Top Items:
Jim Goldman / Tech Check with Jim Goldman:
Apple Apps “Bubble” Talk Just That, As Downloads Soar — You may have seen the Apple advertisement in the New York Times this morning (back page of the Business section) extolling the virtues of the iPhone. Nothing new there. — If you made it through the fine print …
Discussion:
VentureBeat, AppleInsider, ChannelWeb, Gadget Lab, Gadgetell, MacBlogz, Local Mobile Search, Mashable! and Silicon Alley Insider
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Jim Dalrymple / Macworld:
Apple: 300 million iPhone apps downloaded — Apple on Friday said 300 million iPhone apps have been downloaded from its App Store since it opened in July. — The news comes in the form of two ads placed in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. The ads highlight …
Dan Frommer / Silicon Alley Insider: Estimating Apple iPhone App Sales So Far: $50-$100 Million In Revenue (AAPL)
Dan Frommer / Silicon Alley Insider:Apple: 300 Million App Downloads, But Growth Flat (AAPL)
Discussion:
Distorted-Loop.com
Nick Wingfield / Wall Street Journal:
Ballmer: Yahoo Deal Better If Done Soon — Q&A: Steve Ballmer and Qi Lu — After a nearly five month search, Microsoft Corp. on Thursday said it has found a new executive to lead its charge against Google Inc. in the online search and advertising business: Qi Lu, a technologist who was previously a top executive at Yahoo Inc.
Erica Sadun / Ars Technica:
Hidden SDK features transform iPhone into TV gaming device — Look what we found — What do you do after uncovering undocumented SDK features? I got in touch with Freeverse, makers of Moto Chaser, one of the top iPhone games in App Store. After a few back and forth e-mails …
Discussion:
IntoMobile, VentureBeat, 9 to 5 Mac, Appletell, AppleInsider, Engadget, iLounge, MacBlogz, MobileCrunch, TUAW, Touch Arcade, 148AppsNews Archives, MacRumors, techeblog.com and digg.com
Sarah Perez / ReadWriteWeb:
Social Network Profile Costs Woman College Degree — Forget losing your job, apparently your MySpace or Facebook profile and photos can now cause you to lose your degree. In what may be one of the most frightening rulings regarding social networks and privacy to date …
Discussion:
GMSV, VentureBeat, The Social Times, TECH.BLORGE.com, Ars Technica, Chronicle of Higher Education and digg.com
Bonnie Cha / Crave: The gadget blog:
Verizon officially rolls out BlackBerry Storm firmware update — Earlier on Friday, we reported on rumors that Verizon Wireless would release a firmware update for the RIM BlackBerry Storm, but it's now official. — The carrier has begun rolling out the software upgrade via …
Discussion:
Engadget, IntoMobile, MobileCrunch, Electronista, BlackBerryNews.com, TechSpot, The Toybox, PalmAddicts, Gizmodo and PhoneDog.com Cell …
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Did YouTube Just Turn On HD For Real? — After teasing us for a year with the option to watch “higher quality” videos that weren't quite high-def, it appears that YouTube is making the switch to HD, at least for some videos that have been uploaded in that quality.
Discussion:
iTWire, Webware.com, Industry Standard, Lifehacker, NewTeeVee, TheNextWeb.com, Gizmodo, Electronista, Epicenter, SlashGear, Silicon Alley Insider, TechSpot and Engadget HD
Kerry E. Grace / Wall Street Journal:
S&P Cuts Motorola Rating to Junk — Standard & Poor's Ratings Services cut its long-term corporate credit rating on Motorola Inc. into junk territory, saying operational challenges at the company's mobile devices unit will likely for some time. — That will result in lower profits …
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Nicholas Carlson / Silicon Alley Insider:
Google Plasters 75% More Ads On Search Pages...Desperately Seeking Clicks? (GOOG) — So far in Q4, Google (GOOG) is serving 3.82 ads per keyword — about 52% more than it did during Q3. During November, Google served 4.38 ads per keyword, a 75% increase over its Q3 average.
Mary Jo Foley / All about Microsoft:
Microsoft signs major deal with Dell for Live Search — Microsoft and Dell have signed a deal via which Dell will be shipping new PCs with the Live Search toolbar preinstalled, according to sources familiar with the arrangement between the two companies. — Microsoft officials declined …
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Arielle Reinstein / Gmail Blog:
Get your Gmail stickers — Not too long ago, one of the Gmail engineers broke out her vinyl cutter and made some Gmail m-velope stickers. Pretty soon, they were pasted to our desks, stuck on our laptops, and adorning the walls around the office. Then other people started asking us about them — first it was just other Googlers.
