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December 16th, 2009 by Lisa Francis

Daily News: 16/12

Computing.co.uk – Mobile device sales to bounce back in 2010
Worldwide sales of mobile devices in 2009 beat gloomy expectations despite a small decline and are forecast to increase by nine per cent next year, according to a Gartner report released yesterday.

BBC – Teletext close mid-December

The Teletext information service on analogue and digital television will close across the UK on 16 December. Limited services including holidays, racing and bookmaking and the subtitles on analogue channels will remain available.

IT PRO – Google unveils URL shrinking service

Google has unveiled its own URL shrinking system, dubbed Goo.gl. Link shortening systems cut down full-length URLs into much shorter ones so they’re easier to share, such as on sites like Twitter, which limit posts to 140 characters.

Total Telecom – Australia pushes ahead with controversial Internet filter
Australia said Tuesday it would push ahead with a mandatory China-style plan to filter the Internet, despite widespread criticism that it will strangle free speech and is doomed to fail.

CBR – Spammers target online Christmas shoppers
Cyber criminals are using the pre-Christmas online shopping rush to target users with seasonal spam message, new research from Symantec has revealed. The security firm’s State of Spam report for November found that during that month and October, spammers have been sending emails with references to online shopping and luxury goods.

Computer Weekly – Social media has changed online shopping forever, says report

The way consumers shop online changed over the past year as a result of the abundance of social networking applications enabling people to help each other make decisions. Web shoppers today are sharing information and their views on products and services through social networking before deciding what they buy.

July 16th, 2009 by Speed Budapest (Matt)

Bamboozle – taken from us too soon

Bamboozle!!!You can imagine the absolute horror at Speed Towers when we learned that Teletext is to close in January. Yes, it’s the news that we’ve all been dreading; Bamboozle may soon be no more.

The Teletext service, which was originally launched by ITV in 1974 under the name Oracle, was due to be switched off in 2012, but due to a severe drop in revenue Teletext will now be retired two years earlier. In 1993 Oracle became Teletext, and Bamboozle was born.

For those of you that have never had the joy of playing Bamboozle, it is a quiz game on page 390 on teletext or page 840 on digital teletext, presented by Bamber Boozle and several of his relatives. The game features 12 questions with multiple choice answers, which become progressively more bamboozling as the games goes on. Get an answer wrong and you will be forced to start again from the very first question, which for many bamboozle fans is a fate worse than death.

What will become of Bamboozle is not certain. Perhaps an online or iPhone-based version is in the works? We can only hope that this is true, but in the time being our thoughts and prayers are with the friends and family of Bamber, Bambette, Buster and Bonnie Boozler.