Top Items:
Dean Takahashi / Tech Talk with Dean Takahashi:
Ribbit debuts as "Silicon Valley's phone company" — I met with the top executives at Ribbit last week and found their strategy to be eye-opening. The Mountain View company, which bills itself as "Silicon Valley's phone company," is making it easy to embed web phones in just about any kind of web site …
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Om Malik / GigaOM:
Can Ribbit Finally Bring Web & Voice Together? — For a long time, I had this belief that the worlds of web and voice would converge, unleashing upon us a whole new class of voice-web mashups. Instead all we got were some marginal ideas and rarely-used widgets. Voice, in particular, remained too difficult for web developers.
Dan Tynan / PC World:
The 15 Biggest Tech Disappointments of 2007 — These much-ballyhooed products, sites, and services, it turned out, left much to be desired. — Recommend this story? — Five years in the making and this is the best Microsoft could do? — It's not that Vista is awful.
Discussion:
Gizmodo, Electronista, CrunchGear, Hardware 2.0, Engadget, TechBlog, Podcasting News, MacDailyNews, GottaBeMobile and Digg
Paul Miller / Engadget:
Palm Treo 755p goes live (at last) on Verizon, costs more — Here's a special present to those Palm diehards out there that've been sticking with their Verizon service for the past months, hoping against hope that Palm will notice them hanging out over on the largest CDMA network in the States …
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Wendy Tanaka / Forbes:
Help Wanted: A Vacancy In Google's Top Ranks — Everyone wants to work at Google. It's a money machine with a stock price bouncing around $700. The employees are brilliant and free organic meals are served every day. — But there is one job the search giant seems to be having a hard time filling: chief financial officer.
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Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
A Few Thoughts On Google Knol — News of Google most recent project, Knol, came out late last Thursday without, as far as I can tell, much in the way of press pre-briefings. All the major publications were late to the story. Blogs hit it fast, but had nothing to go on other than the brief blog post put …
Larry Dignan / Between the Lines:
MacWorld rumblings: Expect a 11- to 13-inch screen on Apple ultra-portable — With Apple expected to deliver a new ultra-portable Mac at its Macworld conference Jan. 15 prognosticators are busy handicapping the device's features. — In a research note Monday, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster …
Bob Driehaus / New York Times:
Ohio Elections Official Calls Machines Flawed — CINCINNATI — All five voting systems used in Ohio, a state whose electoral votes narrowly swung two elections toward President Bush, have critical flaws that could undermine the integrity of the 2008 general election, a report commissioned …
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Pew Internet:
Digital Footprints: Online identity management and search in the age of transparency — Mary Madden Susannah Fox Aaron Smith Jessica Vitak — Internet users are becoming more aware of their digital footprint; 47% have searched for information about themselves online, up from just 22% five years ago.
Discussion:
WebProNews, apophenia, Silicon Alley Insider, The Buzz Bin, ResourceShelf and Boing Boing
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BBC:
Weblogs rack up a decade of posts — The word "weblog" celebrates the 10th anniversary of it being coined on 17 December 1997. — The word was created by Jorn Barger to describe what he was doing with his pioneering Robot Wisdom web page. — The word was an abbreviation for the "logging" …
Discussion:
Web Worker Daily
Brian Stelter / New York Times:
A Familiar Editor for Gawker — Nick Denton, the entrepreneur who has built Gawker Media into a formidable blog brand, said two weeks ago that he wanted the new editor of his flagship site, Gawker.com, to oversee its evolution toward a more traditional news operation.
Nick Wingfield / Wall Street Journal:
Start-Up to Create Market For Trade of Virtual Goods — A start-up plans to help game companies get a grip on the booming illicit market for virtual goods, including everything from currencies to magical swords that help players advance in online games. — Live Gamer Inc. is developing …
Ryan Block / Engadget:
Dash Express beta hands-on — We recently got to take a Dash Express beta unit for a spin, and while they're still gluing all the software together behind the scenes in anticipation of launch, we did spot the makings of a few obvious and ridiculously useful features new users can expect in February.
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John Markoff / New York Times:
Faster Chips Are Leaving Programmers in Their Dust — REDMOND, Wash. — When he was chief executive of Intel in the 1990s, Andrew S. Grove would often talk about the "software spiral" — the interplay between ever-faster microprocessor chips and software that required ever more computing power.
Erik Huggers / BBC Internet Blog:
From Microsoft To The BBC — It has been six months since I joined the BBC as Group Controller in Future Media and Technology and while flying back from Rome to London, I figured that this was a good time to join the conversation. — Many people have asked me: "why on earth did you join the BBC?
