Top Items:
Saul Hansell / Bits:
Spectrum Auction: C Block Hits Reserve Price — A bid of $4.7 billion this morning for the most valuable group of wireless licenses in the Federal Communications Commission auction for 700Mhz spectrum pushed the price over the minimum price the government set.
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Dan Meyer / RCR Wireless News:
C-Block action could slow — Reserve reached, open access becomes reality — Following a few tense rounds without any bids, the nationwide package of eight C-Block licenses picked up a new bid during round 17 to push the potential winning price for the block past the $4.6 billion reserve mark …
Discussion:
paidContent.org, Orbitcast, IntoMobile, Engadget, FierceBroadbandWireless and dailywireless.org
Eric Bangeman / Ars Technica:
Open access for all: prime 700MHz Block C hits reserve price — After 17 rounds, the 700MHz spectrum auction has finally hit its one of its most closely watched targets: bidding on Block C has surpassed the Federal Communications Commission's mandated $4.638 billion reserve …
Thomas Ricker / Engadget:
700MHz auction exceeds $10 Billion, open-access just one bid away — With weeks still to go, your dysfunctional Uncle Sam is briskly rubbing his hands at having raised more than $10 Billion from the 700MHz auction. This, after just 16 rounds of bidding. But we're not happy to say the least.
Discussion:
Electronista
Saul Hansell / Bits:Spectrum Auction: The C-Block Bidding Is Over at $4.7 Billion
Discussion:
Gizmodo
Amazon.com:
Amazon.com to Acquire Audible.com — Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), today announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire Audible Inc. (NASDAQ:ADBL). — Audible.com is the leading online provider of premium digital spoken word audio content, specializing in digital audio editions of books …
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Larry Dignan / Between the Lines:
Amazon.com buys Audible; March into digital content distribution continues — Amazon.com's march into digital distribution of content continues-this time with plans to acquire Audible for $300 million. — In a statement on Thursday, Amazon said it will acquire Audible …
Discussion:
Valleywag, Digital Daily, The Register, Tech Confidential, TechCrunch, AppScout, Engadget, CrunchGear, CNET News.com, paidContent.org, Gizmodo, TECH.BLORGE.com, Seeking Alpha, Orbitcast, Redeye VC, rexblog.com, Electronista, PDA, Smalltalk Tidbits …, Q-blog, ProgrammableWeb, New York Times, Business Week and Business Wire
Ernesto / TorrentFreak:
Pirate Bay Admins Charged with Assisting Copyright Infringement — “The operation of The Pirate Bay is financed through advertising revenues. In that way it commercially exploits copyright-protected work and performances,” said prosecutor Hakan Roswall in a statement.
Discussion:
TechCrunch, Digital Daily, BBC NEWS, Electronista, DSLreports, BetaNews, p2pnet, The Register, Changing Way and Digg
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BBC:
Pirate Bay hit with legal action — Four men who run one of the most popular file-sharing sites in the world have been charged with conspiracy to break copyright law in Sweden. — The Pirate Bay's servers do not store copyrighted material but offer links to the download location of films, TV programmes, albums and software.
Chris Williams / The Register:
‘Facebook fatigue’ kicks in as people tire of social networks — Shhh! Can you hear a hiss? That's the sound of naughty facts deflating the social networking balloon a tad. — Whisper it, but numbers from web analytics outfit comScore have confirmed what the chatter in bars and cafes …
Discussion:
HipMojo.com, Valleywag, Silicon Alley Insider, The Last Podcast, Mashable! and The Social Times
Doug Sherrets / VentureBeat:
Google's Marissa Mayer: Social search is the future — At an event in August, Marissa Mayer, Google's leading VP in search, said social search hasn't shown much promise, but if it does, Google would be in a good position to incorporate it. I wrote about that here.
Discussion:
Search Engine Land
Eric Savitz / Tech Trader Daily:
Gartner: Apple To Double U.S., Europe PC Share By 2011 — Apple (AAPL) will double its share of the U.S. and Western European PC market share by 2011, the research firm Gartner said today. “Apple's gains in computer market share reflect as much on the failures of the rest of the industry as on Apple's success,” Gartner says.
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Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Google, Facebook Battle For Computer Science Grads. Salaries Soar. — Google and Facebook are fighting hard to hire this years crop of computer science graduates, we've heard, and ground zero is Stanford. Most of the class of 2008 already have job offers even though graduation is months away.
Twitter Blog:
We had a rough night. But now we're back. — I just left the office, at 6am, with most of our engineering and technical operations team. That's only a handful of people, but we were all there all night. — You may have noticed we had an outage last night/stretching into this morning.
Nilay Patel / Engadget:
Good news for TiVo: court upholds patent claims against Echostar — The TiVo vs. EchoStar case got another little push towards finally ending today, as the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that EchoStar had indeed infringed part of TiVo's “time warp” patent.
Nicholas Carr / Guardian:
The internet rewards the lazy and punishes the intrepid — As GPS transceivers become common accessories in cars, the benefits have been manifold. Millions of us have been relieved of the nuisance of getting lost or, even worse, the shame of having to ask a passerby for directions.
Steve O'Hear / The Social Web:
OpenSocial should be renamed “OpenGadgets” — As it stands, the Google-led OpenSocial has very little, if anything, to do with data portability. That's the view of Marc Canter, a long time advocate of open standards and data portability, and one in which I'm inclined to agree.
