Top Items:
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
GrandCentral Homeless Stunt Worked So Well It's Time For An Encore — Most companies target early adopters with their new products, hoping those users will tell all of their friends all about it. But not GrandCentral, the company Google acquired for $50 million in July 2007.
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MSNBC:
Google Gives All SF Homeless Free Voicemail — SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. - Google has made an announcement that could help hundreds of homeless people in San Francisco get back on their feet. — Every single homeless person in the city will be given a life-long phone number and voicemail …
Discussion:
DVICE, Profy.Com, InsideGoogle, Brier Dudley's blog, Salon, IP Telephony, VoIP, Broadband, Ubergizmo, Good Morning Silicon Valley, VoIP Blog, Mashable! and Digg
Ina Fried / CNET News.com:
Microsoft chops Vista retail prices — In what may be an unprecedented decision, Microsoft said Thursday that it plans to lower the retail prices for several flavors of Windows Vista. — For those in the U.S., Microsoft is cutting prices only on the higher-end versions of Vista …
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Adrian Kingsley-Hughes / Hardware 2.0:
“Vista Capable” logo - what went wrong? — Now that a federal judge has unsealed nearly 160 pages of internal Microsoft emails which have been used to support the plaintiffs' lawsuit relating to the “Windows Vista Capable” program we can start to get a clearer picture of how the logo program went wrong.
Discussion:
Gizmodo, Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog, Microsoft Watch, Business Technology and PC World
Sarah Perez / ReadWriteWeb:
Google Sites the Next Sharepoint? Maybe Not....Why Google Apps Could Lose the Enterprise Market — Lately, we've been discussing the concept of tech populism and the how enterprises are moving towards a more people-centric focus when it comes to their IT infrastructure.
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Vladimir Vukievi:
Finding the OS X Turbo Button — Some of you may have noticed that the Firefox 3 nightly builds have felt a lot snappier since a few weeks ago. There's an interesting story in that, one that I finally have time to write up. We've had a number of bugs on the Mac where people were complaining …
Liz Gannes / NewTeeVee:
Steve Chen: YouTube to Add Live Video — YouTube will support live video before the end of this year, co-founder Steve Chen told Pop17 videoblogger Sarah Meyers. Check out the clip: — The background party music is thumping, so here's a transcript: — Meyers: “When are you guys gonna do live video on YouTube?”
Dave Winer / Scripting News:
Guidelines for competing with Twitter — Every time Twitter goes down I think of how can we create something to use when Twitter is down. — There's a difference these days, because there's serious talk among developers about whether or how to compete. Earlier this week at lunch with one of them …
Jessica Dolcourt / Webware.com:
The many flavors of Twitter — Pedestrians repeatedly thumbing their cell phones could be playing the latest mobile game, but it's just as likely they're microblogging addicts updating their Twitter accounts. Twitter's short-form service makes it ideal for two-sentence contributions from mobile phones …
Discussion:
broadstuff
Wilson Rothman / Gizmodo:
Stop! Why It Still Isn't Safe to Buy Blu-ray — By now you know waaaaay too much about Toshiba's format-war surrender, the death of HD DVD at the hands of the larger Blu-ray armada. You may even be eying the Blu-ray players mounted proudly in point-of-sale displays at Best Buy or Wal-Mart.
Stacey Higginbotham / GigaOM:
Rollbase Wants to Make Programmers Obsolete — Platform-as-a-service provider Rollbase launched today, marketing its offerings as web-based software geared toward small- and medium-sized businesses. While the PaaS terminology conjures up images of Rollbase competing with something …
Discussion:
Mashable!
Heidi Moore / WSJ.com:
Sprint Nextel: Officially a ‘Deal From Hell’ — Sprint and Nextel have now written down nearly $30 billion related to their 2005 merger, which is pretty much the entire stock value of Nextel before the deal was announced. No need to tarry: Sprint Nextel is by any definition a ‘Deal From Hell.’
Ryan Block / Engadget:
Apple MacBook Pro Penryn tests: a little more speed, a lot less heat — Sure, more speed is great, but on OS X most bumps don't have an appreciable effect on everyday work (unless all you're doing is video encoding). We were more interested in what Intel's Penryn processors …
Charles Cooper / CNET News.com:
Is Dell biz model yesterday's story? — The headline read, “Dell's business priorities drive revenue up 10 percent in fourth quarter.” The real story was that profits slumped 6.5 percent because of a bevy of charges. — What it means is that Michael Dell still has a lot of work ahead.
