Techmeme: China Mobile: 400,000 Unlocked iPhones On Our Network (AAPL) (Dan Frommer/Silicon Alley Insider)

7:25 PM ET, February 15, 2008

Top Items:

Crash: Amazon's S3 utility goes down — There are reports that Amazon's Simple Storage Service - called S3 - suffered a “massive” outage this morning, beginning at about 7:30 am eastern time. At 9:03, an Amazon official posted a note in the service's customer forum, saying, “We can confirm the high error rate you're experiencing.

Om Malik / GigaOM:

Amazon S3 Storage Service Goes Down, Still Not Up — Amazon's S3 cloud-based storage service went down earlier this morning, according to numerous tips we've received. The service has impacted many companies, including folks like Twitter. According to our tipsters, the service went down around 4:30 a.m. …

Discussion: The Register, Epicenter, Brier Dudley's blog, Rough Type, Between the Lines and Digital Daily

Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:

Amazon Web Services Goes Down, Takes Many Startup Sites With It — Amazon Web Services suffered a major outage this morning, affecting the thousands of Websites that rely on its storage (S3) and cloud computing (EC2) services. Startups including Twitter, SmugMug, 37Signals, and AdaptiveBlue …

Discussion: The Register, Xconomy, Webware.com, Good Morning Silicon Valley, SmugBlog and Storage Soup

Dan Frommer / Silicon Alley Insider:
Amazon's S3 Storage Chokes, Startups Gag

Discussion: CenterNetworks, BlueBlog and Valleywag

Dylan Tweney / Epicenter:
Wired.com CTO Still Bullish on Amazon S3, Despite Service Failure

Discussion: Silicon Alley Insider

Robert Scoble / Scobleizer: Can anyone stop this man?

Michael Krigsman / IT Project Failures:
Amazon S3 web services down. Bad, bad news for customers.

Discussion: Techdirt and Zoli's Blog

Susan / Check Out Blog:

Wal-Mart Chooses a Hi Def Platform — Back in December I posted a Blog that said “HD or BD - Does Anyone Care.” I only received one response, I was very disappointed. :( But following the news from Best Buy and Netflix, everyone's asking “what about Wal-Mart?” — Ok, so are you ready...Wal-Mart is going Blu.

Eric Bangeman / Ars Technica:

Report: Toshiba making funeral plans for HD DVD; Wal-Mart to go all Blu (updated) — Since the beginning of the year, when Warner Bros. announced that it was pulling support for HD DVD, the prospects appeared grim. Toshiba and some of the other backers of the format put on a brave face …

Discussion: InfoWorld, The Technology Chronicles, CNNMoney.com, Engadget, Electronista, Computerworld and The Tech Report

Ryan Block / Engadget:
HD DVD deathwatch: we're making it official

Discussion: Engadget HD

Wal-Mart Facts:
Wal-Mart Moving Exclusively Toward Blu-ray Format Movies and Players

Discussion: Tech Trader Daily, Tech Tracks, geeksugar, DailyTech, TECH.BLORGE.com, Silicon Alley Insider, Gearlog and Gadgetell

New York Post:

BOARD BUCKS YANG — YAHOO! DEAL CONCERN — While Yahoo! chief Jerry Yang desperately seeks an alternative to Microsoft's $44.6 billion hostile takeover, an independent group of Yahoo!'s board members are taking the lead in shaping the company's future. — The informal group is being led by Yahoo! …

Discussion: Good Morning Silicon Valley, Electronista, Digital Daily, Thomas Hawk's Digital …, Breakout Performance, Tech Tracks, Yahoo! Finance, Silicon Alley Insider, Valleywag and Tech Trader Daily

Peter Kafka / Silicon Alley Insider: Jerry Yang's Consolation Prize: $200+ Million Or More

Todd Bishop / Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Sales of PlayStation 3 top Xbox 360 in January — Despite shortages, Nintendo Wii still leads — Sony's PlayStation 3 video-game console topped Microsoft's Xbox 360 in U.S. unit sales for the first time in January, but the Redmond company said its sales were hurt by supply shortages.

