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.
Discussion:
Mark Evans, Silicon Alley Insider, VentureBeat, Between the Lines, GottaBeMobile and Gawker
RELATED:
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 …
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 …
Discussion:
Scobleizer, Mashable!, LiveSide, PC World, AppScout, Personal Technology, GottaBeMobile, Channel 10, ReadWriteWeb and Data Mining
RELATED:
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).
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.
RELATED:
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.
RELATED:
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, CNET News.com, Between the Lines, Boing Boing Gadgets, CrunchGear, Informationoverlord, Gizmodo, mocoNews.net and Digg
RELATED:
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.
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 …
RELATED:
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
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.
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.
RELATED:
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 …
RELATED:
Jonathan D. Glater / New York Times:
Welcome, Freshmen. Have an iPod. — Taking a step that professors may view as a bit counterproductive, some universities are doling out Apple iPhones and Internet-capable iPods to students. — The always-on Internet devices raise some novel possibilities, like tracking where students congregate.
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.
Fred / A VC:
Ten Things I Want On My Mobile Phone — 1) Shazam for places - I blogged about this when I was in Scotland earlier this month. I met a company at TechStars yesterday that might be able to build it. I hope they do. — 2) Shazam for people - same idea. even more possibilities for this one.
Discussion:
Mobile Industry News
Robert Andrews / paidContent.org:
Microsoft Rejigs For Commercial Search, Multimap Leads The Way — Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) is restructuring its Search Business Group to add a new group geared toward commercial search. It's picked Multimap CEO Jeff Kelisky to be GM of this new Commercial Search unit, which covers Live Search cashback …
Discussion:
Search Engine Land
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.
