Top Items:
Tom Neumayr / Apple:
Changes Coming to the iTunes Store — Apple® today announced several changes to the iTunes® Store (www.itunes.com). Beginning today, all four major music labels—Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, Warner Music Group and EMI, along with thousands of independent labels …
Discussion:
L.A. Times Tech Blog, CNET News, Podcasting News, Infinite Loop, Financial Times, iLounge, CrunchGear, Hardware 2.0 and MacRumors
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Ethan Smith / Wall Street Journal:
ITunes to Change Pricing Strategy — Apple Inc. said it is making changes to its iTunes Store, representing significant shifts in its longstanding approach to the business of selling songs online. — The changes, unveiled during a speech Tuesday at the Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco …
Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:
Confirmed: iTunes Going DRM-Free. Unclear: Does Anyone Care? — In 2007, Apple CEO Steve Jobs predicted that half the music offered at his iTunes store would be sold without digital rights management-the lock-and-key system that the music labels wrap their songs-by the end of that year.
Joshua Topolsky / Engadget:
Live from the Macworld 2009 keynote — 9:07AM “If you wanna hear some new things today — I have three new things...” — 9:07AM “The last year was our biggest ever, 9.7 mil Macs. We did it by growing twice as fast as the rest of the industry.” “The hardware THE leopard (!)...”
Discussion:
ReadWriteWeb, CrunchGear, Between the Lines, Techdirt, Tech Trader Daily, VentureBeat, Tech Check with Jim Goldman, Digital Daily, Gizmodo, CNET News, TUAW, Obsessable, Scobleizer, Bits, MacRumors, Boy Genius Report, GPS Obsessed, Ars Technica, Macworld, SitePoint, Paul Colligan's … and I4U News
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Philip Elmer-DeWitt / Apple 2.0:
Live from Apple's last Macworld — This is a live blog of the valedictory keynote Steve Jobs decided not to give — sending Apple (AAPL) senior vice president Phil Schiller to Macworld 2009 in his place. — Schiller's remarks began shortly after 9 a.m PST (12 noon EST),
Discussion:
ReadWriteWeb, AppleInsider, TechFlash, NewTeeVee, Technologizer, Digital Daily, Boy Genius Report, geeksugar, Ars Technica, p2pnet and iPhoneWorld.ca iPhone
AppleInsider:
Apple unveils 17-inch MacBook Pro with 8-hour battery — Presenting at the Macworld Expo on Tuesday, Apple unveiled the new 17-inch MacBook Pro featuring a durable and precision aluminum unibody enclosure, and a revolutionary new built-in battery that delivers up to eight hours of use …
Discussion:
Between the Lines, Infinite Loop, Silicon Alley Insider, MacRumors, Boy Genius Report, Digital Daily, Technologizer and Gearlog
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Joshua Topolsky / Engadget:
MacBook Pro 17-inch first hands-on — Yep — it looks just like its little brothers! Feels like 'em too, except the obvious bit of heft added by that 17-inch display. Of course, they don't have that sweet, gigantic battery inside, or that matte display option (until we torch Curpertino, of course... in love).
Discussion:
techeblog.com
Bill Evans / Apple:
Apple Introduces 17-inch MacBook Pro With Revolutionary New Built-in Battery That Delivers Eight Hours of Use & 1,000 Recharges — Apple® today unveiled the new 17-inch MacBook® Pro featuring a durable and beautiful precision aluminum unibody enclosure, and a revolutionary new built …
Discussion:
GigaOM Daily, Ed Burnette's Dev Connection, MacBlogz, Electronista, Engadget and Obsessable
Owen Thomas / Gawker:
The Russian Bear Slashes a Social Network — The bubble in social networking has burst, decisively. LiveJournal, the San Francisco-based arm of Sup, a Russian Internet startup, has cut 12 of 28 U.S. employees — and offered them no severance, we're told. — The quirky site …
Discussion:
paidContent.org, Silicon Alley Insider, The Social, Mashable!, Changing Way, WebProNews and MarketingVOX
Wilson Rothman / Gizmodo:
Apple Revamps iLife for '09 with iPhoto Facial Recognition and More — Today at Macworld 2009, Apple showed off a new iPhoto with true facial recognition, a better iMovie and other iLife updates—$79 solo, $99 for family, requires Leopard, available late January. — It's a good solid upgrade full of very nice features.
