The protests began after a conversation between Natalia Morar and friends in a cafe in Chisinau, Moldova’s capital. She said, “We decided to organize a flash mob for the same day using Twitter, as well as networking sites and SMS. And when we went to the square, there were 20,000 people waiting there; it was unbelievable.”

The protest started peacefully but ended up with demonstrators storming the parliament building. Morar said, “Not only did we underestimate the power of Twitter and the Internet, we also underestimated the explosive anger among young people at the government’s policies and electoral fraud.”

Web 2.0 played a big part in the American tax demos that went on yesterday. Taking notes from the original Boston Tea Party, modern Americans decided to start their own tea party demonstrations to voice their anger over government debt. There are no central organizers of the events, but hundreds of tea parties went on yesterday with tens of thousands of participants organized virtually.

As we saw first hand, the G20 protests were almost more Tweet than chant, while the recent Tamil Tiger protests were organised via text messaging. With the past G20 protests campaigners posted a three-dimensional map through Google Street View, and even had links to bankers addresses and specific meeting points. And San Franciscans recently used Twitter and pirate radio to protest against the Iraq war.

The internet is making simultaneous protests across the globe possible, like Earth Hour. It began in Sydney in 2007, when 2.2 million homes and businesses switched off their lights for one hour. The concept became viral through Facebook and other social networking sites, and 50 million people switched off their lights in 2008.

Protesting has taken a recent bizarre turn as avatars hit the streets of Second Life, the nerd-strewn online virtual world, to protest the recent attacks in the Gaza Strip. “Protesters” held up signs, yelling and pacing with images of the attacks behind them, while some even set digital fires alight. At least no-one gets hurt, while still getting the cause noticed. But while Twitter and SMS bring the spontaneity back to protesting, to situate a protest entirely in a virtual world is surely dooming it to impotence. As one Tamil ably demonstrated last week, nothing beats a real-life dip in the Thames for people to turn and look at you.

Microsoft and Yahoo have recently been whispering over a possible search engine partnership. Google is, obv, the dominating search engine with a whopping 64.2 per cent of the “search share market”, and usages have expanded over the past year by 16.7 per cent. Google’s share in the market is representative of 6.1 billion searches, which is 400 per cent more than Yahoo Search.

Basically Yahoo has no chance on their own and has to turn to a company that is doing even worse than they are in a desperate attempt to stand a chance against the bully in the playground. Microsoft only had a 0.3 per cent growth over the past year and a 10.3 per cent hold of the search market. Really? Microsoft has a search engine?

Our maths whiz tells us that if the two join forces their share would be around 26% of the search market, which is still nothing, but growth is expected as it would be the main alternative to Google and followers of their other products may be compelled to use their search engine. If the deal goes ahead, Microsoft takes on the searches, it’s reported that Yahoo will take responsibility for the pair’s display advertising business – Silicon Alley Insider’s sources suggest that the most effective option will be for Yahoo to buy MSN outright.

But planning to give the Americans a run for their money is Stephen Wolfram, a London-born physicist, who is to launch a new Internet search engine in May called Wolfram Alpha. If it works it would be able to understand people’s questions and respond to them directly, rather than deploying the keyword-mongering algorithms used by Google et al. What Wolfram is proposing is a computer system that would understand the human language without fumbling around to find the proper keyword, as the A.I. will be able to understand us. 

There are many alternative search engines out there, but they just aren’t being utilized; Google has become such a common phrase in our vocabulary it’s hard to even think to use another method. It’ll have to take either a brilliantly intuitive algorithmic shift, or a spectacular rebranding exercise, to even begin chipping into Google’s monopoly. One feels that doing either will prove too radical for two such enormous companies.

Barnes & Noble claims to offer more titles than any other online bookstore, so the natural progression would be to make their own reader, but is this venture really going to be successful? While there’s still a sentimental attachment to paperbacks, Amazon’s Kindle is starting to make a real impact – sales are predicted to triple this year. Admittedly it’s run into some problems of late: the blind aren’t happy with the read-aloud feature, and on Amazon’s own site hundreds of readers have argued that charging more than (£6.81) $9.99 for many e-books is ridiculous. They even created a user-generated tag – “9 99boycott” for the cost of some e-books in the Amazon store that they are outraged with. People who are tech savvy have been getting things for free for far to long to pay high prices for something that is physically intangible – but the popularity of the reader is nevertheless continuing to grow.

