Top Items:
Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:
New York Times: November Was So Terrible, Even Our Internet Ads Were Down — Earlier this month, executives at the New York Times (NYT) warned investors that they had a miserable November. They weren't kidding. — The grim details are here, but I'll save you some time:
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Rochelle Garner / Bloomberg:
Silicon Valley Braces for Firings as Technology Outlook Worsens — A A A — Dec. 24 (Bloomberg) — Silicon Valley, the technology mecca once considered immune to fallout from the global financial meltdown, now faces the biggest cutbacks since the dot-com crash.
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Sarah Perez / ReadWriteWeb:
The Rise of Cloud Agents — It was only this morning that we were lamenting about the lack of the perfect social tool when what did we stumble across but Twitchboard? No, no, it's not the perfect tool, silly, it's a Twitter app. Yet what it does is something that no other Twitter apps have done before …
Discussion:
PSFK
Monica Chen / DigiTimes:
Intel insists Atom only for Intel chipsets, does not want to share Nvidia's Ion — Nvidia's recent move to try to extend Intel's Atom ecosystem to its recently announced Ion platform appears to have been knocked back by Intel, according to a response primarily directed at PC manufacturers as seen by Digitimes.
Discussion:
Gizmodo, Liliputing, TechSpot, Maximum PC all, Mobility Site, TG Daily and internetnews.com
Ezra Klein / American Prospect:
THERE IS NOTHING ANYONE CAN DO ABOUT IT. — Over at BoingBoing, Clay Shirky engages in a bit of self-congratulatory schadenfreude for predicting the collapse of the newspaper business model back in 1993. And no doubt: He was prescient. But like a lot of folks (many of them named Jeff Jarvis) …
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Saul Hansell / Bits:
Future Bits: Google's Machiavellianism — Defining Moment of 2008: Google's offer to help Yahoo fend off Microsoft's hostile takeover bid. — Google's response to Microsoft's bid for Yahoo may represent one of the most brilliant acts of corporate Machiavellianism in recent history.
Om Malik / GigaOM:
Is Time Warner Having Second Thoughts About Bebo? — Most would agree that Time Warner overpaid when it bought social network Bebo back in March. Given the challenges faced by the company's online businesses since then, among them declining ad sales and the difficulty of monetizing social networks …
Discussion:
Wall Street Journal
Karen Gullo / Bloomberg:
Research In Motion Sues Motorola Over Employment Deal — Dec. 23 (Bloomberg) — BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. sued Motorola Inc. claiming the mobile-phone maker is improperly blocking it from offering jobs to laid-off Motorola workers. — Research In Motion …
internetnews.com:
Acer, Best Buy Slash XP Netbook Price to $299 — At ever-cheaper prices, netbooks are looking like a big holiday seller. But can it last? — Experts and PC industry insiders have long wondered whether bare-bones netbooks were too cheap for manufacturers' own good. — But don't tell that to Acer.
Kevin Kingsbury / Wall Street Journal:
Verizon Wins ‘Cybersquatting’ Case — Verizon Communications Inc. said it has been awarded $33.2 million in a “cybersquatting” case against a San Francisco firm that registered Internet domain names purposely similar to the telecommunications giant's trademarks.
InfoWorld:
Microsoft kicks fake security software off 400,000 PCs — In the second month of a campaign against fake security software, Microsoft has booted the rogue application “Antivirus 2009” from almost 400,000 PCs, the company recently claimed. — December's version of the Malicious Software Removal Tool …
Richard Behar / Fox News:
World Bank Admits Top Tech Vendor Debarred for 8 Years — For months, the World Bank has been stonewalling and denying a series of FOX News reports on a variety of in-house scandals, ranging from the hacking of its most sensitive financial data to its own sanctions against suppliers found guilty of wrongdoing.
David / TmoNews:
Blackberry 8900 release date... We've previewed this highly anticipated follow up to the uber popular blackberry curve. We've been gifted with a hands on video from our friends at crackberry.com who gave us a great walkthrough. Now, we have a HOPEFUL release date...February 18th.
Discussion:
CrunchGear, PhoneDog.com Cell …, Gizmodo, Electronista, ChannelWeb, Boy Genius Report and MobileBurn.com
Stacey Higginbotham / GigaOM:
Wireless Built the Notebook Boom — Yesterday's news that notebooks had overtaken PCs in the number of units sold last quarter owes a huge debt to Wi-Fi and a smaller one to 3G cellular networks. Without those Intel unwired commercials and images of folks surfing the web at Starbucks or sitting in parks …
Discussion:
VoIP Watch
internetnews.com:
Sun's Unwired Motherboard Plans — Cutting the wires doesn't just work on networking, it could also greatly increase CPU-to-memory communications. That's if Sun has its way. — Sun Microsystems is researching ways to make massive supercomputers even faster, including wireless connections between CPU and memory.
Michael Masnick / Techdirt:
RIAA Apparently Unable To Stop Lawsuits In Motion — from the legal-inertia? dept — Following last week's announcement that the RIAA was going to back off using mass lawsuits, some were pretty confused by the RIAA's subsequent claim that it had actually stopped filing such lawsuits back in August.
Discussion:
TG Daily
Jessica E. Vascellaro / Wall Street Journal:
OMG, We're Not BFFs Anymore? Getting ‘Unfriended’ Online Stings — Users of Social-Networking Sites Delete Friends Who Don't Keep in Touch, Misbehave — JoAna Swan recently purged her profile on social-networking site Facebook Inc. of friends she hadn't spoken to for a while.
Discussion:
Gawker
Alan Patrick / broadstuff:
FUTURE OF MEDIA PART 1 - WILL USER GENERATED CONTENT DROWN IN ITS OWN OUTPUT? — One of the prime tenets of the Web 2.0 movement has been the democratisation of content creation, leading to Time Magazine's declaration of 2006's Personality of the Year being YOU!
Serkan Toto / CrunchGear:
Sony Japan follows Sony New Zealand with mysterious new Vaio mobile ad — Following Sony New Zealand, Sony Japan today updated its dedicated Vaio website with a mysterious announcement. If you click here [JP], you can see a woman getting out a small UMPC-like object out of her hand bag.
Discussion:
SlashGear, jkOnTheRun, Gizmodo, Boing Boing Gadgets, Boy Genius Report, Liliputing, GottaBeMobile.com and Engadget
