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As our Doug Berger posted on earlier this month, presidential candidate Barack Obama offered to send you a text message with his VP choice.  You’d be among the first to know, as Obama was leaking this info to you first, instead of the talking heads over at CNN and the like.

So how many gave away their phone number? It is estimated 2.9 million parted ways with that morsel of data.  Shocked?  Astounded?  Me too.  And not just with Obama’s choice of running mates.

Nielsen Mobile makes this estimate and calls it the biggest mobile marketing campaign ever.  So far.

Since younger voters tend to skew toward the ranks of the non-voters, bringing this group to the table could prove huge come this December. Brian McConnell over at Gigom wrote up a thoughtful post on the far reaching effects of thinking outside the networks:

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Sure, we don’t typically cover politics on Gadgetell.  But when a candidate clearly comes into our territory, it’s fair-game.  Senator Barack Obama’s campaign has announced plans to announce his vice presidential running-mate before the Democratic National Convention.  So that means they’ll go on the news and announce it there, right?  Wrong.  The campaign is currently collecting cell phone numbers via their website, and will send out a massive text message to subscribers announcing their selection.

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We had already expected the release to come in mid-June and it looks like Mozilla has held that date true, they have officially announced that Firefox 3 will be available on June 17.

In addition, they have also, as we mentioned early yesterday, released an additional release candidate as RC3 that took care of a few last minute bugs found in the Mac version.

Otherwise start getting ready to download and install Firefox 3 on June 17, and don’t forget to help all of your not-so-computer literate friends and family members do the same.

In addition to the release, June 17 will also be the day that Mozilla is attempting to set the world record for the most software downloaded during a single day.

Read [Mozilla]

While we were all set and waiting for the final release of Firefox to drop at anytime now, CNET is reporting that some of us may indeed be given an RC 3 sometime today. The latest release, which will come officially as RC 3 will only be for Mac users as the Windows and Linux versions are already considered stable. The changes are also reported to be “internal” so assuming you are a Mac user and do choose to update, its more than likely you will not see any difference. Still no word of any delay with the final release, so as of now Firefox 3 is still on track for a “mid-June” release.

Read [CNET]

As we expected Mozilla has made the next early-adopter release of Firefox 3 available for download. The latest is Firefox 3 RC2 and although the release notes are a little light on the exact updates, its safe to say they have taken care of the issues that were found during the testing of Firefox 3 RC1. This latest download of RC2 is expected to be the last early release and the full, final Firefox 3 is still on track for a June availability.

I have been using RC2 since last night, and was able to update from RC1 without any issues, similar to the last few versions of FF3 it has been stable so far. However, a little friendly warning, as always take caution with any beta or pre-release software.

Download [Mozilla]

We have seen numerous reports, those even coming directly from Mozilla about how we can expect the final release of Firefox 3 to land this June and up until now it looked like it was right on track. While we have not heard any news of a major delay with that expected date, the latest news may push it up just a little bit. Recently we had seen the reports that ten critical flaws had been found in Firefox 3 RC1.

Since then Mozilla had been working to decide whether to ship the final “consumer-ready” release and then fix the flaws with version 3.0.1 or just move onto a Release Candidate 2. Well it seems the decision has been made, because they have officially announced that we will indeed be getting an RC2 before the final.

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As expected Mozilla has rolled out the first non-beta release of Firefox 3. For those who are currently running a beta version or just feeling adventurous Release Candidate 1 is now available for download. A final release is still expected to come in June, of course the beta version has been pretty stable for us, we could only imagine the same from Release Candidate 1.

According to the developer page, RC1 includes some updates to the look and feel, improved security and web compatibility as well as added some new features which include location bar auto-complete, bookmark backup and restore, full page zoom and more.

Those running a beta version of Firefox 3 can get the update by going to Help, then Check for Updates, or simply by visiting the download link below.

Download [Mozilla] Read [Mozilla Developer]