Sony, long the poor man of the e-reader world, has teamed up with Google, who gave them access to half a million titles that are out of copyright, and thus potentially giving them the foothold they need. So it remains to be seen what old man Barnes can add to the table, even before mentioning the iPhone. Considering its functionality, the iPhone is much better value than the other devices, and its ebook app Stanza is free and offers 50,000 books. 

Reading novels on mobile phones is so popular in Japan that the Nikkei business newspaper estimated the market was worth nearly 20 billion yen last year, and is in a constant growth stage, rising approximately 200 per cent a year. And it seems like newspapers are beginning to see the potential – as we discussed in a previous post even Hearst and Murdoch are working on plus-sized e-readers to send their content to. No matter how cumbersome they may end up being, it shows the belief in the format is becoming all the more fervent.

Daniel Ek, Spotify’s co-founder said:”This is the first step towards becoming more of a platform. There are lots of services that have APIs, but this is different because it lets anyone build a Spotify client.”

Ek was the former CTO of Stardoll (a teeny bopper website) and Martin Lorentzon, co-founder of TradeDoubler (an Internet marketing company), and together they gave birth to Spotify in 2006. The company was launched for paid public access in October 2008, then in February 2009 Spotify opened free registration within the United Kingdom. Spotify currently has around one million users, and more than 40,000 people signing up to listen to the virtual jukebox daily; it can be blamed for the recent price wars going on between iTunes and Amazon.

So how does Spotify generate any cash if they offer their product for free? Here’s the catch: you have to deal with listening to an advertisement every 20 minutes or so, but there are subscriptions a user can purchase to access the site ad free. It’s gaining popularity with consumers – a report from KPMG this week said that 60% of people were happy to put up with advertising to get content or services for free, and just 16% would go for a paid-for, ad-free service.

So that’s the basic way that Spotify’s making the green, but things get a bit more complex as they begin to monetize other outlets. With YouTube facing troubles over royalty deals, it seems like this would be a difficult market to crack and would anger quiet a few people, for instance the The Performing Rights Society; recently US ad-generated music sites SpiralFrog and Ruckus failed thanks to lack of revenue and having to pay out royalties.

Tony Wadsworth, chairman of the BPI, the record industry trade body said: “You have to question any company based on an ad-funded model at the moment. Is it actually going to be possible to make it pay and produce the type of revenue that the creators and investors needs?”

To combat this Spotify is trying not to be the one trick pony the other music sites were by is tapping into multiple revenue streams. They made a deal with 7digital, the fresh-faced downloading site. If you listen to a song via Spotify you will now be given the option to pay to download songs from 7digital, which gives Spotify a percentage of each download. In another attempt to not go the way of SpiralFrog, last month they signed a deal with Condé Nast to promote the re-launch of Wired magazine. They also has retail relationships with Amazon and iTunes, but they currently apply to only a small selection of the site.

Spotify’s keeping their marketing up too – it’s to offer ‘play safe’ playlists compiled by artists like The Saturdays and Starsailor as part of an MTV and Body Shop campaign to promote safe sex. Good idea: just 30 seconds of Starsailor is enough to get anyone out of the mood for friskiness, and that’s before the advert kicks in.

As Spotify secures more and more music for its service, the question is whether it can keep persuading advertisers that the premiums are worth it, and getting those premiums to fund an increasing royalties cheque. Looking at KPMG’s findings, Spotify may find the £10-a-month premium service doesn’t generate as much cash as they thought it would. And its arguable how engaged someone is with an advert they’re desperately waiting to end. But surely now with consoles and smartphones ready to pump out music and adverts to ears and eyeballs on a massive scale, Spotify can really start gaining traction in a market that’s still very much living hand-to-mouth.

Er, so this is future classroom material? Exit Queen Victoria, enter the Real Shaq, as it will no longer be a requirement that students study the Victorian period or the Second World War. In the greatest education overhaul in 20 years, school curriculum in British junior schools could be instead taking lessons on the digital realm. The proposed plan involves things like improving keyboard skills, Wikipedia, Twittering, and learning how to use spell-check. Hopefully alongside learning how to actually spell.

