On tap for June: new iPhone 4G, Glam Nation, new Ozzy Osbourne album

Welcome to June, the month that brings us summer, and in the case of June 2010 a whole lot more. First up is June 4th, a day which will see Apple CEO Steve Jobs deliver a keynote which will all but certainly include the introduction of the next iPhone, which industry pundits have long dubbed the “iPhone 4G” even though that’s seemingly unlikely to be the device’s official name once introduced. Later in the month, on June 22nd, heavy metal legend Ozzy Osbourne will release his latest album Scream which has been anticipated for some time. Additional highlights for the month will include the release of new albums from Christina Aguilera, Orianthi, and Iyaz on June 8th and the launch of Adam Lambert’s long awaited Glam Nation tour on June 4th.

Why Apple will sell ten million iPads in 2010

When Apple sold its first million iPads in under a month, we predicted that the company would manage to push ten million units by the end of 2010. Although that would require picking up the pace, the iPad 3G and international launch combined with the word of mouth leading to sales acceleration and finally the 2010 holiday season, would boost sales to ten million by the end of December. The argument against such a feat, at the time at least, was that the swiftness with which the first million were sold was a result of the initial early adopter push and wouldn’t hold up over time. Now that we’ve learned that the second month saw an equal number of sales, however, any prediction of slowing iPad sales goes out the window. In fact, once one factors in the fact that not everyone who’s sought out to buy an iPad this month has been able to do so due to inventory issues, combined with the fact that the international rollout happened with just a few days left in the second month and didn’t significantly factor into that second million in sales, there’s every reason to believe that the current baseline of one million iPads sold per month should increase to 1.5 or two million per month as 2010 goes on. That math says that Apple gets to issue a press release announcing that the ten millionth iPad has found a home, right around December 27th. Right or wrong, you heard it here first; we said it a month ago.

Only one of my friends quit Facebook today, how about you?

I lost a friend today. Or so says Facebook, which reports that I now have one fewer “friend” than I began the day with. I don’t know the identity of the friend who deserted me today, but I’m guessing that the abandonment had less to do with something I said and more to do with the fact that today was Quit Facebook Day, a campaign with attacked Facebook over privacy issues and compared quitting Facebook to (I’m not making this up) quitting smoking. Nevermind that smoking will alienate you from most of society and eventually kill you, while the worst that Facebook can do is share super “private” information about you with the world including secrets like (gasp) your name and (oh, no!) your birthday.

So did the campaign work? Well, I began the day with one thousand seven hundred and sixty-seven Facebook friends and I also ended it with 1767, a result of having lost one unidentified friend and then having gained a new one later in the day. I’d say my Facebook friendbase is fairly broad and typical, including everyone from friends and family to industry acquaintances and former co-workers, so if I lost less than one tenth of one percent of my friends, it’s fairly safe to assume that less than one tenth of one percent of all Facebook users quit the service today overall. That’s a monumental flop in my book. And yet some have already referred to Quit Facebook Day as a success even before it began, simply because it brought attention to the Facebook privacy issue. I don’t see it that way; what the campaign told the world is that nearly all Facebook users would rather stick with the service, warts and all, than give it up entirely.

Five iPad “controversies” that turned out to be irrelevant

With the iPad reaching the two million units sold milestone today in fifty-nine days on the market, sales of the tablet have surpassed the expectations of everyone involved, likely including even that of Apple itself. So with the iPad now an inarguable early success, here are five issues that were supposed to have been controversial about the iPad which turned out to be non-issues or at least haven’t negatively impacted sales in a noticeable manner:

Lack of Flash: The theory that the griping about the lack of Flash on the iPad was merely coming from a small number of very loud people appears to have been validated by the iPad’s success.

Second generation syndrome: By now everyone paying attention knows that the second generation of a new Apple product comes with a better feature set and often a better price tag. While some may indeed be waiting for iPad G2 to arrive, it doesn’t appear to be the default behavior of the general public.

