The website was launched in February of this year and as on date has close to 85,000 students signed up on their service. URoomSurf also claims to have successfully paired up over 6900 connections.

While the website is indeed a good way to find prospective roommates, if not simply get to know your future friends, the founders however find a significant challenge in that many universities still do not let students to request for their roommate and the process is many a time done by the authorities themselves.

But with websites like these sprouting up, that policy could soon be relaxed.

Okay, if you are under a rock or something and did not know what Chatroulette’s all about; it’s a video chat service that hooks you up with random pervs from a random part of the world with whom you may chat or choose to click  away to find another person. The website had recently shut their website down and had noted that their “Experiment #1” was over and that experiment #2 was on the way.

So let’s consider you have a relaunch coming up too. What would you typically do? Make an announcement on Twitter or Facebook that a new version is on, then launch the product and then make an announcement once again about the product having launched? Yes, if you have a good number of people following your site, it works. But you can do better the Chatroulette way.

Instead of making the announcement even while the old version is on, how about shutting down the service for sometime? The fact that the site is not available online creates a lot more viral buzz. The initial message on Chatroulette read (emphasis mine),

“The experiment #1 is over for now. Thanks for participating – Redesigned and updated version of the website will be launched tomorrow”

Not only did this message spread around the social web, but it also got people – even those who are not regulars – visiting frequently just to check if the site is back on. Now fast-forward a day ahead and the message now reads,

“The experiment #1 is over for now. Thanks for participating – Redesigned and updated version of the website will be launched shortly”

The web is now talking about the launch being postponed. Now assuming the new version launches tomorrow, expect a lot more virality to flow with people then speaking about the new version having launched finally.

What must have just been one news piece is now being told and retold several times over the week that gets a lot more social conversation going. This may not be a deliberate marketing attempt by Chatroulette (maybe their servers are stuck up and they are still fixing the issue) and agreed that this will not even work for all product launches – what if you have a business oriented website and even a day of downtime could mean catastrophe?. Nevertheless, this is one social marketing strategy that you could remember when you are doing a product relaunch.

This is just one step in the entire process of legalizing internet gambling though. Another measure is pending before the committee that will direct the IRS to begin taxing businesses and individuals on their revenues. The US Government is expected to earn as much as $42 billion from the opening up of internet gambling in the next ten years.

It will be interesting to see how the lobbyists who had apparently spent “tens of millions” to effect the ban in 2006 will react to this change in Government policy. What do you think? Is legalizing internet gambling a good thing?

Envolve is also available as a WordPress plugin and expect it to be installed on the GoRumors Social Web channel shortly. So how does the company make money? Well, the service is free that supports up to 5 simultaneous users. Other plans include a $9 a month plan for allowing up to 10 visitors and the costs rise constantly up to $99 a month for 200 concurrent users.

I think that is the most tricky part of the service. While this is no doubt a very attractive feature that bloggers shall be interested in, this is not exactly a profit-center as far as the publishing business goes. Consequently I wonder if bloggers would really be keen on signing up plans simply to let more users join in a conversation.

What do you think?

But are these suicides actually homicides? A blogger who claims to be a Foxconn employee has now revealed that at least some of the “suicides” were actually homicides caused by the Foxconn security team.

The first time Foxconn was in the news to a related incident was when a Foxconn employee committed suicide after he lost an iPhone prototype. Back then, one of his friends had posted,

“Strongly condemn Foxconn’s security chief Zou Qinming. Sadly mourning our fellow student Sun Dangyong. They used illegal methods of assault, search, and detention to torture Sun Dangyong, causing him to choose to end his life. This is all caused by that group inside Foxconn; they hold undeniable responsibility.”

The recent spate of suicides too seem to have a similar pattern. Another Foxconn employee who claims to work in the logistics department says that these employees were actually beaten and insulted by the security department. The employee calls upon Security Department head Chinming Gu and his subordinate, Feng Liu as people without “any humanity”.

According to this employee, the ninth death on May 14 could not have been a suicide. He writes,

“A suicide victim could not have stabbed himself four times, then jumped off the roof, then flipped over the fence.”

These latest revelations are sure to open a whole new can of worms with respect to Foxconn’s working conditions and more importantly put pressure on MNCs like Apple to rethink their partnership with the manufacturer.

[via Epoch Times]

Patent lawsuits are a common business ploy to either force companies into surrendering their innovation or gain a mileage out of the success of competitors by extracting a licensing fee. And we have had plenty of such cases in the past few months.

In case you stopped keeping track of who’s suing who, here’s an graphical representation for you!

[via DataViz]

“The present invention generally relates to a method for the collaborative creation of a work, and more particularly, to a method for creating a collaborative work one segment at a time by putting a multitude of segment candidates contributed by a multitude of segment creators to an automatically tabulated vote over a digital network in a series of rounds in which a single segment is selected per round for inclusion in the collaborative work until the work is completed.”

As noted earlier, the patent does not make Disney’s idea as comprehensive as Google’s. The main focus of the patent application makes it likely for gathering collaborative opinion and vote for particular issues and finding a consensus.

“The present invention provides a system that taps into the “collective genius” of a large group of individuals to select the best possible segments for inclusion in the final collaborative work, leveraging the judgement and creativity of each individual. The resulting collaborative work will have required minimal effort on the part of any single individual yet they will far exceed in scope and quality what would have been possible with a comparable individual effort, or the comparable collective effort of a group of individuals un-aided by the system.”

Ok, one thing’s for sure – This is not meant to be a Google Wave competitor. If not, where do you think such an application will be used?

Display : 11.6″ diagonally
Resolution : 1366 x 768
Processor : 1.66 GHz Intel Atom N450 Pineview-M
Memory : 16GB NAND Flash (optional 32GB NAND internal)
WebCam : 1.3 MP

Here is a comparitive chart of WePad and iPad. Note that the chart is in German

[via UberGizmo]

Citing AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph De La Vega’s talk at the CTIA annual wireless trade show, Reuters writes,

“A wireless dog collar set to hit the market this year is just one of a plethora of new devices the telephone company hopes will catch on with U.S. consumers.

The collar could send text messages or emails to the owner of a pet when it strays outside a certain area, or the device could allow continuous tracking of the pet.

Other gadgets include a pill box that uses a wireless connection to remind people to take their medicine, e-readers, a device that tracks product pallets for shipping companies, and entertainment systems for people riding in cars.”

There is a tremendous scope for alternate business as these and I guess AT&T is taking the right step here. What are your thoughts?

[via Reuters]

Mr. Singh is quoted as saying,

“This morning I met the chairman of Dell Corporation. He informed me that they are buying equipment and parts worth $25 billion from China. They would like to shift to safer environment with climate conducive to enterprise with security of legal system.”

While a statement from the Indian Prime Minister cannot be taken at face value to gauge Dell’s business strategies, the move however could be interesting considering that Google and now GoDaddy have decided to cease their China operations.

[via Engadget]