The first snag many noticed was the estimated download time for the software. As more people downloaded iOS 5, some began to see prolonged wait times, sometimes up to a few hours. The problems only got worse from there.

It's not clear exactly how widespread the problem was, but the term "3200 error" briefly became a trending topic on Twitter.

Music tech blogger Elliott Van Buskirk published a detailed account of his experience trying to upgrade to iOS 5, screen shots and all. For quite some time, his iPhone was effectively bricked, wiped clean of its data, but unable to connect to Apple's servers for a proper update.

Our experience wasn't quite as riddled with error messages, but the initial software download did take an extraordinary amount of time.

This morning, Apple seems to have caught up with the demand and 9to5 Mac reports that the iOS 5 upgrade is running smoothly.

Image via Evolver.fm

The growth Kickstarter has seen is astronomical. A year ago, they were just under 300,000 backers. By last week, that number had grown by well over 200%.

So how much are people shelling out to support projects? Individually, not much. It's the aggregate spending across many backers that gets projects funded. Ninety percent of all 1.4 pledges have been for $100 or less. Three quarters have been for $50 or less.

Goldman is one of five investors in a convertible note of $350,000, ReadWriteWeb has learned and the company has confirmed. The company will use the funding to build a self-service platform, acquire more high-profile customers and complete an analytics dashboard. The existing consumer app gets high marks for responsiveness and user engagement. Can Qrank extend that formula out across the mobile web?

I'd love to see how the platform could turn a body of content from ReadWriteWeb, or from a set of known websites about a common topic, into a social quiz game.

Launched 18 months ago by Austin, Texas based Ricochet Labs, the startup has been working with Goldman as an advisor since June. Also advising the company is Ross Fubini of Kapor Capital. CEO Rodney Gibbs previously built and sold a game development company called Fizz Factor.

Goldman is widely understood to have been essential to the creation of Twitter's early product. He left the company last December and joined Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone at Obvious Corp, now an investment group for social good minded startups. Obvious's first investment was a stealth startup called Lift, which we published the first details about in August.

Goldman invested in Qrank independent of Obvious. Joining him are Sam Shank,
Trip Levis, Wild Basin Investments and Chris Sherman.

Then Redmonk analyst Michael Coté called Qrank one of Austin's most interesting startups last year, especially from a business model perspective.

The contacts list and IP address data of Jacob Appelbaum, a WikiLeaks volunteer and developer for Tor was given to the U.S. government after they requested it using a secret court order enabled by a controversial 1986 law called the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, according to the Wall Street Journal. The law allows the government to demand information from ISPs not only without a warrant, but without ever notifying the user.

According to the company's own Transparency Report, Google received 4,601 user data requests from the U.S. government in the second half of 2010, and it complied with 94% of them. Those requests include warrantless inquiries as well as those accompanied by a search warrant.

Some Troubling Implications

The idea of an ISP handing over user data to governments without the aid of a search warrant has some troubling implications for privacy advocates and civil liberties proponents.

In the WikiLeaks case, the line between advocates and participants in the transfer of data can sometimes be blurry. If in its ongoing investigation into WikiLeaks the U.S. Department of Justice is free to ask Google, Twitter or Facebook for private data without users' knowledge, who's to say they can't access private information about people who have merely expressed sympathy for the organization?

Tech companies haven't necessarily rolled over and played dead on the issue. When the DoJ made a similar WikiLeaks-related request of Twitter in December, the company succeeded in having the order unsealed, meaning it was able to notify users about the request.

Google is among a number of tech companies that are asking Congress to rethink the law in light of the unexpected ways in which the Web has evolved in the last several years.

To put things in perspective, when the iPhone 4 launched last year, it set a record for Apple by racking up 600,000 pre-orders in a single day. Even though it's not the dramatically overhauled iPhone 5 many were hoping for, Apple's latest gadget has smashed the company's previous single day sales record by more than 66 percent. In terms of first day pre-orders, the iPhone 4S is the most successful product Apple has ever released.

