Top Items:
Bobbie Johnson / Guardian:
Google Earth, Google Ocean: mysteries of the seafloor are mapped for the first time — Since Google Earth launched in 2006 millions of people have used its virtual globe to “travel” around the planet without leaving home, climbing a digital version of Mount Everest and even flying into space thanks to the website.
Discussion:
Digits, 9 to 5 Mac, VentureBeat, Search Engine Land, Electronista, The Lede, Gizmodo, Mashable!, Obsessable, Slashdot and digg.com
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John Hanke / The Official Google Blog:
Dive into the new Google Earth — As you read this, I am at the beautiful California Academy of Sciences, announcing the launch of the newest version of Google Earth. This launch is particularly special to me because it marks the moment when Google Earth becomes much more complete — it now has an ocean.
Discussion:
ReadWriteWeb, Google LatLong, InformationWeek, The Map Room, Lifehacker, Webware.com and dailywireless.org
Alexander Wolfe / InformationWeek:
Apple Planning Video-Call iPhone — Recent stories on Apple's iPhone patent have focused on Cupertino's threatened legal action against Palm, which is launching the iPhone-like Pre smartphone. But a closer examination of the Apple patent yields much more interesting news.
Discussion:
9 to 5 Mac, The Apple Core, The iPhone Blog, Gizmodo, CrunchGear, Furrier.org, TechCrunch, tinyComb and Slashdot
Tom Espiner / CNET News:
IE slips further as Firefox, Safari, Chrome gain — The amount of market share commanded by Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser has dropped for the seventh consecutive month. — Internet Explorer now has 67.55 percent of global browser market share, a drop of over seven percentage points in a year …
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Staska / Unwired View:
Samsung Omnia 16GB, Samsung Android Phone and more leaks — Well, it looks that today is Samsung leak day. — Just few hours ago we reported that there's a new Samsung 12 megapixel handset and probably 8 mpx handset with 3x optical zoom coming out at MWC 2009 in Barcelona.
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Ilinca Nita / Unwired View:
Samsung to present the world's first 12MP phone at MWC 2009 — Samsung was the first manufacturer to release an 8MP camera phone (the Innov8, outed one month before Sony Ericsson's C905), and it looks like it will also be the first to announce and launch a 12MP handset.
Discussion:
SlashGear, Newlaunches.com, Gizmodo, Gadget Lab, Electricpig.co.uk, Engadget Mobile, Boy Genius Report, MobileCrunch, The Toybox, Pocket-lint.co.uk, SlashPhone, Gearlog and Obsessable
Sarah Perez / ReadWriteWeb:
Google: “We're Not Doing a Good Job with Structured Data” — During a talk at the New England Database Day conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Google's Alon Halevy admitted that the search giant has “not been doing a good job” presenting the structured data found on the web to its users.
Katie Marsal / AppleInsider:
Analyst now says iMacs likely in both dual- and quad-core — A Wall Street analyst who recently reported that Apple was torn between using dual-core processors and quad-core processors in its next-generation iMac line now believes the company will adopt both.
RELATED:
Philip Elmer-DeWitt / Apple 2.0:Analyst: iMac update “within a few weeks”
Discussion:
Silicon Alley Insider
Tim Arango / New York Times:
Despite iTunes Accord, Music Labels Still Fret — Last month the music industry and Apple, long uneasy partners, seemed a picture of harmony when they agreed on new terms for pricing on iTunes, Apple's online music store. — Behind the scenes, however, the relationship remains as tense and antagonistic as ever.
Discussion:
AppleInsider, MacRumors, 9 to 5 Mac, Apple 2.0, The iPhone Blog, CrunchGear, MacDailyNews and MediaFile
Alex Dalenberg / Arizona Daily Star:
Porn interrupts Super Bowl broadcast in Tucson — Tucsonans watching the Super Bowl got more action than they bargained for when a short clip from an adult movie channel interrupted Comcast's feed with full male nudity during the final moments of the game. — Officials at Comcast …
Discussion:
Silicon Alley Insider, PC World, Gawker, Gearlog, KVOA-TV, DSLreports and InformationWeek
Dan Goodin / The Register:
Passport RFIDs cloned wholesale by $250 eBay auction spree — Video demo shows you how — Using inexpensive off-the-shelf components, an information security expert has built a mobile platform that can clone large numbers of the unique electronic identifiers used in US passport cards and next generation drivers licenses.
