Top Items:
Eric Bangeman / Ars Technica:
Spectrum auction starts, draws over $2.7 billion in first-day bids — Auction 73, the long-awaited 700MHz spectrum sell-off, got under way yesterday as the Federal Communications Commission conducted two rounds of bidding by the 214 qualified bidders. Action was brisk, although none …
Discussion:
Wired News, Digital Daily, DSLreports, Furrier.org, Computerworld, IP Democracy, Epicenter, Bloomberg, Reuters and Voices
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Dan Meyer / RCR Wireless News:
700 MHz auction ends first week of bidding at $3.7B — Los Angeles generates interest in the fourth round — The Federal Communication Commission's auction of 1,099 wireless licenses in the 700 MHz band headed into an early weekend break having garnered more than $3.7 billion in potential winning bids.
Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Latest Test for DMCA Safe Harbors: Warner Sues SeeqPod — Warner Music Group has sued SeeqPod (complaint, 500k PDF), a “Web 2.0” music search engine (combined with embedable playlists, etc, etc) that has been gaining in popularity in recent months. — This is the latest in a string of lawsuits against Web 2.0 companies.
Discussion:
mathewingram.com/work, Techdirt, WebProNews, TechCrunch, It's Rishi, Listening Post, Threat Level, Mashable! and p2pnet
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Nate Anderson / Ars Technica:Warner sues “playable search engine,” tests DMCA safe harbor
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last100
Philip Elmer-DeWitt / Apple 2.0:
The case of the 1.4 million missing iPhones — The talk among Apple (AAPL) watchers today is Toni Sacconaghi's dogged pursuit of the 4 million iPhones Steve Jobs claimed to have sold as of Jan. 15, the date of his Macworld keynote speech. — AT&T (T), the iPhone's exclusive U.S. carrier …
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Larry Shaughnessy / CNN:
Double amputee walks again due to Bluetooth — WASHINGTON (CNN) — Marine Lance Cpl. Joshua Bleill lost both his legs above the knees when a bomb exploded under his Humvee while on patrol in Iraq on October 15, 2006. He has 32 pins in his hip and a 6-inch screw holding his pelvis together.
Ionut Alex Chitu / Google Operating System:
Google Reader Shows the Published Date — Besides a new favicon and a confirmation dialog displayed when you mark all the posts as read, Google Reader now shows the published date of a post in a tooltip. Next to the snippet, Google Reader displays the date when the post was indexed by Google, not the date when it was published.
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Scoble Sells Out — Robert Scoble, who has long been proud of the fact that his popular blog remains free of advertisements or sponsorships, will soon put ads on his site, he told me yesterday. — The change comes as part of his move to Fast Company, who will sell the ads on his behalf and will also be redesigning the site.
Discussion:
WinExtra, mathewingram.com/work, Valleywag, Smalltalk Tidbits …, WebProNews, rexblog.com and Joe Duck
Michael Masnick / Techdirt:
Smartphones Patented... Just About Everyone Sued 1 Minute After Patent Issued — This past Tuesday, the US Patent and Trademark Office issued a patent on “a mobile entertainment and communication device." Reading the patent, you realize it describes the quite common smartphone.
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Super Panel At Davos: The Future Of Mobile Technology — Fortune Senior Editor David Kirkpatrick led a power-packed session at Davos this afternoon called The Future of Mobile Technology. Panelists included Google CEO Eric Schmidt, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer …
Shel / Global Neighbourhoods:
An Open Letter to the Twitter Guys — To: Evan Williams & Biz Stone — I am a huge fan. You are two good guys. Twitter is the most addictive thing I've experienced since I quit smoking in 1987, and it's so much better for my health. I have built a multinational circle of friends because of Twitter.
Dan Goodin / The Register:
Spamford Wallace's MySpace riches come under attack — The FTC's quest for spam stopping balls — Analysis Anybody who says crime doesn't pay obviously hasn't talked to Sanford Wallace. In just six months' time, the prolific purveyor of spam and spyware engineered a scam on MySpace …
Joseph Weisenthal / paidContent.org:
Will Big Cash Piles Keep Start-Up Sales Alive? AAPL, MSFT, GOOG Piggybanks Total $50 Billion — Big names like Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) continue to sit on burgeoning piles of unused cash, which might just keep the buyout exit window for startups wide open.
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Darren Herman
Ryan Block / Engadget:
MacBook Air review — It fits in a manila folder, you can slide it under a door, and if you threw it hard enough you could probably chop someone in half with the thing. It's the thinnest, and if we may say so, the sexiest laptop around today: the MacBook Air.
Miguel de Icaza:
Usability Disaster Story — In December, someone asked me about how many Mono downloads we had per month to estimate the size of Mono users. With software like Mono the download numbers do not mean much, because most of our users get their software through their distribution, package channels or as a bundled executable.
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Jeffrey McManus
