Top Items:
Justin Scheck / Wall Street Journal:
Dell Tests Player to Renew iPod Battle — Music Device Is Key To Broader Strategy — Dell Inc. failed once to move into Apple Inc.'s digital-music turf. Now, it is plotting another foray. — In recent months, Dell has been testing a digital music player that could go on sale as early as September, said several Dell officials.
Discussion:
CNET News.com, Silicon Alley Insider, Guardian Unlimited, Gearlog, CrunchGear, MacDailyNews, Engadget, paidContent.org, Gizmodo and hypebot
Larry Dignan / Between the Lines:
Amazon aims to make Mechanical Turk more business friendly — Amazon on Wednesday rolled out new features to its Mechanical Turk web service designed to expand its appeal to a broader set of businesses. Mechanical Turk is a work marketplace that can be used to outsource software development.
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Brad Stone / New York Times:
Amazon Offers Other Sites Use of Its Payment Service — SAN FRANCISCO — Amazon wants its customers to take their wallets with them when they leave the giant Web store. — The Seattle-based online retailer unveiled on Tuesday a new payment service that it will offer other online retailers to use on their Web sites.
Juan Carlos Perez / IDG News Service:
Amazon Payment Services Debut — Amazon on Tuesday launched hosted e-commerce payment services for merchants who want to outsource all or some of their online transaction processing tasks. — The two new offerings, called Checkout By Amazon and Amazon Simple Pay, are the latest services …
Tim Wu / New York Times:
OPEC 2.0 — AMERICANS today spend almost as much on bandwidth — the capacity to move information — as we do on energy. A family of four likely spends several hundred dollars a month on cellphones, cable television and Internet connections, which is about what we spend on gas and heating oil.
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Cecilia Kang / Washington Post:
Comcast Illegally Interfered With Web File-Sharing Traffic, FCC Says
Comcast Illegally Interfered With Web File-Sharing Traffic, FCC Says
Discussion:
CrunchGear
John Ribeiro / IDG News Service:
India's ‘$10 Laptop’ to Cost US$100 After All — A low-cost laptop being developed by the Indian government in tandem with two leading Indian education and research institutions will cost US$100 when available, and not $10 as was earlier stated by the government.
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Associated Press:
‘Pentagon hacker’ loses extradition appeal — LONDON, England (AP) — Britain's top court refused Wednesday to stop the extradition to the U.S. of a British hacker accused of breaking into Pentagon and NASA computers — something he claims to have done while hunting for information on UFOs.
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Benwilson / iPhone Atlas:
New iPod touch model revealed in iPhone OS 2.1? — Alongside a few interesting tidbits that could indicate the addition of turn-by-turn directions in Google Maps, the beta release of iPhone OS 2.1 includes a potential reference to a forthcoming iPod touch model.
Discussion:
Infinite Loop, MacRumors, Insanely Great Mac, O'Grady's PowerPage, Ubergizmo and Gizmodo
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Michael Masnick / Techdirt:
AT&T Says It Will Cut Off P2P Wireless Users; But What About Pandora Users? — from the be-careful-on-that-iPhone dept — While those who like to claim that the US broadband market is more competitive than it really is like to point to the rise of 3G wireless networks as proof …
Discussion:
Voices
Jason Chen / Gizmodo:
T-Mobile Sidekick 2008 Review — The Gadget: The Sidekick 2008, which follows up the Sidekick LX and Sidekick Slide as a “main” unit (read: not low-end like the iD) in the Sidekick series. It's got improved features like a 2.0-megapixel camera, 2.6-inch display (400x240), video recording/playback …
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Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
How To Lose Your Cuil 20 Seconds After Launch — The hype cycle now lasts less than a day. Take yesterday's over-hyped launch of stealth search startup Cuil, which was quickly followed by a backlash when everyone realized that it was selling a bill of goods. This was entirely the company's own fault.
Operating / PR Newswire:
Comcast Reports Second Quarter 2008 Results — Consolidated Revenue Increased 11%; Pro Forma Growth of 8% — Consolidated Operating Cash Flow Increased 11%; Pro Forma Growth of 8% — Consolidated Operating Income Increased 19% — EPS Increased 11% to $0.21 — Free Cash Flow Increased 216% to $1.2 Billion
Jeremy Horwitz / iLounge:
iPod nano 4G: a Zune-alike? — It may be hard to believe, but from what we've now heard from multiple sources, it's true: the fourth-generation iPod nano will look like... a Microsoft Zune. Well, sort of. — Contradicting speculation that Apple was planning to transform the new nano …
David Worthington / SD Times On The Web:
Microsoft's plans for post-Windows OS revealed — Microsoft is incubating a componentized non-Windows operating system known as Midori, which is being architected from the ground up to tackle challenges that Redmond has determined cannot be met by simply evolving its existing technology.
Pierre / things of sorts:
Chatting with a Google Street View Driver — Note: some details in this post have been skipped or generalized to be a bit vague to protect the identity of the Google Streeview driver. — Sometime in the past few weeks, I was walking with a friend when we spotted a very funny looking car.
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
MySpace Announces Five New Senior Execs (Four Of Them Have MySpace Pages) — MySpace COO Amit Kapur apparently meant it when he told me earlier today that MySpace is continuing to hire despite letting 5% or so of staff go in the coming days. He introduced five new senior executives …
Kenji Hall / Business Week:
Sony's Renaissance Geek — Can software guru Tim Schaaf help the troubled company make the hottest gizmos again — and make them all work seamlessly together? — In the late 1990s, Tim Schaaff was a senior executive at Apple Computer (AAPL) with a hefty portfolio.