The new curriculum proposal is for students aged five to eleven and was drafted by Sir Jim Rose, former director of inspections at Ofsted, in an attempt to revamp the British primary school curriculum. It is going to cut traditional subjects into six broad “areas of learning”.

A leaked copy of Sir Rose’s draft proposal stated children should be able to “organize and adjust” speaking and writing skills depending on the technology being used. It includes using “emails, messaging, wikis and twitters”, says the report. Shouldn’t that be “tweets”, granddad? Children should also be taught to speak, write and broadcast using “blogs, podcasts, websites, email [and] video”. I feel old already.

With the rate of technology advancing, it was inevitable that curriculum would undergo a massive overhaul, but how much is too much? We all know that the validity of Wikipedia is questionable at best and short, quick, tweets don’t inspire much creativity. As we’ve discussed before little tykes are even all up on the Blackberry trend and texting to their digital puppy pal Scout with the ‘Text & Learn’, a new smartphone-style gadget aimed at toddlers aged three and up. Imagine a primary student who has been brought up with their own “Blackberry” being asked to take out a pencil and paper as the teacher writes with chalk on a dull blackboard – I don’t think that’s going to fly.

School is becoming increasingly futuristic – the interactive whiteboard has been a futuristic staple of British schools for a while now, and school often provide laptops, hand-held learning devices, school radio stations, blogs, podcasts, and video conferencing. In Warrington, five primaries in the most deprived areas of the city clubbed together to provide every kid in their top classes with up-to-date laptops. Schools have no choice but to adapt to keep up with kids.

So what about those chubby little gamers who refuse to participate in gym class? Well many schools are beginning to use the Nintendo Wii in fitness class to get the pudgy tykes moving in a rousing virtual workout. Great idea, but a study found that playing sports on a Wii was not exactly high intensity – players used only 2 per more energy than players of regular computer games. Futuristic, but not so useful.

If virtual reality sports weren’t enough, now thanks to Nintendo kids can participate in some fake music too. In an interesting collaboration between Nintendo and the National Association for Music Education, hardware and software is being donated to schools in 51 cities across the America. With Wii Music, players swing the game’s controllers in time to the music and pretend play an instrument. So we’re going to have a generation of brilliant air guitarists.

With the flood of technology being thrown our way, when feeding it into the educational system it’s important to differentiate between what is important to the growth and education of kids (i.e. Web 2.0 literacy), and what is the government fumbling around for the future (i.e. Guitar Hero). Get the kid to run around and kick a ball – how did that become so difficult to do?

The redundancies come right after they recently sold the debt-ridden Evening Standard for a measly £1 to former KGB lieutenant colonel Alexander Lebedev. Maybe they should get him to take care of the 1,000 people they need gone? Although the Russian billionaire may be a bit busy as he announced plans to run for mayor of Sochi, the Russian Black Sea resort, that will be the frosty wonderland of the 2014 Winter Olympics.

The Daily Mail General Trust’s advertising revenue fell by 24 per cent across in its national newspaper division in the first half of 2009 and 37 per cent in its regional titles. The company said that it has already achieved £100m of cost cutting, but thanks to the crashing advertising revenue they are forced to go through with the layoffs.

Although a massive amount of employees are being let go, Peter Williams, finance director, remained delusional and upbeat: “For the past six or seven weeks, revenues have been flat in absolute terms, which means that rates of year-on-year decline will start to improve significantly as the year continues.” Way to faintly praise that damnation, Peter!

It’s not only the DMGT that is succumbing to the gloom of the recession, although they seem to be doing it with the most panache, what with hurriedly selling the Standard to a former spy for not even for the price of a pint and throwing away 1,000 jobs. It’s almost like the corporate version of a celebrity train wreck.

But there are others (many others) moving along the same crash course as DMGT, like Johnston Press that two weeks ago unveiled annual losses of £429m. Their revenue also fell by 12.4 per cent as sales fell. Johnston Press is looking at selling off some of its companies and they chose to axe their Irish publications, and possibly the Scotsman, in order to alleviate their debt. They’re hoping for more than a pound, but aren’t expecting much.

