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, TechBlog, Podcasting News, Engadget, MacDailyNews, GottaBeMobile and Digg
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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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 …
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 …
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, Silicon Alley Insider, apophenia, The Buzz Bin, ResourceShelf and Boing Boing
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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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Joshua Topolsky / Engadget:
More details on the Palm Treo 800w uncovered? — According to some dedicated — and, might we add, thorough — Palm fans, it looks like we've gotten a few more bits of data about the (rumored) forthcoming Treo 800w. If you believe the data, FCC documents detailing emails between Palm …
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" …
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?
Electronista:
Toshiba ships first notebooks with HD DVD rewriters — In a late addition to its PC range, Toshiba on Monday revealed its first-ever portables to support HD DVD re-recording. New versions of the 15.4-inch Qosmio F40 and the 17-inch G40 each sport HD DVD-RW drives that allow them to be used hundreds …
Discussion:
PC World
