Top Items:
TechFlash:
Bill Gates' mysterious new company — Just months after his Microsoft farewell, Bill Gates is quietly creating a new company — complete with high-tech office space, a cryptic name and even its own trademark. — Public documents describe the new Gates entity — bgC3 LLC — as a “think tank.”
Ashlee Vance / New York Times:
Sun Loses Co-Founder to Start-Up — MENLO PARK, Calif. — Andreas von Bechtolsheim, a brilliant billionaire who has created some of the best-selling computer systems in the industry, is resigning as chief architect of Sun Microsystems to focus on a start-up that is challenging another industry giant, Cisco Systems.
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Om Malik / GigaOM:
Ex-Cisco SVP to Lead Andy Bechtolsheim's Latest Switch Startup — Andy Bechtolsheim may be well known for co-founding Sun Microsystems, but the reality is that his list of accomplishments is much longer. Whenever there is a major infrastructure technology shift, you can bet …
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
LinkedIn Announces $22.7 Million Infusion From SAP, Goldman Sachs, and McGraw Hill — Business networking startup LinkedIn is announcing today that it has raised another $22.7 million, on top of the $53 million D round it closed last June at a $1 billion valuation.
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Matt Buchanan / Gizmodo:
Confirmed: Apple Can Enable Dual GPU and On-the-Fly Switching in MacBook Pro — Nvidia dropped by today to demo some of the awesome things that the GeForce 9400M in the new MacBooks can do that Intel's integrated graphics just can't touch, and to discuss a few technical points.
Walter S. Mossberg / Personal Technology:
Apple Polishes Popular MacBook for a Higher Price — Apple's MacBook laptop, the company's low-end portable computer aimed at average consumers, isn't just any old product. It's the best-selling Macintosh in history, at a time when Mac sales are growing much faster than sales of PCs in the U.S. overall.
Discussion:
Silicon Alley Insider
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Weblogs, Inc. Three Years Later: Impressive Page View And Revenue Growth — Earlier this month News Corp. celebrated the three year anniversary of the acquisition of MySpace. Today, AOL does the same for the Weblogs, Inc. blog network they acquired in October 2005.
James Callan / Bloomberg:
Comcast Doubles Internet Speed, Sells Premium Service — Oct. 22 (Bloomberg) — Comcast Corp., the largest U.S. cable provider, will double the speed of its Internet service for current subscribers and offer even faster connections at additional cost to improve movie, music and game downloads.
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Eric Eldon / VentureBeat:
Facebook Music is getting its act together — Facebook is indeed working on a plan to deeply integrate streaming music into its site, I've learned. The details of a rumor published last week in the New York Post are, from my understanding, basically accurate.
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Svetlana Gladkova / Profy:
Russian Antimonopoly Service Bans Google Acquisition of Begun — Back in July we reported on acquisition of a Russian contextual advertising company Begun (one of the largest companies working in the field in Russia) by Google. At the time we suggested that a combination of contextual advertising sold …
edilee:
Touching Firefox — I finally upgraded from my iBook G4 to one of those new shiny aluminum MacBooks last Tuesday, so over the weekend, I got to play around with the big buttonless glass trackpad. I noticed that I often used the 4-finger gestures to show all windows or the desktop but rarely used any 3-finger ones.
Discussion:
webmonkey, Gizmodo, jkOnTheRun, The Apple Blog, Mozilla Links, Gadget Lab, Ubergizmo, Lifehacker and Crave
Owen Thomas / Valleywag:
Tough times, unoriginal blog posts — Mahalo founder: “Tough times, hard decisions.” Zillow founder: “Difficult times, difficult decisions.” Seesmic founder: “Tough times. Tough decisions.” The only thing easy in these times is what to headline your post about the employees you just laid off.
Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch:
Moblyng Lets You Build Slideshows On Your iPhone — Moblyng, the company formerly known as FlipTrack that is focused on taking Flash-based slideshows to mobile platforms, has released an application on Apple's App Store that allows users to create entertaining slidesshows from their iPhones.
Discussion:
Mashable!
Peter Bright / Ars Technica:
Windows 7 before 2010? Magic 8-ball says “don't count on it” — Last week Microsoft announced that the name that the product codenamed Windows 7 would retail with that same name. At the time, the company refrained from announcing a ship date, with current predictions ranging from late 2009 to early 2010.
