Top Items:
Duncan Riley / TechCrunch:
2007 Crunchies: The Winners — A great evening was had by all tonight as some of the leading startups gathered for the first annual Crunchies, a joint production between Read/Write Web, VentureBeat, GigaOm and TechCrunch. — The ceremony went (mostly) smoothly with a couple of surprises amongst the results.
Discussion:
Beet.TV, Shoemoney, VentureBeat, the j. botter weblog, WinExtra, Valleywag, Laughing Squid, Odelbee and Loic Le Meur Blog
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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.
Mathew / mathewingram.com/work:
Is Joost headed for the deadpool? — It's been awhile since I wrote about Joost, but the sudden departure this week of the company's chief technology officer — which started out amicably and then became a firing — made me want to take a look at the company again.
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MG Siegler / ParisLemon:
Buzz Doesn't Pay. Is Joost Dying? — Mathew Ingram wonders tonight if Joost is heading for the deadpool - if utter lack of talk about the company since launch is any indication, I'd have to agree. — Joost was one of the most hyped services a year ago well before its launch.
Discussion:
NewTeeVee
Wired:
Google to Host Terabytes of Open-Source Scientific Data — Sources at Google have disclosed that the humble domain, http://research.google.com, will soon provide a home for terabytes of open-source scientific datasets. The storage will be free to scientists and access to the data will be free for all.
Skrentablog:
Database gods bitch about mapreduce — This is what disruption sounds like. — This rant by major database guys against mapreduce is pretty telling. — (You can read a good rebuttal here, and discussion on ycomb.) — The thing that disrupts you is always uglier and worse in some way.
Jon Stokes / Ars Technica:
Analysis: Metcalfe's Law + Real ID = more crime, less safety — “We have a saying in this business: 'Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.'” Thus spake security consultant Ed Giorgio, in a widely-quoted New Yorker article on the US intelligence community's plans to vacuum up and sift through everything that flies across the wires.
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 …
Talia Brodecki / Inside AdSense:
A follow-up to our referrals announcement — You may have seen our recent post about the upcoming changes to referrals promoting AdSense. Since we made this announcement, we've received a number of responses about the program being dependent on the location of the referring publisher.
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
Agence France Presse:
Brazil bans popular video games seen to incite violence — RIO DE JANEIRO (AFP) — Brazil this week imposed a ban on popular role-playing computer games “Counter-Strike” and “EverQuest,” claiming they incited violence and were “harmful to consumers' health.”
Tony Smith / The Register:
Jobs: Blu-ray wins HD format war then loses to downloads — Blu-ray Disc beat HD DVD, but who cares? Downloads, not physical media, are the future of HD content consumption. So said Apple CEO Steve Jobs this week, a comment that's a distant echo of allegations made by Transformers director Michael Bay last year.
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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. The news confirms TechCrunch UK's story of January 9, which also predicted that IBM and VeriSign would soon be joining the OpenID train.
David Kaplan / paidContent.org:
Online Ads Hit $50 Billion By 2011; Local Reaches $9 Billion By 2012; Pre-Roll, Embeds Gain In '08 — With all the doom and gloom hovering over the economy right now, analyst reports heralding brighter days for the future of internet ad spend continue to be released.
Joseph Weisenthal / paidContent.org:
700 MHz: Google Could Still Bid To Win; Bid To Lose More Likely: Analyst — The conventional view is that Google's (NSDQ: GOOG) participation in the upcoming 700 MHz auction isn't actually about acquiring spectrum, but about advancing its vision of open wireless networks.
