Top Items:
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 …
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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 …
Discussion:
Download Squad
Thomas Ricker / Engadget:
Amazon adds Audible to its digital empire — Amazon just announced an agreement to acquire Audible Inc. The move, once approved by the Feds and shareholders, leaves Audible.com's 80,000 strong library of audiobooks, radio programs, newspapers, and such in the hands of Amazon.
Joseph Weisenthal / paidContent.org:
Amazon Buying Audible In Deal Worth $300 Million — Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) is pushing further into downloadable media: the company is acquiring spoken-word digital audio firm Audible (NSDQ: ADBL) for $300 million or $11.50/share, a premium of more than 22 percent from yesterday's closing price.
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Amazon Earnings Call Details: Web Services Use Up More Bandwidth Than Amazon.com; The Kindle is a Hit — Amazon earnings just came out. The company had a strong fourth quarter, with revenues up 42 percent to $5.7 billion, net income doubling to $207 million, and free cash flow doubling as well to $1.4 billion.
Discussion:
Between the Lines, ProgrammableWeb, Seeking Alpha, New York Times, Business Week, Business Wire, paidContent.org and Tech Beat
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.
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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.
Bloomberg:
India, Mideast Suffer Internet Disruption — Jan. 31 (Bloomberg) — India and countries across the Middle East experienced slow Internet connections and disruption to international calls to the U.S. and Europe after two submarine cable systems in the Mediterranean Sea were cut.
Discussion:
p2pnet
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Thomas Ricker / Engadget:
MacBook Air's custom-built CPU going PC? — That special Intel processor found in the MacBook Air could be getting a lot less special. PC Advisor, citing “a source familiar with Intel's plans,” claims that a pair of PC makers will use the MBA processor. Not that this would be unexpected.
Discussion:
Gizmodo
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MG Siegler / ParisLemon:
Instapaper, A Beautifully Simple Bookmarking Tool — Instapaper, a new site by Tumblr employee Marco Arment, simply put will easily be one of the websites I visit most this year. It may very well be the easiest and most beautifully minimal bookmarking site ever created.
Lior Ron / Google LatLong:
Find more with Google Maps — There's a lot to discover in Google Maps: addresses, businesses, points of interest, user maps, and even photos, books, and videos. To help sift through all of this, we've added a new search option that will help you find exactly what you want.
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Mark Evans:
Taking Twitter Seriously — Twitter can be easily dismissed as IM-Lite or a tool for people with short attention spans but, interestingly enough, it is also starting to gain traction as a serious communications tool for people to communicate about serious stuff...like politics.
Discussion:
IP Democracy, ReadWriteWeb, Alexander van Elsas's Weblog …, broadstuff, RyanSpoon.com, PE HUB and techPresident
Holovaty.com:
In memory of chicagocrime.org — It's with mixed feelings that I announce the end of one of my projects, chicagocrime.org. This site has been serving Chicago residents since May 2005. I hope you'll indulge me in a brief retrospective. — Chicagocrime.org was one of the original map mashups …
Gregg Keizer / Computerworld:
Free utility condenses Windows Vista from 15GB to 1.4GB — Users can trim Vista to a tenth is normal size by ditching unwanted parts — Computerworld) A Croatian college student has created a utility that installs a seriously stripped-down Windows Vista, saying the heft of Microsoft's biggest desktop OS was just too big to believe.
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Kristen Nicole / Mashable!:
Meebo Rooms Launches API and an Ad Network to Monetize It — Meebo is adding an API to Meebo Rooms, as well as launching what it calls the Meebo Network so partners can share in revenue from advertising. — While Meebo already had an API and offered Meebo Rooms for integration with Facebook applications …
Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins / Mashable!:
Twitter Down For the Debates; Twitter Forces My Hand — In what is becoming an altogether too common occurance lately, Twitter is down, this time due to the Republican Primary debate on this evening. Twitter has been going down more and more frequently in recent weeks. Steve Jobs took it down during the keynote.
Discussion:
rexblog.com
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Alex Johnson / MSNBC:
Cell phone directory rings alarm bells — An online directory that claims to provide 90 million mobile telephone numbers is raising concerns among cell phone users and privacy advocates about unwanted callers who rack up the minutes on their calling plans and the difficulty of opting out of the list.
Tony Smith / The Register:
Dell developing Google Android handset, moles claim — Dell will unveil a smartphone based on Google's Android platform and it'll do so at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) show in Barcelona next month. — At least, that's what unnamed “senior industry sources” cited by UK trade paper Marketing Week claim.