How iPhone 4S Enables Content Creation (and Consumption)

The iPhone 4S offers a few crucial upgrades to the users' ability to both consume and create content. Siri, the iPhone's new voice-activated "personal assistant" feature could represent a new way for people to interact with machines big and small, assuming it works as well as consumers expect it to. It's not the first time this type of sophisticated voice search has been available on smartphones; Siri was already an app before Apple bought it, Dragon Go! uses similar technology and Google offers Voice Actions for Android.

By baking it so thoroughly into the operating system of a hot consumer mobile handset, Apple could do what it does best and propel the technology toward mainstream adoption. While controlling one's phone by voice isn't necessarily in all circumstances, it can be pretty useful while driving. If things go well, we could perhaps expect it to see the technology built into larger interfaces like laptops running Mac OS X and Apple's rumored HDTV set ("Show me the latest episode of 'Two and a Half Men', Siri!")

With each iPhone release, Apple is getting more serious about content creation as well. In the iPhone 4S, the company set their sights on improving the camera significantly. The iPhone 4 is already the most widely-used camera on Flickr and it remains the only platform on which Instagram exists.

The 8 megapixel camera in the newest iPhone not only improves on the picture quality and enables better low-light photography, but it's much faster and iOS 5 will turn the phone's volume button into a shutter release, making it easier to snap a picture without jumping through hoops.

Steve Jobs' Last Hurrah

One of the many hopeful rumors floating around the Web prior to last week's launch was the possibility that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs would make an appearance at the event in Cupertino. Sadly, we now know that even if such a move would have been a good idea from a marketing standpoint (this was widely debated), an appearance by Jobs was never to be. He passed away the next day, seven years after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

Whether or not the outpouring of grief over Jobs' death contributed to the boost in iPhone sales, we'll never know, nor does it much matter. The iPhone 4S probably wasn't the last Apple product that Jobs had a hand in creating, but its success is a testament to much of what the eulogies have pointed out in the last several days.

Steve Jobs illustration by Tim Gough.

Space Lab will allow students to submit a science experiment by video, and a panel of scientists and astronauts, including Professor Stephen Hawking, will pick the best submissions. The winners' experiments will be performed aboard the International Space Station and streamed live on YouTube to the whole world.

As if getting your own science experiment performed live on the ISS for the entire world wasn't enough, there are also prizes like zero-G flights, Lenovo IdeaPad laptops, a trip to Japan to watch your experiment launched into space, or a cosmonaut training experience in Star City, Russia.

Space Lab is part of YouTube's educational channels available at YouTube.com/EDU. Teachers can visit YouTube.com/Teachers to learn how to incorporate Space Lab into their classrooms.

Read more on the official YouTube blog.

Having heard those complaints loud and clear, the company has decided to axe Qwikster altogether and keep their DVD rental service as part of the Netflix brand. This summer's price hike will stay in place, but the company hopes to stop the slow exodous of customers by capitulating on the Qwikster issue, which had proved wildly unpopular.

"It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs," Netflix CEO Reed Hastings wrote in a blog post. "This means no change: one website, one account, one password... in other words, no Qwikster."

The prospect of having two separate Websites with different login credentials and movie queues did not sit well with many customers, who have grown accustomed to managing everything from a single account with a common interface. The backlash was quite loud online, and it apparently wasn't just chatter and empty threats. Evidently, the company has been seeing enough canceled subscriptions (some of which were expected) to warrant a change of plans.

Even as the company gives in to customers' wishes and backs off of an unpopular decision, many commenters on the Netflix company blog remain disastified, many of them demanding that Hastings step down as CEO and criticizing the company's recent series of PR gaffes. Some people remain hard to please, but Netflix is hoping that this latest move will begin to turn things around.

By 2016, the number of households that do not subscribe to a traditional pay TV service will triple from what it is today. All told, 9 million households won't have cable, Magnaglobal predicts. Of those, about 4 million are what we'd call cord cutters; people who once subscribed to cable but canceled it in favor of accessing television content via the Internet using a set top box or computer hooked up to their TV sets.

The number of people who never signed up for cable is expected to double - to 5 million, from 2.5 million today - by 2016, according to the report. Meanwhile, growth of DVR ownership is expected to slow down, as the devices become less necessary in light of stream-anytime Web content sitting waiting in people's video queues.