Multitasking: Like with Flash, the “public outcry” over the lack of third party multitasking on the iPad appears to have actually been just a handful of folks screaming at the top of their lungs in an attempt to appear more numerous than they actually are. As it turns out, the mainstream users buying the iPad don’t even know what the word “multitasking” means, much less care.

iPad 3G surcharge: Not only does the iPad 3G cost $15 to $30 a month for use of AT&T’s 3G network, users have to pay a $130 surcharge right out of the gate just to get the 3G enabled iPad model. While the 3G iPad pricing scheme feels like a racket, it hasn’t prevented iPad users from seeking out the 3G model – so much so that it’s been more difficult to find at retail than the non-3G model since it launched.

The name “iPad”: Remember how the iPad was going to be scoffed at and flop because its name contained the word “pad”? The early jokes have died down, sales are through the roof, and the joke appears to have been on those who honestly thought that the name “iPad” would somehow harm sales.

With two million iPads, Apple shows tech future doesn’t involve geeks

Apple has sold more than two million iPads in the product’s first two months, and the company has largely done so without the benefit of, and in some cases in spite of the efforts of, the geek tech community. Even as tech pundits and tech journalists decried the iPad as being too “closed” (their word for any device that’s not sufficiently hackable) and not doing enough to embrace ancient technologies like Flash (which geeks have inexplicably rallied around), the general public has flocked to the iPad at a rate which today’s numbers show isn’t slowing down.

While critics will point to the late launch of the iPad 3G and the international iPad launch as reasons why month two of iPad sales should have been higher than month one in order to demonstrate continued momentum, the severely constrained retail and online inventory of the device in its second month strongly suggests that month two iPad sales would in fact have been higher than month one if intended buyers had in fact been able to get their hands on one in month two. In other words, sales interest in the iPad is growing, even though the geeks have been refraining from buying one (or at least claiming to), and even as public anti-iPad and anti-Apple meltdowns from prominent geeks have grown more frequent and more severe.

Perhaps those meltdowns are a result of tech geeks consciously or subconsciously realizing that A) the general public is increasingly making technology purchasing decisions without first consulting a geek, B) the technology products coming to market, and specifically the ones that are succeeding, are less geek oriented than ever, and C) there’s nothing that the geeks can do to stop either of these trends.

It’s open to debate as to why the iPad has specifically become the linchpin in the battle between geeks who just want something they can hack without hassle, and normal users who just want something they can use without hassle. Perhaps it’s because geeks have wanted a tablet to rise to prominence for the past decade, and now that it’s finally happened with the iPad, it’s the exact opposite of the kind of product they’d spent all those years wishing for. Or maybe it’s because the iPad represents the most significant new consumer technology product category since the rise of either the smartphone or the laptop, depending on ones point of view. Or it could simply be that after twelve years of Apple increasingly pushing forward with consumer-oriented products that are the antithesis of the geeks’ desires, and becoming increasingly successful with those products, the iPad has simply been the tipping point that’s driven so many tech geeks so far off the reservation that their responses can be painful to witness and are often indistinguishable from that of mental patients (just watch how they go certifiably nuts in the comments section of this article and you’ll get the idea).

In any case, consumer technology continues to march forward in 2010 and beyond, with or without their participation, and frankly the real debate at this point is if the consumer mainstream might just be better off without their input; an unbiased evaluation of consumer technology products of the past few decades reveals that in various they’ve been holding the rest of us back.

Apple says it’s sold two million iPads in less than two months

Apple has announced today that it’s reached the two million sales mark for its iPad, fifty-nine days after the tablet computer’s launch. According to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, “Customers around the world are experiencing the magic of iPad, and seem to be loving it as much as we do. We appreciate their patience, and are working hard to build enough iPads for everyone.” The milestone arrives amid complaints from U.S. customers who say they’re having a hard time getting their hands on the device due to inventory constraints, and a delayed international launch which finally occurred just days ago.

Interestingly, the company has sold its second million iPad units in roughly the same amount of time that it took to sell its first million, suggesting that the iPad is now benefiting from sales to more than just the early adopter types.

“I quit Facebook today and all I got was this lousy MySpace!”

