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27 July 2012 | Olympic.org

New Olympic medal app at London 2012

Sports fans keen to follow all the action at the Olympic Games in London now have access to a free Olympic alert app that will tell them when specific medals are won in London. The official Olympic Medal Alert App tells users whenever their favourite teams or athletes win or when a medal is awarded in their favourite sports categories. The smartphone app is free and simple to use. Produced by the International Olympic Committee, it’s available on the iTunes app store, via Google Play as an Android app, and from Olympic.org as a downloadable desktop widget. Users simply open the app and register their mobile phone or email details plus details of what they want to receive medal alerts for – whether it’s an individual athlete, team, sport or National Olympic Committee. During the Olympic Games, the Olympic Medal Alert app will tell users instantly via email or text alert when a medal is won in one of the fields they’ve specified. In addition, it will give users a link to the website of their relevant rights-holding broadcaster so they can check out videos, images and stories on all the Olympic action in their own language.

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27 July 2012 | Wired

Google attacks Cable and Telcos with new TV service

Kansas City residents learned on Thursday that the first high-speed citywide network built by Google will bring them not just super-fast Internet, but also full-featured cable-style TV service. Google said in a live announcement that the neighbourhoods that rally the most interest will be the first to get hooked up to Google’s fiber-optic lines, which the company says will offer 1 gigabit-per-second downloads and uploads — far faster (Google says 100 times) than the typical broadband connections now in most U.S. homes. The high speed means Google can compete directly with cable and satellite TV companies. For $120 per month for both TV and internet, residents will get a set-top box that Google says will deliver hundreds of HD channels and tens of thousands of on-demand movies and shows. The service even comes with Google’s Nexus 7 tablet, which will serve as the set-top box’s remote.

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27 July 2012 | journalism.co.uk

Citizen journalism at the Olympics

Citizen journalism site Blottr has launched a channel to encourage people to upload and share their photographs and videos of the Olympics. 'The People's Olym-PICS went live July 25th and already includes photos of the opening ceremony rehearsal and preparations. Blottr is offering to print the best photo from each contributor and turn it into a refrigerator magnet that it will give to those who submitted the pictures "free of charge as a keepsake and memory of the games". Blottr is also planning to showcase reports of the games, including "profiles of participating athletes from the smaller, less prominent countries in the world". Blottr is by no means the only news outlet gathering user-generated content from the Olympics, with local, national and international news sites and agencies launching similar projects. Citizen media agency Citizenside, which pays contributors for any photos used by media organisations, is also gathering and displaying photo submissions. Elsewhere the Washington Post is asking users of the video sharing app Socialcam to contribute videos.

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27 July 2012 | The New York Times

Facebook shares plummet in earnings letdown

On Thursday Facebook lost 18 percent of it's stock value causing investors to flee, even as Facebook Chief Executive, Mark Zuckerberg, spoke of the potential growth prospects to industry analysts. To date, Facebook shares have lost a total of 37 percent of their value. Chief Financial Officer, David Ebersman stated, "Obviously we're disappointed about how the stock is traded, but the important thing for us is to stay focused on the fact that we're the same company now as we were before." With nearly one billion users worldwide, Facebook is facing a slowdown in growth. Analysts speculate that the real issue is whether the company can keep users glued to the site and profit from them by offering targeted advertisements, particularly on mobile devices.

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27 July 2012 | The Guardian

TalkTalk launches service to revolutionise pay TV

TalkTalk has pushed the button on its long-awaited television service, promising to revolutionise pay TV. The company unveiled plans for a budget deal to compete against BSkyB, Virgin Media and BT for the 7.5 million Freeview households who have, so far, not been tempted to spend money on subscription TV. At the same time, as the budget pay TV market moves towards centre stage, BSkyB revealed it intends to spend £30m on launching its new internet service Now TV in the next 12 months. Announcing record pretax profits up 17% to £1.2bn, Sky said that Now TV would offer movies, sport and entertainment channels on desktop computers, mobile devices and games consoles, and its arrival would be accompanied by a massive marketing campaign to take on rivals including LoveFilm and Netflix.

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27 July 2012 | BBC

Twitter hit by technical fault on eve of Olympics

Parts of Twitter became inaccessible a day before thousands of fans are expected to start tweeting about the Olympic games. The Twitter.com site was unreachable for almost an hour and continued to suffer intermittent faults thereafter. In a status message posted after the fault was cleared, the micro-blogging service apologised for the problems. It said it was caused by a simultaneous failure in its main data centre and the one supposed to provide back-up. Twitter said it was investing heavily in its data centres to avoid such falling victim to another "infrastructural double-whammy". During the interruption, Twitter was still accessible via its mobile site and other applications. Twitter is expected to be one of the main social networks to be used by both fans and athletes during the Games.

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