INQ Mobile to roll out Twitter-phone

Cell phone maker INQ Mobile plans to introduce a Twitter phone in time for the Christmas sales season, hoping to benefit from surging interest in the micro-blogging service, INQ's head told Reuters on Tuesday.

The model would be the first mass-market phone — costing operators less than $140 — with an Internet-based Twitter client, said Frank Meehan, chief executive of INQ.

Meehan said in an interview the phone will use Internet connections for sending the 140-character messages, called Tweets, not text messages as in Twitter's own service.

Holy Twitter! Tweeting from the pews

When Kevin Joyce, the 29-year-old pastor of the nondenominational Imagine Fellowship in San Antonio, Texas, looks out at his congregation during his Sunday sermons, he sees “a lot of illuminated faces.”

But it’s not the word of God that’s lighting them up. It’s their smartphone screens.

“We hold our service in a movie theater and keep it dark so we can protect the screen,” says Joyce, who not only encourages his congregation to use Twitter and 'tweet' in church, but projects the live Twitter stream on a giant screen during services. “When I look out, I’ll see a lot of people texting and the screens on their phones light up their faces.”

One Math Geek's Plan to Reform Wall Street

Paul Wilmott is out to save Wall Street's soul—one dork at a time.

Imagine an aeronautics engineer designing a state-of-the-art jumbo jet. In order for it to fly, the engineer has to rely on the same aerodynamics equation devised by physicists 150 years ago, which is based on Newton's second law of motion: force equals mass times acceleration. Problem is, the engineer can't reconcile his elegant design with the equation. The plane has too much mass and not enough force. But rather than tweak the design to fit the equation, imagine if the engineer does the opposite, and tweaks the equation to fit the design. The plane still looks awesome, and on paper, it flies. The engineer gets paid, the plane gets built, and soon thousands just like it are packed full of people and sent out onto runways. They fly for a while, but eventually, because of that fatal tweak, they all end up crashing."