Top Items:
Rafe Needleman / Webware.com:
Google launches video chat for Gmail — Google is rolling out video and voice capabilities for the chat function that is embedded in the Gmail interface. It's a bare-bones voice and video-conferencing service, but it's simple to install and use and is a very good addition to Gmail.
Discussion:
ReadWriteWeb, Google Operating System, Tech Central, VentureBeat, Mashable! and jkOnTheRun
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:
Computerworld, PC World, Christopher Null, DailyTech, blogs.chron.com, The Register, AppScout, Neowin.net, The Tech Report and GottaBeMobile.com
Jesus Diaz / Gizmodo:
iPhone 2.2 Release Just 10 Days Away — According to the consistently reliable iPhone Hellas, the iPhone OS 2.2 update will appear even sooner than we all expected. Barring any sudden plan changes, the iPhone Hellas people are saying the upgrade will be available on November 21.
Discussion:
Digital Daily, IntoMobile, SlashGear, Unwired View, Lifehacker, MacRumors, VentureBeat, InformationWeek, 9 to 5 Mac and MacBlogz
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.
Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:
Condé Nast Web Arm CondéNet's Turn for “Across the Board” Cuts — Here's the deal: If you work at a media company that hasn't had layoffs recently, just go ahead and assume they're coming. — This afternoon's installment-CondéNet, which manages some, but not all …
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Frederic Lardinois / ReadWriteWeb:
DeepDyve: Indexing the Deep Web — DeepDyve is a new search engine that is aimed at students, academics, and knowledge workers. DeepDyve's mission is to index the ‘deep web’ that is hidden behind pay walls and subscription fees. We first looked at DeepDyve in September …
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Eric Savitz / Tech Trader Daily:
Trippin' With Trip: One Man's View Of Carnage To Come — Every month, Trip Chowdhry, the one-man band who covers all things tech under the moniker Global Equities Research, writes a piece he calls Silicon Scoop on current trends and gossip from the Valley. It's always a good read …
Kasper Jade / AppleInsider:
Apple may turn to carbon fiber for lighter MacBook Air — Apple enthusiastically claimed ownership to the world's thinnest notebook earlier this year with the introduction of the MacBook Air, but is rumored to be unsatisfied with the system's weight, which it now hopes to drop below 3 pounds.
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.
David Chartier / Infinite Loop:
iTunes Store finally gets a bargain bin for movies — The glory days of grabbing that $5 DVD at the road trip pit-stop or Target checkout counter have finally made their digital transition to the iTunes Store. — With a new section unfortunately called “This Week's Great Movies Under $5” …
Aviv / MacBlogz:
AT&T iPhone Tethering Plan Specifics, No Unlimited Plan? — AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph De La Vega has recently announced the arrival of an official iPhone tethering plan. While we already knew the plan was in development prior to his announcement, little information pertaining to specific tethering offerings has been revealed.
Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch:
TroopTube Restores Streaming Video To Our Nation's Finest — Since 2007, the Department of Defense has restricted overseas military personal from accessing a number of popular sites including YouTube and MySpace for reasons largely attributed to bandwidth usage and possible security issues.
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:
9 to 5 Mac, InfoWorld, CNET News, The Register, Technologizer, MacMegasite, MacRumors, Edible Apple, jkOnTheRun, AppleInsider, Lifehacker, TheAppleBlog, Virtualization.com, Macsimum News and Gizmodo
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.
Discussion:
Liliputing, Guardian, jkOnTheRun, The Mobile Gadgeteer, Mobility Site and GottaBeMobile.com
Rafat Ali / paidContent.org:
Vivian Schiller Leaves NYT; Joins NPR As New CEO — This one is a shocker: Vivian Schiller, the longtime head of NYTimes.com's digital efforts, has left the company, and has joined National Public Radio as its new CEO. She succeeds Dennis Haarsager, who has served as interim CEO since March …
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.
Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch:
iPhone Exploit Undermines App Store Security, Lets Devs Update And Run Arbitrary Code — We have stumbled across a severe flaw in iPhone security that allows third party developers to update and execute arbitrary code from their applications at will, totally circumventing Apple's App Store approval process.
Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:
CBS Kills CNET Music Site It Never Launched — One way for a big media company to avoid the embarrassment of shutting down a Web site-just avoid launching it altogether. That's what CBS has done with “Juke,” a music site that CNET had started assembling last spring and planned to launch this fall.
Matt Asay / The Open Road:
Novell builds bridges...from Red Hat to SUSE — Even as Red Hat, Canonical, Novell, and other Linux vendors seek to differentiate their respective offerings, Novell wants to make it easy to overcome differences between Linux distributions...provided that customers want to migrate to Novell's SUSE?
Nicholas Carlson / Silicon Alley Insider:
Five Rules For Winning Facebook's Developer Competition — Facebook will announce the five winners of its latest FbFund competition for application developers on December 8. Each of the five will win a $225,000 grant. The Facebook investors who fund the competition won't take any equity …
iSuppli:
Mobile G1 Carries $143.89 BOM Cost, According to iSuppli Estimate — The T-Mobile G1 smart phone, the first wireless handset to be based on Google Inc.'s Android mobile operating system, carries a Bill-of-Materials (BOM) cost of $143.89, according to a virtual teardown conducted by iSuppli Corp.
Venky Harinarayan / Forbes:
The Silicon Lining — Think long term. Long, long term. — In the short term, there will be pain in Silicon Valley. Start-ups will have to survive 2009. Layoffs will be in fashion: “You didn't do a layoff? What's wrong with you?” — Venture capitalists will be hit just as hard.
Discussion:
HipMojo.com
Business Technology:
Who Did Nortel Cut? — It was no surprise that Nortel, reporting a $3.41 billion loss, said it would keep slashing jobs, this time on the order of 1,300. More unusual are some of the names on the list: four executives who CEO Mike Zafirovski recently recruited from IBM, Broadcom and EMC in an effort to turn the company around.
David Rothman / TeleRead:
EeeRotate: Portrait-mode reading on the Eee PCs and other notebooks — Laptop screens are often set up for the landscape mode—they're wider than tall. This might be good for watching videos but not for reading e-books. — Some software such as yBook or Mobipocket can actually …
The Age:
Net censorship plan backlash — As opposition grows against the Government's controversial plan to censor the internet, the head of one of Australia's largest ISPs has labelled the Communications Minister the worst we've had in the past 15 years. — Separately, in Senate question time today …
Matt Rosoff / Digital Noise:
Lossless audio will come to portable players eventually — The great draw of portable MP3 players is quantity. — I remember when my wife and I took a six-month backpacking trip back in 1999. We never even considered bringing an MP3 player, which might have had a whopping 64MB of flash memory …
Chris Leckness / Mobility Site:
Review : HTC FUZE from AT&T — Back in June when the HTC Touch Pro news was dropping all over web, all the buzz was when and if AT&T would get the phone and call it whatever they were going to call it. Turns out the name was the HTC Fuze. There was a rash of incorrect dates for launch hit the web too …
Discussion:
jkOnTheRun
