Top Items:
YouTube Blog:
Bigger Isn't Always Better... But in This Case, We Believe It Is — Over the years we've heard a lot of feedback from you about what you'd like to change about YouTube, and the size of our video player is always top of mind. That's why today we're excited to announce a bigger YouTube player.
Discussion:
Christopher Null, Podcasting News, Macworld, CNET News, webmonkey, TheNextWeb.com, Between the Lines, Switched, Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim, p2pnet, Online Video Watch, NewTeeVee, WebProNews, ReadWriteWeb, TechSpot, SuperSite Blog, AppScout, Profy, Gizmodo, Mashable! and The Utube Blog
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Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Land:
YouTube Defaults Videos In HD Format: But Forgets Embed Feature — YouTube announced that all videos on their web site will now be in the wider format HD format, 16:9 ratio. The YouTube player is now 960 pixels wide, as opposed to the standard format of 4:3 ratio.
Discussion:
PC World
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Amazon Kindle 2 Slated For “Early Q1″ — Update on the Kindle 2: It was scheduled to be released in October in time for this holiday season, but Bezos himself reportedly pulled the plug for last minute changes to the software. Our sources now say it's tentatively scheduled to go on sale in “early next quarter.”
Discussion:
TeleRead, TechFlash, Alley Insider, Crave, Gadgetell, SlashGear, Gizmodo, Boy Genius Report, Electronista, Gear Diary, Engadget and Gearlog
ifoAppleStore:
Apple Store Will Now Match Competitors' Prices — Apple has apparently fired the first shot in the holiday shopping battle, by announcing internally that retail store employees have the authority to match the prices of other authorized retailers. The stores have also cancelled …
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Larry Dignan / Between the Lines:
Will Apple launch a netbook? And other burning questions — Apple has said “it doesn't do cheap,” but one analyst reckons that Steve Jobs & Co. will address the netbook market at some point-either with an 11-inch MacBook Air priced between $800 and $1,000 in 2009 or a tablet Mac in 2010.
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Om Malik / GigaOM:
Cisco To Shut Down For 4 Days At Year End — If you want to know how bad it is going to get for all of us in Silicon Valley, just look at Cisco Systems. For first time in its history the company is going to shut down for four days at the end of the year, according to a report by UBS Research.
Eric Horvitz / Microsoft Research Home:
Cyberchondria: Studies of the Escalation of Medical Concerns in Web Search — Available Documents: — The World Wide Web provides an abundant source of medical information. This information can assist people who are not healthcare professionals to better understand health and disease …
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John Markoff / New York Times:
Microsoft Examines Causes of ‘Cyberchondria’ — If that headache plaguing you this morning led you first to a Web search and then to the conclusion that you must have a brain tumor, you may instead be suffering from cyberchondria. — On Monday, Microsoft researchers published the results …
Verizon:
Verizon Wireless Adds Samsung Omnia™ To Its Touch Screen Lineup — Advanced Touch Screen Smartphone Features Samsung's Innovative TouchWiz™ Technology and the Power of Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional — Customer Inquiries — For customer inquiries, please call 800-922-0204 or go to
Discussion:
Unwired View, Engadget, I4U News, InformationWeek, Smartphones and Cell Phones, Mobility Today and Phone Scoop
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Steven Levy / Wired News:
Ray Ozzie Wants to Push Microsoft Back Into Startup Mode — The keynote speaker at this past summer's TechReady conference—a gathering of 6,000 or so Microsoft engineers from around the world—was the company's chief software architect, Ray Ozzie. This was not a routine appearance.
Scott Gilbertson / The Register:
Rock-solid Fedora 10 brings salvation to Ubuntu weary — Next RHEL looking good — Review Fedora might not be getting a complete makeover or flashy new features in version 10, out today, but some welcome enhancements under-the-hood make this a worthwhile upgrade.
