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 …
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".
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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
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.
Discussion:
StartupSquad
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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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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
Robert McLaws / Windows-Now.com:
Shameless Post: I need more storage so that... Seagate is having a contest where someone could win a 750GB external hard drive. All they have to do is describe their digital lifestyle, and explain what they'll do with more hard drive space. So here it goes... My Digital Lifestyle
Lifehacker:
Pluck, tag and save the good stuff from YouTube videos — Ever wish you could show a friend the really cool part of a YouTube video without making them sit through all the rest? That's the idea behind Scenemaker, which lets you bookmark, tag and share individual scenes within videos.
Msrcteam / the Microsoft Security Response Center Blog:
Information on accidental posting of pre-release security updates for Office for Mac — We've seen some questions from customers about some security updates that posted for a while today for Office for Mac that they didn't see any security bulletins for. — I wanted to let you know that …
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.
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 …
Heather Champ / FlickrBlog:
Ho ho ho! Flickr Gifts and Upload Limit Changes — It's now easier than ever to spread joy this holiday season by giving the Gift of Flickr. You can purchase a special activation code that you can give to anyone, whether or not they have an existing Flickr account.
Ewan / The All New Ewan's Musings:
LeWeb3 Fallout. As A Speaker, I'm Not Happy — I was a speaker at LeWeb3, from which I have just returned. As the conference opened, I was on a panel with three others, for a 30 minute session, where I would talk about Combat Cards (the collectible card game for Second Life) …
Discussion:
gapingvoid, One Man & His Blog, Peer Pressure, NevilleHobson.com and Naked Conversations
Ryan Paul / Ars Technica:
A first look at Firefox 3.0 — Mozilla has officially released the first public alpha build of Firefox 3.0. Codenamed Gran Paradiso, Firefox 3 includes the new Gecko 1.9 rendering engine which leverages the open-source Cairo rendering framework and features heavily refactored reflow algorithms …
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 …