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Jack Shafer / Slate:
How Newspapers Tried to Invent the Web — But failed. — A moment of sympathy, please, for newspapers, whose readers and advertisers have been fleeing at a frightening rate. — It would be easy to accuse editors and publishers of being clueless about the coming Internet disruption …
Discussion:
Scripting News
Nicholas Deleon / CrunchGear:
Say hello to iWork 09: Like iWork 08, but plus one — Whoever predicted that Apple would introduce iWork '09 today gets a gold star. Keynote, Pages and Numbers all received what I would consider minor updates; no need to run around all willy nilly for these, methinks.
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Karen Jacobs / Reuters:
Best Buy offers used iPhones at lower price — ATLANTA (Reuters) - Retailer Best Buy Co, seeking new ways to appeal to cost-conscious shoppers, said on Tuesday it is selling refurbished versions of Apple Inc's iPhone 3G at its stores that are priced about $50 less than new iPhones.
AMD:
AMD Delivers Groundbreaking Platform for Ultrathin Notebooks —The AMD Platform for Ultrathin Notebooks Delivers Balanced PC Performance with True HD Entertainment1 in a Surprisingly Affordable, Amazingly Thin Notebook— AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced the availability of the AMD platform …
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Caroline McCarthy / The Social:
Hackers hit MacRumors keynote coverage — Some nasty pranksters, likely associated with Web forum 4Chan, have hacked into Apple gossip mainstay MacRumors' live-blog coverage of Tuesday's Macworld keynote. Hosted on a separate domain, MacRumorsLive.com, the site was plagued by offensive messages …
Brian Krebs / Security Fix:
Spamhaus: Google Now 4th Most Spam-Friendly Provider — Google's free services are being heavily exploited by spammers to redirect visitors to sites touting knockoff designer drugs and scams, according to the latest rankings from Spamhaus.org, a group that tracks unsolicited commercial e-mail.
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Robin Wauters / TechCrunch:
Clearspring Lays Off 20%, President And COO Jay Rappaport Leaving — Seems like widget distribution startup Clearspring is another victim of the economic meltdown forced to make some tough decisions. We heard rumors floating that the company laid off about 20% of its staff in early December …
Discussion:
Webware.com
Joseph Tartakoff / The Microsoft Blog:
Microsoft's MacBU touts the ‘software + services’ mantra — Microsoft used its presence at Macworld today to announce several updates that will make it easier for Mac users to link up with Microsoft applications online. — Here's a summary of Microsoft's announcements at Macworld:
Discussion:
Macworld
The Boy Genius / Boy Genius Report:
HTC announces HTC S743: U.S. edition, suckaz — Not forgetting about those ever-important arrogant American consumers, HTC has crafted a U.S.-specific version of their HTC S740 Windows Mobile Standard device. Supporting 850MHz/1900MHz HSDPA bands (sorry, T-Mo users), they're taking …
Anne Thomas Manes / Application Platform …:
SOA is Dead; Long Live Services — SOA met its demise on January 1, 2009, when it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession. SOA is survived by its offspring: mashups, BPM, SaaS, Cloud Computing, and all other architectural approaches that depend on “services”.
Stacey Higginbotham / GigaOM:
Clearwire Launches WiMAX in Portland — Today, Clearwire unveiled the WiMAX network in Portland, Ore., that we covered last month. Portland is the first city to get WiMAX service under the Clear brand since Clearwire closed its WiMAX spectrum merger with Sprint last month.
Twitter Status:
Delivery delays — We're experiencing some delays in the amount of time it takes for updates to appear in timelines. Working on this now.
Discussion:
Mashable!
Philipp Lenssen / Google Blogoscoped:
Checkout Icon Makes Ads 10% More Clickable, Google Says — An ad with a Checkout badge to the right, with non-Checkout ads below it. — Cross-integrating their products can help Google bring customers from their more successful products to their less successful ones.
Discussion:
Search Engine Land
Staska / Unwired View:
Apple patents iPhone Mobile Navigation / Mapping App — With the introduction of iPhone 3G with a GPS sensor, many fans expected a bonanza of various navigation apps for the new phone. — And, to be sure, there are quite a few of them using location capabilities.