Mary Jo Foley / All about Microsoft:
Microsoft to release critical Windows security patch on October 23 — It's not Patch Tuesday today, but Microsoft is pushing out a Windows security patch, marked as “Critical,” on Thursday October 23. — Microsoft has been attempting to bundle up all of its security fixes and patches so they can be delivered once monthly.
Lee Bruno / Guardian:
US military targets social nets — The social networking landscape could change beyond recognition with technology that maps the skills and needs of users — A new startup is helping reshape the social networking landscape by using artificial intelligence to automate the process of identifying …
Jordy Yager / The Hill:
iPhones are a must-have for Congress — House members in the next Congress could get Apple's iPhone as their newest communication gadget. — The Chief Administrative Office (CAO), which oversees the communications systems for the House, has begun testing a small number of iPhones within …
Discussion:
IntoMobile, Boing Boing Gadgets, Gizmodo, Cult of Mac, TUAW, Life On the Wicked Stage, Gadget Lab, Edible Apple, The iPhone Blog, Hardware 2.0 and Obsessable
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Don't Hold Your Breath For The Facebook Android App — The bad blood between Facebook and Google may go deeper than anyone has really realized to date. The spat became public earlier this year when Facebook banned Google's Friend Connect, theoretically over security issues (but really over competitive issues).
Marci Alboher / New York Times:
The Care and Feeding of Entrepreneurs — GUY KAWASAKI is a best-selling author of seven books on entrepreneurship, a founding partner at Garage Technology Ventures, the co-founder of Alltop.com, an “online magazine rack,” and a popular public speaker and blogger.
Discussion:
Internetnews Blog
James Lee / GamesIndustry.biz:
Sony cuts earnings forecasts by 57 per cent — Sony has slashed its earnings forecasts by 57 per cent and downgraded its operating profit forecast for the full year ending in March 2009. — The electronics' company had expected to make JPY 470 billion (USD 4.8 billion/GBP 2.9 billion) …
Discussion:
videogaming247
Chris Albrecht / NewTeeVee:
Netflix Streaming to Samsung Blu-Ray Players — Well, we've been waiting to see what the fourth and final “mystery” set-top box from Netflix would be, and now we know. You'll now be able to stream Netflix content through two of Samsung's Blu-Ray DVD players, and the two companies say they'll …
Discussion:
Silicon Alley Insider, Between the Lines, Yahoo! Tech, Gadget Lab, Electronista, Zatz Not Funny!, Engadget, Reuters, paidContent.org and PR Newswire
Yahoo! Search Blog:
Inquisitor Expands to Firefox and IE — Earlier this year, we launched Inquisitor 3 for Safari. Since then, users have been asking (demanding) that we make Inquisitor available on other browser platforms. This evening, we're doing just that with the launch of Inquisitor Firefox 2 and 3 and Internet Explorer 7 and 8.
Brier Dudley / Brier Dudley's blog:
Zillow and Redfin vets launch insta-sharing network — It's a scary time to be launching a startup, especially one in the crowded photo sharing-messaging-social networking space... But the founders of Seattle's Allyall must have a good sense of timing - they left real estate startups Zillow …
Discussion:
TechFlash
Matt Marshall / VentureBeat:
The German start-up scene: Copycats, but getting smarter — I've been in Germany since Sunday for the Berlin Web 2.0 Expo, where I participated in a workshop to help European start-ups improve their pitches. — I'll talk about some of the best start-ups at the event — Doodle, Plista …
NewTeeVee:
TiVo Adds Jaman, CinemaNow — Written by Adrian Covert. — Following previous revelations that TiVo would be teaming up with CinemaNow to provide users with Disney movie rentals straight from their DVRs, they appear ready to unleash that content to the public, with digital film provider Jaman.com also along for the ride.
Dan Frommer / Silicon Alley Insider:
Steve Jobs: We Still Haven't Figured Out The Living Room (AAPL) — Not Steve Jobs' most important comment during last night's earnings call, but still interesting: Apple's (AAPL) chief admits no one has succeeded yet at bridging your living room TV with the Internet — including Apple …
