- Do Abu Dhabi's twitterers fear public outing? Business 24-7 reports on the upcoming Twestival in the capital: "'The participating team is growing very fast...' said one of the local volunteers, requesting anonymity....'Twestival is a clear indication that media consumers are in fact the users and makers of media and this seems to be the shape of things to come in future,' said another volunteer, responding through a tweet." Dhabbalicious twitterers, stand proud! Fear not of man!

- Oracle's huge $7.5 billion takeover of Sun has been temporarily paused by EU regulators, who want some more time to look at how the deal will impact MySQL, the open-source database project that Sun kind of owns. "The Commission has to examine very carefully the effects on competition in Europe when the world's leading proprietary database company proposes to take over the world's leading open-source database company." Yet again, the EU's regulatory authorities prove to be the toughest in the world (think mobile phones and microchips.) "This isn't the first time European regulators have proved to be tougher on antitrust enforcement than the U.S," the Washington Post says.

- The president of Nauru, a small island in the Pacific, has declared a national public holiday to celebrate the launch of its first mobile network. To be honest, getting your first mobile network is pretty awesome, and in my opinion, political leaders should declare more impromptu public holidays or weeks of games. The Australian Prime Minister gave us all a day off while tired and emotional once, and we will never forget him for it.  

- The FT has a nice piece from the Nokia World event in Germany last week (where the company gave its imminent doom a bear hug and bought it an ice cream sundae.) In interviews with the paper, Nokia execs hold down the line that they are the biggest and most important smart phone maker in the market, forget about this iPhone / BlackBerry / Android nonsense. "This is a scale game and Nokia has scale," its chief executive says, while the manager of the N-Series line up talked some WWF-style smack. "It's not about becoming number one because we already are number one....It is about becoming undisputed number one."

- But regardless of their scale or number one status, you don't see T-Pain waking around getting famous rappers to sing into his new auto-tune app for the Nokia N97. Click here for an awesome, disturbing video - a harbinger of a million annoying auto-tune internet memes to come...

- And speaking of habingers of doom, millions of data-guzzling iPhones are sucking the life out of the AT&T network in America, the New York Times reports. "It's been a challenging year for us," said John Donovan, the chief technology officer of AT&T. "Overnight we're seeing a radical shift in how people are using their phones...There's just no parallel for the demand."

Nokia's annual Nokia World event kicked off in Germany today. Last year, the company used the event to launch the N97, which seemed at the time like a pretty major new push for the company.

But oh, we were young then, young and naive. The N97 turned out to be a harbinger of doom, a great piece of hardware paired with a hopelessly outdated operating system. Nokia has had almost a year since the N97 announcement to juice up their Symbian OS for the 21st century, and have started showing off their new internet tablets powered by Maemo, which seems from the demos to be a pretty interesting little handheld internet OS.

So what happened on day one of Nokia World this year? Not that they invited me this time around (no bitterness here, I swear...), but from what I can tell, not much.