guinness

The de facto registrar of superlative achievements has credited Mozilla for officially setting a record for downloads in a 24-hour period: 8,002,530 copies of Firefox.

Mozilla's Download Day on June 17, whose server-crippling success delayed its official start, sought to popularize the open-source Web browser. Mozilla, which oversees the Firefox project, projected at the time that it cleared 8 million, but the number is now official.

"As the arbiter and recorder of the world's amazing facts, Guinness World Records is pleased to add Mozilla's achievement to our archives," Gareth Deaves, Guinness' records manager, … Read more

Mozilla hopes to set a world record for the most downloads within a 24-hour period on the day Firefox 3 is released (currently expected to be in June).

The online edition of Guinness Book of World Records does not list a current record for most downloads within 24 hours.

The final release candidates for Firefox 3 are showing a number of improvements, including greater rendering speed, the use of fewer resources, and more baked-in security features than other browsers.

To help Mozilla set a world record, the foundation recommends the following:

If worldwide headlines about the record-setting first-day and first-week sales of Grand Theft Auto IV weren't enough, the game's publisher and its developer, Take-Two Interactive and Rockstar Games, now have a Guinness world record to boot.

On Tuesday morning, Guinness issued a press release certifying the game's insanely profitable launch as the entertainment industry's best ever for one day ($310 million) and one week ($500 million).

Interestingly, in stories I've written about this previously, I wrote that GTA IV had broken the single-day record of $170 million previously held by Bungie Studio's Xbox 360 … Read more

Looks like it's U2's turn to take a pounding from the bloggerati.

A speech on Monday by Paul McGuinness, manager of the band U2, was a call to arms against piracy. He wants to fight file sharing by forcing Internet service providers to ban people who pirate music. He suggested that Apple and other makers of digital music players were wrongly profiting from their "burglary kits."

McGuinness told a gathering of music insiders at the Midem music conference in Cannes, France, that music is making lots of people lots of money. Unfortunately, that money isn't … Read more

In a speech at the Midem music trade show, U2 manager Paul McGuinness claims that Internet service providers bear a portion of responsibility for the sales decline in recorded music. It's so laughable on so many levels that I can't let it pass without comment:

1. File trading's not the sole cause of lower sales. McGuinness, like the RIAA and IFPI and other recording industry bodies, assumes that piracy on P2P networks is the main driver of the decline in music sales. This ignores several studies that have shown that heavy P2P users are also the heaviest … Read more

Calling all people who really, really, really want to go down in the history books, but don't have the advantage of being Sir Richard Branson: Guinness World Records has added a social network to its site, so that you can share all your wackiest exploits.

I thought we had something like that already. It's called YouTube.

Members of the Guinness World Records community, which was created using technology from the New York-based KickApps, can share audio, video, photos, and other dubious evidence of their strange talents. Right now, some of the most-viewed videos include "continuous reading marathons,&… Read more

BURLINGAME, Calif.--If it wasn't for Pez, the theory goes, there would be no eBay.

It might surprise you, but urban legend has it that entrepreneur Pierre Omidyar decided to start his fledgling auction site to give his girlfriend a venue for selling off her collection of Pez dispensers.

Well, it's hard to know what the truth is. But I can tell you (since I spent Wednesday here at what may well be the world's only Pez museum), that there is definitely a set of eBay-branded Pez dispensers. Even some museum walk-ins think of Omidyar as the … Read more

If you've ever spent any time on your sofa wishing you could take it wherever you wanted to go, you might want to talk to Marek Turowsk.

On Sunday, Turowsk set a new world record for "fastest furniture," according to The Sun, a British publication.

The Sun reported that Turowsk hit 92 mph, breaking the previous record of 87 mph for high-speed couches, which was set in 1998 by engineer Ed China.

And no, he didn't set the record by dropping the couch off a building. This was pure horizontal acceleration.

Lest you think this is … Read more