Natal. À primeira vista parece que falamos da quadra que se aproxima, mas não é. Talvez tenha sido a quadra que nos inspirou a voltar ao tema, mas este Natal é mesmo o da Xbox, o projecto que quer abolir os comandos da experiência de interacção com a consola.

A Microsoft criou um site para explicar o conceito – apresentado pela primeira vez a meados do ano – e aos poucos tem-no povoado de vídeos que mostram várias experiências de utilização.

À boa maneira americana já várias caras conhecidas foram arregimentadas para experimentar o Natal e mostrar o seu lado mais…descontraído!

Image by opk via FlickrAs autoridades espanholas desmantelaram um site que disponibilizava para download mais de 30 mil cópias não autorizadas de conteúdos vários, entre videojogos, filmes de alta definição, documentários, séries, música e aplicações informáticas.

O acesso aos serviços prestados pelo site exigia um convite por parte de um utilizador já registado, assim como o pagamento de uma mensalidade de 20 euros, escreve o El Mundo.

A polícia espanhola estima que os reponsáveis possam ter angariado mais de 75 mil euros, só nos primeiros seis meses do ano, mas o desenvolvimento da investigação deverá acrescentar mais informação.

Um dado que não poderá ser apurado com precisão diz respeito ao número de downloads feitos a partir do serviço, apesar das estimativas das autoridades apontarem para um “volume enorme”, já que, para assegurar a tarefa, eram utilizados oito servidores, alojados no Reino Unido, Holanda e França.

Até agora a investigação resultou na detenção de dois individuos, havendo um menor implicado.

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Last week I met with Stephan Uhrenbacher, the founder and chairman of Qype, the European startup which competes most directly with Yelp in local reviews and listings. He revealed to me some exclusive information about where Qype is now.

In Jan 2009 Qype had 8m uniques across Europe. As with Yelp, Qype members evaluate businesses, places or services such as bars, restaurants, stores, petrol stations, nurseries, doctors, pet shops or sports clubs. Today it has 17.7m uniques and the split is now: 5 million in germany, 4 million in the UK and 4 million in France. Spain is on 1m uniques. It now has reviews of 450,000 businesses in Europe from over 50,000 cities. Currently Qype has more than 10,000 businesses each month that sign up across whole network.

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Zemanta, a service that helps bloggers find related content as they write, launches a new version of its service later today. As well as a general makeover designed to make its widget lighter and faster, the big change is that Zemanta is opening up its recommendation engine to no longer just include so-called ‘professional media’ but also content from its community of users. This, says the company, will create a level playing field, giving community content the same chance of being featured as more established sources as long as it’s deemed relevant. However, it’s not yet clear if all community content will make it into Zemanta’s index.

For those that do, however, being regularly featured as a ‘related content’ source could drive significant traffic for a small blog, and presumably that’s Zemanta’s gamble. While it risks diluting the quality of those links, it gives joe-blogger another reason to keep using the service.

On that note, the service offers stats to its users showing how many links they’ve received each month and where they were published.

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