here for a comprehensive view from Macworld.

Click here for a few last minute predictions at PC World.

For those that have been waiting …

If you read the CNET blog (see link above), you’ll see that iPhone 3.0 does includes cut and paste!

Here’s a summary of other features in iPhone 3.0 from Macworld’s iPhone Central …

Landscape orientation is coming to all key applications. Already available in Safari, when you rotate the iPod touch or iPhone sideways, the new functionality will enable you to input using a larger keyboard in Mail, Notes and SMS. It’s also good for viewing widescreen attachments.

Another big win for long-suffering iPhone users: MMS, or Multimedia Messaging Service, support. This enables you to send and receive photos, contact information (using the vCard standard, which will automatically add it to your Contact list), audio files and locations. The new Messages application not only supports MMS, but it can also forward and delete messages, either individually or multiply.

Voice Memos is a new application that enables you to use to record audio files. You can use the built-in microphone or an external microphone, edit the memo and share it by e-mail or MMS.

New calendar format support will be added in iPhone 3.0’s release — CalDAV, the format supported by Yahoo, Google, Oracle, OS X Server and others, as well as .ics, commonly used for sports schedules, national holiday lists, movies and more.

Search capabilities are being added to key applications, starting with Mail. You’ll be able to search messages, From, To and Subject and all other headers, and you can continue your search on the mail server if it’s not on the iPhone — at least for Exchange and most IMAP servers, according to Apple. You can also search in your Calendar and iPod, and search in Notes.

Spotlight search capabilities are also being added to the iPhone, so you can search iPhone-wide for a word or phrase you need to find.

Other new features include Note sync with the Mac (or PC) through iTunes, the ability to shake to shuffle your music (a feature previously seen on the newest iPod nano), Wi-Fi automatic login, stereo Bluetooth support (for devices that support the A2DP profile), YouTube account log-in, enhanced support with better keyboards for different languages, auto-fill, anti-phishing, and extended parental controls.

NOTE: You can find a preview of iPhone OS 3.0 at the Apple iPhone website later today.

Twitter seems to have gone from obscure to mainstream in about the same time it takes to send a “tweet” over the network.

Despite the fact that the three-year-old microblogging service doesn’t generate revenue — nevermind profits — there is already chatter about who might want to buy it.

However, analysts at Sanford Bernstein believe that potential acquirers for Twitter should think twice.

Whoever buys Twitter, they wrote, “will likely have to operate it at a loss in perpetuity, or until the next cool Web 2.0 social networking concept comes along and Twitter tweets no more.”

Read more here.

This world-changing technology started as a proposal by young Berners-Lee entitled “Information Management: a proposal,” which the supervisors he handed it to described as “vague, but exciting.”

They gave the go ahead and his team went about creating the global hypertext language (the “http” on web addresses and the links between pages) and came up with the first web browser.

And while those basics have not changed much in the past two decades, the web went from a mere 26 web server initially for nuclear physicists in Europe to serving 10 to the power 11 pages to over 1.5 billion users today.

According to the report, the marketplace is being dictated by consumers, who are using ever-increasing channels and platforms.

In his blog, Guy Kawasaki calls it “a must for people in any Internet business” and shares these excerpts from his favorite parts of the report”:

Trends to Watch

1. Advertisers will turn to “measurability” and “differentiation”
   in the recession.
2. Search will not be immune to the impact of the economy.
3. Social Influence Marketing will go mainstream.
4. Online ad networks will contract; open ad exchanges will expand.
5. This year, mobile will get smarter.
6. Research and measurement will enter the digital age.
7. “Portable” and “beyond-the-browser” opportunities will create new touchpoints for brands and content owners.
8. Going digital will help TV modernize.

Trends in Social Influence Marketing by Shiv Singh

1. Social media usage will result in more influence.
2. The focus will shift to influencers.
3. Top-down branding will experience growing impotence.
4. Social advertising will grow up.
5. The portable social graph will fuel marketing innovation.
6. Not just friends, but friendsters, will start to matter.
7. Social influence research will become more important than social measurement.
8. Marketers will organize around Social Influence Marketing.
9. The intranet will join the Web.
10. Your CEO will join Facebook.

Click here to download a PDF of the report (6.1MB).

I’ll be attending the New York Tech Meetup at FIT this evening.

Companies presenting will include:

• Drop.io
• foursquare
• KindlingApp
• enjoysthin.gs
• SpeakLike
• Tigerbow
• ProCompare
• and Prof. Panos Ipeirotis from NYU talking about the EconoMining project.

Ping me if you’re going to be there.

DEMO 09 wrapped up this past week, and in case you missed it you can watch videos of all the presenting companies on the conference website.

If you’re not familiar with DEMO, the conference is a showcase of emerging technologies and new products that (according to the producers) “prides itself on a reputation for consistently identifying technologies that will disrupt current markets and change how people use digital technologies.”

Unfortunately, the first presentation I saw this year was from a company called Coveroo, Inc., which makes personalized back covers for mobile phones and MP3 players.  So that can quickly dispell DEMO’s claim to innovation.

Judge for yourself and please feel free to share your comments below.

This year’s presenters included: