Top Items:
Kotaku:
Industry: Lay-Offs Hit SCEA HQ Today — Roughly 80 to 100 employees of Sony Computer Entertainment of America's Foster City headquarters were laid off today, Kotaku has learned from a source who was among those asked to hand in their badge and keys before leaving the premises.
Discussion:
Ars Technica, CNET News.com, DailyTech, GamePolitics.com, Game | Life, Good Morning Silicon Valley, GamesIndustry.biz and digg
Alex Iskold / Read/WriteWeb:
Clearspring Lands Major Deal With NBC — Clearspring is going to annouce tomorrow that it was chosen by NBC to be its exclusive widget platform for the next year. This is a major deal for Clearspring, and for NBC as well. The specific terms of this business arrangement have not been disclosed.
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Brad Stone / New York Times:
Radio Time to Join List of eBay Items Up for Auction — SAN FRANCISCO, June 5 — The auction giant eBay said it would begin selling radio airtime to advertisers starting Wednesday, expanding into a business that Google entered last year — EBay, through a partnership with Bid4Spots …
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Wall Street Journal:
EBay to Broker Radio Ad Time, Stoking Rivalry With Google — Online auctioneer eBay Inc. plans to begin brokering radio advertisements today, in the latest effort by a Web company to sell offline ads via the Internet. The move ratchets up eBay's competition with Google Inc. and could shake up how radio advertising is sold.
NEWS.com.au:
Sony mulls cutting PlayStation 3 price — SONY may cut the price of the PlayStation 3 which is facing fierce competition from Nintendo's Wii, the president of the electronics giant has indicated. — Sony "does not rule out the possibility of lowering the price'' of the PS3 …
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Kiyoshi Takenaka / Reuters:
Nintendo Wii outsells Sony PS3 5-fold in Japan — TOKYO (Reuters) - Sony Corp. took another blow with Nintendo Co.'s Wii game console outselling its PlayStation 3 by more than five to one in Japan last month, raising doubts over Sony's nascent earnings recovery.
Dylan Tweney / Epicenter:
How Craig Newmark Built Craigslist With "No Vision Whatsoever" — Craig Newmark started craigslist in early 1995 as a way of staying on top of San Francisco's busy arts and technology scene. Despite (or perhaps because of) the site's determined non-commercialism, craigslist survived and even thrived in the post-dot-com days.
Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life:
Google Gears: Replacing One Problem with Another — I've been thinking a little bit about Google Gears recently and after reading the documentation things I've realized that making a Web-based application that works well offline poses an interesting set of challenges.
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Anne Broache / CNET News.com:
Politicos threaten schools over campus piracy — WASHINGTON—Politicians on Tuesday threatened to enact new laws if universities don't do more to prevent their students from unlawfully swapping music, movies and other copyrighted files on campus networks. — At the latest in what has become …
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Audrey Bright / Fox News:
CompUSA Store That Sold Texas Man an Empty Box Finally Agrees He Didn't Get Money's Worth — A Texas man who thought he got a bargain when he bought a camera from retailer CompUSA only to find out that he'd purchased an empty box, finally got his money's worth thanks to a Web campaign …
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Jackie Huba / Church of the Customer Blog:Anatomy of the new customer complaint meme
Discussion:
Thomas Hawk's Digital …
Arik Hesseldahl / Business Week:
What Apple TV Costs to Make — Analyzing and pricing out the components of Apple's new set-top video box reveal uncharacteristically slim profits — When Apple CEO Steve Jobs called Apple TV a "hobby," he wasn't kidding. — By typical Apple standards, the new set-top video box …
New York Times:
Doll Web Sites Drive Girls to Stay Home and Play — Presleigh Montemayor often gets home after a long day and spends some time with her family. Then she logs onto the Internet, leaving the real world and joining a virtual one. But the digital utopia of Second Life is not for her.
Duncan Riley / TechCrunch:
SpaceTime: 3D Browser Eye Candy — New York based SpaceTime has released SpaceTime 3D, a web browser that literally takes tagged browsing 3D. — SpaceTime allows users to map out their browsing progress in a visual timeline, treating each site as an object that can be manipulated and rearranged within the 3D environment.
Stephen Shankland / ZDNet:
Google acquires software start-up PeakStream — Google has acquired PeakStream, a start-up that sells tools for writing software that can take advantage of multicore processors as well as graphics and gaming chips. — Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
USA Today:
Skype: 'Locked' phones unfair — NEW YORK — Are cellphone companies using their sway over handset makers to unfairly limit consumers' choices? Skype, a pioneer in PC-to-PC calling, thinks so, and it wants the Federal Communications Commission to do something about it.
GeekSugar / Geek is chic.:
New Mercury Free MacBook Pro Unboxed! — I got my hands on the new MacBook Pro first thing this morning and saying everyone around me is gushing and jealous is an understatement. Unlike last year's model, the new MacBook Pro has a mercury-free, power-efficient LED-backlit display.
Jacqui Cheng / Ars Technica:
Kids' first exposure to gaming, cell phones becoming earlier — Kids are being exposed to consumer electronics at ever-younger ages, according to a new report, and the frequency of use is going up for some devices. The numbers come as part of the NPD Group's third annual Kids …
Mary Jo Foley / All about Microsoft:
Microsoft preps Windows-based kitchen client — Microsoft is beginning work on the first of what it plans to make a family of customized Windows platforms designed for specific rooms around the home. — The "Kitchen Client" software will extend the Windows operating system and integrate …
John Timmer / Ars Technica:
Product loyalty: consumers mistake familiarity with superiority — Anyone who has followed consumer electronics and online services knows that once a product reaches dominance, it becomes very hard for it to be dethroned (hello, iPod, Google, and Windows). Economists have argued …
