Weak in Review: This Week in Tech

I'll admit it. I've been neglecting you three and I haven't written in a few days. If you can believe it, sometimes life gets in the way of meta-life. As an apology I've decided to put together a list of the top six events in tech this week:

6. CELLPHONE FEES ILLEGAL: On Thursday Alameda County Superior Court Judge Bonnie Sabraw awarded over $18 million dollars in restitution in a class-action lawsuit against Sprint Nextel for collecting on early termination fees. Sabraw believes that consumers should not be charged for ending their cell phone service prematurely and ruled that Sprint Nextel cease collection attempts on the outstanding $54.7 million from the 2 million Californians who were assessed the fee. While experts believe an appeal is likely, the case may change the industry considerably. According to Slashdot, the Federal Communications Commission is considering imposing a rule - backed by the wireless industry - which might decree that only federal authorities can regulate early termination fees.

5. WORDSCRAPER: After Hasbro forced Facebook to remove Scrabulous due to copyright issues, Worderati were left with a void. While users could switch to the officially-sanctioned Electronic Arts Scrabble beta, the new app simply did not draw the attention and welcome that Scrabulous received. However, one day after Scrabulous was removed from Facebook, creators Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla released a brand new crossword game - Wordscraper. As per the site description, Wordscraper allows you to "build your own board and try out whacky combinations with special high value squares." The Wordscraper tag line, "Don't follow rules, make them" seems to encompass the true philosophy of these two developer brothers.

4. DELICIOUS RELAUNCHES: Delicious recently launched with their new redesign. Most notably, users can now list links alphabetically and of course, the URL is just delicious.com as opposed to the ever-confusing del.icio.us.

3. OMNISIO PURCHASED: Y-Combinator startup company Omnisio was recently purchased by YouTube for what is believed to be about $15 million dollars. Omnisio allows users to annotate video, sync video to presentations and pull clips from the web and stitch them together as compilation video. The service is believed to increase YouTube's virality and functionality.

2. SEARCH WAR: New search site Cuil launched to great acclaim with pundits dubbing the service "Google's only competition". According to Cuil's site, "Rather than rely[ing] on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. Shortly after, Yahoo engineer Sam Pullara launched Yuil, a mash up of Cuil's UI and Yahoo's search results. Since the initial launch, Pullara has pulled Yuil and relaunched his site as 4 Hour Search. Many experts report better results with Pullara's version that with the original Cuil service.

1. WINGLET: And finally, by far the most interesting story of the week, Toyota has launched Winglet - a self-balancing two-wheeled scooter. Similar to the Segway, the Winglet manages to make any normal human being look like a fattish idiot; however, without the standing handle, the Winglet looks more like an upright gynecological experiment than a mode of transportation.

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Weak in Review: This Week in Tech

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