Top Items:
Sarah Lacy / Business Week:
Slide: The $500 Million Widget — After cashing in big with PayPal, Max Levchin could be at it again with his social network tool. The latest funding values Slide at a half-billion — When Max Levchin started Slide, the popular tool that lets users create slide shows and other bling …
Discussion:
One More Idea, broadstuff, Mark Evans, HipMojo.com, bub.blicio.us, Valleywag, Silicon Alley Insider, Epicenter and BoomTown
RELATED:
Brad Stone / Bits:Slide Slides Into Some Cash
Discussion:
GigaOM, BoomTown, mathewingram.com/work, paidContent.org, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Venture Capital Update, Valleywag and Mashable!
I, Cringely . The Pulpit | PBS:
The Big Picture — Up or down? That's what this week's Macworld show came down to for most news organizations. Would the new Apple products make the company's shares go up or down? They went down. Macworld was a bust, we were told repeatedly, as if it really mattered.
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Kasper Jade / AppleInsider:
Sources: MacBook Air battery replacements take only minutes — Due to its ultra-thin profile, Apple's new MacBook Air was designed with an integrated 37-watt-hour lithium-polymer battery that is not user-replaceable. Though this has caused some initial concern amongst potential adopters …
RELATED:
Nate Anderson / Ars Technica:
The “Google generation” not so hot at Googling, after all — A new UK report on the habits of the “Google Generation” finds that kids born since 1993 aren't quite the Internet super-sleuths they're sometimes made out to be. For instance, are teens better with technology than older adults?
Sean Fallon / Gizmodo:
Ultralight Lenovo X300 Series Thinkpad Leaked — It appears that Lenovo have themselves a new ultralight X300 series Thinkpad—and outside of the price and release date, we have all of the specs that you need to know. At a glance, some of the major features include: a 13.3-inch LED backlit 1440X900 screen …
Greg Sterling / Search Engine Land:
Jupiter: Local Online Advertising Will Be Worth $8.9 Billion In 2012 — There are now a range of local forecasts in the market, some more bullish and some more conservative. But all agree that locally targeted ads in search, display (including video) and classifieds are growing at rates faster than overall online ad growth.
RELATED:
David Kaplan / paidContent.org:Online Ads Hit $50 Billion By 2011; Local Reaches $9 Billion By 2012 …
Discussion:
HipMojo.com
Liz Gannes / GigaOM:
Welcome to The Crunchies: Live Video and Winners — The Crunchies Awards Show is starting now at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco, so keep this post open if you want to follow the night's festivities from afar. Embedded above is the live stream hosted by NewTeeVee lead writer Chris Albrecht.
Duncan Riley / TechCrunch:
Google Offers OpenID Logins Via Blogger — After testing OpenID's as logins to Google's Blogger in Draft program in November, Google has become an OpenID provider itself. — Effective immediately, Blogger users are able to use their blogs URL as an OpenID login, after toggling the option via the draft.blogger.com admin menu.
Peter Ha / CrunchGear:
Bug Labs going live on Monday — Here are the first shots of the BUGBase Hiro P model that goes on sale this Monday when the store opens up. This is the final production model, but is, sadly, sans Wi-Fi. Yeah, seems that open source Wi-Fi drivers were causing some issues and Bug Labs decided …
USA Today:
Social, work lives collide on networking websites — Just after her honeymoon last March, Wadooah Wali took the de rigueur next step these days: She changed her status on the networking websites Facebook and MySpace from “in a relationship” to “married” and posted pictures of her partner — another woman.
Chris Vallance / BBC:
Facebook faces privacy questions — Facebook is to be quizzed about its data protection policies by the Information Commissioner's Office. — The investigation follows a complaint by a user of the social network who was unable to fully delete their profile even after terminating their account.
USA Today:
‘Rock Band’ pumps up music sales — The success of the video game Rock Band is drumming up revenue for the music industry. — Virtual rockers downloaded roughly 2.5 million songs in the eight weeks since the game launched on the Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3 systems.
Dan Goodin / The Register:
Personal data for 650,000 customers vanishes into thin air — Personal information belonging to more than 650,000 US customers of J.C. Penney and other retailers is at risk after the company hired to safeguard the data lost a backup tape. — The information, which was entrusted …
Discussion:
E-Commerce Times
Josh Quittner / Techland:
The hard side of Mister Softie — Ah, Microsoft. Nothing gets the knickers of Silicon Valley startup guys more twisted than signs that the world's largest software company is over-reaching again. The latest outrage? Some of my friends at the Valley's best-known social networks …
Discussion:
Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life
