Top Items:
Kara Swisher / BoomTown:
Is Wonderwall Gonna Be the One That Saves MSN? — In an interesting and innovative move compared to what has typically been less-than-hip online programming over the years, Microsoft's MSN service is debuting a slick new celebrity site called Wonderwall today-created, designed and produced …
Discussion:
PC World, The Social, Silicon Alley Insider, Zatz Not Funny!, WebProNews, Microsoft Pri0, The Microsoft Blog and Pocket-lint.co.uk
Kasper Jade / AppleInsider:
Apple's Snow Leopard to include location, multi-touch tools — Apple's Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard operating system will include tools borrowed from the iPhone that let developers determine the geographical location of Macs, as well as extend additional support for multi-touch to their apps, AppleInsider has learned.
New York Times:
Digital Pirates Winning Battle With Studios — On the day last July when “The Dark Knight” arrived in theaters, Warner Brothers was ready with an ambitious antipiracy campaign that involved months of planning and steps to monitor each physical copy of the film. — The campaign failed miserably.
Douglas Bowman / Stopdesign:
Recreating the button — Until some future version of HTML gives us new native controls to use in a browser, at Google, we've been playing and experimenting with controls we call “custom buttons” in our apps (among other custom controls). These buttons just launched in Gmail yesterday …
GadgetGirl / Gaj-It.com:
Shush! Samsung Acme i8910 is Leaked — Be the first to hear it here, as we have exclusive leaked photos sent to Gaj-It showing Samsungs latest addition to their eclectic portfolio of mobile phones. This new, but very ‘hush hush’ arrival is the Samsung Acme i8910, however …
Discussion:
SlashGear, Boy Genius Report, WMExperts, Unwired View, SlashPhone, CrunchGear, MobileCrunch, Gizmodo, Engadget and GPS Obsessed, Thanks:patrickaltoft
Mike Anderiesz / Guardian:
‘We simply have to suffer,’ says Sony — For a man whose employer has just recorded its worst Christmas in years, David Reeves seems surprisingly calm. Indeed, speaking last Thursday, the day Sony announced third-quarter losses of Y18bn (£141m), he sounded more like a corner-man psyching …
Discussion:
PC World, Silicon Alley Insider, VG247, Joystiq, Kotaku, Digital Daily, Edge Online and GamesIndustry.biz
Nicholas Carlson / Silicon Alley Insider:
China's Lenovo Fires American CEO — Chinese computer-maker Lenovo will replace its American CEO William J. Amelio as his three-year contract expires. Chairman Yang Yuanqing will take the CEO seat and Lenovo founder Liu Chuanzhi will re-take the chairmanship. — Lenovo hired Amelio in 2005.
RELATED:
Tim Culpan / Bloomberg:Lenovo Chief Executive Amelio Resigns After First Loss in Almost 3 Years
Discussion:
Wall Street Journal, Industry Standard, DailyTech, Digital Daily, Engadget, PC World and New York Times
Larry Dignan / Between the Lines:
Woz goes enterprise storage; Becomes chief scientist at Fusion-io — Steve Wozniak, best known for creating Apple with Steve Jobs in 1976, has a new gig now: Chief scientist at Fusion-io, an enterprise storage company. Wozniak had been an advisor to the company.
RELATED:
Ashlee Vance / New York Times:Wozniak Accepts Post at a Storage Start-Up
Discussion:
Data Center Knowledge, MacNN, Insanely Great Mac, The Mac Observer, Gizmodo, The Tech Report, Macsimum News, Jobwire and Slashdot
Steve O'Hear / last100:
Google Latitude shows what's wrong with Nokia's social location (SoLo) strategy — If the next frontier is mobile, a key battle ground is going to be location-based services. And, drilling down further, location-based social networking, such as the ability to share your current location with friends, represents an important use case.
RELATED:
Om Malik / GigaOM:With Latitude, Google Fires Another Shot at Mobile Operators
Discussion:
Googling Google, Boy Genius Report, A VC, TechBays, Phone Arena, MacRumors, WinExtra and Always On Real-Time Access, Thanks:atul
Monty says:
Time to move on — I have now departed from Sun and joined my own company, Monty Program Ab. — There were a lot of rumors around me resigning in August/September last year. I didn't back then want to comment on the rumors, because I was still trying to work something out with Sun.
