The UpStream

It was an astonishing 48 days of nonstop advertising from Microsoft, Sharp and Verizon for their newest media baby, the Kin One and Kin Two. At the end of the 48 days, however, Microsoft has pulled the plug on its project citing poor sales. With over 2 years of development and million and millions of dollars in marketing, how could Microsoft kill its creation in just 6 weeks?

A Microsoft rep said in a statement,

We have made the decision to focus exclusively on Windows Phone 7 and we will not ship KIN in Europe this fall as planned. Additionally, we are integrating our KIN team with the Windows Phone 7 team, incorporating valuable ideas and technologies from KIN into future Windows Phone releases. We will continue to work with Verizon in the U.S. to sell current KIN phones.

Hit the break for what went wrong.

It seems Google just never knows enough about you. Well now they seem to be trying to build a list of your commonly visited places through their new Android app, Open Spot.

When you leave a parking lot, you run the Open Spot app and log the spot as open, then a nearby user can run the app and see the location on their map, thus finding a parking place. For each spot you mark you get awarded "karma points" which you can use to keep score against your friends. Of course with points being introduced, people are always going to find some way to cheat the system. Google is marking these people as "griefers" and they "have a couple of mechanisms available to make sure someone can't leave a bunch of fake parking spots."

A couple months ago we heard some rumors about Apple lawyers confirming that the manufacturer really did have a five year exclusivity agreement with AT&T but didn't hear much more about it. It looks as though this is just the tip of the iceberg now, as the judge in the case has officially certified the case as a class action, which means it now will include every person who has ever bought an iPhone on AT&T.

Hit the break to see what the terms of the lawsuit are.

We have been keeping you up to date with news of Windows Phone 7 Series comes to light, with exclusive chats on app development and gaming with Microsoft's team leaders on the project. Microsoft has always said that WinPho 7 would be launched around the holidays and has never given any specific information beyond that until a couple weeks ago, when a Microsoft rep mistakenly let slip that the launch would be around October.

More speculation and rumors started flying when we learned that AT&T stores were receiving marketing materials with WinPho 7 on it, which meant launch time could be when the stores were to refresh their signage - anywhere from July 24th to September.

Check after the break to see if Microsoft can launch WinPho 7 in time!

I have posed the question before about what Twitter will do with their virtually endless supply of investor capital and while we still don't have a clear answer we now know that it wasn't spent on keeping your information safe. According to the FTC Twitter has had "serious lapses in the company's data security." What exactly does that mean? It means that during January through May 2009 hackers were easily able to get into Twitter admin accounts by using simple password guessing programs. They then reset the password to the accounts so others could have access. In an unrelated instance, another hacker was able to break into a Twitter employees Gmail account in which they had users passwords stored in plain text... IN PLAIN TEXT!

The FTC has given Twitter a written warning about using simple passwords and also for storing them IN PLAIN TEXT. The company will have their security tested every 3 years by an independent company. They will also be fined $16,000 per every instance of a security breach. The icing on the cake however, is that Twitter is also not allowed to lie about their privacy and security settings for the next 20 years. The only reason I can think of as to why 20 years is the requirement is that the FTC doesn't expect them to be around that long.

The evidence has always existed that large corporations will find useful, excellent ways to use torrent services and Facebook has joined the list of big businesses supporting torrents by stating this week that BitTorrent helps with the transfer of new code between each and every one of its servers.

Read more about what the Facebook engineers had to say after the break!