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.
RELATED:
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.
Discussion:
Startup Chatter
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.
RELATED:
Peter Cohen / Macworld:FireWire's MacBook absence—inconvenience or fatal flaw?
Discussion:
Edible Apple
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 …
RELATED:
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 …
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.
RELATED:
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, Crave, Electronista, Gizmodo, Unwired View, BB Geeks, Engadget, SlashGear, I4U News, BlackBerryNews.com, Gadgetell, InformationWeek, IntoMobile, CrunchGear and BlackBerry Cool
GamesIndustry.biz:
LittleBigPlanet release delayed worldwide — The release of Sony's highly anticipated PlayStation 3 title LittleBigPlanet has been delayed worldwide. — The title has been delayed due to references to the Qu'ran on the in-game soundtrack. — “During the review process prior to the release …
Discussion:
Kotaku, Joystiq, PlayStation.Blog, Destructoid, bit-tech.net, videogaming247, PS3 Fanboy and DailyGamesNews.com
RELATED:
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.
Tim Westergren / Pandora:
A Sad Day — This is a very sad day for Pandora, and for me personally. Today we reduced our staff from 140 to 120 employees. Like virtually every company, Pandora is not immune to the challenges presented by the current economic turmoil. We are trying to react quickly and responsibly to the new environment.
Discussion:
Portfolio, VentureBeat, paidContent.org, GigaOM, TechCrunch, Valleywag, AppScout, Webware.com and Tech Confidential
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.
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.
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, Salon, Business Wire, Docu-Drama, p2pnet, GMSV, Slashdot, Threat Level and Boing Boing
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.
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 …
Philipp Lenssen / Google Blogoscoped:
Footnotes in Google Docs — You can now add footnotes in Google Docs documents, as the Google help center explains. Just click anywhere in the document and pick Insert -> Footnote from the menu. The resulting document can display as shown in the screenshot, with a collapsable gray box next to the text …
Discussion:
Google Operating System
Stephen Shankland / CNET News:
Google hedges against foreign currency swings — In recent months, financial analysts have expressed concern that Google's financial results could be hurt by foreign-exchange rate changes. But Google said Thursday that it has taken measures to insulate itself from the potential problem.
Kara Swisher / BoomTown:
The Verbatim Transcript of Ballmer on Yahoo Deal: Separating Fiction From Truth — While many would like to see Microsoft reignite its bid for Yahoo, and as much as even good reporters insinuated that its CEO Steve Ballmer (pictured here) said yesterday in an appearance that he was interested …
Discussion:
Valleywag
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.
Dianne See Morrison / mocoNews.net:
Amazon's UK Launch Of Kindle Delayed — Amazon won't be releasing its Kindle wireless reader in the UK in time for Christmas, thanks to the complex agreements that it must secure with European operators to ensure the gadget works. In the US, Kindle uses whispernet, the Amazon data MVNO that uses the Sprint …
Henry Blodget / Silicon Alley Insider:
Desperate Google Will Now Take Gambling Ads — Google's Q3 growth rate in the UK is a sign of things to come elsewhere: a measly 17%. Why was growth so slow? In part because of the economy and in part because of market saturation. Google utterly dominates search in the UK, as it will soon do in the US and everywhere else.
