Top Items:
Ryan Block:
New MacBook Pro: now with 20% less battery power — Apple touted some pretty decent battery life numbers at the new MacBook / MacBook Pro press event this week: up to five hours on the Pro with discrete graphics off, and four hours with it on (both surely assuming ideal low-power conditions).
Discussion:
Gizmodo
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Arn / MacRumors:
Apple Enabled GPU Hardware Decoding of h.264 on New MacBooks, Pros and Airs? — Tonight, forum user MGLXP noticed that playback of 1080p high definition trailers from Apple took far less CPU time on his new aluminum MacBook (28% CPU) as compared to his old MacBook Pro (100% CPU).
Henry Blodget / Silicon Alley Insider:
Twitter: We'll Announce Our Secret Business Model Early Next Year — “It's like the stupidest question in the world,” Fred Wilson said of the robotic query chirped at Twitter people in every interview ("But how are you going to make money?") — Given the rate at which Twitter has seized …
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David Leppard / Times of London:
Passports will be needed to buy mobile phones — Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance. — Phone buyers would have to present a passport …
David Chartier / Ars Technica:
Google monetizes start page, vocal minority gets vocal — If you love something, set it free. Then, if you're lucky, maybe you can figure out a way to make money with it. Despite what appears to be a vocal minority that is unhappy with the changes, that's what Google may have finally …
Discussion:
Micro Persuasion
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Destruction Of Bloglines Now Complete; Founder Prepares To Switch To Google Reader — Users who hadn't already left Bloglines for Google Reader and other functional RSS readers are doing so now, largely because Bloglines has stopped working and the company has done absolutely nothing …
Discussion:
TomsTechBlog.com
Miguel Helft / New York Times:
Changing That Home Page? Take Baby Steps — A FEW weeks ago, Yahoo began what may be its biggest overhaul of its home page. But if you are among the roughly 100 million Americans who stop by Yahoo.com every month, the odds are that you haven't noticed any changes.
Ellen Knickmeyer / Washington Post:
Al-Qaeda Web Forums Abruptly Taken Offline — Separately, Sunnis and Shiites Wage Online War — Four of the five main online forums that al-Qaeda's media wing uses to distribute statements by Osama bin Laden and other extremists have been disabled since mid-September, monitors of the Web sites say.
Steve Gillmor / TechCrunchIT:
FriendFeed to add Realtime APIs next week — Play in Popup | Download — Twitter appears to have an unassailable lead in users and their resultant Follow clouds. Though Track is dead and IM is postponed indefinitely, the service has added a political track page with a company-selected keyword cluster around the political race.
Michelle Meyers / CNET News:
Move over pinochle, Web surfing stimulates aging brains — Functional MRI brain scans show how searching the Internet dramatically engages brain neural networks (in red). The image on the left displays brain activity while reading a book; the image on the right displays activity while engaging in an Internet search.
Discussion:
Freakonomics
Cameron Baker / TheTechLounge:
Mitsubishi LaserVue 65" HDTV - We Meet Again … Specifications — Images — Introduction — Kurtis and I got another chance to check out Mitsubishi's LaserVue DLP set in the early morning hours this Tuesday, and this time we were armed with some juicy, hand-picked HD goodness.
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Some Of These Layoffs Aren't Really Layoffs — I've spoken to a lot of CEOs this week who are going through layoffs or who are thinking of going through going through layoffs. The list of those who've pulled the trigger gets longer every day, and the unparty seems to just be getting started based on the email flow that we're seeing.
Anthony Ha / VentureBeat:
Surprise! Venture investments falling — No one should be surprised to hear that venture investment dropped during the last three months, with notable decreases in first-time financings and Internet investment. And the worst is probably still to come, since Q3 numbers don't reflect the recent meltdown of the finance industry.
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PE Hub Blog
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