According to the Wall Street Journal, some of the IT giants are teaming up to stop potential patent-infringement lawsuits against them.

Their plan is to buy up key intellectual property before it falls to other parties who could use it against you. They claim, from their sources, that Verizon, Google, HP, Ericsson and Cisco have joined a group known as the "Allied Security Trust".

The companies will pay $250,000 to join and will put in $5 million into the organization to buy patents. Not one of the companies mentioned commented about the story.

Vodafone has struck a deal with MySpace to launch a brand new platform for your mobile, called Vodafone Music Reporter - allowing fans of its music events a chance to present a MTV show that will be shown online and on mobile.

It will also see interactivity on MySpace profiles and hopes to expand Vodafone’s music activity, which includes summer festivals in the UK and Germany.

Fans from Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK will be able to compete and will be asked to "demonstrate their reporting skills" across the events. To enter the competition, you will need to upload a photo and video review of their favourite recent gig experience - then "friends" of the Vodafone Music Reporter community will decide on who are the best.

The winner will then join an MTV crew for a day of recording and will have a chance to record their report on-site for the show.

I have one word to say - interesting?

Aerosmith fans will now be able to act like Steven Tyler and Joe Perry as Activision released a brand new game under its Guitar Hero series.

Dubbed "Guitar Hero: Aerosmith", dozens flocked the Hard Rock restaurant in Times Square to see the band debut and try out the game for themselves. The game will also feature 30 of the band’s notable hits, like "Love in an Elevator" and "Sweet Emotion" - and will also include songs from other artists that Aerosmith collaborated or performed with.

The game’s controller will have the famous logo of the band emblazoned on the "guitar".

The bundle will be available for all Next-Gen consoles for $99.99, but for the game itself will cost $59.99. A PlayStation 2 version of the game will be sold for $49.99 - but a bundle will cost $89.99.

The company will also release "Guitar Hero : World Tour" during this Christmas season, and will include a drum kit and a microphone. This will bring it in competition with another title "Rock Band" - which is produced by MTV and EA.

Tomorrow, Telstra will be pushing out a new software update to half a million customers that will see their camera being used as a barcode reader. The new software will be supported by a couple of phones on their line-up, including Nokia’s 6120 and N95.

The new software works like this: You would see a barcode and you would scan it and it will direct you to a relevant web page. It will be using two standards - Data Matrix and quick response codes, both internationally recognised standards.

As well, these barcodes can transfer information from business cards to their phone books, scan their travel itineraries to show information about their flights or find reviews of television shows and movies.

Users will not pay a single cent for the extra costs related to the new software - however, in the future, they may place warnings that users may be charged for data - take for example, a song download.

Telstra has confirmed that it will sell the iPhone, in time of the July 11 launch. It will use the Next G network, allowing iPhone handsets to reach around 99% of the population.

Telstra will join Optus and Vodafone in selling the iPhone. However, both finalised their deals in May - as part of international agreements with Singapore Telecommunications and Vodafone respectfully. Sources say that it took this long to get the deal was due to differences between the content services provided on the iPhone.

Twitter is now turning into crap, with constant downtime and many features being disabled for a short (or long) period of time. Now I’m getting fed up with it. So I’ve decided to list my alternatives for a Twitter alternative, all of them I have used.

Jaiku

The now-Google owned service was one of the major competitors to Twitter, and still is. It even goes further to allow you to have your RSS feeds from blogs and data from services like Last.FM. There is the same character limit, but there is limited customisability.

Pownce

The Kevin Rose-owned company is another favourite with others, and it looks like a more classier version of Twitter. It even offers some themes, but if you can pay for an upgrade, you can create your own. It also embeds photos, videos and links - and there is no word limit. While there is no way you can add your feeds as ‘notes’, you can put links of your social network profiles.

FriendFeed

FriendFeed is the other alternative to Twitter; while maintaining its own site. With its special application, AlertThingy, you can post Tweets to your Twitter account.

BlurbEM!

Yes, remember that service. It is a very good start-up, which is growing. From our review, it seems that it has added some features (stay tuned for a re-review), but there is no SMS feature and there is still a limited number of people who use the service.

Now, I’m wondering what is your idea for a Twitter alternative. We may also listed on this post - so go ahead. Also make sure that you also link to the site, I don’t want to go burying for it.

Plans for a DVD-ready version of the popular Nintendo Wii gaming system have now been put on hold after President Satoru Iwata said that he is focusing on getting the Wii’s supply problem fixed.

According to the Nihon Keiza Shimbun, the company also showcased a new DS digital television tuner meaning that the device would be able to get television signals and played them on the DS. It his, however, sold exclusively online. It is also most likely to not reach Australia, as Australia and Japan’s digital broadcasting standards are different

News In Brief: Virgin Mobile in the US have announced that they will buy struggling mobile carrier Helio for $39 million, paid in stock, with its South Korean owner - SK Telecom, owning 17% of Virgin Mobile.

Also, Richard Branson’s Virgin Group and SK Telecom will also invest $25 million each to the new combined company. However, there is expected to be no disruption with the service since both are virtual networks, meaning that they borrow mobile infrastructure from other companies - in this case, both are on the Sprint Nextel service.

I’ve had reports from terence, that optus has had a little screw up in their system. Look at the attached image, boy hasn’t terence used alot of offpeak!

In my opinion, TYPICAL OPTUS!

Time of screw up: 12:43AM.

TECHGEEK is soon going to launch a new design in a couple of weeks - however, we will release it for those under our Development team before it gets released as a beta for the public.

The new design will be based of suggestions on our Dev forums, over at http://dev.reawaken.info/forums.

We also have some news as well. Kenny Yeoh, our gaming Editor, has been promoted to Senior Editor status - having the same role with James and Stewart. As well, we have added three new contributers, all which we will announce in the next few days.

Other than that, it is back to work over at TECHGEEK HQ.

- Terence