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 …
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:
All about Microsoft, Mashable!, Scobleizer, PC World, AppScout, LiveSide, GottaBeMobile, Channel 10, Personal Technology and ReadWriteWeb
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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).
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.
Discussion:
GigaOM, All Things Distributed, Data Center Knowledge, RightScale Blog, Amazon Web Services … and TechCrunchIT
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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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Caroline McCarthy / CNET News.com:
Age and location restriction now available to Facebook developers — Facebook has announced modifications to its developer application program interface (API) so that the creators of third-party apps can restrict their reach by demographic—more specifically, by age or location.
Discussion:
Inside Facebook
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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
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.
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.
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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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.
Dana Blankenhorn / Open Source:
The new Intel gets open source mojo with SpikeSource — The biggest business story of the year may be the transformation of Intel from a tech-driven chipmaker to a marketing-driven products-and-services company. — I have talked about this with regard to health care but the transformation is more far-ranging than that.
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
Larry Dignan / Between the Lines:
Dell bets on Salesforce.com's platform as a service — Amid a quarter that Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff called “spectacular,” but spooked analysts worried about future growth was an interesting nugget: Dell has jumped on the platform as a service bandwagon.
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.
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.
