2009 was a big year for us here at iTech Report. We’ve broken news right across the board, and have some exciting announcements lined up for early 2010. We launched on July 14th, and since then have amassed more than 7,541 unique visits - a massive 4,050 of which came from this month alone. We’re certainly growing at an immense pace. This time four months ago, we were averaging only 15-20 hits per day. We’re now getting [...]

Telstra has today released its predictions for the New Year, showing they believe more than 66 million SMS messages will be sent across New Years Eve and New Years Day period. The telecommunications giant is estimating more than 31 million phone calls, 25,000 video calls and more than 850,000 MMS messages will be sent on the Telstra network over the two-day period. Five years ago only 14 millions SMS messages were sent on Telstra in [...]

CES 2010, undoubtedly one of the biggest technology conferences of the year, has launched an iPhone app for the convention but is charging participants to download it. Follow Me Logo (Credit: CES) The app, dubbed “Follow Me” is now available on the iTunes App Store and has been since early December, going for $2.49AUD or $1.99USD after originally launching for free. Since the last update on December 10, organisers have begun charging for the app, something not usually done for conference apps. Take the recent LeWeb [...]

Apple’s $100 per year online iPhone to computer sync service today went down for just over 3 hours in a festive season party pooper. The pricey service, already a sore point against free alternatives such as the Google Apps suite, allows iPhone and iPod Touch users to synchronise data including their emails, calendar events and contacts wirelessly over the Internet to computers or Macs. It was plagued with outage issues when it first launched last [...]

Post Christmas clearance sales have now begun in Australia, with many outlets offering big discounts on some of 2009′s biggest tech gadgets. In the Apple department there’s some great bargains to be had across the range of iPods, MacBooks and iTunes cards. JB Hi-Fi stores offering the most convincing deals so far, with$21 discounted from the latest iPod Nano, $25 off the recommended retail price for the 8GB iPod Touch, two $20 iTunes cards for [...]

Popcap, the maker of hit desktop and web game Plants vs Zombies, says the iPhone version of the game has been delayed until late January 2010. Originally the company had been pushing for a ‘late 2009′ release, after announcing it would be porting the game to the iPhone and iPod Touch in April this year. As the year draws to a close, eager fans have been pestering the company to find out when they would [...]

Twitter, the popular micro-blogging site, is about to bring their SMS notifications and tweeting service to Australia, just one week after announcing support for Facebook SMS. When Telstra announced support for Facebook’s SMS service, we suggested (thanks to no strong hint from their blog) that support for Twitter’s own service was not far away. Well today it seems support for the service is about to launch over the next couple of days, with many Australian [...]

Contenture, a micropayments platform that launched in May, is closing its doors on December 31 citing a lack of interest from ‘big publishers’ as being behind their decision. The platform allowed publishers to paste a small code snippet onto their site which gave them the tools to offer a ‘freemium’ version of their site. The idea was likened to that of ‘TipJoy‘, another site which allowed publishers or bloggers to receive small tips from readers [...]

As part of its initiatives in opening up Australian Government data, OpenAustralia has today launched a new tool that allows you to subscribe via email and receive updates on planning applications near you. OpenAustralia, a volunteer organisation started by Matthew Landauer and Katherine Szuminska, aims to create applications that utilise Government data, with the group already rolling out apps like OpenAustralia which provides information on your local MPs and Senators. Their latest web app, “Planning [...]

WordPress 2.9 was today pushed to all sites running the popular blogging platform, marking the last major update for the platform for 2009 as the developers behind the CMS look for a new default theme for the next release in 2010. Coming just days after the release candidate was announced, the update has some exciting new features including built-in post thumbnails (something that developers have previously had to add themselves), a new “trash status” that [...]