Top Items:
Vasanth Sridharan / Silicon Alley Insider:
Ballmer Tells Microsoft Troops He's Not Insane: Willing To Walk Away From Yahoo — Steve Ballmer said there's nothing new to report about Microsoft-Yahoo!, but he did use the presentation to the employees to explain the motivation for going after Yahoo!, take some shots at a Google-Yahoo! …
Discussion:
paidContent.org, All about Microsoft, Tech Beat, CNET News.com, Electronista, Tech Tracks and Epicenter
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Henry Blodget / Silicon Alley Insider:
Ballmer to Microsofties: “Yahoo Announcement in Very Short Order” — Steve Ballmer held a Town Hall conference call with Microsoft (MSFT) employees today—reported minute-by-minute by our Vas Sridharan. — Not surprisingly, the topic employees most wanted to talk about was Yahoo.
Kara Swisher / BoomTown:
MicroHoo: Decision Time at 1 p.m. PDT Today? — Memo to Yahoo from Microsoft: We will begin bombing in 30 minutes! — Whether it is love-bombing or the other kind, it's still a mystery to BoomTown. — But, according to sources close to Microsoft (MSFT), as early as today …
Discussion:
Silicon Alley Insider
Apple:
Purchase New Movies on iTunes Same Day as DVD Release — Apple® today announced that new movie releases from major film studios and premier independent studios are available for purchase on the iTunes® Store (www.itunes.com) on the same day as their DVD release.
Discussion:
Apple Watch, Between the Lines, Apple 2.0, Today @ PC World, Bits, GMSV, Webomatica, iLounge, Homotron.net, Macsimum News, DVICE, CrunchGear, CyberNet, Gadget Lab, Digital Trends, Download Squad, MacUser, Life On the Wicked Stage, Digital Daily, InformationWeek, Silicon Alley Insider, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, NewTeeVee, The Apple Core, Parks Associates, DSLreports, Insanely Great Mac and Mashable!
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David Chartier / Ars Technica:Blockbuster beware: iTunes Store gets same-day DVD releases
Discussion:
Los Angeles Times, PC World, Tech Trader Daily, Computerworld, CNET News.com, 9 to 5 Mac and CrunchGear
Josh Lowensohn / Webware.com:
Get multiple Web chat services on your desktop with 1 application — The other day we told you how to get Facebook chat in your browser's sidebar, but what about if you want to run it as a standalone desktop application? If you're a Mac user you're in luck with Gabtastik from Mesa Dynamics.
Discussion:
Download Squad, TechCrunch, Mashable!, Web Worker Daily, Macsimum News and The Mac Observer
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Michael Masnick / Techdirt:
Will Grand Theft Auto IV Hurt Iron Man's Opening Weekend Sales? — from the the-media-landscape-has-expanded... dept — While Marvel's lawyers have been doing plenty of work on their own to hurt interest in the new movie Iron Man, some are suggesting an even more interesting scenario …
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Erica Sadun / The Unofficial Apple Weblog:Flickr Find: Grand Theft Auto hides Apple and iPhone parody
Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed:
Age and the Entrepreneur — A while back Fred Wilson started a firestorm with a series of three posts (1, 2 and 3) about age and the entrepreneur. The gist: He was seeing more and more young tech entrepreneurs, most of them under 30, and some even in their teens, and he wondered aloud …
Discussion:
Leigh's Blitherings
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Robert Vamosi / Defense in Depth:
As Storm calms down, Srizbi gains steam — On Thursday, MessageLabs reported in its April Intelligence report a marked decrease in the number of malware links connected to the Storm botnet. “It's not too often that a security company says that things are getting better,” said Mark Sunner, chief security analyst.
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Eric Taub / Bits:
Blu-ray: The Future Has Been Delayed — Hot on the heels of last week's report from ABI Research noting that many consumers may not see the picture quality difference between Blu-ray and standard DVDs comes the latest Blu-ray sales figures from NPD Group. And they're not pretty.
Discussion:
Techdirt, VentureBeat, DailyTech, Electronista, NewTeeVee, TECH.BLORGE.com, Lefsetz Letter, The Tech Report, TechSpot, Gizmodo, Silicon Alley Insider and Associated Press
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Twitter Said To Be Abandoning Ruby on Rails — We're hearing this from multiple sources: After nearly two years of high profile scaling problems, Twitter is planning to abandon Ruby on Rails as their web framework and start from scratch with PHP or Java (another solution is to stick …
Robin Cannon / Search Engine Journal:
Is Google Trumping The URL? — When there's a simple box to fill in with your search term, and you know exactly what you're looking, why bother to use the address bar? If statistics on popular searches are anything to go by, it looks like many people aren't bothering with that inconvenient …
Discussion:
larry borsato
Arianna Huffington / Time:
Michael Arrington — Michael Arrington, a former corporate attorney who, via his TechCrunch blog, has become one of the most influential figures on the Web, is the quintessential blogger: intense, passionate, consumed with his subject, opinionated, sleep-deprived, forward-thinking, easy to irritate and apt to air his grudges in public.
Ryan Paul / Ars Technica:
Adobe seeks to extend reach of Flash, nukes licensing fees — Adobe has announced a new initiative called Open Screen, which aims to make the company's Flash multimedia technology ubiquitous on mobile and embedded devices. Adobe plans to eliminate the licensing fees required to distribute …
Christian Yee / Inside AdWords:
Place ads on television with Google TV Ads — We'd like to introduce Google TV Ads, a flexible, all-digital system for easily and efficiently buying more accountable and measurable TV advertising. The program, which has been an invitation-only beta test since June 2007, is now available to all US-based advertisers.
Randall Kennedy / Enterprise Desktop:
Streaming Office: Death knell for Google Apps? — It's the holy grail of punditry: You make a bold, unconventional prediction that's way out in front of an emerging trend, then get to gloat as that prediction comes true. In my case, the prediction involved Microsoft's recently (at the time) acquired SoftGrid technology.
Discussion:
CenterNetworks
James Lewin / Podcasting News:
AOL, RealNetworks, Yahoo Owe $100 Million For Digital Music Services — The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York today made public a decision in the proceeding to determine reasonable license fees to be paid to the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers …
Discussion:
CNET News.com, Listening Post, Download Squad, Ars Technica, ascap.com, E-Commerce Times, Digital Daily, The Register, AppScout and WebProNews
Eric Savitz / Tech Trader Daily:
Sun: Q1 Results Fall Short On U.S. Economy Issues — Sun Microsystems (JAVA) reported highly disappointing first quarter results. — For the quarter, the company posted revenue of $3.266 billion, down 0.5% from a year earlier, and below the Street consensus of $3.38 billion.
