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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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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.
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.
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Timothy B. Lee / Ars Technica:
Gates' “creative capitalism": profits plus philanthropy — At a high-profile speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, yesterday, Bill Gates urged business leaders to focus on finding new ways to turn a profit while benefiting the world's poorest residents.
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CNET News.com
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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.
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
Michael Masnick / Techdirt:
Palm Realizes It's Not Apple; Closes Retail Shops — Over the last decade, plenty of technology hardware companies thought it would make sense to open their own retail shops. Sony, Gateway, Palm and Apple all went down that path. Of that list, only Apple has been able to turn those retail stores into something valuable.
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CNET News.com:
Palm closing retail stores, paying out Treo owners — Two pieces of bad news for Palm this week: it's going to have to pay out cash rebates on some Treos, and it's closing its retail stores. (From News.com's One More Thing blog.) — Microsoft updates Vista SP1 test build
Charles Spirakis / Google LatLong:
Making changes — At Google, we're encouraged to move to different groups and learn new skills. I recently transitioned to the Maps team — specifically, to the group that empowers local experts like you to improve your virtual neighborhood on Google Maps.
Discussion:
Insider Chatter, Webware.com, Screenwerk, Search Engine Land, O'Reilly Radar, Mashable!, Computerworld and Understanding Google …
Artur Bergman / O'Reilly Radar:
Books that make you dumb — Wikiscanner hacker Virgil Griffth told me a while ago about his latest data mining project, to visualise the relationship between books and SAT scores. Today he released his findings at Booksthatmakeyoudumb. — He does this by cross referencing the 10 …
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 …
Ryan Paul / Ars Technica:
OLPC angering donors: “Give 1 Get 1... some day... probably” — The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative launched the Give 1 Get 1 (G1G1) program in November, which allowed individuals in North America to obtain an OLPC XO laptop by making a donation of $399.
Ryan Block / Engadget:
Adding insult to injury: USB 3G modems won't fit in the MacBook Air — Ouch, we just tested and confirmed that one of the smallest (and thus likeliest to fit) USB EV-DO modems around, the Sprint / Novatel U727, won't even come close to fitting in the cramped, foldaway USB port on the MacBook Air.
Discussion:
Computerworld, The Mac Observer, O'Grady's PowerPage, Gizmodo, Neowin.net, Bubblegeneration Strategy Lab and Digg
Aaron Rutkoff / Wall Street Journal:
The Game of Life — Players Get Married, Age In Five-Minute Indie Game — A “mature” videogame rating is usually meant to warn players — and parents — of oozing wounds, virtual nudity or other adult fare. But “Passage,” a downloadable PC game released in late November …
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MTV Multiplayer