This week Blackberry maker, RIM, suffered it's third major service outage since 2007.  Not very good timing since they are already suffering market share losses to Apple and Android devices.  This outage affected users ability to send and receive emails as well as access certain data services.

Although service appears to be returning to normal, at the time of this writing RIM still has no idea why the outage occurred.  The Blackberry is still popular among government and other security conscious organizations due to the fact that emails are sent encrypted accross the Blackberry network, the devices have been declining in popularity due to the fact that they have just not kept up with the desires of the public for ease of use and variety of apps.

"The new iPhone is here, the new iPhone is here."  If Steve Martin's movie The Jerk was made today that might be what he would be yelling about.  The long awaited release by Apple on October 14th was met with long lines and positive reviews.  Even Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak waited in line outside and Apple store to get his.

The new iPhone boasts many new features, and even if you cannot get a new iPhone just yet, upgrading your current iPhone 4 to the new iOS 5 will add some additional functionality.  One of the newest gems to the iPhone is Siri, a speech recognition tool designed to make may iPhone functions easier.

One thing to watch out for however is the upgrade to iOS 5 for those who cannot simply get a new iPhone just yet.  You may find your apps and music are no longer on your iPhone or iPad after the upgrade to iOS 5.  A sync with iTunes will easily remedy this.

So what does this mean for Apple?  The last time Jobs left Apple the company did not fare very well.  They went from 12% PC market share to 3% and had a string of failures and bad decisions.  So will that happen this time?

I sincerely doubt it since Steve Jobs is not "leaving" Apple entirely this time.  He will still remain a member of the board and will likely remain somewhat active in driving Apple forward.  In addition, Tim Cook, Job's successor, is a solid candidate for taking the reigns at Apple.

Jobs has been in poor health for quite a while now and it is likely Tim Cook has already taken a larger role in leading Apple while Jobs has been absent.  I would not expect to see any detremintal effects on Apple as a result of this change, but only time will tell.

Serious consideration was given this week to the option of shutting down social media sites to help quell the violence that has rocked the UK.  Arrests had already been made by some who used social media sites like Facebook and Blackberry Messenger to help incite violence.

The move would not be unprecendented.  Eqypt and Tunisia took similar actions earlier this year when raucus anti-government mobs got out of control in those contries.  A Home Office spokesperson indicated it would likely not try to shut down social media sites, but would seek to gain cooperation from companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Blackberry owner Research in Motion and would ask these companies to work with police.

Police think that youth are using the social media tools to message friends and to get them to concentrate in certain neighborhoods on short notice.  Both Facebook and Research in Motion have been working to enforce UK laws and to help police deal with credible threats of violence.

Here is a pretty cool link to check out the flight deck of the recently de-commissioned Space Shuttle Discovery.  You can pan and zoom to see the entire flight deck. 

http://360vr.com/2011/06/22-discovery-flight-deck-opf_6236/index.html

If you think Facebook's facial recognition technology is just for tagging photos in your photo albums, think again!  At a recent tech seminar, researchers at Carnegie Mellon Universtiy demonstrated that the technology can be used to identify people in real life.

The advantage Facebook has is that it has a huge database of photos that users have uploaded and tagged.  Therefore, many people have their faces mapped through the use of the Facebook technology and Facebook has a huge database of users.

While the researchers could only identify 31% of the people who volunteered to look into a webcam.  And the researchers used a limited number of passes scanning the webcam image to identify these volunteers.  The researchers foresee a day where one pass scanning of a persons image will be able to identify that person.