Top Items:
Om Malik / GigaOM:
Google & Its 99 Broadband Balloons — Google, according to The Wall Street Journal is thinking about teaming up with Space Data Corp., a company that sends balloons carrying small (micro) base stations about 20 miles up in the air for providing connectivity to truckers and oil companies.
RELATED:
Amol Sharma / Wall Street Journal:Floating a New Idea For Going Wireless, Parachute Included
Discussion:
Gizmodo, Techdirt, localmobilesearch.net, All News Feeds, DSLreports, MobHappy and Blogcosm
Nivi / Venture Hacks:
T-Shirts for VCs — Hilarious new t-shirts for the “top 2/20%” (get it?) of the population from VC Wear: — There are more awesome t-shirts at VC Wear as well as a Powerpoint Pitch and a Buy it (the company) Now button. — There's truth in every t-shirt.
Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:
Google Launching AdSense for Video - Minus the Video — After nearly a year in closed beta, Google is expected to announce tonight that its AdSense for Video program is now open to publishers. When the program's pilot was announced last May, AdSense for Video was intended to serve up video-in-video ads.
RELATED:
nextgendesigncomp.com:
Momenta, the PC for Life — Momenta, the neck worn PC also captures the best and most exciting moments of your life. Ever thought, “Man I wish I had that on tape!” When everybody is laughing themselves to tears, Momenta has already captured the previous 5 minutes from its rolling buffer …
Discussion:
Life On the Wicked Stage
RELATED:
Jacqui Cheng / Infinite Loop:
Apple: Have a keyboard update! Oh, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH — Are you a MacBook or MacBook Pro owner who recently installed Apple's Keyboard Firmware Upgrade 1.0? Turns out, that update brings more than the first keypress after the machine has been sitting idle.
Robert X. Cringely / InfoWorld:
Look before you leak — I bet you thought people banked in the Cayman Islands because they serve fruity cocktails with tiny parasols in them while you're waiting for your checks to clear. Well, you're only partly right. The other reason people keep accounts in the Caymans is to avoid paying taxes …
Discussion:
Bits
Ashkan Karbasfrooshan / HipMojo.com:
Why Most VC-Backed, Ad-Supported Companies Are Doomed to Fail — Most of the web projects out there are ad-supported, or intend to be ad-supported. — While a lot of companies are bootstrapped, most are financed by angel investors or venture capitalists.
Discussion:
VC Ratings, One By One Media, Clickety Clack, broadstuff and Bubblegeneration Strategy Lab
Todd Bishop / Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog:
Bill Gates pooh-poohed Yahoo deal last year — In a series of interviews this week, Bill Gates has spoken positively about Microsoft's proposed Yahoo deal — telling CNet News.com, for example, that the addition of Yahoo's engineers is why Microsoft believes the potential combination would be “powerful.”
RELATED:
Eric Bangeman / Ars Technica:
Judge dismisses malicious prosecution lawsuit against RIAA — Exonerated RIAA defendant Tanya Andersen ran into a bit of a roadblock yesterday in an attempt to pursue her malicious prosecution lawsuit against the RIAA and MediaSentry. After a hearing, a federal judge dismissed Andersen's complaint …
Discussion:
RSS
Brier Dudley / Brier Dudley's blog:
T-Mobile aiming for home phones with new service — It turns out the Wi-Fi home phone service that T-Mobile USA launched last summer was just the beginning. — Today, the Bellevue-based wireless carrier is dramatically stepping up its effort to take over your home phone service …
Doug Aamoth / CrunchGear:
AirDrives for iPhone now available — Now we're talking. Back in July, yours truly did a post on the new AirDrives headphones — you know, the headphones that basically sit on the outside of your ear “eliminating the need to choose between music and social interaction” …
Discussion:
Ubergizmo
Brad Linder / Download Squad:
Microsoft releases Windows XP SP3 RC2 — Microsoft has released Windows XP Service Pack 3 Release Candidate 2 to the general public. For the last few weeks the latest pre-release version of SP3 was only available to about 15,000 beta testers. But now you can download the update from Microsoft's servers using Windows Update.
Discussion:
WinBeta
RELATED:
Michael Masnick / Techdirt:
Why Is Adobe Trying To Add DRM To Flash? — The EFF's Deeplinks blog has an excellent discussion about Adobe's plans to add DRM to Flash. Flash has become something of a defacto standard online, and it's partly the lack of included DRM that allowed this to happen, encouraging creative uses, such as mashups.
Discussion:
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Todd Bishop / Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog:
Departing Microsoft exec has big house, warm pants — Here's some interesting timing: The new issue of “425,” a magazine about the Seattle region's Eastside, includes a big spread on the home of Steve Berkowitz — a senior vice president in Microsoft's unprofitable online division …
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Friend Spam Is The Worst Kind Of All — Facebook announced a number of steps today to battle the growing problem of application spam - stuff that is sent from your Facebook friends asking you to try out new services. Generally, applications force users to send these invitations in order to get access to the more interesting features.
Discussion:
Facebook Blog
Frank Caron / Ars Technica:
XNA games coming to the Zune, Xbox Live Arcade — This morning at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Microsoft announced the next step in its Xbox Live and XNA initiative: the Zune will be entering the fray as new third pillar of XNA software support, with over 1,000 games for the device by year end.
