Top Items:
Wall Street Journal:
Microsoft Enlists Jerry Seinfeld In Its Ad Battle Against Apple — Microsoft Corp., weary of being cast as a stodgy oldster by Apple Inc.'s advertising, is turning for help to Jerry Seinfeld. — The software giant's new $300 million advertising campaign, devised by a newly hired ad agency, has been closely guarded.
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Thomas Ricker / Engadget:
Microsoft enlists Seinfeld, Gates to battle “Get a Mac” ads — Those Apple “Get a Mac” ads have long been an annoyance to Microsoft and to Bill Gates in particular. No surprise as an emboldened Apple with rising market share has continued to ratchet up the venom with quips like …
Discussion:
CNET News.com
Josh Lowensohn / Webware.com:
Microsoft launches 3D wonder Photosynth for consumers — On Wednesday night, Photosynth, a technology demo from Microsoft Live Labs, is graduating from its “ooh, that's pretty” status to being a viable Web service for consumers. — The technology, which takes a grouping of photographs …
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Brady Forrest / O'Reilly Radar:
Photosynth is Released and Moves to Virtual Earth — Live Labs has released Photosynth, the 3D-esque photo collection viewer that it first tech-previewed in 2006 (Radar post). With this release any Vista or XP user running FireFox or IE can create, view, and share Synths (Mac support is planned).
Walter S. Mossberg / Personal Technology:Microsoft Live Labs Creates Web ‘Synth’ For 3-D Photo Tour
David Kravets / Threat Level:
Judge: Copyright Owners Must Consider ‘Fair Use’ Before Sending Takedown Notice — In the nation's first such ruling, a federal judge on Wednesday said copyright owners must consider “fair use” of their works before sending takedown notices to online video-sharing sites.
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Jacqui Cheng / Ars Technica:
Apple hit with class-action lawsuit over iPhone 3G flakiness — We all knew it was coming, it was just a matter of time. A lawsuit has been filed against Apple over what the plaintiff is referring to as the “Defective iPhone 3G,” which she hopes will become a class-action complaint.
Discussion:
The Register, Between the Lines, CrunchGear, Informationoverlord, Gizmodo, mocoNews.net and Digg
Eric Eldon / VentureBeat:
Facebook's forthcoming iPhone app to be more like its web site; that site redesign was no coincidence — Facebook is planning to launch a new version of its iPhone application in September that will make the app more like the newly-redesigned web site. So, the deeper rationale for the web site redesign …
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Richard MacManus / ReadWriteWeb:
10 Promising Web Platforms — In this post we review 10 promising developer platforms for the Web. We're not talking about the obvious ones either, like Facebook, iPhone, OpenSocial or even Twitter. Those have been covered extensively already. The list below features some of our favorite ‘lesser known’ web developer platforms.
Maggie Shiels / BBC:
Intel unites the internet with TV — Intel has signed a deal with Yahoo to drive web applications to TV and refresh the viewing experience. — The collaboration will product a “Widget Channel” that lets viewers e-mail friends, trade stocks or check the weather while watching TV.
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Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Verisign's Personal Identity Portal Is Half Way To Password Bliss — Verisign's new Personal Identity Portal (PIP from now on) isn't the sexiest application out there to help you manage passwords. But it has Verisign's strong reputation for security behind it, and it is a surprisingly easy way to manage website credentials.
Discussion:
David Recordon's Blog
Amazon Web Services Blog:
Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) - Bring Us Your Data — A few months ago I talked about our plans to offer a persistent storage feature for Amazon EC2. At that time I indicated that the service was in a limited alpha release with a small number of customers.
Michael Masnick / Techdirt:
If You're Looking To Learn Basic Economics, Here's A Free Textbook — Against Monopoly points us to an LA Times story about an economics professor from Caltech, R. Preston McAfee, who has written what he calls an “open source” economics textbook. You can download the textbook for free …
Discussion:
The Equity Kicker
Erica Sadun / TUAW:
The Rumor Room: iTunes Unlimited — By definition, nearly all tips we receive about Apple future product intros are wrong. After all, we're not Engadget. People aren't going to risk their jobs to deliver insider information. — That being said, a tip that shot into our mailbox …
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MG Siegler / VentureBeat:
Spotted: FriendFeed Beta — coming soon — A new version of FriendFeed, which may or may not be called “FriendFeed Beta” is in the works, FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor just confirmed to me. — Earlier tonight I was going through my Flickr traffic logs of all things when I noticed the mysterious beta.friendfeed.com domain.
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
OpenSocial Now Reaches 350 Million Users, And Growing — Six months ago, OpenSocial was nothing but a list of promised partnerships. But the social network application platform backed by Google has made a lot of progress since then as those partners started to go live with their OpenSocial Apps.
Bill Ray / The Register:
Nokia admits major Series 40 security problems — Nokia has admitted that the security flaws exposed by Adam Gowdiak of Security Explorations are genuine, and that a miscreant exploiting them could do whatever they like to a Series 40 phone just by knowing the phone number.
Todd Shields / Bloomberg:
Comcast to Slow Some Web Traffic for Up to 20 Minutes — Aug. 20 (Bloomberg) — Comcast Corp. plans to slow Internet service to its heaviest users during periods of congestion, after regulators ordered the company to devise a new method for managing its Web traffic.
