It isn't the first, and I assume it's not going to be the last either. Apple and AT&T are facing a new putative class action from an iPhone user who alleges that the companies misrepresented the phone's MMS (multimedia messaging service) capabilities. Clyde Bernard Franklin filed the complaint (case 1:2009cv00704) in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama on behalf of all Alabama residents last Wednesday.

  As expected, regulatory body ICANN has approved plans to let web addresses be written in non-Latin characters in a move that it calls the "biggest technical change" to how the Internet works since its invention four decades ago.The vote was announced at the last day of the non-profit group's Seoul conference. The proposal would mean that domain names could be written in the languages such as Greek, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi or Cyrillic and be understood natively by the machines that connect computers together over the web.

  Japan went crazy over the iPhone when it made its debut in summer last year, but China as another big Asian market for Apple seems to react differently. The iPhone officially launched in China today, offered by China Unicom, one the country's three big cell phone carriers. But our friends over at major Chinese news portal 163.com are reporting [Google machine translation] that not too many people were actually queuing up to get one, at least in Beijing.

  Finnish startup Fruugo fascinates me to no end. Founded in late 2006, the company set out to build a massive pan-European social e-commerce service, which it finally launched in closed beta at the beginning of this year. Their mission statement? To make Fruugo the equivalent of Google in search when it comes to social commerce on the Web.The company reportedly raised dozens of millions of euros, at one point flirted with an employee headcount of 150 to 160 people (including contractors) and boasted a rock star board of directors that included people like former Nokia CEO and current Chairman of Shell Jorma Ollila as well as F-Secure Founder/Chairman Risto Siilasmaa. In 2008, they burned through about 14.5 million euros before they even put the closed beta product live and were ultimately forced to lay off almost half of its workforce as a result.

  Maybe you'll recall when I ripped apart the Bing jingle winner back in August. It was bad — real bad. But its creator, Jonathan Mann is a talented guy, and even made a jingle ripping me, which was both better than the Bing one, and funny. Sadly, Microsoft now controls his Bing jingle and is subjecting little children to it.As you can see in the video below, Microsoft has forced a bunch of middle schoolers in Pennsylvania to learn and perform Mann's Bing song. The horror. It's hard to watch this without immediately thinking about parents who accept money to allow their child to be sponsored. Is this the future of branding?

  The Foo Fighters will be streaming a concert live tomorrow night on Facebook, direct from the band's Studio 606 headquarters in Los Angeles. You can RSVP to the event here, and stream it live here beginning at 7 PM PST tomorrow. As with Facebook's other recent video streaming events, users will be invited to update their status messages with their thoughts about the concert, which will draw in even more fans as they see the updates in their news feeds. The live video will be powered by Livestream. Live concert streams seem to be a growing trend for the web's most popular content and social sites. Last week MySpace streamed their Secret Show Weezer concert in San Francisco. And earlier this week YouTube streamed a U2 concert from the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, CA.

  We recently wrote about Epix, the movie and entertainment streaming network that works across your TV, computer, and mobile phone. Jointly backed by Lionsgate, MGM and Paramount, Epix is launching its service today with 150 titles, with 3,000 more movies, concerts and shows to be added in the next year.Epix says that eventually it will be able to provide access to over 15,000 titles, but as we wrote in our initial review of the service, that’s just a sliver of what’s out there, since it's only the movies available through the studios that are backing the company. And, if you want this content in your living room, you’re going to need Verizon FIOS, which only some 2 million people have.

  Skype app developer Netralia is bringing high-quality video recording through it's app, VodBurner. VodBurner lets users create video podcasts directly from Skype calls using webcams, incorporating recording and post-production editing in a single software package. The app, which is $9.95, is fairly simple. Once downloaded, it will let you record a video and audio conversation via Skype and will then let you edit the final file within its software. What's interesting about the app is that it actually detects who is talking (using volume) and will record the video of that person during the time. If both people are talking, the app will record video on both individuals in the frame. You can also add graphics and sub-titles to the videos and publish the clips as ASF files suitable for uploading directly to YouTube and other video-hosting services.

  Personal genomics startup 23andMe has just gone through a round of layoffs, we've confirmed. The company declined to comment on how many people were laid off, but offered this statement:We have reduced our staffing levels in a restructuring of our workforce. This was a very difficult decision, but one that we felt was necessary to achieve 23andMe's long-term business development goals and maintain our strength in the industry.These cuts, which are a reflection of the current economic environment all companies are facing, will allow us to continue to invest in the growth of our Personal Genome Service and research endeavors.

  Ustream has just started to roll out a new feature for its live video streams that allows commenters to syndicate their thoughts across four of the web's largest social sites: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and AIM instant messenger. The feature will go live for Featured shows beginning on Monday, and everyone else will have access soon thereafter.The feature is similar to what Facebook has offered for its video broadcasts (like the one it had for President Obama's inauguration), where users are invited to update their statuses in real-time as they watch a video. Except with Ustream's comments, users will be able to check off boxes at the top of the chat window to choose if they'd like to broadcast their updates across multiple services. Each update from the Ustream 'Social Stream' box will also include a link to the video you're watching, which means that the feature can help videos go viral quickly.

  Realtime, realtime, realtime — it's all you seem to hear now with regard to the web. But back in May, it was just emerging as a new trend that looked poised to explode. And one company at the forefront of that was Scoopler, a Y Combinator-backed realtime search engine. Today, being ahead of the curve has paid off, as the service has just raised a seed round of funding from some big name investors.When we intially wrote about the service (remember, very early on in the realtime search phenomenon), we noted that the presentation of results was impressive, but the results themselves were utterly dominated by Twitter. That really shouldn't have been all that surprising considering Twitter's popularity in the space. But the service has since added some new features to make it more robust.

  Google has just debuted a new form of advertising called AdWords Comparison Ads — a special kind of ad that will prompt users to view a list of sponsored products in a structured format. To get started, Google is running the ads for queries related to the mortgage market, though it has plans to eventually expand beyond that. The ads are in a limited rollout for now, with only some users in some states seeing them.Here's how Google describes the new ad type:AdWords uses a host of targeting and relevancy signals to determine the best ads for each query. However, sometimes a user's query doesn't provide enough information for us to confidently predict what they want. Take, for example, users who search for "mortgage." Do they want a new home loan or a refinance? Do they want a fixed rate or an adjustable rate loan? Comparison Ads improves the ad experience on Google.com by letting users specify exactly what they are looking for and helping them quickly compare relevant offers side by side.

  Online restaurant reservation site OpenTable has hit a milestone today, seating one million diners via its mobile apps. And the site says that based on an estimation of a $50 average check per diner, OpenTable believes that diners using its mobile applications have generated more than $50 million in revenue for its restaurant partners.OpenTable allows diners to find and book reservations at more than 11,000 different restaurants in multiple countries via mobile applications for the iPhone, Palm, Blackberry and Android. Other smartphone users can book reservations through OpenTable's mobile-optimized Web site.

  I was Tweeting with Michael Gartenberg last night about all the great Android games. After all, the Android Marketplace has so many great titles like Civilization Revolution, Canabalt, iShoot, and… oh… wait…All kidding aside, the reason there is such a dearth of great games has to do with some programming choices in Android itself and it's a problem that can - and should - be fixed before the Droid comes to market this November.