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Globe Telecom will be the official network carrier of the iPhone in the Philippines and units may be sold locally starting this September.

That’s according to an Inquirer news story and a short press statement published in Globe’s website:

Globe, SingTel, Bharti Airtel and Optus today announced that they have signed an agreement with Apple to bring the iPhone to the Philippines, Singapore, India, and Australia later this year.

More information will be released at a later date.

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Apple’s uber-slick phone, the iPhone, is still not launched yet throughout Asia but the gadget is already penetrating the Philippine mainstream market.

A friend showed off his jailbroken (read: hacked) iPhone last week which he bought from Virra Mall in Greenhills. His 8GB phone costs P21,000 (US$525) — a 30% price drop from the cheapest iPhone we saw back in September 2007.

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In response to criticisms that its ranking methodology is not representative of the entire Internet population, web ranking company Alexa unveiled today a new system wherein rankings are now based on “multiple sources of data” rather than just the Alexa Toolbar.

In the past, Alexa used to measure a site’s traffic rank and reach based on the toolbar users installed on their PCs. This means if you don’t use the Alexa toolbar, your internet surfing habits are not counted. Today Alexa announced that they are implementing a new rankings system closer to the actual statistics of a website.

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As the market for web-based email gets tougher and tougher, big players Google’s Gmail, MSN’s Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail are on a continuous battle to offer something extraordinary in order to retain customers and get new ones.

Yahoo!, for its part, has exclusively inked a deal with — brace yourselves — the wizard Gandalf and the hobbit Frodo of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings to promote the web-based email service.

Here’s a very funny video of Gandalf using Yahoo! Mail and Messenger to send Frodo on a mission to save Middle Earth.

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Woohoo! The wait is over. Photo sharing site Flickr finally supports video upload and hosting.

When I opted for a Flickr Pro Account exactly a year ago, I knew videos was up next. Flickr is, at least for me and for some people, the best photo upload and sharing site ever. It’s only a matter of time before they leverage that expertise to videos.

And now it happened: Flickr has launched videos.

(Sample Flickr video after the jump!)

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The latest survey of 304 companies in the US showed that 84% of employees fired for internet misuse was due to accessing porn or other inappropriate content at work.

The study, conducted by the American Management Association (AMA) and The ePolicy Institute, analyzed cases of workers fired for misusing the internet on the job.

The survey also showed that 34% of these companies let go of workers due to excessive personal use of the Internet. A majority of companies monitor the online activities of employees by monitoring their keystrokes and time spent on the keyboard. They also review personal blogs for company-related content and even individual social networking accounts of employees in, say, Friendster, Myspace or Facebook.

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Extending the popular “I’m a Mac… and I’m a PC” ad campaign of Apple, here’s another one promoting this time the supposed superiority of Leopard OS versus Microsoft Vista.

The ad clip, occupying large spaces at the top and right-hand side of websites, features the PC guy (played by John Hodgman) hilariously refuting a Wall Street Journal article that proclaimed that “Leopard is better than Vista.”

The online advertisement was earlier seen on the sites of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal but today, it’s now being bannered on Yahoo! News.

Watch a YouTube video of the funny Apple ad below.

Dictionary maker Merriam-Webster this week crowned the word “w00t” as 2007 Word of the Year.

“w00t” — typically spelled with two zeros — is like saying “Yay!” and is used as an expression of joy by online users.

Visitors to Merriam-Webster’s Web site were invited to vote for one of 20 words and phrases culled from the most frequently looked-up words on the site and submitted by readers.

The Word of the Year runner-up is “facebook,” a new verb which means “to add someone to a list of friends on the Web site Facebook.com or to search for people on the social networking site.”

Kudos to the word w00t! W00t!

People using mobile phones for more than 22 hours a month or about an hour everyday are at risk of developing tumors, so says the latest scientific study by Israeli researchers published in the American Journal of Epidemiology this week.

The report puts the risk of developing a parotid gland tumour nearly 50% higher for frequent cellphone users. The risk increases if users clamped the phone to the same ear, did not use hands-free devices, or were in areas with higher levels of exposure.

Parotid gland tumours are mumps-like enlargements of the parotid salivary gland that occur below and in front of the ears (see image).

The research was led by Dr Siegal Sadetzki, a cancer and radiation expert at the Chaim Sheba Medical Centre in Israel and as part of a World Health Organisation project.

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A new robot has been invented in Japan which can help train dentists regarding dental pains experienced by patients. Read on, this one’s just absolutely cool.

Humanoid robot teaches dentists to feel people’s pain

Japan’s future dentists may soon be able to better appreciate patients’ pain by training on a humanoid robot that can mumble “ouch” when the drill hits a nerve.

The dental-training robot, dubbed Simroid for “simulator humanoid,” has realistic skin, eyes and a mouth fitted with replica teeth on which students practice drilling. A sensor fitted where the nerve endings would be raises the alert when they drill too close — triggering a yelp from the robot.

“Ow, that hurt!” a female robot squeaked, narrowing her eyes as a young dentist drilled on her replica teeth. “Now, I’m OK,” she said as the dentist eased off.

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