Top Items:
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Full Text Of AOL Email: XDrive, AOL Pictures, MyMobile And Bluestring To Shut Down — Below is the full text of the email AOL EVP Kevin Conroy sent out to staff on July 14, outlining the reorganization of his product groups and announcing the “sunsetting” of XDrive, AOL Pictures, MyMobile and Bluestring.
Discussion:
Guardian Unlimited, Startup Meme, Ryan Stewart, FierceMobileContent, localmobilesearch.net, P2P Blog and Out of the Box
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Larry Dignan / Between the Lines:
AOL gussies up for potential sale, but who's buying? — AOL is shutting down XDrive, AOL Pictures and other properties in a belt tightening move that may indicate the company is setting itself up to be sold. The larger question: Who will buy AOL from Time Warner?
Peter Kafka / Silicon Alley Insider:More AOL Cost-Cutting: Dumping Properties; Cutting Back On Blogs (TWX)
Discussion:
AppScout
Denver Post:
Missing ‘spam king’ kills self, family — BENNETT — Just four days after escaping a federal minimum-security work camp, “Spam King” Eddie Davidson shot his wife and child and wounded a teen-age girl before turning the gun on himself. — Sheriff's deputies responded to a report of gunfire …
Discussion:
Guardian Unlimited, The Register, Network World, Computerworld, AppScout, Switched, Threat Level, Computerworld Blogs, Zero Day, TechWeb, Spyware Sucks and Security Watch
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Charlie Demerjian / Inquirer:
Escaped spammer kills himself — Comment Yay. No, YAY! — NOT ALL STORIES have a happy ending, but the tale of escaped spam king Edward “Eddie” Davidson sure does. After walking away from prison, he got a gun, killed his family, then killed himself. — While it is hard not to feel bad …
Andru Edwards / Gear Live:
Apple beta testing iPhone 2.1 firmware, adding more GPS features — We just got word that Apple has released a beta version of iPhone OS 2.1 to developers. Along with the 2.1 firmware, a new version of the iPhone SDK has been seeded as well, but the new SDK can't be used for submitting applications to the App Store at the moment.
Discussion:
Infinite Loop, Gadget Lab, Boy Genius Report, Engadget Mobile, iLounge, Gizmodo, CrunchGear, O'Grady's PowerPage, Insanely Great Mac and MacBlogz
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Aidan Malley / AppleInsider:Apple seeds iPhone 2.1 with directional GPS, push notification
Discussion:
Apple Gazette
PR Newswire:
Netflix Announces Q2 2008 Financial Results — Subscribers - 8.4 million Revenue - $337.6 million GAAP Net Income - $26.6 million GAAP EPS - $0.42 per diluted share — Netflix, Inc. (Nasdaq: NFLX - News) today reported results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2008.
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Richard MacManus / ReadWriteWeb:
Android Is For The Masses, iPhone For The Rich — Our network blog last100 has an interesting interview with Nicolas Gramlich, founder of anddev.org - an online community for Android developers. As editor Steve O'Hear notes in his intro, there have been issues with Google's mobile OS of late …
Daniel AJ Sokolov / heise Security UK:
Speculation over back door in Skype — According to reports, there may be a back door built into Skype, which allows connections to be bugged. The company has declined to expressly deny the allegations. At a meeting with representatives of ISPs and the Austrian regulator on lawful interception …
Amit Agarwal / Digital Inspiration:
Believe In Superstitions? Avoid The Word “me” In Product Names — If you are superstitious and believe that names can bring (or deny) good luck, avoid giving your products a name that ends with “me”. — This is not a recommendation of any soothsayer but just a personal observation …
Discussion:
MacBlogz
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Stephen Shankland / CNET News.com:
Microsoft tries to one-up Google PageRank — Though a distant third place to Google, Microsoft thinks it can teach its rival a thing or two about searching the Internet. — A big part of Google's rise to search engine leadership was an algorithm called PageRank that assesses …
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Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land:The Day After: Looking At How Well Knol Pages Rank On Google
Discussion:
I'm Not Actually a Geek, The Next Web, Guardian Unlimited, broadstuff, WebProNews and Sean Percival's Blog
Nate Anderson / Ars Technica:
DRM still sucks: Yahoo Music going dark, taking keys with it — The bad dream of DRM continues. Yahoo e-mailed its Yahoo! Music Store customers yesterday, telling them it will be closing for good—and the company will take its DRM license key servers offline on September 30, 2008.
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Svetlana Gladkova / Profy.Com:
Google's Begun Growing Very Fast — I have just seen a press release (in Russian) issued by Begun, the Russian contextual advertising company recently acquired by Google from Rambler. The ad company reports on the revenue it has received in the first 6 months of 2008 …
Discussion:
Mashable!
Kim Hart / Washington Post:
High-Stakes Race to Unlock a Wider Web — Critics Say New Technology May Hinder TV Signals — The nation's top technology companies have spent millions of dollars and nearly two years building devices, poring over laptops and working in federal labs trying to come up with a new way of …
Discussion:
Digg
Dianne See Morrison / paidContent.org:
Italian Prosecutors To Charge Google Execs Over Third-Party Content — Four Google (NSDQ: GOOG) executives may be standing trial over failing to adequately monitor third-party content posted to their Italian language site. Italian prosecutors are preparing to file charges in a two-year old case …
Jeff Atwood / Coding Horror:
Coding Without Comments — If peppering your code with lots of comments is good, then having zillions of comments in your code must be great, right? Not quite. Excess is one way good comments go bad: … I'm constantly running across comments from developers who don't seem to understand …
Discussion:
webmonkey
Chris Morris / Forbes:
Doom'ing The iPhone — While he's best known for creating graphics engines that push systems to their limits, game designer John Carmack is spending a lot of time with mobile gaming these days. — The co-founder of id Software is considered one of the creators of the first-person shooter genre …
Discussion:
Touch Arcade
