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:
eWeek, AppScout, Gizmodo, CNET News.com, Newlaunches.com, Electronista, MEDIANAMA and Digg
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.
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Larry Dignan / Between the Lines:
Amazon: Persistent storage open for EC2 — Amazon said Thursday that its Elastic Block Store feature is now available to all of its EC2 Web service customers. The move gives Amazon Web Services a full storage suite delivered as a service. — EC2 is Amazon's storage service …
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:
The Register, All about Microsoft, Mashable!, CrunchGear, AppScout, Scobleizer, LiveSide, MediaFile, GottaBeMobile and ReadWriteWeb
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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:
Facebook developers to factor in age, location — Facebook has announced modifications to its developer application programming interface so that the creators of third-party applications 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
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.
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 …
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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:
Datamation, The Register, CNET News.com, Gearlog, Between the Lines, CrunchGear, Informationoverlord, PalmAddicts, Boing Boing Gadgets, Gizmodo, mocoNews.net and Digg
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.
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.
Joel Hruska / Ars Technica:
Intel announces dual-core Atom, chains it to 945C chipset — It looks like we'll be seing Intel's new dual-core Atom 330 on the market sooner rather than later. The chip will launch in September accompanied by a refreshed D945GCLF2 motherboard, and is targeted at entry-level computer users …
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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
Ryan Grove / wonko.com:
Yahoo! Search brings Search Assist, SearchMonkey, and more to the iPhone — In June, my boss came to me with a challenge: bring the full Yahoo! Search experience—including SearchMonkey, Search Assist, shortcuts, and other awesome Yahoo! Search features—to the iPhone with as few compromises as possible.
Dave Rubert / NaviGadget:
tomtom PRO 4000 and 8000 — TomTom just introduced what they call a ‘PRO’ series designed for the mobile workforce. The first two models in the series are TomTom PRO 4000 and TomTom PRO 8000 which will cost $330 and $460 respectively. — As far as hardware there's no difference from the non-pro models.
