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5:00 PM ET, December 13, 2006

Techmeme

 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 …
USA Today:   Skype expands calling options
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: Download Squad and StartupSquad
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".
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 …
RELATED:
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).
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.
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.
Discussion: TechEffect and digg
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 …
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?
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 …
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 …
Discussion: Ramblings About SEO and digg
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) …
 
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 More Items: 
Stephen Shankland / CNET News.com:
IBM to give birth to 'Second Life' business group
Robert McLaws / Windows-Now.com:
Shameless Post: I need more storage so that...
Larry Dignan / Between the Lines:
VMware's Greene: Utilities pushing virtualization
Discussion: Rough Type
PR Newswire:
Scanbuy, Inc. Hires Industry Veteran Jonathan Bulkeley as CEO
Chris Kohler / Game|Life:
Dragon Quest on DS: What It Means
Discussion: Kotaku and Joystiq
Ryan Stewart:
I Get To Meet Bill Gates Today
Steve O'Hear / The Social Web:
Do ordinary users care about data portability? …
Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Land:
Yahoo Answers Birthday: One Year Old
 Earlier Items: 
Heather Champ / FlickrBlog:
Ho ho ho! Flickr Gifts and Upload Limit Changes
Katharine Q. Seelye / New York Times:
More Journalists Join Political News Venture
Discussion: PaidContent
Ryan Paul / Ars Technica:
A first look at Firefox 3.0  —  Mozilla has officially released …
Chris Pirillo:
A Tablet PC Wedding
Annie Sullivan / Official Google Blog:
Nifty Toolbar upgrades for Firefox
Kasper Jade / AppleInsider:
Adobe Photoshop CS3 beta to drop this friday
Discussion: Apple Gazette and digg
 

 
From Mediagazer:

Lachlan Cartwright / The Ankler:
Sources: MSNBC renewed Rachel Maddow's contract early this fall, but with a pay cut; MSNBC bosses' plan to shake up daytime and weekend programming

Caitlin Huston / The Hollywood Reporter:
Internal memo: Hearst Magazines president announces layoffs as part of a decision to “reallocate resources” to “continue our focus on digital innovation”

Jon Brodkin / Ars Technica:
FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel announced she will leave the agency on January 20; she was the first woman to be confirmed to lead the agency

 
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