US World Cup Win, Earthquake, BP, Twitter and More

Yesterday was certainly made for Twitter as news flowed in so fast it was difficult to cover the major events with any more depth than 140 characters. First there was the report that the US had an exchange of generals in the Afghanistan war while at around the same time the BP oil spill took a turn for the worse when a robot accidentally knocked into some equipment causing the spill volume to increase.

All this while in World Cup news, the US prevailed in a historic win in the final moments of a game against Algeria – even though it seemed referee calls in back-to-back games were decidedly anti-American (US Vs. Algeria, US vs. Slovenia) resulting in two important goals being called invalid. In the first case the call kept America from winning (they tied instead) and the referee was further restricted from officiating games. Prior to this most-recent nail biting game, Soccer in the US was considered a bit more important than Jai Lai or checkers – now it seems the US may have a new sport to rally around as we join the rest of the world in celebrating the game of soccer. Of course the good news will likely be enjoyed by television networks who will certainly grace our screens with new soccer-related beer, sneaker and pizza ads.

The US scored its historic World Cup goal while I was interviewing Gary McNeil the VP of Marketing at Parature – see how the Gaylord National hotel erupted in applause at the time (the applause comes in at around 60% of the video being played) – and hats off to McNeil who kept his composure during the whole incident

 

While the earth figuratively shook in Africa as Americans won a major soccer game, it shook literally in Canada where a 5.0 magnitude earthquake jostled the Canadians – who by the way already have a wealth of soccer related beer ads. Michael Roston at True/Slant tells us Twitter was one of the first sources of information about the quake and not to be outdone, there is a new Facebook group on the matter titled I survived Canada’s Earthquake 2010 which is currently liked by 14,030 people. Actually make that 14,034 – I decided to add in my thumbs up along with three others.

World’s longest tennis match undecided

While the above turmoil took place and sports fans watched a tennis match which literally took forever, the tech world also had big news as according to Tom Keating the Apple iPhone launch caused FedEx servers to choke, sputter and gasp as hundreds of thousands of customers waited impatiently to get their shiny new gadgets delivered. And I am glad he was tracking as my shiny new iPhone 4 is expected any minute.  All this while the Motorola Droid X made its debut on the Verizon network – it will be available in a few weeks but it is always good to counter the news of your competitor just before they release a new product to keep them from capturing too much market share. Although it is made from a rival company, I expect this phone to perform similarly to the HTC Incredible as it also runs the Android OS and has solid technical specs as well. And the Incredible is quite good – almost as good as the iPhone 3Gs. In fact other than having to press too many menu buttons in email to get things done and turning on seemingly by itself, this is an awesome phone and worthy of the name “Incredible.”

TMC’s Marisa Torrieri reviews the new Google/HTC Incredible which runs the Android 2.1 OS

 

But is it as good as the iPhone 4? After getting my hands on one today it seems like a denser version of the 3Gs with much better response time. Taking a picture for example is super-fast and of course the front-facing camera while made first by companies like Nokia will be remembered as having been invented by Apple. But back to the iPhone 4 – with 100 new features and hundreds of new developer APIs expect this phone to captivate millions of new users – in fact some reports say there were already a million of these gadgets sold!

To me one of the biggest achievements of the new iOS 4 software which can also be applied to iPhone 3GS models and recent iPod Touches is its limited multitasking and the ability to categorize apps. Ironically neither of these features is groundbreaking as PDAs did this handily ten years ago. But still, somehow when Apple decides to catch up with the rest of the world on certain features a decade later, we call it groundbreaking. But whether it is a big deal or not, these two features will result in less desire to jailbreak which could mean good news for Apple investors and the US economy as more people buy their apps instead of getting them for free. Remember, Apple is the OPEC of the west.

And one final comment on Android – Google has come a very long way and this platform is much better than it was in the past. It has become a very credible and serious iPhone competitor and as we see Android tablets achieve some popularity (beyond the Nook) we can expect the Google ecosystem to be a viable Apple OS competitor – across the board.

Well that’s it for today, I need to spend some time backing up my current iPhone and saving the pictures and videos so I can be ready for the iPhone 4 to arrive. Me and my 999,999 potentially new Facetiming video chat friends are indeed very happy today.

  • Tom Keating
    June 24, 2010 at 3:58 pm

    Not sure how you mixed the World Cup, the BP oil spill robot, Wimbledon, a Canadian earthquake, the iPhone 4, FEDEX, and the HTC Incredible – but somehow, inexplicably you pulled it off!
    Great article!

  • Rich Tehrani
    June 25, 2010 at 8:17 am

    Thanks – it was fun to write – what an amazing news day. We don’t get too many days like that a year. Wonder what things will be like when the iPhone 5G comes out. 🙂

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