The cable industry, having seen this coming, is preparing its own preemptive strikes. Comcast and Verizon are rumored to be bringing cable subcriptions to Microsoft's XBox 360, a gaming console that effectively doubles as a set-top box. Comcast has rolled out its own Web TV initiative called "TV Anywhere" that lets paying subscribers watch content from a variety of devices. They also bought a giant content company, just in case.

Photo by Windell Oskay

The Hangout will be held tomorrow (Saturday, October 8) at 10:30 a.m. South African time (GMT +2:00). Unfortunately for U.S. readers, that's 4:30 a.m. Eastern, 1:30 a.m. Pacific. Google SVP Vic Gundotra says the video will be available shortly thereafter. You can follow the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu on Google Plus.

The Dalai Lama is unable to attend the lecture in person, because the South African government has not responded to his application for a visa multiple times. Official acknowledgement of the Dalai Lama's legitimacy is politically sensitive, since it can be perceived as an affront to China. In refusing to grant the Dalai Lama entry, the South African government may be capitulating to that pressure. The Hangout will provide the opportunity for these two global spiritual leaders to converse remotely.

As an exiled leader, as well as a worldwide figure, the Web is an important part of the Dalai Lama's outreach. He has maintained a Twitter presence (@DalaiLama) since 2010, and he has a Facebook page with over 2 million fans. He spoke to ecademy that year about his views on social media:

"Alongside our natural ability to empathize with others, we also have a need for others' kindness, which runs like a thread throughout our whole life. It is most apparent when we are young and when we are old, but we have only to fall ill to be reminded how important it is to be loved and cared about, even in our prime ...years."

The 14th Dalai Lama has been in exile in India since 1959 after Tibet was annexed by China. Desmond Tutu is a South African activist and retired Anglican bishop who has been a longtime champion of human rights causes.

Follow the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu on Google Plus for more updates.

But advertisers don't want to be in the background. They want ads to be engaging, interesting, even fun - whatever creates a lasting memory of the product. It's an attention economy, and whatever can grab users' attention wins. But touch-driven mobile apps are so immersive, advertisers need to step their game up. Palo Alto-based Cooliris has a solution, and the team thinks the science backs it up. World, ready or not, here comes interactive, touch-controlled, 3D mobile advertising.

"The advertisement experience does not have to be sub-par compared to the application experience," Cooliris CEO Soujanya Bhumkar says. "Good experience matters, because that is what delivers high engagement." To deliver that experience, Cooliris has created a standalone business unit called Adjitsu to build 3D mobile ads that users can touch to move, pinch, zoom and explore products.

"What we wanted to do was create a new generation of ads that allowed people to decide which parts of the experience they wanted to indulge in," says Aneesh Karve, product manager at AdJitsu. "Our mantra is pretty simple. It's 'Beyond HTML5.' We think [AdJitsu ads are] the next generation, which goes beyond video and beyond HTML."

"Video is telling the consumer what they should look at," Karve says. "What we've tried to do with our ads is to allow the consumer to decide which part of the ad they're most interested in."

The Ad Is An App

An AdJitsu ad starts off as a small, out-of-the-way display ad, but it has a 3D model of a product, like a new smartphone, suspended inside it. The model is linked to the device's accelerometer. As the user tilts the phone or tablet he or she is using, the product tilts and turns, catching the user's attention. Ideally, the user will then tap the ad, which expands to into a full-screen, app-like experience where the user can manipulate the product using typical touchscreen gestures.

The advertiser can display more info about the product on the screen alongside the model, but the experience is designed around letting the user closely examine the product and kick the tires a little bit - virtually, of course.

Karve says these ads are especially effective for "products that consumers need to hold in their hands." It's not just for consumer electronics, but jewelry or clothing, too. "People want to see how a fabric hangs or how a material looks in a certain light, and we're uniquely capable of providing those kinds of experiences."

This Is Your Brain On AdJitsu

It's neat, it's technologically advanced, and it shows off the product better than any static or video ad can. But does it really engage users with the product? Cooliris has enlisted a neuromarketing firm called MindSign to prove that it does, and this is where things get a little... edgy.

