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, WinExtra, Odelbee, Laughing Squid, Valleywag 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.
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:
i-boy, One More Idea, BoomTown, broadstuff, Snipperoo, Mark Evans, HipMojo.com, GigaOM, paidContent.org, Valleywag, VentureBeat, TechCrunch and Silicon Alley Insider
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.
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.
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.
Discussion:
DBMS2
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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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.
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 …
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.
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
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 …
