Top Items:
Paul Graham:
Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy — The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies. — When Microsoft and Apple were founded. — As those examples suggest, a recession may not be such a bad time to start a startup.
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Don Dodge / Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing:
Start a company in a recession? Absolutely! — Now is a great time to start a company. Why? Because great people are available to join you, VCs are loaded with cash, and office space is available cheap. Everything is cheap and readily available in a recession.
Prince McLean / AppleInsider:
Jobs responds to outrage over MacBook's missing FireWire [u] — In one of his characteristically terse email replies, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs has reportedly told one Mac user that changes in video camera technology have reduced the need for FireWire on his company's 13-inch MacBooks.
Discussion:
Gadget Lab, BetaNews, Infinite Loop, The Mac Observer, Computerworld, TechSpot and Technologizer
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Peter Cohen / Macworld:FireWire's MacBook absence—inconvenience or fatal flaw?
Discussion:
Edible Apple
MG Siegler / VentureBeat:
See who knew how to quit you on Twitter with Qwitter — We all lose followers on the micro-messaging service Twitter from time to time. It happens to the best of us. Sometimes it's because we go on 25 tweet (Twitter message) political rants in 5 minutes.
Discussion:
The Web Services Report, TechCrunch UK, Mashable!, PR 2.0, Download Squad and Things That
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Keeping Count: The TechCrunch Layoff Tracker — After Silicon Valley woke up to the economic crisis last week and VCs rang the alarm bells, startups are starting to heed the call and tighten their belts for a long winter. As the slide above from Sequoia Capital illustrates …
Discussion:
Scobleizer
Rich Barton / Zillow® Blog:
Difficult Times, Difficult Decisions — This week we are reducing our workforce by 25%. This was an incredibly painful decision for me and the leadership team, but, in the end, we concluded that we had no choice but to securely batten down the hatches as we sail into a major economic storm.
Kasper Jade / AppleInsider:
Apple's Snow Leopard to sport Cocoa Finder and ImageBoot — Apple next-generation Snow Leopard operating system will introduce a massive re-write of the Mac OS X Finder and debut a new feature called ImageBoot, AppleInsider has learned. — Cocoa-based Finder
Brian Garrity / New York Post:
FRIENDS OF THE BAND — ZUCKERBERG PONDERS FACEBOOK MUSIC BIZ — Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg is plotting a possible push into the digital-music business in the wake of MySpace's launch of MySpace Music last month. — The surging social-networking giant is talking to a number …
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Rebecca / Electronic Frontier Foundation:
EFF Challenges Constitutionality of Telecom Immunity in Federal Court — San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Thursday challenged the constitutionality of a law aimed at granting retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that participated in the president's illegal domestic wiretapping program.
Discussion:
DSLreports, InformationWeek, p2pnet, Business Wire, GMSV, Docu-Drama, Slashdot, Threat Level and Boing Boing
RELATED:
Cyrus Farivar / Salon:New EFF brief argues telecom immunity law is unconstitutional
Discussion:
GigaOM
Tim Bradshaw / Financial Times:
Google adds gambling to revenue search — Google is allowing gambling advertisements in its search results in Britain - for the first time anywhere in the world since a self-imposed moratorium in 2004. — Industry experts say the search engine, which welcomed the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh …
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AppleInsider:
Due next from Apple: refreshed 20- and 24-inch iMacs — Assuming last minute snags are avoided, the coming weeks should bring new iMacs, rounding out Apple's 2008 hardware introductions as the company enters the holiday shopping season with one of its strongest product portfolios ever.
Mark Finkle / Mark Finkle's Weblog:
Fennec - M9 (User Experience Alpha) — Fennec (Mobile Firefox) has reached milestone 9, which is also our first alpha! We're calling this release the User Experience alpha. The last eight milestones were building up to getting a stable browser with an easy to use interface.
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Kara Swisher / BoomTown:
What Yahoo's Looming Costs Cuts Actually Mean (Not as Many Layoffs as You Think) — A lot has been written about the need for drastic layoffs at Yahoo, including reports that the troubled company was preparing to fire from 3,000 to 3,500 of its 15,000 employees.
Stephen Shankland / CNET News:
Newer Chrome, Firefox show speed improvements — The SunSpider test shows the newest Chrome build beating all comers in JavaScript performance—for now at least. Test results reported in seconds, so smaller is better. — Correction 12:00 p.m. PDT: This report has been updated …
BBC:
Man killed wife in Facebook row — A man has been jailed for life for stabbing his wife to death over a posting she made on the social networking site Facebook. — Wayne Forrester, 34, told police he was devastated that his wife Emma, also 34, had changed her online profile to “single” days after he had moved out.
The Boy Genius / Boy Genius Report:
RIM announcing BlackBerry Storm-alike for U.S. at WES 2009, more devices — Look, we really don't want to do this to you, (well, we kind of do) but we've just got the word from one of our RIM ninjas that there will be a BlackBerry Storm-type device announced at WES 2009.
Discussion:
CrackBerry.com blogs, Unwired View, BB Geeks, I4U News, Gadgetell, InformationWeek, SlashGear, Engadget, Electronista, Gizmodo, Ubergizmo, BlackBerryNews.com, Crave, IntoMobile, CrunchGear and BlackBerry Cool
Juan Carlos Perez / PC World:
Gmail Back After 30 Hours Down — A Gmail outage that lasted about 30 hours and affected some Google Apps customers was finally fixed late on Thursday. — At around 9:30 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time, a Google spokesman said via e-mail that the problem had been solved.
John Gruber / Daring Fireball:
Translation From Weasel-Speak to English of the Entirety of Duncan Riley's Second Post-MacBook-Introduction-Event Update to His Widely-Cited Week-Ago Report That Apple Was Going to Announce an ‘$800 Laptop’ — With regard to “Update 2” here. … The entire report was completely wrong.
Dylan Stableford / Folio:
Mygazines Folds — Controversial magazine sharing site shuttered. — RELATED POST: R.I.P. Mygazines, 2008-2008 — Just weeks after settling a lawsuit with dozens of publishers, Mygazines, the controversial Web site that allowed users to share digital copies of hundreds of magazines, has closed.
Peter Kafka / Silicon Alley Insider:
Video Network Heavy Fires 14% Of Staff* — The snap consensus among tech and Web outfits who are sloughing off staff this fall: something in the 15%- to 30% range seems to be the way to go. Today's entry: Dude-centric publisher and ad network Heavy, which is laying off 12 people, which it says amounts to 14% of its staff.
Eric Eldon / VentureBeat:
Search engine startup SearchMe cuts 20 percent of staff — The streets of Silicon Valley are running red this week. The latest startup to pare down is search engine SearchMe, a company with high-profile investors and a warchest of nearly $40 million. — It reduced its staff by two-thirds …
Peter Cohen / Macworld:
DisplayPort: What you need to know — With laptop updates, Apple supports emerging display standard — Apple didn't just introduce new laptops Tuesday; it also introduced a new term to the vocabulary of Mac users—DisplayPort. The Mini DisplayPort found on new MacBooks …
Discussion:
Salon
