The two Twitter users who were arrested in Mexico for "terrorism" have been freed and the charges against them dropped.
34-year-old Maria de Jesus Bravo Pagola (@maruchibravo) and 48-year-old Gilberto Martinez Vera (@gilius_22) were two of many who retweeted a rumor that narco gangsters were killing children at a school. They were subsequently taken into custody by security forces and charged with "terrorism."
Mobile Roadie, a self-service app development platform for brands and music, launched its system in a crowded but fragmented China platform ecosystem today.
The China mobile application market is characterized by confusion right now. Already-strong local players like Tencent have launched mobile app platforms to sell apps for Android and iOS. But those platforms depend on partnerships with companies in Europe and the United States.
Mobile Roadie is tearing up that formula. It's a Western company that's letting local developers make apps for themselves.
Everything's easier in China, even managing the end of your relationship. Users of the eBay-like site Taobao managed by Alibaba are making a killing on outsourcing their breakups to complete strangers in exchange for a little bit of dosh.
You met someone and thought it would turn into a great relationship, only to be disappointed later on by the harsh reality that they just are not that into you. Well, for a few yuan (eight yuan roughly equals a dollar), you can hire someone to be the emissary for this hardest of all social missives.
Groupon's Chinese joint venture Gaopeng is not doing so well. It has apparently closed 10 offices and fired at as many as 400 employees over the past three months.
Executives of the Chicago-based daily deals company, which is planning an IPO at some point, say changes are part of a shift in strategy and that that the company will now concentrate on middle-tier and upper-tier cities rather than the smaller cities in more distance reaches of the country.
Twitter will support Chinese language in the coming weeks, according to a research report published today.
It's not clear how well that will help Chinese users in the mainland, since the service has been banned since 2009. It may not make much of a dent at all in Twitter's hopes to capture the hearts and minds of Chinese-language users of the microblogging platform.
Lashou.com could become China's first daily deals site to launch an IPO in the United States, pitting it against major challenger Groupon, according to a report by Bloomberg.
But the news could be all bluster and roadshow theatrics. The China-based site is also looking to replace Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as the IPO-backing banks, the report said. Groupon recently pushed back its impending public market launch due to swings in the market.
With mobile tech, Siemens helps torture a new generation, this time in Bahrain. Siemens was instrumental in bringing the Nazis to power and keeping them there as they murdered millions of Jews, along with Gypsies, trade unionists, leftists, homosexuals and others. Serving as one of its engines of genocide, Siemens provided the German Reich with, among other things, slave labor factories located next to concentration camps. Apparently, Siemens thinks that it has been good enough for long enough and that this Internet thing has made a sense of history a thing of the past.
Bloomberg reports that Siemens AG and its joint venture, Nokia Siemens Networks, has made it possible for Bahraini secret police to intercept and generate transcripts of text messages and other mobile communications made by protesters in that country's troubled version of the Arab Spring.
The press is one of the many casualties of Mexico's ongoing violence, in particular, the local media. Newspapers and TV stations are caught in a battle between censorship, control and threats from the drug cartels and the local governments. In some cities, people often witness shootings, grenade attacks and other violent events, but when they try to find out what happened, their local news has nothing to offer. Some newspapers have officially announced a policy of self-censorship when it comes to reporting drug war-related news.
The result for a lot of Mexicans is that local media is no longer a source of news. Some citizens claim that their local news sources are paid off by the local government in an effort to minimize the violence; others argue that it is the cartels who have bribed them; while others, especially the journalists, say they are being threatened to keep quiet. What is certain is that journalists are being murdered and their murders often go unpunished.
Siemens was instrumental in bringing the Nazis to power and keeping them there as they murdered millions of Jews, along with Gypsies, trade unionists, leftists, homosexuals and others. Serving as one of its engines of genocide, Siemens provided the German Reich with, among other things, slave labor factories located next to concentration camps. Apparently, Siemens thinks that it has been good enough for long enough and that this Internet thing has made a sense of history a thing of the past.
Oopsie.
Bloomberg reports that Siemens AG and its joint venture, Nokia Siemens Networks, has made it possible for Bahraini secret police to intercept and generate transcripts of text messages and other mobile communications made by protesters in that country's troubled version of the Arab Spring.
It's a little discussed but widely-known fact that Twitter is bigger outside the United States than it is inside its home country: it's huge in Brazil, Japan and the Philippines, for example. It turns out Twitter's pretty hot in the Spanish speaking world, too.
Rebecca Villaneda of HispanicBusiness.com points out some interesting numbers in an article tonight: the official Spanish Twitter account @Twitter_Es now has half a million more followers than the official global Twitter account in English, @Twitter. That's pretty remarkable; according to Twittercounter.com, @Twitter_Es just took the lead earlier this Summer. Twitter en español amassed its bigger pile of followers in less than half the time, too.
