Top Items:
John Cook / Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
$10 million in venture capital to help Wallop build social network — Wallop, the social networking startup that was spun out of Microsoft Research Labs earlier this year, has landed $10 million in venture capital that it will use to create a new competitor to MySpace, Friendster and Facebook.
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Rafe Needleman / CNET News.com:
Wallop, the social network where you pay for pretty — The "important" social network I mentioned in my post about Piczo is launching at DemoFall on Tuesday, and going into limited beta tonight. It's called Wallop. A lot of Wallop was developed inside Microsoft, but it's been spun out into a separate …
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Microsoft Spinoff Wallop Launches — Wallop, previously a semi-forgotton Microsoft Research "sandbox" social network and photo sharing project, was spun off into a new, independent, venture backed business earlier this year (details here). Tonight at 9 pm California time, Wallop is launching a semi-public beta.
Carlo / Techdirt:
Paid Social-Networking Model Doesn't Pack Much Of A Punch — from the more-of-a-tap-really dept — Social-networking sites seem by now cyclical by nature — everybody's on one, then they lose interest, or something better comes along, leaving the previous one to be taken over by Brazilian drug dealers.
Associated Press:
Microsoft launches social networking site — Wallop testing premise that you're willing to pay extra to look good — SEATTLE - Wallop, a startup spun out of Microsoft Corp.'s research lab, is launching the test version of an online social networking site with the premise that people will want to pay extra to look good.
Ryan Katz / Think Secret:
Apple iPhone to be Cingular-exclusive at launch — Apple and Cingular have signed an agreement that will make the US' largest cell phone provider the exclusive carrier of Apple's forthcoming phone, sources report. Apple's iPhone remains on track for an early 2007 release.
Nokia:
All the music, imaging and Internet functionality of Nokia Nseries in a sleek folding design — Nokia Open Studio 2006, New York, US - Nokia today introduced the Nokia N75, its smallest multimedia computer, offering digital music playback, quality photography, telephony and rich internet communication.
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BBC:
Mobile web shake-up gets started — The mobile web is about to receive the biggest shake-up in years with the start of open registration for mobile phone-specific website addresses. — The general public can now register websites ending with .mobi (dotmobi) as the backers of the mobile net hope to overturn consumer apathy.
Tom Krazit / CNET News.com:
Intel pledges 80 cores in five years — update SAN FRANCISCO—Intel has built a prototype of a processor with 80 cores that can perform a trillion floating-point operations per second. — CEO Paul Otellini held up a silicon wafer with the prototype chips before several thousand attendees at the Intel Developer Forum here Tuesday.
ShanghaiDaily.com:
Report: Tom.com to buyout eBay China, PayPal — HONG Kong-listed Tom.com is going to announce its takeover of eBay's China division and its PayPal service, the 21st Century Business Herald reported today, citing a well-informed source. — Tom Group is the distributor of Skype, eBay's online telephone service in China.
John Paczkowski / Good Morning Silicon Valley:
Judgment for the plaintiff: 1,000 hours of AOL FREE!!!!! — It's taken longer than expected, but the uproar over America Online's data Valdez has finally made its way to the court system. Today the division of Time Warner is facing a possible class action lawsuit over its intentional …
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Steve Lohr / New York Times:
Hoping to Be a Model, I.B.M. Will Put Its Patent Filings Online — I.B.M., the nation's largest patent holder, will publish its patent filings on the Web for public review as part of a new policy that the company hopes will be a model for others. — If widely adopted, the policy could help …
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Facebook Just Launched Open Registrations — We mentioned a couple of weeks ago that this was coming...moments ago Facebook removed the restrictions on registration and anyone can now become a member by joining a geographic network. — They've also anticipated backlash from existing users …
Discussion:
Download Squad, Unit Structures, seattleduck, ShoutBlog, Lifehacker, Monkey Bites, Social Degree, andrewteman.org, PaulStamatiou.com, The Blogging Times and digg
John Markoff / New York Times:
Google to Push for More Electrical Efficiency in PC's — Google is calling on the computer industry to create a simpler and more efficient power supply standard that it says will save billions of kilowatt-hours of energy annually. — In a white paper to be presented Tuesday on the opening …
Paul Miller / Engadget:
Nokia bumps the stakes to 8GB on their N91 — The HDD-based, music playin' N91 might've been panned by the critics, but a 4GB musicphone still isn't nothing to scoff at, and now the phone is doubling up the memory with 8GB, for even less scoffing opportunity.
Robert Scoble / Scobleizer:
Introducing ScobleShow — It's 1 a.m. and the engineering team, me, and Valerie, are still working at the office. But the show is slowly coming up. The URL is at http://www.podtech.net/scobleshow/ — Stuff is still broken, and probably will be for a little while longer.
Discussion:
B2Day, Thomas Hawk's Digital …, ScobleShow, Podcasting News, Frank Barnako, Paul Colligan's …, Clique Communications, Laughing Squid and digg
VoIP & Gadgets Blog:
Cancelling Vonage Difficulties — I thought I would share my interesting experience with cancelling my Vonage service. I recorded the entire call, including the traversal over their IVR to reach an agent. Surprisingly, I was connected pretty quickly to an agent. I was expecting a much longer hold time.
Peter Rojas / Engadget:
Sony Reader PRS-500 hands-on + Connect Reader screenshots — Last night we nabbed an exclusive sneak peek at the oft-delayed Sony Reader, which we're happy to report is finally getting close to coming out. — What we can't report, at least not yet, is a confirmed MSRP or when it is actually going to go on sale.
Adam Frucci / SCI FI Tech:
Info rings save us from hassle of human interaction — You gotta love technology designed to remove as much human interaction as possible from our days, moving us closer and closer to the dream of everyone existing in private spheres, completely cut off from any legitimate human contact.
Marshall Kirkpatrick / TechCrunch:
Del.icio.us reports 1 million users - post Yahoo! growth tops all of Digg — Del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter just posted to the del.icio.us blog that the service has registered its 1 millionth user. Schachter says that number has more than tripled in the last 9 months.
Jeremy Reimer / Ars Technica:
Firefox 2 reaches RC1 — Today, the Mozilla organization is preparing to release the first release candidate for version 2 of their popular Firefox web browser. Firefox 2 RC1 is available in binary form for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X (the latter a Universal Binary for both PPC and Intel systems).
Jack Loftus / searchopensource.techtarget.com:
Open Source News: — Open source router on par with Cisco, users say — The price and flexibility of an open source router is sometimes enough to lure in users, despite the router's reputation for having support and usability issues. — That reputation may be old news …
Matt / Signal vs. Noise:
Buzzwords say all the wrong things — Our industry is addicted to bulls**t buzzwords. Emails are full of "I'm an insider" jargon, blog posts brim with tech duckspeak, and resumes are loaded with meaningless action verbs. Everyone's always implementing or enabling or optimizing or leveraging.
