Check out Mini-Techmeme for simple mobiles or Techmeme Mobile for modern smartphones.
2:35 PM ET, April 14, 2008

Techmeme

 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 …
RELATED:
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.
Don Reisinger / CNET News.com:
Blockbuster's pending acquisition of Circuit City is laughable  —  Reuters is reporting that Blockbuster has offered Circuit City between $1 billion to $1.3 billion to acquire the floundering electronics retailer.  And now, all that's left for us to do is laugh.
Henry Blodget / Silicon Alley Insider:
Crazy Blockbuster Circuit City Bid Great News For Netflix
Discussion: Portfolio.com
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
RELATED:
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?
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:
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 …
RELATED:
Werner Vogels / All Things Distributed:
Persistent Storage for Amazon EC2
RightScale Blog:
Amazon takes EC2 to the next level with persistent storage volumes
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 …
Discussion: Google Earth Blog
RELATED:
Reid J. Epstein / Newsday:
LI's wireless Internet project seems less likely  —  Long Island's much-heralded wireless Internet project, billed as a free-to-taxpayers endeavor that would bring the Web to underserved communities, is months past its initial target date and the company charged with building it has failed to deliver on Wi-Fi efforts elsewhere.
RELATED:
Marguerite Reardon / CNET News.com:
T-Mobile betting on 3G to close on high-speed competitors
Discussion: eWeek and dailywireless.org
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 …
Scott Holden / The Official Salesforce Blog:
Introducing Salesforce for Google Apps  —  Today we are excited to announce that we have expanded our partnership with Google and together have delivered an industry-changing new product called Salesforce for Google Apps.  It went live last night at 11pm PST to all salesforce.com customers.
RELATED:
Miguel Helft / New York Times:
Google and Salesforce Join to Fight Microsoft
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.
InfoWorld:
Qualcomm missing in industry pact on LTE patent costs  —  As the fight for 4G (fourth-generation) supremacy continues, seven industry heavy weights have joined forces to set up rules for licensing LTE technology, but Qualcomm is missing.  —  The companies on board are Alcatel-Lucent, NEC …
Discussion: GigaOM and eWeek
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.
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) …
Discussion: Netcraft and Security Watch
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.
Discussion: Download Squad and Howard Lindzon
 
 Archived Page Info: 
This is a snapshot of Techmeme at 2:35 PM ET, April 14, 2008.

View the current page or another snapshot:


 
 Techmeme Sponsor Posts: 
Meta:
Open Source AI: Available to all, not just the few  —  Meta's open source AI enables small businesses, start-ups, students, researchers and more to download and build with our models at no cost.
Tribe AI:
Build AI products that matter  —  Tribe AI helps organizations rapidly deploy AI solutions that have real business impact.  We bring together world class AI talent and tooling to drive differentiated results.
Zoho:
CIO challenge 5: Can we find an effective solution that also minimizes operational costs?  —  Welcome to the next and final installment of our CIO series!  After what feels like a thousand cups of coffee …
Hamming:
Make AI Voice Agents trustworthy  —  Hamming AI automatically tests AI voice agents and continuously monitors them in production.
Sponsor Techmeme
 
 See Also: 
Techmeme: site main
Techmeme River: reverse chronological Techmeme
Techmeme Mobile: for phones
Techmeme Leaderboard: Techmeme's top sources
 
 Subscribe: 
Techmeme RSS feed
Techmeme on X
Techmeme on Mastodon
 
 
 More Items: 
Michael Kanellos / CNET News.com:
GE confirms that wind turbine supply is getting worse
Tom Allard / Sydney Morning Herald:
Bosses' power to check email
Discussion: Ars Technica and Slashdot
Scott Ferguson / eWeek:
IBM, Partners Preparing 32-nm Chips
Discussion: TG Daily
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Here Comes More HD Video On the Web—Move Networks Raises $46 Million in C Round
Brooke Crothers / CNET News.com:
Toshiba delays 128GB solid-state notebook
Times of India:
UAE releases one of the ships impounded for cable damage
Discussion: Gizmodo and Engadget
 Earlier Items: 
Anne Helmond / The Blog Herald:
Do You Care Where Your Comments Are?  —  The discussion surrounding …
Brian Stelter / New York Times:
At CBS, Bad News Doesn't End at 7
Martin LaMonica / CNET News.com:
Microsoft touts media business gains with Silverlight
Dan Primack / PE Hub Blog:
That's Rich: FM Publishing Gets Big Valuation
Mike Yamamoto / Crave: The gadget blog:
When one headset just isn't enough  —  Another case of life imitating art.
Thomas Ricker / Engadget:
Willcom's D4 MID pumps Vista on Intel Atom, into our hearts
Philipp Lenssen / Google Blogoscoped:
Third-Party Gmail Redesign Style
Discussion: Mashable!
BBC:
Hackers exploit poor website code
 

 
From Mediagazer:

Alex Sherman / CNBC:
Analyzing Comcast's spinoff of cable networks, purposefully structured with low debt: the move might be a signal to the industry that it's time to consolidate

Daniel Thomas / Financial Times:
James Harding says the Tortoise-Observer deal could create a profitable media group and there isn't a guaranteed future for the Observer with the Guardian

Lauren Forristal / TechCrunch:
Tubi launches Scenes, a mobile feature that lets viewers watch 60-to-90-second trailer-style clips from its library to help with content discovery

 
Sister Sites:

Mediagazer
 Top news and commentary for media professionals from all around the web
memeorandum
 What US political commentators are discussing online right now
WeSmirch
 The top celebrity news from all around the web on a single page