Top Items:
phx.corporate-ir.net:
Amazon.com's 12th Holiday Season is Best Ever — Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced that the 2006 holiday season finished as its best ever, with its busiest day being December 11th. On this day Amazon customer orders exceeded 4 million items.
Sara Kehaulani Goo / Washington Post:
Google Set To Expand Newspaper Ad Program — For some of the nation's newspapers, Google's offer was too good to pass up. — This fall, the search-engine company proposed to show how it could help newspapers sell print advertising to the hundreds of thousands of small merchants who buy Internet ads from Google.
Monica Chen / DigiTimes:
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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Andy Abramson / VoIP Watch:
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 …
Ken Fisher / Ars Technica:
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.
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Phil Windley / Between the Lines:
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?
Discussion:
Alec Saunders .LOG
Tony Long / Wired News:
2006 Foot-in-Mouth Awards — Welcome to Wired News' 2006 Foot-in-Mouth Awards program. You, the readers, have sent us your picks for the lamest quotes from or about the world of technology during this eventful year. We have selected the "best" of those and present them to you now.
Discussion:
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Pete Cashmore / Mashable!:
Megite Developing a Video Memetracker — Megite, one of many so-called "memetrackers" that attempt to find and cluster the buzziest topics on blogs and news sites, is working on a video service that Mashable has been invited to test. Similar to the video section on Technorati …
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TechCrunch
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Computerworld:
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.
Charlie Demerjian / Inquirer:
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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Fimoculous.com:
30 Predictions for 2007 in Media/Tech/Pop — The usual caveats apply: I have no inside knowledge on any of this stuff. I talk to media+tech people about trends all the time, but nobody ever tells me anything important. And I only have mutual funds, so don't try to play that angle.
Discussion:
Lost Remote
Jeffrey Gangemi / Business Week:
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 …
Karen J. Bannan / New York Times:
Online Chat Is a Grapevine That Yields Precious Fruit — When MD Moms was introduced to market baby skin-care products a year ago, it had plenty going for it. The founders are pediatricians who are also mothers. The company has a strong distribution strategy and the baby products are cleverly packaged.
Joshua Freed / Associated Press:
Star Tribune to Be Sold to Private Group — McClatchy Co. Flagship Newspaper Star Tribune Sold to Private Equity Group for $530 Million — MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Newspaper publisher The McClatchy Co. said on Tuesday that it will sell its flagship Star Tribune to the private equity firm Avista Capital Partners …
Rafat Ali / PaidContent:
Possibility Of A Yahoo-AOL Merger in 2007; Google-AOL Change of Control Clause — So bets Merrill Lynch analyst Jessica Reif Cohen, in a note titled "Is 2007 the year AOL and Yahoo are in play?" last week. She said that AOL and Yahoo could be open to a tie-up in 2007 …
Michael Barbaro / New York Times:
Rush at End, but Holiday Sales Fall Short — There is always next year. — Shoppers swarmed discount stores and mobbed suburban malls over the crucial holiday weekend, but the final burst of buying is expected to fall short of retailers' expectations. — Visa USA, the credit card company …
Wired News:
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.
