Top Items:
Antony Bruno / vnuemedia.com:
ZUNE GETS IN THE RING — Microsoft officials for the first time have confirmed that the Redmond, Wash.-based company is readying a portable music player and integrated service, shedding new light on a topic that has fueled rampant speculation in news reports and blog postings for weeks.
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Ryan Block / Engadget:
Microsoft confirms Zune project — Well, it's not much, but we've got a quote and an official confirmation of the Zune project at Microsoft. The Zune brand is being billed as a "music and entertainment" project aimed at "connecting with others to discover new music and entertainment …
Michael Gartenberg:
Zune is Real and Here's What it Means - First Take Analysis — Well, it's 12pm PDT and my embargo is lifted so I can finally stop talking about this in terms of something Microsoft "might" do and now start talking about what it means. If you have the current issue of Billboard, there's an article in there as well.
Ryan Block / Engadget:
Microsoft portable to be a totally "Integrated Experience" — From the looks of it our own Stephen Speicher was on to something in his latest edition of The Clicker. We've received word from a trusted insider (no, not Mr. Speicher) that the shape everyone's been expecting the Zune …
Reuters:
UPDATE 1-Microsoft confirms plan to take on Apple's iPod —Text+(Adds analyst comment, background) — SEATTLE, July 21 (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Friday it plans to release a new music and entertainment player and accompanying software under the …
Ryan Block / Engadget:
Zune: what we know, think we know, and don't yet know — Ok, so we got off the horn with Microsoft just a few minutes ago and realized that making heads or tails of all this Zune stuff is probably driving some of you crazy . (We know others are probably just getting driven crazy by all the posts we've been writing about it.
Reuters:
AMD seen close to $5.5 billion chip deal — Source says Applied Micro Devices could announce deal with #2 Canadian chipmaker as early as Monday. — PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) — Advanced Micro Devices, the No. 2 supplier of computer processors, is close to a deal to buy graphics chip maker ATI …
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Fuad Abazovic / Inquirer:
AMD and ATI to ask shareholders for merger approval — Monday's news today — ACCORDING to an extraordinarily reliable source, AMD and ATI will on Monday pitch their shareholders with the proposition that the two companies merge. — It's an interesting idea - AMD doesn't quite have the shekels in the bank to buy ATI outright.
Paul Thurrott / SuperSite for Windows:
Windows Genuine Advantage: An Overview and Screenshot Gallery — I've found Microsoft's recent forays into customer relations with Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) to be somewhat amusing. I mean, after all, Microsoft is a huge company just brimming with really smart people. How could they do something so silly?
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Erick Schonfeld / B2Day:
Apple Invents a "Touchless" Touch-Screen — What if the entire surface of your iPod was a screen, and you could wave your fingers over different parts of the screen to call up different controls? Depending on what you were doing, you could manipulate a virtual scroll-wheel or get a keyboard to pop up.
Jenstar / JenSense:
Site Diagnostics tab returns to Google AdSense control panel — It's back! The "Site Diagnostics" tab, which appears to be an extension of Google Sitemaps, has returned to the AdSense control panel after it showed up several weeks ago for a couple of days.
Discussion:
John Battelle's Searchblog
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Official Google Blog:
Findings on invalid clicks — Those of you who follow news about online advertising closely are seeing plenty about the issue of "click fraud" lately. Since there's been a development in a case Google is involved in, you might like to hear about it. — As part of the settlement …
bLaugh:
Skype vs. Gizmo vs. Vonage — I think Skype is an amazing product. I'm recommending that all my friends and family members start using *pwing* kskll f kaslkk fllaklk. LFilial liflk kdlalk lal lfllfal alla lallkl lala aaa kdllak slkal alkalk a lka kal lakklkla lkalkll allall kkllal llalkkal …
Discussion:
Webtown
Matt Marshall / SiliconBeat:
The Gizmo free-call surprise, too good to be true? — Wow, the open standards Internet telephone company the Gizmo Project is offering free calls to 60 countries now. — This is serious stuff. Skype was doing something similar, but it was bought up by eBay and never had to prove it could make money.
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USA Today:
Sony BMG releases first song that works with all music players — LOS ANGELES — Record label Sony BMG Music Entertainment, which got into trouble last year when it sold copy-protected CDs that inadvertently threatened PCs with a computer virus, has become the first major record label to sell an unprotected digital song.
Discussion:
Guardian Unlimited
Kevin Newcomb / ClickZ:
Study: Display Ad Exposure Boosts Search Conversion — A new study from Atlas Institute proves what many marketers have intuitively known: Running display ads can help improve the results of a concurrent search campaign. — The study, which looked at 11 direct response advertisers …
Denise / Official Google Base Blog:
New rich text editing feature — By Deepak Lachwani, Google Base Engineering — To help you better describe your items, we're introducing a new rich text editor to our posting form. When you're posting an item, you can now format your description by using formatting buttons or by using HTML.
Paul Miller / Engadget:
Microsoft's Argo, Pyxis, Zune and Alexandria — confused yet? — It's raining Zune rumors again, or more properly, "Project Argo" rumors, and far be it from us to keep these to ourselves. The latest word comes from BetaNews and their "sources close to the situation," and things just keep looking better coming from the Redmond camp.
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Alicetiara / tiara.org:
MySpace to Secondary Markets: Drop Dead — On Monday, MySpace started displaying the following message when you log in (this is kind of a crappy screenshot, but you can see it larger if you click on it): … What Tom doesn't mention is that Flash 9 has a a new attribute for the tag called allowNetworking.
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Xeni Jardin / Boing Boing:MySpace clamps down on users through new tech limits
Discussion:
CNNMoney.com
