Blogging

Oh, no! They can't get Twitter SMS updates anymore!

(Credit: Second City Television)

This can’t be good. Just a few months after restricting its U.K.-based text-messaging number due to cost issues, Twitter has done the same for Canada.

The microblogging service has cut outbound SMS messages for the folks up north, citing “unexpected changes in our billing.” Costs had been doubling for a few months.

Basically, this means Canadian Twitter users will be able to send numbers to its short code, 21212, but not receive them that way. They can instead use the Twitter mobile site or one of many third-party mobile apps to see what their friends are “tweeting,” but that requires a mobile data plan. Text messages do not.

“There is a realistic, scalable SMS solution for Canada (and the rest of the world),” a post on Twitter’s blog read. “We’re working on that and will post more details on the Twitter blog as we make progress.”

Twitter, which allegedly rejected a buyout offer from Facebook, has raised a significant amount of venture funding but has yet to produce a business plan.

Source:
Twitter: No more outbound texts for Canada

Ektron is getting some love… again. The Web CMS vendor has made it to the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing private companies for 2008. This marks Ektron’s second consecutive appearance on Inc.’s annual list – this year, at # 1,607.

Go here to see the original:
The Accolades Keep Building for Ektron

Facebook users in the U.S. and Canada can no longer access Scrabulous, the faux-Scrabble game that quickly became one of the most popular applications on its developer platform.

This was done independently on behalf of the Scrabulous creators, a Facebook representative told CNET News.com in an e-mail Tuesday. “In response to a legal request from Hasbro, the copyright and trademark holder for Scrabble in the U.S. and Canada, the developers of Scrabulous have suspended their application in the U.S. and Canada until further notice,” the e-mail explained.

The game’s disappearance comes in the wake of a lawsuit filed last week by Hasbro, the game manufacturer that owns the rights to Scrabble in the United States and Canada. In the suit, Hasbro named as defendants the creators of Scrabulous–India-based brothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, and their company, RJ Softwares. The suit asked Facebook to pull the game, citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and asked the Agarwallas to close their Scrabulous.com site.

That hasn’t happened completely, though. Outside the U.S. and Canada, the rights to Scrabble are owned by game company Mattel, so Hasbro doesn’t have jurisdiction there. Both game companies have released separate official Scrabble games for the Facebook platform. Meanwhile, the Scrabulous.com site, which existed before the Facebook application, is still working just fine.

Hasbro representatives were not immediately available for comment Tuesday.

When Hasbro initially filed its suit last week, Facebook responded in this way: “Over the past year, Facebook has tried to use its status as neutral platform provider to help the parties come to an amicable agreement,” the statement sent to CNET News.com read. “We’re disappointed that Hasbro has sought to draw us into their dispute; nevertheless, we have forwarded their concerns to Scrabulous and requested their appropriate response.”

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had said in speeches that he was a fan of Scrabulous. That was before Hasbro started making it clear earlier this year that it wanted the game taken down.

Accessing the Scrabulous application on Facebook now leads to a message that states, “Scrabulous is disabled for U.S. and Canadian users until further notice” and allows members to submit their e-mail addresses to the Scrabulous creators to receive updates.

This post was updated at 7:31 a.m. PDT with comment from Facebook.

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‘Scrabulous’ disappears from Facebook after Hasbro suit

Google’s popular free 411 service GOOG-411 (1-800-4664-411) is now available in Canada. The toll-free directory service that uses Google results to give people phone numbers and addresses of local businesses launched in the States back in April of last year. Since then it’s added an SMS maps service that will send you a link to the WAP-friendly map. The computerized operator has also since been enhanced, and now has a voice closer to the all-seeing HAL 9000 seen in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 instead of the Microsoft Sam-like one from before.

With the updated version the real work is not just in the sound of the voice, it’s also in the service’s capability to understand what people are saying. To that end, Google’s official blog post on it says the voice recognition engine was tuned to better understand some of the Canadian dialects:

Although English is spoken in both the U.S. and Canada, there are enough differences between the way it’s spoken in the two countries that we engineered GOOG-411 especially for Canadian English. We incorporated some Canadianisms [sic] such as “eh,” “Traw-na,” “Cal-gry,” and, of course, “aboot.” We also took into account geographical differences. Whereas users in the U.S. are prompted for “city and state,” Canadians are asked for your “city and province.”

For the segment of French-speaking Canadians, the announcement also says an updated version of the service with support for localized French is coming soon, which might lead to international variations for large markets in Europe.

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Aboot time: GOOG-411 comes to Canada