MindSign is a San Diego facility that uses functional MRI to analyze consumer reactions to products and advertising. An fMRI scanner magnetically tracks hemoglobin, the iron-rich protein in the blood, as blood flows in the brain. When blood cells offload oxygen to activated brain cells, the hemoglobin's magnetic field changes, which shows up in the scan. This allows researchers to measure the level of activity in specific areas of the brain in real time.

MindSign did a study for Cooliris that presented one group of subjects with a Cooliris ad and another with a video ad that was the same, shot by shot, but not interactive. Using the fMRI, MindSign produced video of the subjects' brain activity as they experienced the ads. MindSign found that the passive act of watching video was the "most deactivating" experience across all subjects. The subjects who manipulated the 3D ads were lit up all over their brains, engaging motor and attention areas.

We're not neuroscientists at RWW, so the subtle differences between the scans might be lost on us, but one clearly defined area of difference was the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, what MindSign calls the "personal meaning area." This is a central region of the brain involved in decision making. "It's an area that activates with what I would call good, engaging content," says MindSign vice president Philip Carlsen.

Unfortunately, MindSign couldn't provide RWW with a shareable video that compared the control and 3D subjects side by side, but they did offer these still images that show an average activation across the whole trial. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is mostly dark for the control group, but it's brightly colored for the group that saw the AdJitsu ads:

Is Neuromarketing For Real?

Does this activation necessarily correspond to the kind of engagement advertisers want? MindSign couldn't really answer that. This is a brand new science, and MindSign admits it. "fMRI is still in an infant state as far as neuromarketing goes," says Carlsen. "Activation is compared to a baseline looking at a blank screen with a crosshair on it, so you're going to want your stimuli to be more activating than the crosshair."

"Whether that's good activation because they love it or bad activation because they're disgusted," Carlsen says, "that depends on the stimuli."

"The reporting that we do fits into the traditional marketing reports of memory retention, brand recognition, value judgments, but we can do lots more than that," MindSign president Devin Hubbard says. "You can quantify, pretty objectively, the brain reaction in these key areas that are researched and known to be caused by certain stimuli, and they react accordingly."

For now, it sounds like the best fMRI can do for advertisers is provide a corroborating hunch alongside traditional marketing surveys.

Bringing UI Into Advertising

"The importance of engaging MindSign was to show the brands that they could get a higher return on their investment for their dollars," Karve says. "A lot of the really deep things advertisers want to track, you can't do with just Internet cookies or tracking session data from an app. So by going to the brain data, we want to establish how this is going to really have an impact on people."

The brain data do look differently between the control group and the 3D ad subjects, but it's hard to make the case conclusively that this means 3D ads are really better ads. But there's no question that these AdJitsu ads make fuller use of the Web technology and hardware that users love than traditional ads do.

What do you think? From a user standpoint, does the opportunity to play with the ad in 3D make it more interesting to you? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Today's announcement incorporates community contributions from a bunch of new countries, territories, and even an entire continents into the live Google map. The graduates are: Afghanistan, Antarctica, Ecuador, Georgia, Guatemala, Heard Island and McDonald Islands, Honduras, Iraq, Norfolk Island, Saint Pierre & Miquelon and Saudi Arabia.

Google has strained under the weight of mapping the entire wold. After launching Map Maker to crowdsource the effort in 2008, it has steadily increased the importance of community contributions. In April, Google opened Map Maker in the U.S., a tacit admission that it can't map all the locations and businesses itself, even in the world's most wired places.

In September, the Google LatLong team even shifted some of the Map Maker approval process onto Regional Expert Reviewers from the community, rather than having staff moderate all changes.

The system has shown signs of strain. It took the Google Maps team two months to recognize South Sudan's independence, despite a clamoring community. But Google has pressed forward with its effort to expand the global importance of Maps. In August, 40 new countries received localized top-level domains for Google Maps.

As curating Maps becomes a worldwide effort, crowd contributions from Map Maker will only become more important. Today's large crop of graduates is a recognition of great work by a community of volunteers around the world.

