Top Items:
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.
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Nicholas Carlson / Silicon Alley Insider:
MySpace Ad Sales Out-Hustling Facebook's — Everyone knows Facebook is having a hard time selling ads. But did you know how badly it's being outsold by less popular social network MySpace? Jessica Vascellaro laid it out in this morning's Journal: — [Facebook] says 70 …
Discussion:
HipMojo.com
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:
Boy Genius Report, IntoMobile, CrackBerry.com blogs, Between the Lines, CrunchGear, I4U News, SlashGear, InformationWeek, Electronista and Obsessable
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.
Discussion:
Technologizer, AppleInsider, The Register, TheAppleBlog, Virtualization.com, Gizmodo, Macsimum News and eWeek
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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 …
Discussion:
PC World, AVG Free Forum, The Register, blogs.chron.com, AppScout, The Tech Report, GottaBeMobile.com and Slashdot
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 …
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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.
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Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Land:Google Reader Now Translating Your Subscriptions
Discussion:
Download Squad
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.
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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.
Tricia Duryee / mocoNews.net:
Facebook Grows Mobile Team And Reports 15 Million Active Mobile Users — Facebook said on its blog today that it's beefing up its mobile team and making improvements to take advantage of a growing number of people who are using the social network while on the go.
Discussion:
mobilesyrup.com
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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.
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Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:Confirmed: Owen Van Natta Finds A Home At Project Playlist; Bob Pittman Invests
Discussion:
Bits
Chris Sherman / Search Engine Land:
DeepDyve Explores The Invisible Web — As web search engines have improved over the years, there's been less attention paid to an “inconvenient truth” about the indexes of our favorite information finding tools—namely, that search engines still miss the lion's share of information available on the web.
Chippy / UMPCPortal:
Free PDF Report. Ultra Mobile Computing Buyers Guide. — To all the websites, companies and visitors that I've learned so much from in the last few years, here's something back. The 5-part, 11,000 word, 28-page Ultra Mobile Computing Buyers Guide as a single re-flowable PDF file.
Bobby White / Wall Street Journal:
Cisco Plans Major Leap in Hardware — Cisco Systems Inc., reacting to a spike in video and data traffic on the Internet, is introducing a new generation of hardware to help communications carriers cope with the flood. — The networking-equipment giant says its new hardware took four years …
Jasmine France / Crave: The gadget blog:
SanDisk jams 8GB into the itty bitty Sansa Clip — I remember when an MP3 player with 128MB of internal storage cost easily $100 and was the size of a fist. Sometimes, new product announcements make me feel old. Such is the case with today's release of an 8GB SanDisk Sansa Clip for $99.
Amanda Kelly / Inside AdWords:
Google Ad Planner: new features, available to everyone — Since we launched Google Ad Planner a few months ago, you've suggested more ways we could help improve your media planning process. First, we're excited to announce that Ad Planner is now accessible to anyone with a Google account.
Dusan Belic / IntoMobile:
HTC Fuze aka Touch Pro now available on AT&T! — We told you it's coming today! The HTC Fuze which is also known as HTC Touch Pro is now available on AT&T. The full slide-out QWERTY keyboard-equipped smartphone costs $299.99 after $50 mail-in rebate and with a two-year contract.
Robin Wauters / TechCrunch:
The Jellyfish Guys Are At It Again, Raise $4.3 Million For Online Retail Service Alice.com — As serial a serial entrepreneur can get: Brian Wiegand and Mark McGuire, who managed to sell three companies in the past +10 years, most recently flipping social shopping service Jellyfish to Microsoft …
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 …
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.
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.
