After eight months of waiting, Deutsche Telkom and France Telecom have merged their UK operations to form Britain’s largest communications company, now know as Everything Everywhere. The 50:50 joint venture will merge the corporate operations and network resources of Orange UK and T-Mobile UK to create an umbrella company that will continue to operate the two distinctive brands. Combining the best of both Orange and T-Mobile UK, the newly merged Everything Everywhere now boasts: 713 retail stores, 16,000 employees, and a customer base of 30 million — which exceeds that of rival O2. Hit the jump for the full press release. ORANGE AND T-MOBILE UNVEIL JOINT VENTURE NAME, TEAM, VISION AND PLANS Companies outline vision to give customers instant access to everything, everywhere Everything Everywhere: One company, running two of Britain’s most famous brands – Orange and T-Mobile Best for customers: Scale of new company allows delivery of best value, best choice, best coverage and best quality in the industry Biggest Network: Plans for a single super-network that will give bigger and better coverage for customers, with a smaller impact on the environment Benefits begin this year: Roaming across both networks due later this year, at no additional cost to the customer Boost for Sales: Biggest operator retail presence on the high street with over 700 stores today Brilliant Service: Focus on quality, to ensure customers receive the very best service, helping people discover more from their mobile Acceleration in new markets: New assault on business market, continued leadership in wholesale, and focus on new revenue streams One Team: New Leadership Team announced to take the company forward London. 11 May 2010

GOOD , the company behind the integrated media platform for “people who give a damn”, has added some serious weight to its leadership team with the addition of three high-profile advisors. The company announced today that YouTube co-founder and CEO Chad Hurley (GOOD uses YouTube to power its video channel ) and Chief Marketing Officer and President, Joint Ventures, PepsiCo Beverages America Jill Beraud have joined GOOD’s Advisory Board. Also signing up as an advisor is founder and CEO of DonorsChoose.org Charles Best . “Their unique insights and diverse experience will enable us to position ourselves for continued success and achieve our company mission, which is to celebrate and enable individuals, businesses and nonprofits pushing the world forward,” said Craig Shapiro , President of GOOD (he was formerly Head of Content Strategy & Acquisition at HELIO, Virgin Mobile USA). In other news, GOOD recently formed a strategic partnership with GoodSearch whereby the two entities will combine their traffic under the GOOD umbrella – generating over four million unique visitors on a monthly basis. GOOD recently secured a “single digit millions” funding round from co-founder and CEO Ben Goldhirsh and a number of angel investors including OLPC’s Nicholas Negroponte , in an effort to solidify as the go-to media platform for people who want to live well and do good. CrunchBase Information GOOD Information provided by CrunchBase

It’s all well and good to cut corners when you’re ridding durable, miniature electronics of their brittle plastic clamshells — but this time, Amazon’s ” Frustration-Free Packaging ” initiative has gone too far. The company’s shipping computer hard drives in the stuff. According to dozens of irate customers, Western Digital hard drives shipped by the e-tailer over the past several months have arrived in damaged cardboard containers, thin layers of bubble wrap, or even loose in a simple electrostatic discharge bag without an ounce of padding to keep them from harm. And while some buyers shipped them back immediately when they saw what had happened, many who tried them anyhow found their magnetic storage dead on arrival.

Europeans won’t have to wait as long for the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus as they did the original models, according to the documents passed through the Global Certification Forum allowing them entry through Heathrow, Charles De Gaulle and Schiphol. More

Filed under: iPad Bob Koon, President and Tech Director of Binary Hammer , was kind enough to pass along this sneak peak for their upcoming polyhedra XL for the iPad. This larger sized version of their award winning polyhedra game introduces new game play and provides an enhanced soundtrack, as you can see (and listen to) in this video. This is one game that I’m definitely going to want to try. I’m a big fan of Kongregate’s Filler and this video suggests that polyhedra XL plays like Filler on steroids, with shapes expanding to fill a limited space and penalties for touching. Watching the video, I’m going to admit that I’m not a huge fan of the music. Also, each screen kind of saturates me out on a given color. (Pink, pink, more pink!) That having been said, the game looks like it’s gotten a nice iPad refresh, with clean art and a “zero gravity” mode. Can’t wait to play it.

Well here’s some fresh cell phone news for you. LG has released two new devices to follow their predecessor, the LG Cookie, which sold over 13 million units worldwide. The Cookie series is now expanding with the LG Cookie Plus (LG GS500) and the LG Cookie Fresh (LGGS290). LG is attempting to offer a visually dynamic interactive experience that enables users to keep in touch online easily with smart social network service (SNS) connectivity and LiveSquare™. Dr. Skott Ahn, President and CEO of LG Electronics Mobile Communications company said,”LG Cookie Series reflects our effort to bring creativity and fun to the mobile touch-phone experience.” He continues with,”LG Cookie Plus and LG Cookie Fresh offer various features to suit different tastes while maintaining the core features of the original LG Cookie phone.” The LG Cookie Plus will be available worldwide this month after making its debut in France and Italy and the LG Cookie Fresh will be available in over 60 countries following it’s introduction in Germany and Russia. Prices are TBA in each market.

Those of you that have wanted a QWERTY keyboard, but haven’t found it necessary to buy a smartphone with all the bells and whistles. AT&T has your solution, earlier today they announced four new quick messaging QWERTY-equipped devices for those on a modest budget. They also come with some relatively new features and are among some of the first in the AT&T arsenal to offer a “Mobile Locker”, or a new media sharing capability that let’s users upload to social network services, an online address book to synchronize your PC and phone, and a threaded messaging inbox that now offers the ability to SMS groups of contacts. The AT&T share service is going to cost 10$ and will include 50 transfers or users could just pay $0.35 per transfer.