RELATED:
Thomas Ricker / Engadget:Video: Hacker war drives San Francisco cloning RFID passports
Discussion:
The Technology Liberation …
Royal Pingdom:
Revver and Pageflakes go dark for days — Both the video-sharing site Revver and the personalized start page service Pageflakes have been down since last Thursday, January 29. As of this writing, that is more than three-and-a-half days of straight downtime.
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Larry Dignan / Between the Lines:
Google's flub: Do we have a Web monoculture too? — Google had a rough weekend and a human error caused the search giant to list the entire Web as malware for an hour or so. The screw-up is likely to raise questions about the risks of having a monoculture dependent on any one technology supplier.
Discussion:
Epicenter, eWeek, Notes from the Field, Search Engine Watch, The Open Road, BetaNews, Computerworld Blogs and Network World
John Leyden / The Register:
Black hats poison Google video search — Game for a hack — Miscreants have poisoned Google Video search results in a bid to trick the unwary into getting infected with malware. — Instead of video clips, researchers at Trend Micro discovered that around 400,000 queries returning malicious results …
Mary Jo Foley / All about Microsoft:
Windows XP still powering 71 percent of business PCs — More than two years after the Windows Vista launch, XP is still the dominant business PC operating system in North America and Europe. — Windows Vista “finally appears ready to dethrone XP” as the operating-system choice for enterprise PCs …
Pete Carey / Mercury News:
Layoffs mean more than lost wages for H-1B visa holders — For the two out-of-work engineers, it's a race against time. They've lost their Silicon Valley jobs and need to quickly find others at a time when companies everywhere are tightening their belts. — Both are Indians whose advanced degrees …
Elinor Mills / CNET News:
IBM report: Vulnerabilities still going unpatched — More than half of the security vulnerabilities disclosed during 2008 had no patches available from the vendor by the end of the year, according to a report released on Monday by IBM's X-Force research group.
Discussion:
eWeek
Business Wire:
Applied Materials Announces Preliminary First Quarter Results — SANTA CLARA, Calif.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Applied Materials, Inc. today announced preliminary results for its first fiscal quarter ended January 25, 2009. — The company expects a net loss in the range of $.09 to $.11 per share …
RELATED:
Tiernan Ray / Tech Trader Daily:Applied Materials Cuts Q1 Outlook, Warns of Shutdowns
Discussion:
CNET News
Aaron Ricadela / Business Week:
Want a Wireless Plan with Your Netbook? — PC makers and telcos are pairing up to offer discounted devices with wireless data plans, but success could come at the expense of feature-laden phones — Stripped-down computers known as netbooks have been taking a bite out of laptop sales for the better part of a year.
Discussion:
The Toybox
Robin Wauters / TechCrunch:
The Challenges Of Tomorrow's Multimedia As Seen Through The Eyes Of Google, Yahoo, Nokia And Others — Part of this year's ACM Multimedia conference, the Multimedia Grand Challenge 2009 aims to collect information on the specific problems and issues companies like Google, Yahoo, Nokia …
Thanks:malpern
Fareastgizmos.com:
While in Korea download a 120-minute film in just 12 seconds! — Korea is to acquire the world's fastest wired and wireless Internet service at 10 times the speed of the current service by 2012. The government and the communications industry plan to invest some W34 trillion over the next five years in the project.
Jonathanhstrauss / SnowBlog:
Suggest to Techmeme Button — Techmeme is an essential news discovery tool for me. It replaced my RSS reader and the totally unmanageable list of blog feeds that came with it years ago, and now I'd estimate that at least 95% of the news I consume is discovered via Techmeme or Twitter.
Robin Goad / Hitwise Intelligence:
Searches for e-books double — Over the last year UK interest in e-books has grown significantly, with searches for ‘ebooks’ doubling between January 2008 and 2009. There are four main e-book readers currently available: the Amazon Kindle, the Sony Reader, the Borders iLiad, and the Bookeen Cybook V3.