They’ve already faced strikes from Yorkshire Post staff after three of their number got served with compulsory redundancies. They seem to allowed the doom-laden mood to seep into their editorial – check out these headlines from today: “Leeds plans for 10,000 deaths”, “Leeds child rapist jailed”, “Leeds grandad ‘was left to die in hospital shower’”, “Paralysed former soldier loses ‘dignity’ battle”. The “grim up north” stereotypes continue unabated, and for good reason.

Johnston Press and their ilk are undoubtedly valuable while we still languish in the broadband dark ages, but if they can’t find a way to be profitable on the web then they can expect to be superceded by the BBC Local rollout that we’ll hopefully see in the next few years.

Today the companies publicized the union that will join network infrastructure in the UK, Germany, Spain and Ireland, and possibly the Czech Republic (discussions are currently taking place). Both companies will continue to manage their own calls separately, but will either share network sites and masts or build new masts and base stations together.

The deal is an attempt to cut back on costs, which most everyone is doing these days. If the venture works according to plan, it is estimated to save hundreds of millions for each company over the next decade. Initially analysts though mobile phones would be relatively immune to the recession but it appears they are not, as none of us are. Eventually and hopefully this saving of money should trickle down and lead to savings for customers.

The impromptu marriage could have been hastened due to Lord Carter’s Digital Britain overhaul, in which O2 and Vodafone could be made to give up some of their 900Mhz spectrum to other companies. Orange have just said they’re happy to rollout 2Mbps broadband across Britain, as long as O2 and Vodafone give them some of their spectrum to use.

The matrimony is not only supposed to be good for our pockets but for the environment as well. The collaborative building of new sites and sharing of current stations will lead to a “significant” reduction in the total number of masts, reducing environmental impact, the companies said. Any opportunity to bolster green cred, eh? Although it is not such good news for employees, as Vodafone is in the motions of freezing the salaries of 10,000 staff members in the UK, under a month after they announced a plan to cut 500 jobs in Britain as part of proposed plans to save £1bn by 2011.

Given O2 and Vodafone’s increasing cosiness, in assets both physical and intangibly wave-based, are we to expect an outright merger sometime soon?

The service currently can view streets in 25 British cities and other major UK towns will become available for viewing in the near future. It records real images provided by patrol cars with panopticon cameras mounted on their roofs taking 360-degree images. Users can type in an address and view it as an ordinary map, a satellite image, or a 3D photograph and take a “stroll’ through a panorama of their street or “wave” at a neighbor who has been caught in the still. 

Google has been the topic of complaints (as per usual) in regards to privacy, as people don’t so much like being captured on hidden cameras. Parents have also expressed concern with Street View over the device compromising the security of their children.

The head of Google UK, Matt Brittin, defended the company’s 3D Street View. ”It is a great product and we have talked to the Information Commissioner’s Office about the product, what it does and how we have built privacy [elements] into it. We have also talked to the Metropolitan police and they have said it actually helps track and monitor crime.” Not sure how that one’s going to work, unless the camera guys happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Google said: “We blur faces in Street View and we offer easy-to-use removal tools so users can decide for themselves whether or not they want a given image to appear in Street View. “ Brittin said the service has a “report a concern” button if people would like to have images removed from the service.

In recent months Google has come under fire for an array of mistakes and privacy slip ups with Gmail’s occasional crashes, the Google AdSense outage, and Google Docs accidentally sharing people’s personal files. And so it begins with Street View: a leading privacy group has asked the US Federal Trade Commission to shut down Google’s web services until it establishes safeguards for confidential information and privacy.

But come on! People are acting like it provides a real-time feed of your daily activities, when really it’s just  single snapshot. If you think your privacy is being invaded with a shot of your blurred face walking down the street, then you probably don’t leave the house very much in the first place. Get over it, world!

Though if you want to see some hot sunbathing babes on Street View, as well as guys busted walking into adult book stores, out of strip joints, and attempting to break and enter a house, click here. Look, you can’t really see their faces. Except the strip club guy.

The economy is not a mob of zombies that is actually going about eating peoples brains, but the downturn has been associated with some very high profile suicides. They may not be a synchronized diving of suited businessmen from skyscraper windows, but there have been a series of deaths likely related to the economy. 

