The National Basketball Association’s (NBA) playerlockoutstarted today after its previous collective agreement expired last night, and the lockout will remain in place until a new bargaining agreement is reached with the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA). The lockout means that players won’t be paid, teams can’t negotiate, sign or trade players, and players won’t be able to participate in any kind of professional-related activity…including speaking to their coaches. And it transpires that this latter rule extends to Twitter, where Business Insiderreportsthat coaches will face a $1m fine for retweeting one of their players during the lockout....

NBN Co and Telstra have today finalized the deal that allows NBN Co to use existing Telstra infrastructure, a major part of the process that needed Telstra’s cooperation to go ahead. Telstra’s existing fiber network (which is admittedly next to non-existent) will be available to NBN Co, and their national duct system can be used to do the much larger job of rolling out fiber to the rest of the nation, the sixth largest country by area in the world....

National Broadband NetworkCo chief executive Mike Quigley today announced that the company was working on a deal with IBM worth $200 million to build the business and operations systems required to manage customers, billings and connection provisioning. Quigley said the contract would pay out around $200m over a three year span, but the timetable for deployment has much of system done by early 2012. NBN Co, as a wholesale company, will depend on telecoms retailers to sell bandwidth on the government’s $6 billion fibre-optic network, so a complicated operations system that gives third party retailers access to the information they need is important....

Facebookis about to hit another huge milestone as itnears 700 million userson the site. This has come in an incredibly short time since the news surrounding its500 millionth user, which occurred last July 2010. Reports have shown that this significant new surge in growth is coming from Brazil, where the site has new-found popularity. Brazilians accounted for an additional 1.9 million users per month, representing a growth increase of a massive 11%....

Every so often we do a complete run down of the Windows Phone 7 vital signs, and there is no more contentious number in the market than the number of ‘monthly active users’ for theofficial WP7 Facebook application. When the number was first discovered, people assumed that it was a leading indicator of how many people had purchased a handset. After all, who would buy a WP7 handset and not use the app, right?...