Congratulations to the graduates!

For more before-after photos and videos, check out the Google LatLong Blog.

Users of LinkedIn could follow company profiles since 2010. Previously, users following a company would see personnel changes, new job openings and company profile updates. Now companies can also share 500-character messages, links and media with followers as well.

LinkedIn has made an effort to enhance its social features this year, opening its Groups API to developers and adding Groups to its new native mobile apps. The professional social network also set a good precedent for sharing in its first-ever public earnings call, making the slide deck embeddable for anyone and live-tweeting the call.

LinkedIn is moving toward becoming the human resources hub for companies on the Web, not just a place for two-way networking. In July, LinkedIn enabled employers to let job applicants apply with LinkedIn from a company's own website. Today's update adds another way for companies and professionals to interact using LinkedIn.

[8/23/2011 10:11:32 AM] Abraham Hyatt: Check out the slides from LinkedIn's Q2 2011 earnings call:

Everyone from Apple customers and admirers to other tech luminaries and the President of the United States expressed their condolences in the form of obituaries, blog posts, tweets and status updates on Facebook and Google Plus. Somber homepage tributes went live on Apple.com, Google.com and other major websites, and some publications like Wired and Boing Boing altered their homepages dramatically to pay tribute to Jobs.

Among the most widely-circulated (and worth reading) tributes came from Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg, who was friends with Jobs, and Gizmodo editor Brian Lam, who recounted the exuberant experience of meeting Jobs, as well as the more tense exchanges the two later had when Gizmodo acquired a stolen prototype of the iPhone 4 before its release.

This Week in Tech host Leo Laporte streamed a special, impromptu segment in which he and other technology journalists and commentators shared stories and thoughts related to Steve Jobs, sometimes on the verge of tears.

While the epicenter of the mourning was undoubtedly the Silicon Valley and the news dominated major media outlets across the United States, the passing of Steve Jobs was in fact a global news story.

"Steve Jobs is dead and I learned about it first through a notification on my android from a #Libya colleague on Facebook," tweeted Small World News founder Brian Conley. Another tweet, this one from NPR social media guru Andy Carvin read, "Right now I'm seeing tweets from Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Bahrain, all united by one thing: #RIPstevejobs."

While most of the reflections on Jobs' life and career were highly positive, sometimes bordering on deifying, the reaction was not without criticism of some of his business practices. Some tactfully pointed out common critiques of Apple, including factory working conditions, their environmental impact and the limited nature of Jobs' philanthropic efforts.

It was was with somewhat less tact, however, that controversial Westboro Baptist Church tweeted about plans to picket Jobs' funeral because he "gave God no glory & taught sin." That tweet, as many were quick to point out, was sent from an iPhone.

More on Steve Jobs From ReadWriteWeb:

• Steve Jobs, 1955-2011
• A Great User Experience: The Web Legacy of Steve Jobs
• What Steve Meant Back Then
• The Steve Jobs Formula and Why It Works

In this post I want to highlight 3 main things that I'm grateful to Steve Jobs for: 1) re-defining mobile computing with the iPhone and iPad; 2) his design philosophy; 3) his leadership. Steve Jobs strived for greatness in the products his company built, which resulted in a great user experience on the Web for millions of people.

Over the years, Steve Jobs had been at the helm of a number of revolutionary technology products, including the MacIntosh computer in 1984 and the iPod in 2001. In January 2007, Steve Jobs announced what was arguably his biggest triumph: the iPhone.

At the time, Jobs described the strange new product as "three revolutionary new products" all rolled up into one device. Part iPod, part phone and part "internet mobile communicator". He boldly claimed that this new hybrid product, called an iPhone, would reinvent the phone. It would be "the Internet in your pocket for the first time ever."

As Steve Jobs was fond of saying at the time: boom! Because the iPhone more than lived up to Jobs' descriptions. It brought the Mobile Web alive with its touchscreen display, native apps and Web browser.