On these pages we’ve seen Patrick Rocca, who put a gun to his head in his home after losing nearly £500m; German industrialist Adolf Merckle who threw himself under a train after a short position on VW ended badly; and French financier Rene-Thierry Magnon de la Villehuchet who stabbed himself after losing big with Madoff. Add to them Chicago real estate mogul Steven Good and London-based financier Kirk Stephenson and you’ve got yourself a certified cultural meme. 

Jonathan Alpert, a Manhattan psychotherapist, says: “The identity of these people is so tied into their career that when it’s gone they don’t know who they are any more. These are high achievers, high earners, ‘Alpha Male’ types who have a good education, a good career, a high standard of living and suddenly it disappears on them and they have to re-evaluate everything.”

So if you’re used to the good life, it can be impossible to leave behind. Princess Luciana Pignatelli washed down a bottle of sleeping pills with gin at the age of seventy because she had lost what she believed to be most important: her money and looks. The author of The Beautiful People’s Beauty Book told friends “I can’t face being old and poor”, after learning all of her investments were worthless.

Unfortunately the money troubles faced by the incredibly rich can end up trickling down and affecting the more average person. Last month Major William Foxton, 65, scribbled a suicide note, marched to a park bench near his home and put a pistol to his head after he lost up to £1million to the Madoff fraud. ”People think econocide is a problem on Wall Street but it is also affecting people on Main Street, ordinary families who have lost their homes, their jobs, their savings,” says Dr Leslie Seppinni.

Dr Alan Berman of the American Association of Suicidology warns of the dire econocide-filled future we may face: “If the current recession lasts as long as the experts are predicting we expect we will see something parallel to the Great Depression. During the Great Depression, suicide rose by more than 50%, to 17.5 per 100,000 of the population.”

On a side note, the 1930s had its own suicide anthem in the form of “Gloomy Sunday”, said to be responsible for hundreds of deaths. But the noughties has gone one better, and we’ve got an actual band called Econocide, playing bedroom grindcore so awful that ending it all seems like the only method of truly cleansing your ears of the sonic memory.

All of this doom, gloom and econocide talk is absolutely depressing and inflated when lumped together like this, but at the moment these cases are rare. While the billionaires’ shame at not being able to provide for their employees can easily be replicated in an average family situation, let’s hope ordinary people maintain perspective. Just don’t listen to Econocide and you should be fine.

There has been a worrying privacy issue with Google’s Document and Spreadsheet products; in response they have sent notices to a number of users, although Google says that it was a small incident affecting less than .05 per cent of all documents. The letters read: “Dear Google Docs user, We wanted to let you know about a recent issue with your Google Docs account. We’ve identified and fixed a bug which may have caused you to share some of your documents without your knowledge.”

With the amount of information we feed into Google each day, personal information, this all makes that nervous feeling in the pit of our stomachs turn into a constant gurgle. It’s getting worse as it seems like “dropping the ball” is a recurring theme with Google lately, what with Gmail going down last month for two hours, affecting 25 million users. Then there was the phishing trip by ViddyHo on Google Chat, and the Google AdSense outage too. 

We previously discussed the Gdrive, a maybe-in-development cloud application that stores a person’s personal files and operating system on Google’s own servers and is accessed via the Internet. We also touched on the topic of Google Latitude, that lovely new human tracking device. Imagine that went haywire and someone you thought you had blocked could now pinpoint the exact location you were? Imagine the social awkwardness!

As we venture ever deeper into Google’s cloud, the horror stories of lost information, compromised privacy and service outages are only going to increase. What’s interesting is how Twitter is filling the gap – people turned to the service during the Gmail outage, and it’s increasingly being used in lieu of actual emailing. So where will the first Twitter outage send people scurrying to? Hotmail?!

With all this going on Roberto Cavalli still showcased his main line that featured a toned down version of himself, a big departure from his usual bright colours and animal prints. There was an array of suede miniskirts, cropped jackets and spray-on leggings - the whole combo looked almost armour-like, to metaphorically fight back against the economy. Cavalli said: “It’s not a time for romance. You have to be aggressive to win.” He added that he had “declared war on the (financial) crisis.”

