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 …
Discussion:
Tech Confidential, TechCrunch, Gizmodo, Electronista, PDA, Seeking Alpha, rexblog.com and Smalltalk Tidbits …
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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 …
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; Should Boost Kindle Content
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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Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Meebo Turns Chat Rooms Into A Web Service — Today, Web-based IM and chat room provider Meebo is releasing full-fledged APIs for its Meebo Rooms that will allow Websites to embed chat functionality in an automated fashion. Currently, Meebo Rooms can be embedded on sites or blogs manually …
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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 …
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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David Chartier / Ars Technica:A tour of Google's new Experimental Search. Verdict: awesome
Discussion:
Digg
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.
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.
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.
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, mathewingram.com/work, broadstuff, Alexander van Elsas's Weblog …, ReadWriteWeb, RyanSpoon.com and PE HUB
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.
George Ou / Zero Day:
Even SSL Gmail can get sidejacked — When Robert Graham demonstrated how Web 2.0 wasn't safe at last year's Blackhat, it was thought that at least the SSL mode (HTTPS) of Google Gmail would be spared from sidejacking. That presumption now appears to be false according to this updated blog posting from Graham.
Discussion:
Connecting the Dots
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.