RELATED:
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
Netflix movie downloads are a success on Xbox 360 — Microsoft said today that more than a million Xbox 360 users have downloaded the Netflix application via Xbox Live since the alliance was launched in November. — In less than three months, Xbox Live gold members (who pay $50 a year) …
Dancho Danchev / Zero Day:
Commercial Twitter spamming tool hits the market — Last week, a commercial Twitter spamming tool (tweettornado.com) pitching itself as a “fully automated advertising software for Twitter” hit the market, potentially empowering phishers, spammers, malware authors and everyone in between …
Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch:
Mobile Restaurant Ordering (Finally) Hits The App Store — In the last week, a pair of new iPhone applications have appeared on the App Store that put the menus of hundreds of restaurants at users' fingertips. Dubbed GrubHub and CityMint, both applications allow users to order food …
Matthew Hines / eWeek Security Watch:
Malware Scam Parks Itself on Cars — We've heard a lot about savvy attackers marrying both physical and online tactics as part of their efforts to increase the levels of social engineering going into their nefarious schemes. — Now someone appears to have pulled together badware distribution …
David Sarno / L.A. Times Tech Blog:
YouTube: ‘Popular’ no longer means the thing everyone's watching — In the latest in a series of moves away from its early, freewheeling roots, YouTube has quietly changed the default filter on its highly trafficked main video page from “Most Viewed” to something called “Popular.”
Bill Snyder / Tech's Bottom Line:
IBM's Palmisano: Tech's slumdog millionaire — IBM's cruel layoff options: Take a job in the Third World and lose your severance, move within the United States at your expense, or lose both your job and severance — Meet Sam Palmisano, bozo of the month.
Andy Greenberg / Forbes:
Letting Google Take Your Pulse — Search giant rolls out service allowing Web surfers to remotely monitor medical devices. — Google is the Web's king of data collection, aggregating details from users' search queries, e-mail, even phones and photos. Now, thanks to a partnership with IBM …
Discussion:
CNN, Mashable!, Beyond Search, Webware.com, CloudAve, Wall Street Journal and MobileDevicesToday
Mary Jo Foley / All about Microsoft:
Windows Mobile: What's coming when — Much was made of this week's slip-up by Motorola's CEO that Windows Mobile 7 is due in 2010 (something that's actually been expected for a few months now). — I've been curious about how Microsoft plans to try to catch up with its mobile-phone competitors given …
Hipstomp / Core77:
Mozilla Phone developer seeks your input — Designer/editor Billy May has been working with Mozilla Labs on developing “a conceptual ‘Mozilla Phone,’” he writes. “I thought it would be interesting to work this project out in the open and thought your readers might like to contribute to the development blog linked here.”
Discussion:
Gizmodo, GPS Obsessed, blogs.chron.com, The Mozilla Phone, SlashGear, Boing Boing Gadgets, Gadget Lab and techeblog.com
Nate Anderson / Ars Technica:
Ars Technica's tech policy “People to Watch” 2009 — With a new, tech-savvy US administration in power, Ars Technica and Tech Policy Central team up to profile the top names in tech policy for 2009. — With Barack Obama in the White House, the US has a president who understands—and cares directly about—technology policy.
Daniel Shen / DigiTimes:
HTC to launch Qualcomm Snapdragon-based mobile devices in 2Q09 — High Tech Computer (HTC) is expected to launch Qualcomm Snapdragon-based mobile devices in the second quarter of 2009, according to market sources in Taiwan. — HTC's Snapdragon device will hit the market one quarter later …
Hillel Italie / Associated Press:
AP alleges copyright infringement of Obama image — NEW YORK (AP) — On buttons, posters and Web sites, the image was everywhere during last year's presidential campaign: A pensive Barack Obama looking upward, as if to the future, splashed in a Warholesque red, white and blue and underlined with the caption HOPE.
Discussion:
TechCrunch, PlagiarismToday, Techdirt, LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION®, Gawker, Anthony Falzone's blog, chartreuse and digg.com
David Pogue / New York Times:
Video Chats Overcome Clunkiness — When AT&T demonstrated its video telephone at the 1964 World's Fair, everyone — including AT&T — pretty much figured that it would be the future. People wouldn't just hear each other over the phone — they would see each other, too.
Neil McAllister / Fatal Exception:
The case for supporting and using Mono — Novell's open-source .Net clone is alive and well, and it's turning up in surprising, useful places. — You may remember Mono, the open-source implementation of Microsoft's .Net platform spearheaded by Miguel de Icaza of Gnome fame.
Opera Community:
Carakan — The last couple of generations of Opera's ECMAScript engine have used a stack-based bytecode instruction set. This type of instruction set is based around a stack of values, where most instructions “pop” input operands from the value stack, process them, and “push” the result back onto the value stack.
