Top Items:
b2i.us:
Blockbuster Proposes Combination With Circuit City — Blockbuster Inc. (NYSE: BBI) today announced that it has offered to acquire Circuit City Stores, Inc. (NYSE: CC) for at least $6.00 per share in cash, subject to due diligence. The offer was made in a letter sent to Circuit City Chairman …
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Larry Dignan / Between the Lines:
Blockbuster sees media convergence; Offers to buy Circuit City — Updated: Here's a deal where 1 + 1 = 0.5: Blockbuster is offering to acquire Circuit City for “a least $6 a share.” — Blockbuster went public on Monday (statement) with an offer to buy Circuit City.
Discussion:
Ars Technica, DealBook, Silicon Alley Insider, Wall Street Journal, IP Democracy, paidContent.org, Intuitive.com, Gearlog, TG Daily, Electronista and TechBlog
Arnold Kim / MacRumors:
‘OpenMac’ Promises $399 Headless Mac... But Not From Apple — A company called Psystar has started advertising a $399 computer called “OpenMac” which claims to be a Leopard compatible Mac built from standard PC-parts. For $399, you get a tower computer with the following specs: — 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
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Charles Jade / Infinite Loop:
Company claims to sell Mac clone for $399 — Source: Psytar (at least until Apple Legal has their morning coffee) — Personal technology enthusiasts yearning for the Mac Experience without the Apple Tax—that huge markup that Mac users pay for off-the-shelf PC hardware with OS X—your days of gnashing teeth may be over.
Philip Elmer-DeWitt / Apple 2.0:
What's wrong with a $399 Mac? — It's been almost a decade since Steve Jobs drove the last of the licensed Mac clones out of business, but that hasn't stopped bargain hunting users from trying to get the Mac experience without feeding Apple's hefty profit margins. — Persuading a generic PC to run OS X isn't that hard to do.
Discussion:
Apple Watch, InformationWeek, Tech Trader Daily, Digital Trends, The Mac Observer and Cult of Mac
Peter Kafka / Silicon Alley Insider:
Nick Denton “Pruning” Gawker Media, Ditching Three Sites — Gawker Media boss Nick Denton is “rationalizing” his blog business by spinning off three underperforming sites: Wonkette, Gridskipper and Idolator. The sites will find new homes/owners as follows:
Discussion:
mathewingram.com/work, The Social, paidContent.org, FishBowlNY, Web Scout, Deal Journal, MediaFile, The Blog Herald, Portfolio.com, Pro Blogging News, hypebot and Wonkette
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Owen Thomas / Valleywag:
Nick “The Slasher” Denton cuts loose three blogs: Gridskipper …
Nick “The Slasher” Denton cuts loose three blogs: Gridskipper …
Discussion:
WebProNews
Stephen Shankland / CNET News.com:
Google mapping spec now an industry standard — Members of an industry group called the Open Geospatial Consortium have approved Google's KML technology as an open standard for describing some geographic data. — KML is used to manage the display of geospatial information in Google Earth …
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Michael Weiss-Malik / Google LatLong:
KML: A new standard for sharing maps
KML: A new standard for sharing maps
Discussion:
Official Google Blog
Verizon:
Verizon Wireless Offers Smartphone Users Unlimited Web Browsing And Access To Favorite E-mail Accounts — For customer inquiries, please call 800-922-0204 or go to — BASKING RIDGE, NJ — Multi-tasking moms, tech savvy young professionals, and entrepreneurs will be able to access e-mail …
Discussion:
InformationWeek, Digital Trends, Unwired View, jkOnTheRun, Phone Scoop and Web Worker Daily
Amazon Web Services Blog:
Storage Space, The Final Frontier — Developers who have found our cloud computing model attractive have been asking us to be a little bit more open about what we are planning to do in the future. To date we've simply announced new additions to the Amazon Web Services lineup …
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Werner Vogels / All Things Distributed:
Persistent Storage for Amazon EC2
Persistent Storage for Amazon EC2
Discussion:
Phil Windley's Technometria
Mike Butcher / TechCrunch UK:
With Highfield gone, the BBC must now open up — As Ashley Highfield leaves the post of the BBC's director of future media and technology to head up Project Kangaroo (the joint online video platform for the BBC, ITV and Channel 4) one wonders what a startup - or even several startups …
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Rafat Ali / paidContent.org:
CBS Interactive Opening Menlo Park Office; Big Acquisition Needed? — CBS Interactive (NYSE: CBS), the digital media arm of CBS, is finally opening up a fully staffed office in Menlo Park, CA, in an apparent attempt stir innovation and content development...this comes about 18 months …
Discussion:
Valleywag
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Jeff Jarvis / BuzzMachine:
The press becomes the press-sphere — One problem I've had with much discussion about the future of news lately is that it's too press-centric. It focuses on the press as if it were at the center of the world, as if it owned news, as if news depended on it, as if solving the press' problems solves news.
Xssniper / Billy (BK) Rios:
Google XSS — Now, normally when I find an XSS vulnerability on a popular domain I just report it to the appropriate security team and move on, but this one is interesting... By taking advantage of the content-type returned by spreadsheets.google.com (and a caching flaw on the part of Google) …
Dan Primack / PE Hub Blog:
That's Rich: FM Publishing Gets Big Valuation — Federated Media Publishing has raised between $40 million in $50 million in Series C funding at a $200 million pre-money valuation, peHUB has learned. Oak Investment Partners led the round, with return backers like Omidyar Network also participating.
The Boy Genius Report:
Sony KDL-XBR6, KDL-XBR7, and KDL-XBR8 specs, and release dates! — What could possibly be better than your 52 inch Sony XBR5 TV? The XBR6, XBR7, and XBR8, of course! If there was any doubt about Sony's seriousness with the XBR line, we can safely put that to rest right now.
Richard MacManus / ReadWriteWeb:
TwitLinks: The Techmeme of Twitter? — Just launched today is a new Twitter mashup called Twitlinks. This one aggregates the latest links posted to Twitter by tech industry pundits. The end result is a homepage that kind of resembles Techmeme, only without the threading of topics.