Top Items:
Business Week:
Universal Music Takes on iTunes — Universal chief Doug Morris is enlisting other big music players for a service to challenge the Jobs juggernaut — Relationships in the entertainment world can be famously fraught. And few are more so these days than the one between Steve Jobs and Universal Music chief Doug Morris.
Discussion:
TechCrunch, Today @ PC World, Digital Noise, Download Squad, Lefsetz Letter, Profy.Com, CrunchGear, The Register, AppScout, Podcasting News, BloggingStocks, Contentinople, MacDailyNews, Digital Trends, Gizmodo, Hear 2.0, Good Morning Silicon Valley, Tech.co.uk, Digital Daily, Geek News Central, iLounge, TECH.BLORGE.com, hypebot, Engadget, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, Valleywag, MarketingShift, Macsimum News, Boing Boing Gadgets and Mashable!
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Mathew / mathewingram.com/work:
Let's force people to take our music — It's hard to know where to start with Universal's rumoured TotalMusic plan, which Business Week has just written about (although as Techdirt points out, Digital Music News first had the story weeks ago). Apparently the idea is to get all the record labels together …
Discussion:
ParisLemon
Nate Anderson / Ars Technica:
Report: Universal prepping revolutionary free music service — Universal has a plan to change the music download business: give people free, unlimited music subscriptions with the purchase of portable devices. — Universal boss Doug Morris is trying to launch a new, label-owned subscription …
Discussion:
Podcasting News
David Kaplan / paidContent.org:
As Online Ad Revenue Remains Concentrated In Few Hands, Frustration Builds — With online ad spending growing more slowly, are internet ad dollars being spread too thin? Reuters put the question to a few media execs and digital agency heads who express concern about the heavy reliance on advertising as a means of support.
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Paul Thomasch / Reuters:Ad dollars flood Web, but will they go far enough?
Discussion:
Micro Persuasion
Eric Savitz / Tech Trader Daily:
BEA To Oracle: "Your Bid Is Too Low"; This Could Get Ugly — BEA (BEAS) has issued a statement in response to Oracle's (ORCL) unsolicited $17-a-share takeover bid: and they're asserting that the offer is too low. BEA notes that the letter was sent to Oracle yesterday, before the bid was announced.
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Chris Ziegler / Engadget Mobile:
"Deep red" iPhone in the works for AT&T? — With iPod shuffles and nanos available in a variety of shades, it only makes sense to bring the love to the iPhone too, right? AT&T's internal inventory sheet is apparently now showing iPhones in "deep red" (we probably would've gone with something …
Henry Blodget / Silicon Alley Insider:
NYT Adds Reader Comments to Front Page! * — We're always impressed with the New York Times' (NYT) progressive use of its web site, but seeing reader comments above the fold on the Home page was still startling. Hats off to the company's web team for this smart move!
GigaOM:
Enterprise Software's Youth Drain — By M.R. Rangaswami, publisher of SandHill.com and co-founder of Sand Hill Group — They say that youth is fleeting. In the enterprise software industry, the youth are fleeing. — One need only look at the hairlines of today's software leaders.
Saul Hansell / Bits:
LinkedIn Plans to Open Up in a Closed Sort of Way — Dan Nye, the chief executive of LinkedIn, has looked closely at the frenzy around Facebook, and has made a crucial decision: There will be no food fights on LinkedIn. — Yes, he's rushing to copy the electronic underpinnings …
Discussion:
WebProNews, Profy.Com, All Facebook, Read/WriteWeb, Between the Lines, CenterNetworks, muhammad.saleem, CNET News.com, Valleywag and Mashable!
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
The Clock is Ticking for Joost — There's a time bomb out there with Joost's name on it. Full-screen, broadcast-quality video streams—the main selling point of Joost's peer-to-peer Internet TV client software—is quickly coming to the Web. Brightcove will soon be offering such streams to its video publishers using BitTorrent DNA.
Janet Meiners / Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim:
Costco.com Hits the Billion Dollar Sales Mark — Internet Retailer.com reports that Costco Wholesale has reached a billion in online sales. This year their online sales grew by about 39% to $1.22 billion. Last year they were at $880 million. They reported net income of $1.08 billion …
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Exclusive: MapQuest Plays Catch-Up With Launch of Beta — AOL's MapQuest may be the market-leading map site by a long shot (with 50 million monthly visitors versus 30 million for Google Maps), but it is still playing catch-up when it comes to features, functionality, and mash-up capabilities.
Mary Jo Foley / All about Microsoft:
Windows Update automatically changing user settings (again) — After Patch Tuesday this week (October 9), some Windows Vista users noticed something strange: Windows Update had changed their Automatic Update settings and rebooted their machines automatically without their consent.
Merlin Mann / 43 Folders:
Geek Throwdown: How to sync two or more Macs? — Enter the Octagon — Here's an experimental new feature: The Throwdown. Take a problem that lots of people face and tell us your personal favorite way to deal with it — in as much detail and with as much persuasion as you can muster.
