Wednesday, July 9, 2008
FiascO2, Redux
The best laid plans of mice and men “gang aft agley,” as they say. iPhone carriers as well, apparently. Because British wireless carrier O2 claims it was well prepared for the iPhone pre-order event that felled its Web site earlier this week. It just wasn’t well prepared enough. In an email to customers today, O2 apologized for the failure of its online ordering system this week, explaining there was little it could do to prepare for the 13,000 orders per second that overwhelmed it. That’s right: 13,000 orders per second. O2’s full statement follows.
Soon Nokia mobile phone users will be able to tell people who don’t particularly care what they’re doing, where they’re doing it — not that they cared in the first place. This morning Nokia acquired location-based services venture Plazes, which has developed a sort of social GPS that allows users to tell one another where they are and what they’re doing
With Apple’s much lauded iPhone having captured about 19.2% of the smart-phone market, expectations were high in advance of Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s keynote at the company’s World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco. And Jobs did not disappoint, unveiling the iPhone 3G, which will go on sale July 11 for $199.
