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6:50 PM ET, December 5, 2008

Techmeme

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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:
Apple: 300 Million App Downloads, But Growth Flat (AAPL)
Discussion: Distorted-Loop.com
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 …
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.
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.
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Frederic Lardinois / ReadWriteWeb:
The Age of Grainy Web Videos Has Come to an End: YouTube Turns on HD
Discussion: Off On A Tangent
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 …
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 …
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 …
Discussion: Tech Beat and mocoNews.net
RELATED:
Eric Savitz / Tech Trader Daily:   Motorola: It's Junk, Says S&P
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 …
RELATED:
Karl Bode / DSLreports:
Amazon Pirate Firefox Plugin Was Art Project …
Discussion: Techdirt, Threat Level and DailyTech
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.
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.
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?
Stephen Lawson / Macworld:
AT&T hopes for single smart phone OS  —  AT&T hopes to standardize on a single operating system for AT&T-branded smart phones as part of a “dramatic consolidation” of its mobile platforms over the next few years, a company executive said Thursday.  —  The mobile operator believes smart phones …
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.
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) …
Rafat Ali / paidContent.org:
Industry Moves: NYT Promotes Denise Warren as GM of NYTimes.com  —  The New York Times Company (NYSE: NYT) has appointed Denise Warren, SVP and chief advertising officer of the company, as the GM of NYTimes.com, adding to her current duties.  She fills the position left vacant by Vivian Schiller, who joined NPR on Dec 1 as the new CEO.
Discussion: Silicon Alley Insider and Jobwire
Duncan Geere / Tech Digest:
Medion launches Akoya P8610 18" media centre notebook  —  Medion, the mid-range laptop producer who sell great machines at surprisingly low prices, yesterday announced the Akoya P8610 at Dolby's sound laboratories in deepest darkest Soho.  It's a whopping 18.4" beast of a machine …
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%.
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 …
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.
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 …
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.
Discussion: Guardian, Gizmodo and TUAW
Will Park / IntoMobile:
HTC MAX 4G reviewed, liked  —  The world's first GSM/WiMAX handset was launched not too long ago for use exclusively on Russia's Scartel-owned Yota WiMAX network.  The HTC MAX 4G sports GSM/EDGE and WiMAX hardware on top of the WiFi radio to ensure high-speed wireless connectivity …
Discussion: Boy Genius Report
 
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 More Items: 
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
The mouse turns 40: An interview with Paul Saffo on technology's past and future
Burtonator / Kevin Burton's NEW FeedBlog:
Destroying MySQL  —  Update:  —  This post hit Reddit and now has 10k views.
Discussion: Open Sources
InfoWorld:
Python 3.0 upgrade incompatible with earlier versions
Discussion: eWeek and The Register
Sam Oliver / AppleInsider:
A $99 Apple-branded cell phone is inevitable, analyst says
Discussion: Gizmodo
Jennifer Kingson / Bits:
A Credit Card Loses Its High-Tech Cred
Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch:
SaveThePlanetAndWin: Another Social Network Hoping To Make The World …
Discussion: Mashable! and Download Squad
 Earlier Items: 
Andy Greenberg / Forbes:
Second Life's Second Wind
Discussion: Virtual Worlds News
RGS / Random Good Stuff:
DIY iPhone Airplane Holder
Discussion: PC World, Engadget and Gizmodo
Tom Wright / Wall Street Journal:
Poorer Nations Go Online on Cellphones
Kara Swisher / BoomTown:
Yahoo CEO Countdown, 26 Days to Go: As Chernin Declines, Will a Dark Horse Emerge?
Saul Hansell / Bits:
Amazon's Team of Rivals
Paul Graham:
Could VC be a Casualty of the Recesssion?
Discussion: TechFlash and HipMojo.com