Top Items:
Chrix Finne / Google Reader:
Is Your Web Truly World-Wide? — The Reader team is happy to announce that another 20% project has come to fruition: automatic translation in Reader! Post by 20% volunteer and glottology expert, Brett Bavar. — Believe it or not, the web truly is world-wide.
Claire Cain Miller / Bits:
Vacation Rental Site Raises $250 Million — HomeAway, the largest online vacation rental marketplace, announced Tuesday that it has raised $250 million in venture capital, an extraordinarily large amount of money for an Internet company. The new round, which is the biggest a tech company …
Discussion:
Silicon Alley Insider, TechFlash, TechCrunch, PE Hub Blog, VC Ratings, VentureBeat and Business Week
Thomas Ricker / Engadget:
BlackBerry 9530 Storm pricing revealed on VZW staging server — Ah, now this is a bit more solid pricing information. Verizon's testman pre-launch site now lists the BlackBerry 9530 Storm for $219.99 under a 2 year contract. Not quite below the $199 threshold set by the iPhone 3G as predicted by some analysts.
Discussion:
InformationWeek, SlashGear, Boy Genius Report, Between the Lines, SlipperyBrick.com and MobileCrunch
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Spot.Us Experiments With Citizen-Funded Community Journalism — Newspapers are dying across the country. Local papers are shutting down, Gannett is laying off 3,000 people, the Christian Science Monitor will no longer put out a print edition, and even the New York Times is facing a serious cash crunch.
RELATED:
David Cohn / DigiDave:Launching The Spot.Us Ship: Community Funded Reporting
Discussion:
...My heart's in Accra, LIVEdigitally, MediaShift Idea Lab, Susan Mernit's Blog and Smart Mobs
Jacqui Cheng / Infinite Loop:
Parallels Desktop 4.0 gets a 50 percent speed boost over 3.0 — Don't look now, but Parallels is back with the final release of Parallels Desktop 4.0 today. The release, which we heard a little bit about in September, does indeed now have full support for DirectX 9 and OpenGL 2.0, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Martin / Security and the Net:
AVG virus scanner removes critical Windows file — An update for the AVG virus scanner released yesterday contained an incorrect virus signature, which led it to think user32.dll contained the Trojan Horses PSW.Banker4.APSA or Generic9TBN. AVG then recommended deleting this file …
Jessica E. Vascellaro / Wall Street Journal:
Facebook Tries to Woo Marketers — Firm's ‘Engagement Ads’ Amplify Its Push to Curry Favor With Madison Avenue — Despite its surging Internet audience, Facebook Inc. has yet to prove it can wring steady revenue out of advertisers. Now it's trying a new tactic to woo Madison Avenue.
Jessica Dolcourt / Webware.com:
Opera Mini 4.2 beta is a mini update — With so much energy and progress in the mobile browser space these past two months (see here and here), you would expect the makers of the venerable Opera Mini browser to release an update that makes real progress on its free browser for Java phones.
Wayne Chang / Facebook Blog:
A Rush for Mobile — When we recently added the ability to comment on your friends' status updates to the Facebook mobile site, we didn't expect that we would receive nearly a million status comments in the first 24 hours. — This may not seem like much, but it was actually part of a really important change.
John Mahoney / Gizmodo:
How To: Max Out Apple TV's Potential With Boxee — This is a guide that, if followed, will unchain your Apple TV from its cruel iTunes tether, turning it into the useful living room conduit of music, video and web-based content it should have been all along via the media center software Boxee.
Kara Swisher / BoomTown:
Van Natta Takes Playlist CEO Job, With New Investment By Pittman — Former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta will take the CEO job at a music discovery site called Playlist, a move that had been speculated last week, after he did not end up taking another position as head of MySpace Music.
David Kravets / Threat Level:
Guns N' Roses Uploader to Plead Guilty — The Los Angeles man arrested on accusations that he uploaded nine pre-released Guns N' Roses songs from the upcoming Chinese Democracy album has agreed to plead guilty to one federal count of copyright infringement as part of a deal, authorities said Monday.
Thomas Ricker / Engadget:
Optoma teams with Apple to launch DLP Pico projector in Japan — At long last, an official release date for Texas Instruments' DLP Pico projector. Mark it down, December 1st is the launch (delivered by December 19th) of the “world's smallest / lightest” (51 × 105 × 17-mm / 120g) projector under the Optoma PK-101 branding.