Discussion: Electronista, Tech Check with Jim Goldman and Engadget

Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
Next Xbox 360 Designs are “Opus” and “Valhalla”

Discussion: Gizmodo, Xbox 360 Fanboy and Joystiq

Nicholas Deleon / CrunchGear:
Next motherboard revisions of Xbox 360 will have 65 nm CPU, GPU

Discussion: Electronista and CyberNet

Adam / Xobni:

Jeff Bonforte Joins Xobni as CEO — Matt and I have hired a new CEO to help us build Xobni. As those close to Xobni know, we were not actively looking for a CEO. Nevertheless, when we met Jeff Bonforte several months ago we said We've got to get this guy on our team.

Discussion: WebProNews and Gabor's Blog

Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch: Another Vice President Parachutes From Yahoo, Lands as CEO of Xobni

Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:

An Outsider's Flawed View Of Silicon Valley — Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman wrote a blog post a couple of days ago comparing Silicon Valley unfavorably to the Seattle tech scene. — I spend a lot of time in both places, and I think some of his observations are correct (people here compete to the death, people there go hiking).

Discussion: Redfin Corporate Blog, Insider Chatter, Scobleizer, The Drama 2.0 Show, The LinkedIn Blog, Ryan Stewart and Valleywag

Avram Piltch / LAPTOP Magazine:

CloudBook Unboxing and Very First Impressions — Our CloudBook just arrived and we've taken it out of the box and snapped a few photos. Editor-in-Chief Mark Spoonauer is working on a hands-on post right now, and already we've encountered two significant problems:

Discussion: Gadgetell, Boing Boing Gadgets, GottaBeMobile, Engadget and CrunchGear

Jason Chen / Gizmodo:
Everex Cloudbook Unboxed, Fondled, Declared Horrible So Far

Discussion: Electronista, LAPTOP Magazine, Mobility Site and Computerworld Blogs

I, Cringely . The Pulpit | PBS:

Plan B — Last week I presented my best guess why Microsoft would want to buy Yahoo. What was it that made Yahoo worth $44.6 billion to Bill Gates? Based on what I believe is a pretty profound understanding of the innards of each company, I said it came down less to competing with Google …

Discussion: WinExtra

David Benjamin / EE Times:

Users' love affair with iPhone stumps Mobile World panel — BARCELONA, Spain — A blue-ribbon panel of human behavior and technology experts at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain agreed that the best recent advance in the mobile telecommunications user space came …

Discussion: Tom Raftery's Social Media, Alexander van Elsas's Weblog …, IP Telephony, VoIP, Broadband, localmobilesearch.net, I4U News and The Apple Core

Philip Elmer-DeWitt / Apple 2.0:
iPhone: 'It's the user experience, stupid'

Discussion: Ars Technica and The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs

Dan Frommer / Silicon Alley Insider:

China Mobile: 400,000 Unlocked iPhones On Our Network (AAPL) — An eye-opening stat we hadn't seen until today: China Mobile, the biggest wireless carrier in China, said there were 400,000 unlocked iPhones operating on its network at the end of 2007. — If true, that represents more than 10% …

Discussion: Apple 2.0, 9 to 5 Mac, Valleywag, Macsimum News and Pat Phelan

Staci D. Kramer / paidContent.org:

News Corp. Working On Music ‘Hulu’ For MySpace — paidContent has learned that News Corp (NYSE: NWS). is pursuing a music joint venture for MySpace—similar to Hulu, its video joint venture with NBC Universal (NYSE: GE), but with variations on the theme. The constant in both instances is content for equity.

Discussion: Silicon Alley Insider, Mashable! and Coolfer

Nicholas Carlson / Valleywag:

Screenshots of Yahoo Buzz, a Digg competitor — The pace of of product launches from Yahoo is breathless — and with a whiff of desperation. On February 26, Yahoo plans to beta launch Yahoo Buzz as a competitor to Digg, and a tipster supplied Valleywag with screenshots.

Discussion: Mashable!

Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:

Comparing Six Ways to Identify Top Blogs in Any Niche — In the early days of blogging you could go to the Technorati Blog Index, enter some identifying terms for a particular niche topic and discover what the top blogs were in the field. — Identifying top niche blogs is invaluable knowledge …

Discussion: Jaffe Juice

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