Top Items:
Matt Richtel / New York Times:
Skype's Free Phone Call Plan Will Soon Have Annual Fee — Skype, the Internet calling service owned by eBay, said Tuesday that as of Jan. 1 it would begin charging $30 a year for unlimited calls to landline and mobile phones within the United States and Canada. Those calls had been free since last spring.
RELATED:
About Skype:
Skype Announces New Skype Unlimited Calling Plan — Offers 12 Months of Unlimited Skype Calls to Any Phone Within the US and Canada for a Flat Annual Rate — Skype, the global Internet communications company, is now offering U.S. and Canadian consumers the new Skype Unlimited Calling plan …
CIO.com:
IBM, Yahoo Launch Free Enterprise Search Tool — IBM and Yahoo have developed a free, entry-level, enterprise search application that at least one analyst believes will seriously disrupt the low-end segment of this market where Google has been selling many of its Mini search devices.
RELATED:
Yahoo! Search blog:
Enterprise search made easy - and free - from IBM and Yahoo! — Earlier this year Yahoo! and IBM got together to ask a simple question — how can we make enterprise search easier to install, use, and maintain. The result of that question is IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition which we believe …
Larry Dignan / Between the Lines:Hardware costs make IBM-Yahoo's enterprise search less free
Discussion:
Search Engine Land
BBC:
Apple denies download sales fall — Apple has denied a report which claims US sales at its iTunes Music Store fell by 65% in the first half of 2006. — Research group Forrester said it was too soon to say whether its findings showed that buyers were "reaching their saturation level for digital music".
Discussion:
Gizmodo, Techdirt, Macsimum News, Rex Hammock's weblog, MacUser and Blackfriars' Marketing
RELATED:
Josh Bernoff / Devices, Media …:
iTunes sales are NOT plummeting! Press credibility, on the other hand . . . What an interesting couple of days it's been. What follows is a case study in how information — and misinformation — spreads on the Net. — We put out a simple little report about iPods and iTunes based …
John Paczkowski / Good Morning Silicon Valley:iTunes sales reportedly recorded in Apple Lossless
Discussion:
Reuters
Scott Martin / Red Herring:
Yahoo Dethroned By MySpace — Fox Interactive Media, largely thanks to MySpace, has edged into No. 1 for Internet page views. — Yahoo is getting good at being No. 2. News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media has now edged the search giant out of its long-held perch at the top position for Internet page views.
RELATED:
Anick Jesdanun / Associated Press:ComScore: MySpace tops Yahoo in November
Discussion:
Search Engine Land
Microsoft:
Microsoft Robotics Studio Now Available to Provide Common Development Platform — More than 30 vendors offer support for creating broad range of innovative robotics applications. — Among the many remarkable innovations emerging out of the robotics industry, from surveillance robots …
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Mike / CrunchNotes:
Putting TechCrunch UK On Hold — TechCrunch UK, just a few months old, has been tremendously successful in creating a community for local UK & Ireland Entrepreneurs. However, today I put the blog on hold and terminated our relationship with editor Sam Sethi.
MacOSXHints.com:
Take iSight snapshots during invalid login attempts — With the new MacBook Pro's including built-in iSight cameras, I thought it would be useful to take an iSight snapshot of anyone trying to break into my laptop. This is done by tailing /var/log/asl.log for invalid login attempts (both at the login screen and screen saver).
Discussion:
Lifehacker, Gizmodo, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, MacUser, Infinite Loop, O'Grady's PowerPage and UNEASYsilence
Connie Guglielmo / Bloomberg:
Apple May Be Carrier for IPod Phone, Analyst Says (Update1) — Dec. 12 (Bloomberg) — Apple Computer Inc. may serve as its own wireless carrier if it delivers an iPod-based cell phone next year and rely on the company's network of retail stores to sell service contracts for the device, UBS AG said.
Elinor Mills / CNET News.com:
Google unveils unorthodox stock option auction — Google plans to start an unorthodox stock options program in April that will allow employees to sell their vested options in an online auction, the search giant announced late Tuesday. — Traditionally, employees have two ways to deal with stock options …
Yahoo!:
Yahoo! Search Marketing Platform Opens Online Sign-up for New Customers — U.S. Businesses Can Now Sign Up Online To Take Advantage of Yahoo!'s Powerful New Search Marketing System — BURBANK, Calif., Dec 12, 2006 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), a leading global Internet company …
Jacqui Cheng / Infinite Loop:
Interview: Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster — With the hit that is Delicious Library making its rounds around Mac software land and Delicious Library 2 on the way, Delicious Monster and Omni founder Wil Shipley has been, to put it lightly, a busy guy. We were able to catch him for a few words …
Chris Anderson / The Long Tail:
WHAT WOULD RADICAL TRANSPARENCY MEAN FOR WIRED? (PART 2) — In the previous post, I described how the media landscape is changing, starting with reader expectations. In this post I'll describe what that might imply for a media organization like ours. If the key word is "participation", how could we encourage that to the fullest?
Google Blogoscoped:
Does Google Allow Cloaking When They Like the Site? — Google's Matt Cutts is on debunking duty lately - everything from "Google is in bed with the CIA" to "the Google Toolbar indexes your page" - but there's one big rumor that hasn't been touched yet; Google is unfairly allowing some websites …