Quit Facebook Day, a campaign so misguided that it scheduled its event on a national holiday during which mainstream Facebook users are most likely to be nowhere near their computers anyway, has predictably flopped – if my loss of a whopping zero out of my current seventeen hundred-plus Facebook friends is any indication. While we’ll never know whether the creators of the “day” were truly attempting to effect positive change or were merely using the recent anti-Facebook PR in an attempt to carry out a geek agenda against service, the public backing of Quit Facebook Day by certain anarchist geeks whose reasons for leaving Facebook had more to do with their own distaste for the non-geekiness of Facebook and its userbase here in 2010 than any motives relating to actual privacy concerns. But in any case, the fact that the campaign received so much national attention yet resulted in a mere 26,000 signups tells us what we already knew before the clock struck midnight: quitting Facebook is no way to fix Facebook.

For social network early adopters, the lesson was learned years ago: Twitter was the only service of its specific type that had any traction, and yet it had terrible problems with uptime which more than once prompted an attempted mass exodus to competing sites like Jaiku and others you’ve never heard of unless you were a part of the mix back then. The reason why such attempted mass migrations never worked was that no one on those services like Jaiku; the few who switched over found themselves to talking to a handful of strangers or no one at all, gave up, and came back. Similarly, the 2010 campaign to try to get users to abandon Facebook has failed because nowhere on the QuitFacebookDay.com site is there a suggestion of what viable alternative the quitters are supposed to then turn to. Sure, we’ve seen some spam here about this or that tiny open source social network which is supposedly going to be the “next Facebook” if it can just get over the hump of only having three current users, but when it comes down to it there’s nowhere to go but Facebook (MySpace is a past-tense wasteland and Twitter is simply too different of a service to be a Facebook replacement), asking mainstream Facebook users to give up social networking entirely is just not the answer.

So what is the solution when it comes to getting Facebook to see it users’ way when it comes to privacy and respect? I’ve said it before: I don’t have that answer, at least not in any specific terms, and not yet. But I do know that winning the philosophical debate with Facebook’s founders (which is what this is, as there’s no actual privacy risk to participating in Facebook, despite what paranoid geek anarchists claim) is a fight which won’t be won by taking our ball and going back to the twentieth century. While some next generation service may indeed eventually replace Facebook just as Facebook replaced MySpace and what all came before, we’re not anywhere near that happening right now. So even as today’s small handful of Facebook quitters now move on to some tiny open source social network for a few days before quietly sneaking back onto Facebook out of frustration by the end of the week (or retreat back to the odorously rotting MySpace for a bit before getting tired of holding their noses and returning), the rest of us will stick with Facebook and try to find a solution to the problem together. I’m open to ideas; you should be too.

Top Bargain iPad and iPhone Apps

Here are this week’s best bargain apps for your iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad!

The Simpson Arcade is just awesome! If you enjoy the Simpson, get this one and help lead Homer to the donuts! He beats up the entire neighbor for them! The game is optimized for the iPhone and iPod Touch, but I really enjoy playing it on the iPad in 2x mode. The graphics look great and the controls are even easier to use. Get it now since it’s on sale for 99 cents! It’s normally $2.99 iPhone/iPod Touch Version ($0.99) | Free Version

We Rule Gold is a version of We Rule that comes with 10 free mojo with your account. Now with more items to build, and tress to grow, you can make your kingdom bigger and better than before. There are new orange groves that produce fruit, ruby trees, a prison, and much more! Now up to level 40! The new version of the game is available for the iPhone and iPad for free. iPhone/iPod Touch (Free) | iPad Version (Free)

The Guild Comic #1 and #2 are finally out as digital comic apps! Guildies from all around the world can now rejoice! These new apps of “The Guild” comics are based on the web series created by Felicia Day just hit the iTunes app store! Each comic is only 99 cents each. These are optimized for the iPhone and iPod touch, but it they look fine on the iPad at 2x as well. Purchase Comic #1 ($0.99) | Purchase Comic #2 ($0.99)

Square is an app that allows you to start accepting cash and card payments right on your iPhone or iPad. No contracts, monthly fees, or hidden costs for this new service. You can manage your money effortlessly with the app’s easy and intuitive interface. For more information, see SquareUp.com. Download for iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad (Free)

