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:
IP Democracy, Wired News, Digital Daily, Furrier.org, DSLreports, Computerworld, Bloomberg, Epicenter, Reuters and Voices
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Dan Meyer / RCR Wireless News:700 MHz auction ends first week of bidding at $3.7B
Discussion:
dailywireless.org
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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Barry Neild / CNN:
Bill Gates' new project: Farming — DAVOS, Switzerland (CNN) — Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates announced a new direction Friday as he pledged $306 million in grants to develop farming in poor countries, leading the charge for corporate responsibility at a major meeting of business chiefs.
RELATED:
Timothy B. Lee / Ars Technica:Gates' “creative capitalism": profits plus philanthropy
Discussion:
CNET News.com
Matt Asay / The Open Road:“Kinder capitalism"? It's called open source, Mr. Gates. You should try it
Discussion:
Joe Duck
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:
WebProNews, Ars Technica, mathewingram.com/work, It's Rishi, Techdirt, Threat Level, Mashable! and p2pnet
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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.
Discussion:
WebProNews, WinExtra, mathewingram.com/work, Cost Per News, Valleywag, rexblog.com and Joe Duck
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.
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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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.
Discussion:
Jeffrey McManus
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.
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 …
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.
Mary Jo Foley / All about Microsoft:
Windows 7: The Anti-Vista? — Even with Windows Vista's one-year anniversary launch just a week away, all that anyone in the tech-enthusiast community seems to want to talk about is Windows 7 (Except for those who are already sick of hearing about 7, as one Windows user characterized himself in a conversation I had yesterday.)
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 …
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.
Discussion:
Darren Herman
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.
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.