Eric Savitz / Tech Trader Daily:
Google: Goldman Trims Ests, Target On Macro Troubles — No, Google (GOOG) is not immune from the downturn. — The latest analyst to reach that conclusion: Goldman Sachs' James Mitchell. Late Monday, he trimmed his profit estimates for the company, citing several factors all of which stem …
Jesus Diaz / Gizmodo:
MacBook Nano Looks Like It Came from Cupertino — I don't know if these MacBook Nanos are a custom hack or if they come from some kind of shady outlet selling retrofitted MSI U100 laptops made to look like shiny—and fictional—Apple notebooks with Mac OS X installed.
Discussion:
Boing Boing Gadgets, Guardian, JustinFlood.com, MacRumors, LAPTOP Magazine, Gadget Lab, PalmAddicts, MacBlogz, Liliputing, 9 to 5 Mac, TUAW and digg.com
Eric Krangel / Silicon Alley Insider:
Rock Band Creators Score $300 Million-Plus Payday (VIA) — When Harmonix founders Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy — the guys behind mega-hit games Guitar Hero and later, Rock Band — sold their company to Viacom's (VIA) MTV for a reported $175 million in 2006, the deal didn't end there.
Kate Holton / Reuters:
Vodafone to focus on cost control after revenue cut — LONDON (Reuters) - Mobile phone group Vodafone cut its full-year revenue outlook for the second time in four months on Tuesday but said it would maintain profits and boost free cash flow by cutting 1 billion pounds ($1.6 billion) of costs.
Stan Schroeder / Mashable!:
RefSeek is Google for Students and Scientists — Google used to be a great tool for researchers, but then it got swarmed by billions of links from companies trying to sell you something. Clearing your way through all this information can be (and often is) counterproductive.
Richard MacManus / ReadWriteWeb:
Exclusive: First Look at Blue Spruce, IBM's Next Generation Browser Platform — IBM is about to commit itself heavily to browser-based applications. The giant IT company is quietly working on a project called Blue Spruce, which aims to create a fully browser-based application development platform.
Om Malik / GigaOM:
For FCC Chair, Obama Should Look Outside the Beltway — BusinessWeek today has a short list of the people being considered to head up the Federal Communications Commission. The decision as to who will be appointed FCC Chair is a critical one, for in coming years the country faces …
David Kaplan / paidContent.org:
Earnings: Sirius XM Loss Balloons On $4.8 Billion Impairment Charge; Revs Grow 16 Percent — The newly merged Sirius XM satellite radio company took a big swallow of bitter medicine in Q3, reporting a loss of $4.88 billion ($1.93 per share) versus last year's loss of $119.6 million …
Timothy Lee / Techdirt:
A History Lesson For Those Advocating Network Neutrality Laws — Over at News.com, Declan McCullagh writes that Barack Obama's election as the next president of the United States has bolstered the hopes of those hoping to impose network neutrality regulations on the Internet.
Discussion:
The Technology Liberation …
Hallyu Tech:
IRIVER CELL PHONE AVAILABLE MARCH 9TH — Reigncom's President, Myoung Woo Lee has announced that iriver will be releasing a cell phone early next year. The new iriver phone will be available from Korean carrier KT. The iriver phone concept had been spotted at CES 2008 …
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
On its second try, Sandbridge promises a revolution with the Holy Grail of wireless chips — Sandbridge Technologies is announcing today that it has created a chip that could represent the Holy Grail of wireless computing: a processor that can perform software-defined radio with low cost and low power consumption.
Discussion:
CNET News
Priya Ganapati / Gadget Lab:
Google Fixes Embarrassing Android Bug — Google has fixed an a potentially devastating bug in its newly released Android operating system. — Some users of T-Mobile's G1 phone found that typing any word on the phone's keyboard — in any application — sent whatever they typed to the phone's command line shell.
Anthony Ha / VentureBeat:
Yahoo's BrowserPlus continues to dismantle wall between browser and desktop — BrowserPlus, Yahoo's Google Gears competitor for allowing web applications to work with your desktop, rolled out two cool new features today: Drag-and-drop file uploads and desktop notifications. — These are smart additions.
Guy Kawasaki / How to Change the World:
Looking for Mr. Goodtweet: How to Pick Up Followers on Twitter — At 10:15 pm I discovered that I had not brought a Macbook power supply on the trip. I was in a hotel on Coronado Island, and early the next morning I was flying to an aircraft carrier off San Diego for an overnight visit.
