Top Items:
Paul Miller / Engadget:
Sony hates you, offers $50 “Fresh Start” option to build your laptop crapware-free — Sony has quite the history of crippling excellent, beautiful hardware with horrible, useless software. The company's UX UMPC bluescreened on us the first time we turned it on, and crashed the first time we tried …
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CNET News.com, TechConsumer, Guardian Unlimited, Electronista, Gearlog, Crave, CyberNet, OhGizmo!, p2pnet, Gadget Lab, The Boy Genius Report, Dan's Tech-n-Stuff Weblog, Gizmodo, Mark Evans, Boing Boing Gadgets, Hardware 2.0, Michael Gartenberg, jkOnTheRun, Alice Hill's Real Tech News, 9 to 5 Mac and AppleInsider
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Peter Sayer / IDG News Service:
Sony Removes Bloatware—for a Fee — For only $50, Sony will uninstall some of the trial software it loads onto new Vaio laptops. — Sony is offering to remove some of the trial software it crams onto the hard disks of new laptops — for a fee. — Buyers of the configure-to-order versions …
Farhad Manjoo / Salon:
The Wall Street Journal's Web site is already (secretly) free — Late in January, Rupert Murdoch put an end to speculation that he would set free the Wall Street Journal's subscription-only Web site. — While he planned to “expand” the site's free offerings, “the really special things …
Henry Blodget / Silicon Alley Insider:
Facebook Toast? Hot Today, Dead Tomorrow—Like AOL? — For now, Facebook continues to take over the world. Its global traffic is about to blow past MySpace's, its image (and Mark Zuckerberg's) has recovered from the Beacon fiasco, and it has raised a big enough cash pile that it should be able to power through any downturn.
Discussion:
Economist
Mark Hendrickson / TechCrunch:
LinkedIn, Now For Companies — LinkedIn, the boring social network that won't find you a date but may land you a job, is expanding beyond people profiles. — On Friday morning they will launch company profile pages that partly serve as fact sheets for about 160,000 companies and partly serve …
Discussion:
Search Engine Land, WebProNews, SmoothSpan Blog, Evolving Web, Twist Image, The LinkedIn Blog, Marketing Nirvana, Marketing.fm, Mashable! and Mark Evans
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Danis Dayanov / The LinkedIn Blog:
The Engineering component | LinkedIn Company Profiles — Over the course of the last years there were several important features that we've brought to you. The past few months in particular has seen the rapid deployment of features such as these: Profile photos, Redesigned Homepage …
Caroline McCarthy / CNET News.com:
Gibson turns volume up to 11 with new ‘Guitar Hero’ lawsuit — Legendary guitar manufacturer Gibson Guitar has sued six major retailers—Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Target, Amazon.com, Gamestop, and Toys-R-Us—for selling Activision's Guitar Hero video game series, MarketWatch reported Friday.
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Stefanie Olsen / CNET News.com:
Q&A: Battelle talks blog roll-ups, Google, and Federated Media's future — John Battelle knows tech booms and busts. He's been at the forefront of them for nearly two decades. — In 1993, he co-founded Wired, a print magazine that set a standard in technology coverage and spawned popular sites …
Discussion:
Silicon Alley Insider
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Michael Arrington / TechCrunch: Federated Media's Battelle Slams Rival, Hints At Investing In Publishers
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
CBS Sports Facing March Madness Backlash on Facebook. “This App Blows.” — Don't mess with March Madness. CBS Sports is learning that lesson the hard way on Facebook, where a major backlash is happening over its NCAA basketball bracket application. Yes, this is the same application …
Thomas Ricker / Engadget:
Little old lady suing Sony, Samsung, Nokia and everyone else for infringing on her laser patents — Oh sure, she looks friendly enough. But don't let her matronly, argyle looks fool you. Retired Columbia University Professor, Gertrude Neumark Rothschild, is looking to extract some cold …
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Jacqui Cheng / Ars Technica:
Report: 95% of Internet video stuck looking longingly at TV — Video content online may be growing in popularity, but the vast majority isn't getting anywhere near a TV screen. New survey results from Macrovision (commissioned by Harris Interactive) say that only a small number of adults …
Larry Dignan / Between the Lines:
Do you have to be in every conversation? — Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb has a good post about how the conversation is leaving blogs and going to Twitter, FriendFeed and other services. More importantly, she touches on a big question: How do you keep up? — Perez then dutifully notes …
Discussion:
bub.blicio.us
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Sarah Lai Stirland / Threat Level:
Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig Bets ‘Wikipedia’ Approach Will Transform Congress — Stanford law professor Larry Lessig plans to use collaborative software to change Congress. — Courtesy Larry Lessig — A prominent Stanford law professor on Thursday launched an ambitious project …
Discussion:
Ars Technica, TeleRead, The Drama 2.0 Show, Computerworld, IT News Digest, CNET News.com, p2pnet, open, Slashdot, Sunlight Foundation and techPresident
Doug Aamoth / CrunchGear:
Firefox 3: So easy a caveman could do it — Firefox 3 won't be out of beta until the end of June but Mozilla told Reuters yesterday that anyone can go ahead and download the most recent version and run it without worrying too much. It's now stable enough for everyone, not just developers.
Nivi / Venture Hacks:
Getting Recommended … On April 1st, we started publishing the best damn term sheet hacks we could find. Why? Because a lot of entrepreneurs ask the same question: … We're trying to make everything we've learned—from other entrepreneurs, investors, and lawyers—readily available.
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Breaking: FCC Confirms that Big Winner in Spectrum Auction is Verizon. So Why Is Google Smiling? — The big winner of the FCC's $19.6 billion auction of wireless spectrum that ended yesterday is Verizon. That was pretty much everyone's guess. — At a press conference today …
Discussion:
Salon, Search Engine Land, DSLreports, Silicon Alley Insider, Portfolio.com, MobHappy, MarketingVOX, Electronista and Reuters
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Dianne See Morrison / paidContent.org:
Dish Network To Offer Mobile TV Service? — Analysts have been abuzz with speculation over Dish Network Corp's surprise win at the government auction for wireless airwaves that ended this week, speculating that the satellite television company formerly known as Echostar (NSDQ: DISH) …
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Gizmodo
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