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Topics: iPhone What kind of Christmas present is this? The Consumerist is reporting that AT&T has stopped selling the iPhone in the New York metropolitan area , at least via the company’s website, due to high data congestion (or possibly due to online fraud ). Stephen in Brooklyn says he made the discovery while shopping on AT&T’s website for an iPhone today: I was on the AT&T Wireless website trying to get an iPhone. However, when I put in my zip code 11231, the site says the iPhone is unavailable. This seemed a little odd so I started punching in other famous zip codes: 90210, 60609 (spiegel catalog), 02134 (zoom, an old children’s show). For theses cities, LA, Chicago, Boston, iPhone is available. Then I looked up some…

David Spinks is a graduating senior in NY that is utilizing the power of social web communities to pursue a career in social media/marketing. He authors a blog at DavidSpinks.com . There is an almost overwhelming number of options on the social web for businesses to create and participate in communities. You hear a lot about Facebook Fan Pages, Twitter communities, and even LinkedIn Groups; but businesses have another option when looking to build a community online that’s often overlooked despite having nearly 40 million users: Ning . Ning allows businesses to create their own off-site social network for their brand’s community, and participate in existing conversations with the communities …

Well that didn’t take long. We outlined the not-so-ethical ways that the big social gaming startups are generating revenue through lead gen scams and subscriptions through a series of posts over the last week. Starting with Social Games: How The Big Three Make Millions and Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem Of Hell . We also threw in some comments by other companies and a former scammer , and a quote from Zynga that 1/3 of their revenues come from offers, much of which are scams. We thought this would be a fight that would take months to end successfully, and we thought that only Facebook or MySpace would make the move to clean up their own platforms. But boy am I surprised today to…

It’s been known for a number of months that Twitter inventor Jack Dorsey is working on a new startup codenamed “Squirrel”. Rumors swirled that it may be a mobile payments system, although the name of the venture and its specifics have remained under wraps. Today both the company’s name and technologies have been unveiled. Dorsey’s new venture is called the Square iPhone Payment System, his new company is Self Edge NYC, and the service’s site will likely be located at SquareUp.com . The service provides a white dongle for your iPhone or iPod Touch that lets you pay without a credit card. As CoolHunting wrote in July (without knowing about…

Apple confirmed Friday that it is allowing App Store purchases from within free applications. Until now, the company had only allowed purchases from paid applications on the iPhone and iPod touch. Insiders agreed that Apple has made a prudent move. John Muchow, founder of 3SixtySoftware.com and iPhoneDeveloperTips.com, wrote in an e-mail that the idea is solid. “I think this is a fantastic update and several clients have already contacted me to talk further about how to best leverage this capability into both existing applications as well as applications on the drawing board,” Muchow wrote. A Smoother Path To Sales The key is efficiency. Lee Barney, a professor of computer information at Brigham Young University in Idaho, …

Botnets — autonomous and automated collections of compromised computers that spew spam all around the globe — have become a scourge on the communications infrastructure. As we covered a few days ago, Message Labs, a division of Symantec that tracks over 3.7 billion SMTP connections per day, reports that botnets are responsible for a whopping 88 percent of email traffic from new and previously unknown bad sources. Currently, one of the most nefarious botnets, dubbed Grum, is responsible for over 23 percent of all global spam. That’s power — and not the good kind. In talking with MessageLabs officials recently, though, I also discovered that there are increasingly sophisticated efforts at the ISP level to filter out traffic from botnets. On that …

As anyone who follows the mobile space knows, the CTIA, aka the International Association for the Wireless Telecommunications Industry, is holding its annual conference this week in San Diego. Besides serving as a stage for new wireless products and services, the CTIA Board has convened to discuss a variety of issues that affect the industry as a whole. Perhaps the most important news to come out of the conference this week is the Board’s decision to back universal standards to “[s]implify input/output features on mobile devices.” In particular, the Board is looking to “streamline and enhance the customer experience” through this new initiative by promoting the universal adoption of the 3.5 mm audio plug for earbuds/headphones and…

We recently wrote about dominance of number of .com domains and also noted that .com domain registrations were starting to turn around again after a poor 2008. It looks like values of .com domains may be rising as well. Insurance broker Insure.com has sold its name and Web site for a whopping $16 million. The insurance company’s name and URL, which was sold for 10 times more than it was bought for in 2001. According to this report, the domain name was purchased by marketing firm QuinStreet, which also shelled out $18 million for Internet.com’s tech trade business in August. QuinStreet helps businesses target their customer audiences and generate sales leads. Other large domain purchases this…

With AmazonBasics, the online retail giant is jumping headfirst into the consumer electronics space with its own private line of low-cost accessories. The products are all packaged in “frustration free” packaging, and include HDMI cables, Ethernet cords, and blank DVDs, to name a few. This has to irk the consumer electronics companies that currently sell marked up cables and other items in Amazon’s virtual marketplace already, but Paul Ryder, Amazon’s vice president for consumer electronics and wireless, said all they’ll need is a little re-education. “I’m sure some vendors of cables and blank media are going to ask us, ‘What just happened?’ We’ll educate them that we saw value available …

Yesterday, cable behemoth, Comcast, announced plans to make its emerging On Demand Online service available to cable subscribers on their mobile devices in the near future. At first glance, this news seems a bit odd. However, Comcast has recently begun to offer consumers wireless Internet access in select areas across the country as a result of its partnership with WiMAX provider, Clearwire. Thus, porting On Demand Online to the mobilesphere actually makes a lot of sense for the cable giant. “I can envision sometimes in the future (On Demand Online) having a wireless component,” Comcast Chief Financial Officer Michael Angelakis said at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia conference. Comcast is also considering re…