A return to our hunter-gatherer roots was the predominant theme of Prada’s contribution. Drawing inspiration from the recession, designers attempted to take us back to utilitarian styles of the past, with colourful tweed jackets, sweaters and massive hip waders. I’m not too sure how the massive hip waders fit into the theme, unless they’re assuming we’ll soon have so little money that we are going to have to fish for our own dinner, and we can do this with our stylish new Prada hip waders. Who would have thought that the concept of absolute poverty could be made to look so posh? 

The collection was also filled with very sensible and scratchy looking tweed suits; just like the Milan menswear lines, they pointed at a frivolity-free future. The models were haunting with their overly teased hair and ghostly pale faces; maybe their faces are sombre due to the uncertainty of the week itself, or maybe it’s the fibre-pill-and-cocaine breakfast they had. 

So the theme in Milan seems to be wearable pieces, driven by the economy, but the paradox is that the collection is designed for the elite few that can actually afford to buy a simple sweater and some hip waders for an outlandish amount of money in order to prepare for an economic collapse. Most of us would have to sell everything we own and actually take up fishing to feed ourselves just to afford one of these low-key pieces, which doesn’t seem to help.  

The difference between the fashion collections was significant as we discussed previously, New York’s fashion week was aggressive and took a frightened attitude toward money troubles while London laughed in the economy’s face with its ridiculous “mashups” and technicolour palette. Now Milan is taking a conventional approach. What is next? Space suits for the elite to move to the moon with? Zoolander-style “Derelicte” where the fashionistas and hobos look one and the same?

JPG is a photography magazine, launched in late 2006 with the innovative idea of accepting user-submitted photography as a way of cutting back costs and incorporating readers into the project, bringing print and the web together. It was composed of user-submitted photographs but crumbled last month, despite its popularity, when its parent company 8020 Media’s wells ran dry thanks to inflated salaries and overambitious expansion plans – get the full story from ValleyWag here.  

The rebirth of the company has been possible thanks to an undisclosed price by a joint venture between Adorama Camera (a camera retailer) and an anonymous investment group. 8020 will re-hire some former staff members that were lost in the collapse, and they say that next issue should hit stands in two months. Adorama will become the site’s e-commerce partner, and photos and advice from JPG members, will appear on Adorama’s site. This venture seems suspiciously like a way for Adorama to promote their company and for the magazine to run a slew of advertorials for their Daddy Warbucks. So there you have it – one way for a struggling magazine to turn a profit is to whore itself, to become one of the branded.  

If being in a love nest with a brand doesn’t appeal to you, or if one doesn’t want you, another way to finance a magazine is to be a massively respected style maven with a heartfelt pitch. It worked for Love, the creation of Katie Grand, who was fashion director of The Face before starting POP… enough said.

The magazine is supposedly an edgy take on the traditional fashion magazines currently being churned out. To accentuate just how edgy and out of the box Love is, it placed Beth Ditto, the voluptuous front woman of a band that had a good song out a couple of years ago, completely nude on the cover. It’s not often that the NME can claim to be ahead of the curve, but I think they’ve got an opportunity here. The cover also trumpets the “icons of our generation”, like Iggy Pop and Courtney Love.

Grand has promised a ban on size zero models and a shift away from overly airbrushed images, saying in her editorial: ”Everything about the way that Beth looks reminds us not of her imperfections but our own. She is happy with who she is and the way she is. Don’t we all wish that we woke up in the morning and felt like that?” The utopian statement pairs well with the magazine’s blog, which opened with a magazine employee getting a boob job: “Miss O’Neill will be having her blossoming bosoms enlarged. From the meagre double A you see before you to a whopping great 32C!” 

But if you haven’t got a decades-long track record in the upper echelons of successful mags, yet you have loads of your own money, you can be set anyway. We saw recently how Buck magazine was funded from the editors inheritance and former life as a KPMG exec. Rather more respectable is FUN magazine, which is free, has no advertisers, and generates no revenue, and on its third issue; the founders are bankrolling it through their other ventures as promoters Real Gold, who put on club nights Rich History, Cough/Cool, and The International Amalgamation Of Champions. Co-founder, Ben Freeman, 30, said, “If you want to do something, you can’t sit around and wait for it to come to you,” in The Independent. “Rather than worrying about demographics, target audiences and business plans, we just got on with it.” Fair enough, as it’s funded from their other business ventures.

It seems that in a recession, niche magazine business plans seem to be just as varied as their content…