TWiST #171 News Stories

San Francisco renter EJ used the service to rent out her apartment for one week

When she returned she found her locked closet smashed open and her passport, jewelry, cash and electronics missing

EJ says Airbnb has been helpful and the company says that they are working with the authorities and using their security infrastructure to assist the police in their investigation

LAUNCH got confirmation from Airbnb that an insurance offering is in the works (read more: http://launch.is/blog/airbnb-confirms-insurance-in-case-your-pad-gets-trashed.html)

Brands will now be able to pay to have Twitter feature their tweets in the streams of their followers

Twitter has long promised that a solution like this for brands would debut

When a brand you follow tweets, they will automatically be placed at the top of a users stream, regardless of when they fall in the chronological timeline

Just weeks after entering the US market, European music service startup Spotify was sued by streaming music service PacketVideo

The patent in question is for a "device for the distribution of music information in digital form"

PacketVideo bought the patent a several years ago and the idea contained within it is not new

As Verizon has already done, AT&T will limit data rates in an effort to curb the problem of data congestion that has hurt their 3G network performance since the iPhone’s debut

The heaviest users will see significant speed decreases once they go over a threshold of data, estimated to be somewhere between 2 and 4GB

Since the iPhone 1’s debut in the summer of 2007, AT&T has seen an 8000% increase in mobile data traffic

AT&T’s new data throttling is rumored to begin in the first week on October, as is Virgin Mobile’s--coincidence, or sign that the iPhone may be coming to yet another carrier?

According to disclosure documents just filed, Google and Facebook both spent record amounts on lobbyists this quarter

Earlier this year Facebook had to offer an explanation of its privacy efforts to the FTC and Google confirmed it was the target of an FTC antitrust investigation

Spending $2M in Q2 is the first time that Google has out-spent Microsoft on lobbyists

Facebook spent $320k in the second quarter (last year their most costly lobbyist spend in a quarter was $130k)

Google targeted online advertising, privacy issues, openness and competition in online services, and cloud computing, while Facebook targeted international regulation of software companies, restrictions on Internet access by foreign governments and federal privacy legislation