Dan Frommer / Alley Insider:
Magnify.net Raises $750K For Web Video Service — NYC-based Web video startup Magnify.net has raised about $750,000 in Series A1 financing. This is in addition to the $1 million it raised in February. Innovation Ventures led the round, and all major investors returned, including RoseTech Ventures …
Google Watch:
Microsoft, Not Google, Has the Real Search Wiki — The New York Times this weekend put the spotlight on a research project Microsoft is working on for next-generation search that is more like a search-oriented wiki than Google's own SearchWiki. — No, this isn't Kumo.
Bill Ray / The Register:
iPhone developer stoops to straight bribery — Best application ever, five stars, taverymuch — One iPhone developer has found a novel way to increase rankings in the iTunes store: pay people $5 a time to post positive reviews, thus ensuring the general public gets an unbiased view of application quality.
eMarketer:
Economy Deals Online Ad Spending a Hit — Digital still stronger than traditional — There seems to be more bad news about the economy every day, and falling ad spending numbers are part of the mix. Although online advertising is still on a positive growth curve, that growth is slowing …
Electronista:
TiVo Mobile brings remote queuing to iPhone — TiVo and web firm Mobui today rolled out TiVo Mobile. The web app gives the iPhone, iPod touch and other mobile devices with full web browsers the ability to remotely schedule one of TiVo's Series 2 or 3 DVRs and to find shows using …
Fred / A VC:
Making Twitter Smarter — Soren and Howard have been busy building out stocktwits and today they sent me a link to a firefox extension that makes twitter a bit smarter. When you add the stocktwits extension to firefox, a stock tweet will look like this: — Those tickers are now hotlinked to stocktwits.
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Stacey Higginbotham / GigaOM:
Telco Startup Raises $100M for Northeast Buildout — Pocket Communications Northeast, a subsidiary of San Antonio-based cellular operator Pocket Communications, has raised a first round of $100 million to build out a five-city CDMA network in the Northeast that will join an existing network and customer base in South Texas.
Brad Stone / Bits:
E-Commerce Shrinks for First Time, Research Firm Says — Just as many Web retailers feared, online shoppers are being unusually frugal this holiday season. — During the first 23 days of November, according to a report to be released later on Tuesday by the research firm comScore …
John Leyden / The Register:
Unofficial fix issued for Vista networking flaw — Crash bang wallop — A system-crashing bug with potential malware implications has been uncovered in Vista. But a fix for the vulnerability, which revolves around flaws in the operating system's network stack, may have to wait until the next service pack.
Simon Sage / IntoMobile:
Opera Mini 4.2 Ready to Roll with New Servers and Skins — The round of beta and bug-testing for the latest Opera Mini mobile browser has wrapped up, and now the official release of version 4.2 is available for download. There are lots of improvements to this version, including skins …
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Was Ebay's BillMeLater Acquisition A Huge Blunder? — When eBay paid $945 million for BillMeLater in October, we blinked. The business assigns credit at the point of sale to ecommerce customers who can't use credit cards because they don't have them, have maxed out credit limits, or choose not to.
Daniel Terdiman / CNET News:
Is the video game industry recession-proof? — Nintendo is hoping that strong sales of its Wii console are evidence that it, at least, is immune to the economic downturn. Others agree that the video game industry as a whole will suffer less than other technology sectors. — (Credit: GameSpot)
Ian Youngs / BBC:
Beatles iTunes deal is ‘stalled’ — Sir Paul McCartney has said he wants The Beatles' catalogue to appear on Apple's iTunes store, but that negotiations have currently “stalled”. — “We'd like to do it,” Sir Paul told BBC News. “We are very for it, we've been pushing it.
Kit Eaton / Gizmodo:
Ninendo DS In Red Mario Bros Limited Edition On Black Friday — It's not a special Black Friday deal, but DS fans may think it's a bit special all the same: Nintendo's launching a limited edition Mario Red DS bearing the M logo this Friday. It'll also come with a bundled copy of New Super Mario Bros, and it'll set you back $150.