Although the native apps would later come to define the Mobile Web on iPhone, in January 2007 it was the Web browser - Apple's Safari browser optimized for iPhone - that was probably the most impressive thing about the new device. Jobs called it "the first fully-usable browser on a cellphone." For those of us who came of age with the WAP version of Mobile Internet - a puny, minimal version of the Web for previous generations of smartphones - this was indeed a revelation. So this is what the Web should be like on a mobile phone!

When I wrote up the iPhone launch in January 2007 (nearly 5 years ago now, can you believe it!), I wrote:

Apple is really upping the ante in the Mobile Web market. I think this will finally propel mobile Internet into the mainstream. Maybe 2007 will be the year of the Mobile Web after all!

Just a couple of weeks prior to the iPhone launch, the Mobile Web was merely third in a RWW poll asking what would be the defining trend of 2007. That's how skeptical most people were, in that pre-iPhone time, about the long-promised dream of the Mobile Web. But after Steve Jobs showed the world his company's new fangled device, that all changed.

If the iPhone was a revolution for the Mobile Web, then the iPad was Act II. The iPad was announced by Jobs in January 2010 and once again re-defined how people read and write on the Web.

Design Ethos: Make Great Products

Steve Jobs was always the first to say that the revolutionary Apple products he announced were team efforts. But a lot of the success of those products came down to the design ethos that Steve Jobs had and infused into his company. He was a perfectionist and strived to make great products.

While Jobs' design ethos was primarily focused on hardware decisions - for MacIntosh, iPod, iPhone, iPad and other big Apple products - it also had a huge impact on the Web. It raised peoples expectations for what the user experience on the Web should be. Sometimes, Jobs made contentious decisions - for example deciding to exclude Flash technology from all iOS devices, which essentially meant that many Web videos could not be viewed on the iPhone or iPad. But he always had a design reason for those decisions (in the case of Flash, because it slowed down the device and thus made for a frustrating user experience).

The following video gives a glimpse of the quest for "greatness" that Steve Jobs pursued at Apple:

Leadership: Jobs at The Center

Steve Jobs was one of the great leaders of the modern technology era, rivaled only by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. The two had more in common than is generally recognized. Both were visionary, driven to succeed and very focused. Also, both companies revolved around the controlling leadership of their iconic founders.

A book about Steve Jobs that I reviewed in May 2008 - Inside Steve's Brain, by Leander Kahney - asserted that much of Apple's success can be attributed to the personality traits of Jobs. Here's just one example of how the decisions that Steve Jobs made led to the eventual success of the company (it became the most valuable company in the world in August): when Steve Jobs returned as Apple CEO in the 90's, one of the first things he did was cut down the number of products Apple had, from around 40 to just 4. Jobs simplified Apple's brand and focused it on the key products that consumers wanted.

An organization chart that Forbes Magazine created earlier this year perfectly encapsulates Jobs' leadership style. All major decision makers within Apple were only one or two people removed from the man himself. Jobs also created a culture of accountability - his staff had to take direct responsibility for things. As Fortune described it:

At Apple there is never any confusion as to who is responsible for what. Internal Applespeak even has a name for it, the "DRI," or directly responsible individual. Often the DRI's name will appear on an agenda for a meeting, so everybody knows who is responsible.

The design ethos and leadership style of Steve Jobs led to two revolutionary Mobile Web products, amongst the many other Apple products that have changed peoples lives over the past 30+ years.

Steve Jobs, you will be sadly missed. I'm grateful for all that you gave us - and for helping to make the Web truly great. R.I.P., sir.

The technology world was saddened to learn today that Steve Jobs, co-founder and former CEO of Apple Inc., has passed away. He was 56 years old.

Apple's board of directors released this statement:

We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Jobs passed away today. Steve's brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve. His greatest love was for his wife, Laurene, and his family. Our hearts go out to them and to all who were touched by his extraordinary gifts.

To remember him, watch his famous 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University entitled "How To Live Before You Die:"

Here are some of our favorite posts celebrating this world-changing icon:

• Boom! iPhone Rocks Tech World
• The Steve Jobs Formula and Why It Works
• As Steve Jobs Steps Down, Linux Turns 20: Which Changed the World More?
• What is Apple Without Steve Jobs?