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! …
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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, as early as today, sometime after the market closes …
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, Digital Daily, Webomatica, Homotron.net, CrunchGear, DVICE, iLounge, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, Macsimum News, CyberNet, Gadget Lab, Digital Trends, Download Squad, MacUser, InformationWeek, Parks Associates, NewTeeVee, DSLreports, The Apple Core and Insanely Great Mac
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David Chartier / Ars Technica:
Blockbuster beware: iTunes Store gets same-day DVD releases — In January, Apple flipped the switch on movie rentals for the iTunes Store to much fanfare. A lot of customers don't want to own movies, digital downloads are just plain convenient, and the move seemed to finally crack the major studio nut and catch their attention.
Discussion:
Los Angeles Times, PC World, Tech Trader Daily, Computerworld, 9 to 5 Mac and CrunchGear
Spencer Kelly / BBC:
Identity ‘at risk’ on Facebook — Personal details of Facebook users could potentially be stolen, the BBC technology programme Click has found. — The popular social networking site allows users to add a variety of applications to their profile. — But a malicious program …
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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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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, DailyTech, VentureBeat, NewTeeVee, TECH.BLORGE.com, Lefsetz Letter, Silicon Alley Insider, The Tech Report, TechSpot and Electronista
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 …
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Derrik J. Lang / Associated Press:
MADD attacks ‘Grand Theft Auto IV’ — LOS ANGELES (AP) — Mothers Against Drunk Driving wants a stricter rating on “Grand Theft Auto IV.” — The organization is calling on the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, the independent organization that assigns video-game ratings, to reclassify “GTA IV” as an Adults Only game.
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Erica Sadun / The Unofficial Apple Weblog:Flickr Find: Grand Theft Auto hides Apple and iPhone parody
Discussion:
MacUser
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.
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.
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
Michael Masnick / Techdirt:
Musician Claims He Was Tricked Into Appearing In Anti-Piracy Video — Australian guitarist Lindsay McDougall was asked to appear in a film that he was told would be about what it was like to try surviving as a musician — and only later realized that it was actually part of an industry-backed anti-piracy campaign.
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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 …
Matt Marshall / VentureBeat:
Kleiner Perkins creates $700M new fund, plus $500M for green investments — Kleiner Perkins, the respected Silicon Valley venture capital firm, said it has finished raising its thirteenth fund (called KPCB XIII) for early-stage companies, totaling $700 million.
Mark Hachman / PC Magazine:
New Sezmi Set-top Blows Away the TV — Building B, a startup that has since changed its name to Sezmi, has come out of hiding with an ambitious plan to totally remake the television viewing experience. — In short, Sezmi plans to deliver as much video as it possibly can to a consumer's television …