Pebble Jump is a sweet little puzzler where you’re given a pebble board with a few pebbles in it. The object is to hop over pebbles and have the last pebble land in the red area. The game is normally $1.99, but is on sale this week for 99 cents. iPhone/iPod Touch Free Version | iPhone/iPod Touch Version ($0.99) | iPad Version ($0.99)

Dizzy Bee and Dizzy Bee 2 Help guide the Dizzy Bee and help him safe all of his fruit friends by tilting your iPhone/iPod Touch. Collect flowers along the way for extra points, but be sure to avoid the evil baddies! The gameplay is a lot of fun — one of the first games I played that used the accelerometer, and the artwork is fabulous. Of the two games, I like Dizzy Bee 2 more because of the extra difficulty levels. But if you’re someone who like to play games in series, get both apps or better yet, get the Arcade version that contains both games. Dizzy Bee 1 iPhone/iPod Touch Version ($0.99) | Dizzy Bee 2 iPhone/iPod Touch Version ($0.99)

Bed Bugs is an adorable game where you help the sleepy walker through a series of bad dreams. Squash all the bad monsters (bed bugs) but be careful of the faeries! Each level has unique monsters that are defeated a certain way. The graphics are beautiful and you can see some of pictures of Dizzy Bee hanging on the walls. The app is currently on sale for 99 cents. Free Lite iPhone/iPod Touch Version | iPhone/iPod Touch Version ($0.99)

Flippin’, formerly “Flipside” is perfect for those who enjoy fast-pace games. Imagine if Tetris was crossed with match 3, with better colors, sounds, and graphics and you got Flippin’! Matching pieces fall with a symbol on each side — near side (your side) and far side (you opponent’s side). The object of the game is to create at least 3 matches on your side. You have the option of flipping the pieces over by tapping on them. You can also drag falling pieces over to different columns. Match pieces horizontally or vertically to get points!
iPhone/iPod Touch Version ($0.99) | Full Review

Igloo Games Arcade – this is probably the best deal. It contains all of the 4 mentioned games above AND is a universal app. So you can play it on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad! The iPad version has additional modes — play in two player mode against or with a friend, as well as play two different games (with two players) at the same time. Definitely worth the $2.99, especially if you have an iPad. Purchase Universal App ($2.99)

PingChat! 2 is an instant messaging service for iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, and soon Blackberry and Android phones. This new version allows group chat, message confirmation, and multimedia support for photos, videos, voice notes, contacts, and maps! PingChat is normally $0.99 for iPhone/iPod Touch and $2.99 for iPad, but this version is free for a limited time! Download PingChat! 2 for the iPhone/iPod Touch (Free)

Supermarket Management is a fun time management game where you’re in charge, and you’re managing all the services in the supermarket. Get carts for the customers, stock up food, cut the deli meat, and run the cash register! Normally $2.99, it’s now on sale for 99 cents for just this weekend! Purchase iPhone/iPod Touch Version ($.99) | Free Version

Baby Memory Cue HD is an adorable memory match game. You can choose from 6 game pieces to 22. Your child can have fun finding matches to their favorite animals. It’s normally $1.99 for the iPad, but is free this weekend. Download Baby Memory Cue for the iPad (Free)

With next generation Kindle, Amazon must ponder chasing iPad (or not)

Amazon must now determine the future of its successful Kindle eReader tablet after seeing Apple’s more expensive, more full featured all-purpose tablet succeed in its own right. With the iPad, Apple admits its ambitious desire to adjust the course of personal computing such that touchscreen tablets may someday replace traditional laptops as the portable computing device of choice; in contrast, up until now Amazon’s Kindle ambitions have been limited to taking book reading into the digital age. The two tablets are different enough in pricing, functionality, and potential user bases that they might well both succeed, with the $200 and up Kindle appearing attractive to book readers who don’t want to pony up $500 or more for the iPad just to use it as a book reader, as well as those users who really would like to take advantage of all of the iPad’s range of features but simply can’t afford or justify the price tag and are willing to settle for the one trick pony Kindle instead.

