Top Items:

Verizon to Allow Ads on Its Mobile Phones — VERIZON WIRELESS, among the nation's most widely advertised brands, is poised to become the advertising medium itself. — Beginning early next year, Verizon Wireless will allow placement of banner advertisements on news, weather …

Presence for your presents — You've probably got the paper and boxes cleaned up by now. Did you get that new gadget you've wanted? A new phone? A Zune? A new MacBook? Regardless of what it was, chances are that its stated purpose was to make you better connected. Is that really want you want?

HD disk format wars are over — Opinion A clear victor emerges — THE NEXT GENERATION disk format has been settled once and for all. Thanks to the due diligence, hard work and unprecedented cooperation between the media companies, the hardware vendors and the OS vendor, we finally have a solution.
Discussion:
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Skype Subverts T-Mobile — Many a writer, analyst and blogger have put the label of "disruptive" on Skype. — I think NOT. — The proper term, as I have said before is "subversive" and what the following will prove and point to that exact claim. Now for those who don't see the fine points …

65nm Xbox 360 CPUs delayed until mid-2007 — According to industry sources, plans to produce CPUs for the Microsoft Xbox 360 game console on 65nm at Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing will be pushed back until the middle of 2007, at least one quarter behind the original schedule.
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Fine-Tuning Local Search — Small businesses may soon be able to target their online ads to prospective customers who are within a few blocks of their shops — Karl Murphy, president and co-owner of Carolina Auto Spa, a car wash and automotive detailer with two locations outside Raleigh …


Google to Write an 'Integrated Story'? — Internetnews.com editors provide an early roadmap for tech's direction in 2007. — Google (Quote) says its mission is to organize all the world's information and make it accessible and useful to everyone. — Now well on its way to accomplishing …
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2007: Google Talk Phone Calls, Offline Google Docs
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comScore to take Web 2.0 seriously — Television has Nielsen, but the web has no clear leader for ranking the world's busiest websites. There's no shortage of competitors in the space, of course, and you've probably heard of many of them: Alexa, comScore, HitWise, and the newcomer, Compete.


Ad Costs on the Web Are Rising, but Perhaps a Bit Irrationally — MEDIA executives and investors get a pleasant neck ache from watching the skyward path of online advertising revenues. But for those who have to pay for advertising, the trend is bringing some anxiety.

Biblio Tech … The new library at Chicago State University has one ironclad rule: No students allowed in these stacks - only robots. Every book, CD, and DVD in the school's $38 million facility is tagged with a radio-frequency ID chip. When a borrowed item slides through the return slot, the system identifies and sorts it.

How I nuked mobile spam — Here's how to keep spam off your phone — Mike Elgan Today's Top Stories or Other Mobile/Wireless Stories — On Jan. 24, 2004, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates famously announced that by 2006, "spam will be solved." He was right.

Wiimote Controlled Smarthome — I've been getting scads of CES pitches from smarthome software and gear makers, and not a single one is as interesting as LiquidIce's Wii-home hack. It uses the Wii browser, a Flash interface and some PHP script to control the lights, thermostat, security camera, cable DVR, and stereo system.

Wikipedia Founder Plans Search Engine — The search engine, code-named Wikiasari, would combine open source technology and human intervention to deliver more relevant results than the algorithm-based systems used today. — Jimmy Wales, founder of online encyclopedia Wikipedia …
Discussion:
John Battelle's Searchblog

Korea Doesn't Want That Virtual Currency To Be Traded For Real Money — from the and-you-will-do-this-how-exactly? dept — It's not like people haven't been warning others around the world about the potential tricky issues that come up with online worlds and offline laws …

Exclusive Details: Best Buy, Exceptional Innovation and ConnectedLife.Home — NOTE: This is a long story. If you're an integrator wondering why I spent so much time on it, skip to the bottom. Well, not the VERY bottom. -JJ — Best Buy is going to sell a packaged solution of Media Center plus home automation.
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NAMING NAMES: The tech reporters who flack for Second Life — CLAY SHIRKY — "Here at KingsRUs.com, we call our website our Kingdom, and any time our webservers serve up a copy of the home page, we record that as a Loyal Subject. We're very pleased to announce that in the last two months …

CES Gathering update: Tablet PC & UMPC Community Gathering — CES is just around the corner and I'm looking forward to the annual Tablet PC & UMPC Community Gathering. I just got off the phone with Cheeseburger Las Vegas, where we met last year, to confirm our reservation for January 9th.