According to the Sidney Morning Herald, “

[a] British travel company has paid $US1.1 million ($A1.2m) for the domain name cruises.co.uk, a price that is effectively $1 million just for the letter ‘S’ since it already owns the address cruise.co.uk.  The sum shatters the previous record for a .co.uk domain of $US300.000, paid in October last year.  Seamus Conlon, whose company bought the address from a German travel company, said it was a necessary move to retain dominance in the rapidly growing market for ocean cruising.  ‘<Cruises> is consistently ranked first on Google, with <cruise> just behind,’ he said.  ‘We wanted the top positions so that when Internet users are searching for deals … we are the first port of call.’”

PCWorld.com reports that Facebook "took a new step into the mobile realm on Thursday, launching a platform for operators designed to make its social networking application work better on portable devices.  Vodafone is the first operator to use the Facebook for Mobile Operators platform and has started services in the U.K. and Germany, said Jed Stremel, Facebook’s director of mobile division. Vodafone will soon expand the program to Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland and Portugal.  The platform involves giving operators a set of technical specifications intended to resolve some of frustrating hang-ups when using Facebook on a mobile phone rather than a PC, such as smoothing out login problems and opening up other features, Stremel said.”

The Register today has an interesting article entitled “Just because it’s SaaS doesn’t make it good.”  Dale Vile, the author of the article, points out that “[t]he prevailing view among SaaS evangelists […] that if it’s hosted and charged for on a price per user per month basis, or better still free, then it must be good” is “a religious standpoint that is no more useful or valid than oft-heard claims that open source software is universally better than the commercial equivalent.”  Vile doesn’t “seem to be alone in [his] unwillingness to blindly accept everything SaaS as representing the future of IT. Reg readers too seem to have a healthy degree of scepticism for a lot of the SaaS-related noise we are hearing. The recent Tech Barometer survey, for instance, placed SaaS right at the bottom of the list of IT-related priorities.”

The Washington Post writes that “U.S. intelligence officials are cautioning that popular Internet services that enable computer users to adopt cartoon-like personas in three-dimensional online spaces also are creating security vulnerabilities by opening novel ways for terrorists and criminals to move money, organize and conduct corporate espionage.  Over the last few years, ‘virtual worlds’ such as Second Life and other role-playing games have become home to millions of computer-generated personas known as avatars. By directing their avatars, people can take on alternate personalities, socialize, explore and earn and spend money across uncharted online landscapes.  […]  Intelligence officials who have examined these systems say they’re convinced that the qualities that many computer users find so attractive about virtual worlds — including anonymity, global access and the expanded ability to make financial transfers outside normal channels — have turned them into seedbeds for transnational threats.”

The San Francisco Gate reveals that, according to the U.N. telecoms agency, “[t]he number of mobile phone users will overtake the number of nonusers this year for the first time.  Ownership rates in developing countries are rising fastest, with Brazil, Russia, India and China alone accounting for 1 billion subscribers last year, the International Telecommunication Union said.”