But while the Kindle had been up until now free to carve out its own future, as it had been the only tablet on the market with mainstream success on any level, the emergence and sudden semi-ubiquity of the iPad leaves Amazon with choices to make. Will the online retailer, which has little experience in developing hardware or software (and demonstrated its shortcomings with the latter when it launched a digital music store with AmazonMP3 which feels like it could have come out of the 1990’s), set caution to the wind by trying to develop a full fledged iPad competitor? Or will Amazon decide to instead stick with what it’s proven it’s good at by continuing to attempt to develop the perfect eReader?

The former could put the company in well over its head in the development arena, while the latter might not work in the long term due to the Apple’s recent propensity for finding ways to bring the prices of its mobile devices progressively lower with each passing year ($99 iPhone, $59 iPod shuffle, etc). If Apple manages to offer, say, a $299 iPad by the year 2012, then the $199 Kindle suddenly won’t look like as much of a bargain, even for those who do plan to use their tablet primarily for book reading. Then again, with the presence of the Kindle book platform on the iPad, Amazon could argue that it gets a shot at winning no matter which hardware device consumers turn to.

U-Socket USB wall socket pushed to October by FastMac

FastMac’s U-Socket, an electrical wall outlet which includes a pair of USB charging ports built into the socket alongside the two standard electrical plugs, will not ship until October, according to fulfillment emails sent to customers who had pre-ordered the product, a fact first reported on by TUAW> The $20 U-Socket debuted at Macworld 2010 back in February and was one of Beatweek Magazine’s “Best of Show” winners. The full details of the award winning product can be found right here.

iPhone users prefer Bing over Google already, says App Store

Apple may replace Google with Microsoft’s Bing as the new default search engine in its mobile web browser, if reports are true. But in a surprising development, Bing’s search app for iPhone has already become more popular than Google’s iPhone search app. On the list of most frequently downloaded free iPhone apps, Bing currently ranks 29th while Google ranks a mere 40th. Considering the comparative ubiquity of the Google search engine over outsider Bing, that more iPhone and iPod touch users would choose to search via the Bing app than the Google Mobile app comes as a surprise. While the App Store charts tend to fluctuate, and the popularity of the Bing app over the Google app could have more to do with users’ evaluations of the quality of each of the two apps than their preference for one search engine over the other, the news does suggest that Apple might have an easier time of getting iPhone users to accept Bing as their default search engine than some (including us) would have expected.

Android powered iPad hits Chinese black market

Those geeks who’ve dreamt of having an iPad that runs on the Android operating system instead of the iPad operating system are in luck if they know how to get their hands on copyright violating products from China’s black market. The iPed, a name that adds insult to injury if ever there was one, which has been unearthed by trendhunter.com, leaves one to wonder just what repercussions Apple has outside the U.S. where it’s at the mercy of the copyright rules of the nation in which the product is being manufactured and sold. Of course wanting an iPad but wishing it ran the geeks-only open source Android operating system is about as nonsensically wasteful as buying a Mac just to run Linux on it instead – but then again, there are existing geeks who do just that, for reasons that no one but them will ever be able to understand.

Source: this product was brought to our attention when Ashton Kutcher tweeted the Trend Hunter link.

Radioactive leak follows oil spill; Bush’s poop continues to pile up

A nuclear power plant in Vermont sprung a radioactive leak yesterday. The leak was found and fixed and there’s now “no public threat” going forward, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, but it’s yet one more scary chapter of late in which something goes horribly wrong that would have been infinitely less likely to happen if corporate entities in the United States were properly regulated and overseen. The Gulf has turned into one big oil slick, and now Vermont came who knows how close to being wiped off the map, plus countless other idiocies of late, all because the government was 100% owned by corporations from 2001 to 2009, and the “new guy” can’t put out the old guy’s fires fast enough. Our banking industry collapsed because George W. Bush was allergic to regulation; our cellphone carriers provide the worst service in the civilized world because the industry came to prominence during the era that the regulation-allergic Bush was in office.

