Top Items:
Liz Gannes / GigaOM:
DVD Jon Fairplays Apple — DRM-buster DVD Jon has a new target in his sights, and it's a big piece of fruit. He has reverse-engineered Apple's Fairplay and is starting to license it to companies who want their media to play on Apple's devices. Instead of breaking the DRM …
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Rob Hof / Tech Beat:
Unrepentant PayPerPost Gets Funding — Three months after getting slammed by BusinessWeek's Jon Fine, TechCrunch's Marshall Kirkpatrick, and a gazillion bloggers, PayPerPost is crying all the way to bank. The Orlando-based startup, which matches advertisers with bloggers willing to write …
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Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Controversial PayPerPost Raises $3 million — We first covered PayPerPost when it launched three months ago. — The service is a marketplace for advertisers to pay bloggers to write about products for a fee. Commenters to our original post wee polarized into those violently for and those againt the product.
Terence O'Hara / Washington Post:
Hard-Learned Lesson: Don't Try to Censor A Blogger — Memories fade, but the Internet is forever. — Murry N. Gunty found that out the hard way this summer. Well known among Washington financiers, the head of Milestone Capital Management LLC ran afoul of bloggers for an attempt to censor …
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Mark Pincus Blog:
I got skewered today in the washington post! — so this writer for the washpost (terrence o'hara) calls me last week saying he wants to do a piece on how my former classmate murry gunty tried to silence my blog and the controversy around it. and wow. if you read his story today …
Discussion:
The Jason Calacanis Weblog
Brad Stone / Newsweek:
The Battle Over YouTube — The video-sharing site is the hottest start-up since Google. Is it worth a billion dollars, or is it just another company in need of a business model? — Warner Music, the fourth largest music company in the world, has every reason to wage business and legal warfare …
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Jeremy Caplan / Time:
Google's Growing Grasp — To fend off Microsoft and other foes, the search giant is bulking up on partnerships — What does Google search for? Over the past few months, the Web titan has been looking for new partners. It has teamed with Intuit to enable small-business owners …
RON / Rondam Ramblings:
Top ten geek business myths — Since I've started my new career as a venture capitalist I have become keenly aware of some of the classic mistakes that geeks make when trying to raise money for a new business. Instead of writing the same comments over and over again I thought I'd try …
QuadsZilla / SEO BlackHat:
10 Steps to Guarantee You Make the Digg Front Page — As I sit here writing on the world's greatest personal computer (The Mac Pro Quad Xeon 64-bit workstation with dual 30 inch monitors): — I can't help but pity you Wal-Mart shoppers who still use software from the Antichrist (Microsoft) …
Mike / Techdirt:
Winner Take All Outsourcing: Netflix Will Pay $1 Million To Whoever Improves Their Recommendation Engine — from the and-the-rest? dept — The concept of crowdsourcing has been popular lately, but not everything is easily sourced out to the crowd. Netflix is trying their hand at the game by throwing a little money into the pot.
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Katie Hafner / New York Times:And if You Liked the Movie, a Netflix Contest May Reward You Handsomely
Discussion:
TechCrunch, TechEffect, Valleywag, shmula, MIT Advertising Lab, O'Reilly Radar, Geeking with Greg, Genuine VC, UMBC eBiquity, Tony Gentile, unmediated, Dan Blank, BGSL, Slashdot, digg and Hacking NetFlix
Ryan Block / Engadget:
Zune wireless: worthless (for now) — So throughout this whole Zune launch thing the whole lot of us have been playing cat and mouse with Microsoft on the finer points. Will it or won't it be built on PlaysForSure or some variant? How will it recognize copyrighted vs. creative commons content without opening up piracy loopholes?
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Brad Linder / PVR Wire:
Mobile TV viewers have short attention spans — Well, maybe it's not so much that you're likely to have a short attention span if you're watching TV on your cell phone as it is that you're less likely to willingly sit through a 30 second commercial while waiting for your program to start.
Jake Ludington:
Zune and iPod Photo Comparison — I got face time with a Zune this weekend and decided to look at how the form factor compares to the 80GB iPod I picked up a few days ago. The Zune weighs considerably less than the iPod, although I didn't have a scale on hand to get exact comparison.
Nick / Rough Type:
Beyond question — It's funny how a set of instructions - an alogrithm - written by people can come to be granted, by those same people, a superhuman authority. As if a machine wrought by man should, upon trembling into motion, shed its earthly origin and assume a god-granted imperium, beyond our small-minded
Frank Barnako:
Rocketboom's ad price: $80K a week — Andrew Baron seems to have shaken off the heartbreak of separation and gotten down to business. While Amanda Congdon, with whom he co-founded Rocketboom, is on a coast-to-coast trip in a Ford Hybrid, Baron is newly-focused.
Discussion:
Paul Colligan's …
Zoë Slocum / CNET News.com:
Facebook follower gets 'unfaced' — Rocketboom anchor Amanda Congdon launched a site called Amanda UnBoomed when she allegedly got fired. But a University of Texas sophomore launched UnFaced.com before he was even kicked off of Facebook. — UnFaced is a site that employs technology designed …
Steve Rosenbush / Business Week:
Why Online Video Sites Are Hot Targets — As TV viewing habits change, media companies—and advertisers—are looking elsewhere: They've set their sights on a new breed of startups — As the Internet snaps to life with homemade movies, TV shows, and other forms of video …
Michael Liedtke / Associated Press:
Google buys garage that launched Internet's top search engine — SAN FRANCISCO - Internet search leader Google Inc. has added a landmark to its rapidly expanding empire - the Silicon Valley home where co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin rented a garage eight years ago as they set out to change the world.
Discussion:
Valleywag, Zoli's Blog, Search Engine Watch Blog, VentureBeat and John Battelle's Searchblog
