Top Items:
Jeff Clavier / Jeff Clavier's Software Only:
AOL acquires Userplane to expand AIM network — A brief interruption of my holiday schedule to announce a great news: portfolio co Userplane has been acquired by AOL LLC a couple of weeks ago, and I just heard that the official press release is now up there.
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Black Voices:
AOL Acquires Userplane — Company's Industry-Leading Web-Based Chat & Instant Messaging Services Will Expand the AIM Network, Serve Social Networking Audiences and Emerging Online Communities — AOL LLC today announced that is has acquired Userplane (http://www.userplane.com) of Los Angeles …
Marshall Kirkpatrick / TechCrunch:
Userplane purchased by AOL — Web messaging services company Userplane has been acquired by AOL, it was was announced this morning. This company powers the interactive features (chat, video chat, video profiles, etc.) on most online dating and many social networking sites. — Terms remain undisclosed.
Microsoft:
Microsoft Invites the World to Create Its Own Xbox 360 Console Games for the First Time — More than 10 esteemed universities to add XNA Game Studio Express and Xbox 360 game development into their curricula starting this fall. — In the 30 years of video game development …
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Ina Fried / CNET News.com:
Play your own Xbox game — Microsoft is trying to turn hard-core gamers into Xbox programmers. — The company plans to show off on Monday a new set of developer tools that will let college students, hobbyists and others create their own games for the Xbox 360 console, for a Windows PC or both.
Robert Levine / New York Times:
Microsoft Has a Starter Kit for Aspiring Game Designers — During the last decade, the cost of recording and producing music and video has plummeted, giving amateur auteurs a chance at stardom. But at the same time, the expense involved in making video games has gone up …
Todd Bishop / Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
Software Notebook: Xbox offers do-it-yourself games — ONE OF THE HOTTEST online trends is to get people to create and contribute their own material — things like reviews, photos and videos. — But will user-generated content work for video games? Microsoft plans to find out.
Ouriel Ohayon / TechCrunch:
Netvibes secures a $15 million investment — NetVibes, a Paris/London based company, will announce a $15 million round of financing on Monday. Index Venture (which is a prior investor) and Accel ventures lead the investment operation which certainly is one of the largest in European internet this year …
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Matt Marshall / SiliconBeat:
NetVibes, the slick "homepage" company, raises $15 million — NetVibes, the Paris based company that lets you personalize your home page with cool little modules that you can drag across the screen, has raised $15 million in more financing. — If you go there and play …
Discussion:
paidContent.org
Ken Belson / New York Times:
Verizon Is Rewiring New York, Block by Block, in a Race for Survival — It's 9 in the morning, and a team from Verizon has been stringing fiber optic cable along a residential side street in the Bronx for three hours. In a basket about 20 feet in the air, James DeMattia guides the cable …
Method ~ of:
enter windows live writer — it's official! — for the past few weeks i've been able to use a new tool just released, called windows live writer. at it's core, writer is a blogging client (i'm sure there will be other uses for it in the future, but for now, this is what i use it for).
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Joe Cheng / whateverblog:Windows Live Writer Released
Discussion:
OakLeaf Systems, Digital Inspiration, PaulStamatiou.com, Paul Kedrosky's …, The Blog Herald and Elliott Back
John Battelle / John Battelle's Searchblog:
GOOGLE'S NEW VIDEO TAB - WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? — Just off the phone with an AP reporter (Jessica Mintz, sharp reporter from the Journal who moved over) who was grokking the fact that Google has added Video to its hallowed first tier of search options on the home page, and relegated Froogle to a pop up window off the "more" link.
Sara Ivry / New York Times:
Segway Plans 2 New Models of Transporter — The Segway Human Transporter was introduced in late 2001 after a flood of anticipation, a barrelful of venture capital and a promise from its inventor, Dean Kamen, to revolutionize the way cities worked. Since then, the two-wheeled vehicle …
Discussion:
Valleywag
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Guy Kawasaki / Signum sine tinnitu:
Everything You Wanted to Know About Getting a Job in Silicon Valley But Didn't Know Who to Ask — Many people ask me for advice about getting a job in Silicon Valley, so here's the inside scoop. Not everyone will agree with this advice, and some will outright deny what I'm saying …
USA Today:
HSN to offer point and shop by TV remote — See something you like on Home Shopping Network? Point your remote at the TV. Hit "select." And buy, buy, buy! — At least, that's what HSN (IACI) hopes its viewers will do. — On Monday, HSN is announcing the nation's first shop-by-remote system for digital TV customers.
Jeremy Toeman / LIVEdigitally:
10 Tips on Maximizing Laptop Battery Performance — I am on the planes a decent amount of the time (100,000 miles by late May) and tend to spend a chunk of my flights using my laptop. Most of the time it's productive, but it can also include a DVD or the occasional game …
Jason Clarke / Download Squad:
Getting Things Done Software Systems (Part 1 of 2) — Native Windows (offline-capable) software — Scope — While there are a great number of ways to put a Getting Things Done system into action on a Windows PC, I'd like to compare and contrast the benefits of using native Windows software like Outlook …
Nathan Weinberg / InsideGoogle:
DO WE NEED TO KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT GOOGLE? — Damn, everytime I go through Valleywag, I say, "Surely, they've crossed the line this time!" Amazingly, there is no anti-Valleywag campaign, no angry missives from Google, and no blogs spouting angry rhetoric against the Silicon Valley gossip king.
John Naughton / Observer:
Websites that changed the world — Amazon used to be a large river in South America - but that was before the world wide web. This month the web is 15 years old and in that short time it has revolutionised the way we live, from shopping to booking flights, writing blogs to listening to music.