Discussion:
InformationWeek, Gizmodo, geeksugar, WebProNews, Maximum PC all, GottaBeMobile.com, Lockergnome Blog Network and digg.com
Eric Krangel / Silicon Alley Insider:
Hate Vista? Dell Now Charging $150 Extra for Windows XP (MSFT) — We know that many consumers just don't like Windows Vista. But just how much more will people pay for a copy of the now nominally off-the-market Windows XP? — More and more. In June, Dell (DELL) …
Frederic Lardinois / ReadWriteWeb:
Qitera: Social Bookmarking for the Deep Web — Earlier this year, we featured a stealth startup called Qitera, which just launched publically today. At its core, Qitera is a social bookmarking service, but unlike most of its competitors, Qitera can not only save a screenshot of the site …
Discussion:
RotorBlog.com
Brad Stone / Bits:
Pirates of the Amazon Abandon Ship — Earlier this week, two students from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, made headlines by releasing a plug-in for the Firefox Web browser that made it easy for people who were browsing books, music and movies on Amazon.com to download …
Kevin C. Tofel / jkOnTheRun:
First Qualcomm Snapdragon netbook concept is a tablet — What do we have here? Looks like some of the first pics I've seen of a netbook based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon chipset have appeared at Silicon.com. While the eight portraits likely represent more concept design rather than actual product, I like what I see.
David Rothman / TeleRead:
Gasp, MIGHT Sony have sold more e-readers than Amazon has? And has Amazon bungled the ePub-creation question? — I should have picked up on this yesterday. A CNN story says “more than a quarter million” Kindles have been sold. Whose numbers are most helpful? CNN or Forrester Research, which estimates 400,000?
Dan Moren / PC World:
Obama Sports White Earbuds, Doesn't Rock Zune — Our long national nightmare is over. Despite rumors to the contrary, it's been confirmed that President-elect Barack Obama is not a user of Microsoft's Zune music player. If you've been holding your breath you can let it out now.
Paulita David / Google Retail Blog:
Cyber Monday is the new Black... Labels: 2008 Winter Holiday, Online Traffic Trends, Seasonality — ...Friday that is. Fashionistas and Frugal Freddies alike hit the keyboards in record numbers this Cyber Monday. According to comScore, the four days from Black Friday to Cyber Monday saw spending online up 13%.
PC World:
AT&T Hopes for Single Smartphone OS (PC World) — AT&T hopes to standardize on a single operating system for AT&T-branded smartphones as part of a “dramatic consolidation” of its mobile platforms over the next few years, a company executive said Thursday.
Discussion:
Ars Technica, InformationWeek, eWeek, Gizmodo, Boy Genius Report, Local Mobile Search, AppScout, Electronista, FierceWireless, Phone Scoop, Slashdot and Engadget
Greg Sandoval / CNET News:
Netflix fixes streaming-video glitch — Netflix, the Web's top video rental store, has corrected a glitch that has plagued some customers of the company's streaming-video service for several weeks, the company said Friday. — Owners of Roku's Netflix Player and Microsoft's Xbox 360 began complaining …
Symbian Smart Phones World:
HOT: Next Nokia Full Touchscreen Device Leaked!!! — Wow, wow, wow, here it is, another hot Nokia leak! Although Nokia has managed to hide the N97 from the public before its official release but promo poster of their next touch based device just appeared on the net and the endless saga …
MSDN Blogs:
Update on the Black Friday cashback outage — We want to apologize again for the outage on Friday and the inconvenience it has caused. We deeply regret that many users were unable to access the Live Search cashback service. — We've been working diligently to correct the issues.
Sindya Bhanoo / Industry Standard:
Facebook Connect vs. Google Friend Connect: A battle for Internet mindshare — One hour after Google did a public launch of Google Friend Connect, Facebook launched Facebook Connect. The simultaneous launch is not a coincidence — the two competing services are battling for mindshare …
Don Reisinger / The Digital Home:
Times are tough, but tech companies don't need to suffer — Back when I was a public company auditor (yes, you read that correctly), I quickly realized after discussing business with top-level executives that few were prepared to meet the challenges that (at that time) seemed unlikely to affect us again.
Discussion:
Download.com editors
Katie Hoffmann / Bloomberg:
Cisco, Dell Sales at Risk as Slump Fuels Gray Market — A A A — Dec. 5 (Bloomberg) — The remnants of businesses crushed by the economic slump now sit in Liquid Technology Inc.'s warehouse by the Hudson River in New York's Chelsea district. — Hundreds of servers, personal computers and routers …