This nation is in crisis, and it’s past the point of ideology; even the most conservative of our citizens knows that blaming Obama for these disasters would be the equivalent of blaming the fire department because you drunkenly burned down your own house. Is there a such thing as over-regulation to the point of being harmful? Absolutely. But if there’s anything that the increasingly devastating fallout from the GW Bush era has taught us, it’s that big businesses in America are regulated about one-tenth as much as they should be. Think about that the next time your cellphone call gets dropped (they don’t have dropped calls in Europe because the EU properly regulates the carriers), a loved one gets laid off from their job due to the recession that the deregulated banks sank us into, an oil soaked animal washes up on your beach, or a nuclear power plant starts leaking radiation near your house.

These are scary times. Things will get better. But only to the extent that we allow the new guy to continue cleaning up the last guy’s epic failures. This is not a time for ideology. If you thought it was your patriotic duty to support President Skippy McDumbass after 9/11, then it’s your equal duty to support the new guy as he continues to clean up the crap piles that Skippy left behind for us.

Here’s a thought: perhaps those mentally deficient individuals who’ve been standing on the shore and throwing tea on the ocean to protest imaginary things should instead put down the tea bags, grab a mop, and try helping to sop up some of that oil as it washes ashore.

Dennis Hopper earned more than his “Speed” character’s gold watch

Dennis Hopper, whose latter-year career was perhaps best defined by his creepy-but-cool villain in the movie Speed, passed away yesterday after a long batter with prostate cancer. Hopper’s evil character in Speed was motivated to greed and murder by, so he claimed, the fact that when he retired from a long thankless career, all he was given was a gold watch as a parting gift – which he then repurposed into a bomb. In contrast, Hopper himself had a distinguished acting career which saw him remain not only famous but relevant in the eyes of multiple movie-going generations. So as we go about choosing how long and how well to remember him, thereby setting the stage for whether the next generation knows his name or not, let’s keep in mind that Hopper earned far more than the proverbial gold watch that his Speed character was saddled with. Let’s try to posthumously give Hopper a better parting gift.

Verizon iPhone to be ready for Christmas 2010: report

Verizon customers will not get their iPhone at this week’s WWDC conference, but they can start saving to buy a Verizon iPhone as a Christmas gift for themselves, according to a report which says that the Apple-Verizon alliance is not set in stone but has already begun in earnest, which manufacturers having been told to be at the ready. Apple won’t wait for the unifying 4G network to arrive but will instead offer a CDMA iPhone to Verizon customers starting with the holiday 2010 season as a stopgap, according to the report from The Street, which suggests that Apple is looking to move the iPhone to carrier agnostic status. Meanwhile, Apple is in fact widely expected to introduce the next generation iPhone – for AT&T users at least – this week. Here’s why a Verizon iPhone needs to be Apple’s first priority.

Lee DeWyze achieves two top ten singles, top twenty album

Lee DeWyze has scored two simultaneous song in the top ten pop singles chart in iTunes, a rare feat for someone who hasn’t yet recorded his major label debut album. His studio version of Hallelujah, the song which in hindsight was likely what won him the American Idol title, is currently at number six on the pop chart (at the time of this article’s publication, 6:00am U.S. Eastern Time) while his “official” single Beautiful Day is above it number three on the pop chart. DeWyze has a third entry on the pop chart with his Crystal Bowersox duet Falling Slowly coming in at number twelve at the moment. He’s also seeing sudden Billboard chart activity for his earlier independent album Slumberland, which is currently at number twenty on the iTunes rock album chart. Whether all of this is merely a carryover from Lee’s Idol victory, or a positive sign for his commercial viability, is a topic likely to be debated to no end by Idol viewers on all sides of the equation between now and the time that his debut album is released.

A note to commenters: keep in mind that iTunes sales charts are cyclical and are updated multiple times per day, and may have changed by the time you look at them.

Lady GaGa has to answer to London fans today

Lady GaGa is in London this morning, appearing on Showstudio.com at noon local time for a live interview broadcast during which she’ll answer questions from fans. The two hour broadcast is part of a United Kingdom leg of her Monster Ball which sees her performing at London’s O2 Arena tonight and again tomorrow night before heading to Manchester and Sheffield before returning to North America for dates which will include a Fourth of July concert in Atlantic City and three consecutive nights at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. Lady GaGa’s live interview with Showsudio.com starts in about an hour at 7:00am U.S. Eastern Time, but if you can’t wait that long (or if you already missed it) you can check out Beatweek’s own interview with GaGa right here.

