Dillon Amburgey’s Blog

iPhone Atlas - iPhone guides, help, applications, news and more, updated daily.

With the iPhone 3G’s significantly faster data transfer rates and ability to perform voice and data functions simultaneously, potential buyers have become intoxicated with the idea of tethering the device: using it as a cellular modem for laptops — a service AT&T and other carriers offer for many other portable phones. iPhone Atlas has learned, however, that AT&T will not be offering tethering capabilities for the iPhone 3G.

What we all expected has been confirmed. Tethering will not be on the iPhone 3G. At the same time as they are touting themselves as an enterprise product, they are removing a key component that most enterprise level phones have.
I’d feel better about using my phone legitimately, however until Apple and AT&T decide to allow me to do that, I’ll be hacking my phone to tether it.

I agree with TechCrunch. Technorati will jump on the blog advertising bandwagon, which is saturated to say the least. Kingpin Google has a majority of the space with many smaller companies such as Adroll, Glam, ValueClick, etc. providing little competition. While this is a hot space, they need to offer something above and beyond what Google already does to so many people to even make a dent in the market. I like Technorati, and I wish them the best of luck. They’ll need it.
Technorati Confirms New Financing; New Business Focus Coming

I spoke with Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra this evening, who confirms that a venture round has been closed and says that the company will make an announcement next week that includes more information.

It’s also clear that the company is refocusing its business. We believe they are launching a blogger-focused advertising network based on documents we published in February. The company has, however, considered other strategies recently, including a blog rollup. We’ll know more next week.

Techcrunch reports,

Sometime soon, perhaps this week, Facebook will turn the year-old Facebook Platform into an open source project, multiple sources have told us. The immediate effect will be to allow any social network to become Facebook Platform compatible - meaning application developers can easily take their Facebook applications and have them run on those social networks, too.

As I said in the comments, I did not see this coming at all.
In sight of recent developments, I had seen Facebook as a company trying to own all data. It’s hard to imagine that that same company is willing to open up its doors to competitors to use the technology it has spent ever so much time developing.
That’s the Microsoft mindset, and Microsoft is a huge investor in Facebook. They also handle all advertising for Facebook.
If this story is true, maybe Facebook is turning a new leaf. Maybe they’re actually thinking of their users. I sure hope so.

You can see the landscape, the solar panels, and some of the instruments on the spacecraft.

View them all here.

These photos were made over 36 million miles away. That’s pretty epic.

NASA’s Phoenix lander just touched down on mars.

We should have the first images about 9:45 EST.

Check the Planetary Society blog for more time information. Watch NASA TV here.

ImportGenius reports that US Customs data shows 188 containers of some new apple product arriving in the United States.

Some of this new product also made its way to Canada, which as of yet had on official iPhone.

All signs point to a new iPhone. We’ll know if there is one on June 9.

Today, via their corporate blog, Last.fm announced a public beta of their next platform.

I’m a huge fan of last.fm, and I was naturally very excited by the opportunity to see what they had up their sleeve.

Major new features:

• Music Library - Keeps track of the music you listen to and creates a virtual library. I predict this fits well into their plan to offer unlimited streaming songs. You will be able to listen to the songs you own from anywhere in the world. It’s not a new concept, but I think they are doing it better than the other guys have.
• Real time charts - You no longer have Sunday to Sunday charts. They are updated in real time now. Quite frankly, I don’t know why it’s taken them so long to get this simple feature working. My best guess is that it would require more computing power than they could expend at the time.
• Activity feeds - Think Facebook. I don’t think this matters at all really. The only reason I can see them adding it is that everyone else is doing it (see any one of dozens of Friendfeed clones).

The beta is open to all subscribers of Last.fm, and I highly suggest everyone try it. It is worth mentioning, however, that Internet Explorer is not supported at the moment and will not work.

Phil Plait has an awesome post about supernovae.

He goes into more detail than I would want to post here. Here is the short version: For the first time ever a supernova was photographed as it happened.

This is truly a huge leap forward in astronomy.

Techcrunch reports that Microsoft and Yahoo are once again trying to get along.

Who didn’t see this coming? With the recent action by Carl Icahn, I don’t see that Yahoo has much of a choice but to make a deal.

The real question is who will the deal be with. While a deal with Google could be hard to get past the EU, I think it is the most likely path. Yahoo has too big of an ego issue to join forces with Microsoft.

As the old saying goes, “If you can’t beat them, join them.” I think that will sum up Yahoo’s mentality towards Google in the coming months.

Google

Powerset

More at Jason Calacanis’ blog