As part of his presentation at the RSA Security Conference currently taking place in San Francisco, Scott Charney, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President for Trustworthy Computing, discussed different tactics for combating the scourge of spyware that is infecting computers by the billions. One such proposition applies a health care paradigm to the problem and views spyware as a disease that requires a social program to identify, quarantine, and cure afflicted computers. The bulk of the cost to identify and cure these sick computers would be shouldered by the Internet service providers who could pass this cost onto consumers by presenting the problem as a public safety issue and funding it with general taxation. Would you pay a stupid computer user general tax to help better the Internet and keep it clean or is Microsoft just drunk with success at its recent victory over the Waledac botnet and spewing forth wild and crazy ideas? Read

Current NASA Administrator and former astronaut Charles Bolden, speaking a few weeks ago at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, explained how our nation’s space program is at a crossroads and pledged to continue manned missions into space. A combination of the federal budget deficit and a number of successful unmanned space endeavors—think Hubble, Mars Rovers—has dimmed Dubya’s plan to put man back in space in a big way. Bolden, however, refuses to let the Astronaut die on his watch. “I do not see this president being the president who presides over the end of human spaceflight,” he said. Bolden expressed an interest in partnering with other nations on practical manned missions, in addition to continuing to develop more efficient space flight technologies. Still, there are many powerful voices who consider manned spaceflight a frivolous endeavor. NASA’s course will be determined in large part by Barack Obama and the funding he allots to the agency in the next few weeks. Here’s to hoping he’s looking towards the stars

Chris Allison is a social media strategist at NeboWeb , where he helps clients make the most of the social web. You can follow him on Twitter as the voice behind @Neboweb . You may have seen Twitter’s recently announced most discussed topics of ‘09 . The list really highlights the gravity of this important year: A new US President was sworn into office, celebrities died and celebrities were born, there were revolutions, there were pandemics, and technology continued its rapid advance. 2009 has also been a huge year for Twitter itself, as the network has rapidly become the sieve through which all real-time news and culture flows. Here, we break down the most influential topics that passed through Twitter this year, and discuss what they mean for users and the service itself.

Last week Zynga CEO Mark Pincus said that they would take steps to remove scammy advertising offers from their social games. There have been a couple of missteps since then, and Facebook responded by taking Zynga’s newest game, FishVille, offline . Zynga insists they are serious about cleaning up the industry. And today Pincus has announced that the company will remove all offer advertising from their games. This isn’t a meaningless action. Offers account for 1/3 or so of Zynga’s rumored $250 million in revenue . All offers will be removed by the end of today, says Pincus, “until we can control their inclusion and presentation ourselves.” The blog post also discloses that Zynga is an investor in DoubleDing, an offer provider that competes with OfferPal and SuperRewards.

First, the venerable Rubik’s Cube recreated the masterworks of Da Vinci . Today’s example, while not quite as grandiose, is still impressive. Ladies and Gents, the Space Invaders are here. And Sonic. And Pac-Man. Even President Obama makes an appearance, although I don’t think Hope: The Video Game is out just yet

Kosmix , the reference engine that dynamically generates comprehensive topic pages as soon as you search for them, has just acquired a small startup called Cruxlux . Cruxlux has spent the last two years building an engine that can take any two people, places, or things and tell you how they’re related. Terms of the deals were not disclosed, other than that that it was in both cash and stock. If you’re a fan of the classic game ‘ Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon ‘, you’ll love the Cruxlux engine. The company has built algorithms that will automatically figure out how various people, places, things, and topics are related through a handful of steps, using sources across the web. Say, for example, I wanted to see how TechCrunch is connected to President Obama: the site first says that TechCrunch was founded by Michael Arrington, who is connected to Stanford Law School (he went there).

One of the more interesting parts of Delicious has always been its “popular bookmarks” section, a list of the links that have been bookmarked the most by users over a given time frame. But similar to Digg, which is also currently trying to reinvent itself, it can take a relatively long time for these links to bubble up, especially compared to services like Twitter and the link tracking tools built on top of it. Today, Delicious is trying to combat this issue by integrating a number of Twitter-related features. With its new “Fresh Bookmarks” section on its homepage, Delicious doesn’t wait for a story to get a lot of bookmarks (typically more than 100 in the old version), but looks at other metrics including related links as well as tweet count.

Twitter just announced its new home page redesign complete with trending topics and search. Publicly launched at the 2006 South by South West interactive festival, users first flocked to the site as a way to communicate with friends and festival attendees. However, as we’ve seen in the past few years, the site has evolved into a multifaceted real-time tool. The community has given timely updates on earthquakes , the Iran election and we’ve even seen professional poker players bluff in real-time Tweets . Twitter has evolved into a community where users can discover breaking news and trends and the new home page certainly matches that. Sponsor Says Twitter cofounder Biz Stone in a blog post , “Demonstrating the power of Twitter as a discovery engine for what is happening right now through our Search and Trends often awakens a sense of wonder which inevitably leads to a much more compelling question, “How do I get involved?” And it seems at this point, if you haven’t gotten involved you’ve been living under a rock. While the site always contained the ability to search and discover trends, these features were buried. Today, with the new design, all of those television viewers who refused to give into the peer pressure of Oprah and Ashton Kutcher’s hour-long Twitter tutorial will finally understand the value of the service