Hayley Williams, Paramore sell out first night at London’s O2 Arena

Hayley Williams and her band Paramore got some good news at the end of a rough week for the singer, as the band has sold out its first night at London’s O2 Arena, which is scheduled for November 13th. The sellout has led the band to schedule a second concert at the 23,000 seat venue which was built in 1999 and was originally known as the Millennium Dome. The good news for Williams comes just days after a furor erupted on the internet when a TwitPic of the twenty-one year old singer not meant for public consumption found its way onto her public Twitter account anyway. Paramore’s next concert dates are in Germany in mid June, and the band’s next U.S. concert is on June 23rd in North Carolina as part of the Honda Civic Tour. The Raleigh gig will also include Tegan and Sara as well as New Found Glory.

Hayley Williams’ reaction on Twitter to the news that Paramore had sold out the O2? “THANK YOU LONDON for selling out our first night at the O2 Arena! That’s right… the O2… WHAT!? Yes, that’s right.”

Unlike Lost, Fringe benefits from a coherently established gameplan

Lost certainly had a sizable audience for its six seasons, but there were undoubtedly those who tuned in along the way, quickly surmised that the plot twists were too random to be part of a master gameplan and were instead likely being made up on the spot, concluded that they could thusly never be explained coherently in future episodes, and tuned back out knowing that the series would never provide satisfying answers. And sure enough by the end of Lost’s series finale last week, longtime viewers were still so desperate for answers that many of them mistook some random b-roll footage at the end of the episode as perhaps one final clue.

Contrast that with Lost series creator JJ Abrams’ other current major television vehicle Fringe, whose second season also recently wrapped up. The show’s paranormal rabbit hole does grow deeper as the series marches on, but answers are invariably provided along the way in a manner which never contradicts what had previously been established but rather merely contradicts what you had assumed you knew. Like any good ongoing mystery, each new answer brings more new questions with it, but the key here is that the “answers” actually answer things. Some of the twists you’ll be able to see coming, others you won’t, but in hindsight they’ll each leave you feeling like you should have been able to see it coming, again, a hallmark of strong mystery writing.

Perhaps Lost was never meant to make sense; perhaps its twists and turns were never meant to have any more meaning than than of an actual roller coaster, meant to be enjoyed more for the shock and surprise factor than any ability to make any sense of why the ride zigged when it did instead of zagging. But one has to wonder if Abrams, who already had four years of Lost trial and error under his belt by the time he launched Fringe, had decided by then that he was going to have a better shot at keeping things coherent and explainable if the show’s underlying secrets were sketched out in advance, before the first camera even started rolling. In watching Fringe, it’s impossible to say for sure just how much of the underlying plot framework was in fact sketched out ahead of time, but it sure feels like most of the nuts and bolts have been there all along – as opposed to Lost, whose viewers will now spend the rest of their lives debating just what it was that they spent the past six years watching.

Taylor Swift performs her first-ever headlining stadium concert at LSU

As unlikely as it seems, Taylor Swift had never headlined a concert at a football stadium until tonight, when she performed a LSU’s Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The twenty year old country pop singer has been a sales chart phenomenon over the past couple of years but had previously been limited to arenas. Tiger Stadium has an official football game capacity of 92,400 people; that number could be higher could be higher or lower for a concert depending on field capacity and the number of obstructed view seats not made available. For her part, Swift remarked that before the show, she and her bandmates “could be found taking pictures on the stage like tourists.” She went on to sum it up with “It was just.. Wow.”

Taylor Swift is in the midst of an extended U.S. tour which will next see her in Washington, DC on June 1st and 2nd for a pair shows at the Verizon Center (perhaps ironic, as Swift herself is known to be an iPhone user and therefore AT&T customer), ahead of another stadium show in Foxboro, Massachusetts at Gilette Stadium, home of the New England Patriots. She’s also doing a charity gig in her hometown Nashville, Tennessee, on June 22nd in aid of flooding victims, a cause to which she’s already donated half a million dollars.

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