Top Items:
Vasanth Sridharan / Silicon Alley Insider:
Confirmed: Facebook Apps Are Useless — Everyone knows that most Facebook apps are time-wasters, at best. But here's statistical proof from FlowingData: A breakdown of the service's 23,160 applications, via Facebook's self-selected categories. — We keep hearing promises that there are developers …
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Kara Swisher / BoomTown:Facebook Apps Are Still For Toddlers: The Visual Proof!
Discussion:
All Facebook
Saul Hansell / New York Times:
Amazon Sues Over State Law on Collection of Sales Tax — Amazon.com has filed a lawsuit challenging New York State's new law forcing online retailers to collect sales tax on shipments to state residents. — On Friday, Amazon filed a complaint in State Supreme Court in Manhattan objecting to the law …
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Nick / Rough Type:
Is Office the new Netscape? — As Microsoft and Yahoo continue with their interminable modern-dress staging of Hamlet - it's longer than Branagh's version! - the transformation of the software business goes on. We have new players with new strategies, or at least interesting new takes on old strategies.
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Dan Farber / Outside the Lines:
The IBM-Google connection — LOS ANGELES—Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt gave a speech and chatted with IBM's CEO Sam Palmisano onstage Thursday at IBM's Business Partner Leadership Conference here. The two talked up their relationship, which primarily involves a joint research project.
Peter Burrows / Business Week:
The Mac in the Gray Flannel Suit — More office workers infatuated with iPods and iPhones are demanding Macs. Is business ready? Is Apple? — Istvan Banyai — Soon after Michele Goins became chief information officer at Juniper Networks (JNPR) in February, she decided to respond …
Elizabeth Corcoran / Forbes:
Tech's Top-Paid CEOs — Jerry Yang should take note: The best-paid chief executives among technology companies last year was not Google's Eric Schmidt. — Oracle's (nasdaq: ORCL - news - people ) Larry Ellison tops our ranking of the best-compensated chief executives at technology companies in 2007.
Marc Andreessen / blog.pmarca.com:
Examining Microsoft's and Yahoo's unspoken concerns — In this post, I discuss what I believe are some unspoken concerns that weigh on the decisions both Microsoft and Yahoo are making during this very exciting takeover battle. — Quick status update, largely derived from the excellent Wall Street Journal …
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Wall Street Journal:Ballmer Says Microsoft Can Build Ad Business Without Buying Yahoo
Discussion:
Fortune, Salon, Search Engine Roundtable, Search Engine Journal, Digital Daily, Tech Trader Daily, IDG News Service, MacUser, Homotron.net, p2pnet, Contentinople, ClickZ News Blog, Scobleizer, MarketingVOX, BloggingStocks, Forbes, Valleywag, BBC NEWS, Epicenter, Tech Ticker, Between the Lines, paidContent.org, CNET News.com, I4U News, Tech Beat, Search Engine Land, Mashable!, BBC, Silicon Alley Insider, Beyond Binary and WinBeta
The Boy Genius Report:
BlackBerry KickStart: T-Mobile launch and a whole bunch of specs! — You didn't think we'd actually leave you hangin', did you? To follow up on on yesterday's post of the BlackBerry KickStart photos, we've got here a couple more images of the phone with T-Mobile branding and some interesting details on the physical design attributes.
Discussion:
Unwired View, CrackBerry.com blogs, TmoNews, Electronista, BB Geeks, Engadget and Gizmodo
BBC:
Adobe opens up Flash on mobiles — Adobe has announced a plan to try to get its Flash player installed on more mobile devices and set-top boxes. — Dubbed Open Screen the initiative lifts restrictions on how its multimedia handling software can be used. — Adobe will stop charging licencing fees …
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Thomas Ricker / Engadget:
Xbox 360 Blu-ray console shipping by September? — For all of Microsoft's denial, the Xbox 360 Blu-ray console rumors just will not die. In fact, they are getting more and more specific. The Chinese language Economic Daily News is reporting that Pegatron, an OEM subsidiary of ASUS …
Discussion:
DigiTimes, Electronista, Joystiq, TG Daily, Xbox 360 Fanboy, Gaming Nexus, CrunchGear and Digg
Google News Blog:
Google News now available on your iPhone and iPod Touch — As we sat in our offices in Trondheim staring off at the fjord — we're Norwegians, that's what we do — a thought occurred to us: wouldn't it be nice to make Google News accessible to readers on their iPod Touch or iPhone?
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Mike Yamamoto / Crave: The gadget blog:
The ‘Hard Disk Crusher’ doesn't mess around — Oliver North found out the hard way that erasing e-mail doesn't mean it's gone forever. And in more than two decades since, countless others have shown that they still hadn't learned that lesson. — But there is one foolproof way of confounding …
Andy Serwer / Fortune:
Larry Page on how to change the world — Breakthrough ideas are around the corner, says the Google co-founder. But most of us are failing to take a chance on them. — (Fortune Magazine) — As president of Google, Larry Page has pushed his people to take risks that have led to hot new applications like Gmail and Google Maps.
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Coming to America: Getting visas to do business in Silicon Valley — One of the parlor tricks I like to perform when starting off any Silicon Valley talk or presentation is to ask the audience to raise their hand if they currently live in the area. Most people raise their hand.
Discussion:
STARTUP CHATTER
Unstrung:
4G Backhaul: A Problem for All? — We already know that the challenge of providing back-end capacity for faster base-stations helped delay the launch of Sprint Nextel Corp. (NYSE: S - message board)'s Xohm WiMax, so could 4G backhaul be a problem for all carriers moving to faster broadband networks?
Andrew Wallenstein / Hollywood Reporter:
ABC.com mulls adding ads — Research to test tolerance for multiple commercials — ABC.com is about to find out whether one good ad deserves another. — Disney-ABC Television Group will begin conducting research next week on inserting multiple commercials into ad breaks for primetime series on its broadband player.
