Top Items:
Mary Jo Foley / All about Microsoft:
A Microsoft smartphone: No. A Microsoft phone chassis: Yes — Microsoft is not going to introduce a Microsoft-branded phone at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona later this month. Not a Microsoft-branded Zune phone. Not any kind of Microsoft-branded phone. Period.
Discussion:
DigiTimes, Microsoft Watch, VentureBeat, Engadget Mobile, Local Mobile Search, Electronista, mocoNews.net, Gizmodo, wmpoweruser.com, Obsessable, GPS Obsessed, MarketWatch and I4U News
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Chris Ziegler / Engadget Mobile:
Microsoft's SkyBox site live, branded My Phone? — It appears that Microsoft may have its SkyBox beta sign-up site up and running in preparation for a Mobile World Congress unveiling — except that it's not called SkyBox, it's called “My Phone” (even though the domain is getskybox.com — go figure).
Discussion:
Boy Genius Report, NEWSFACTOR, InfoWorld, MobileCrunch, GPS Obsessed, I4U News, wmpoweruser.com, SlashGear, Mobility Site, Mobile Roar, AppScout, Phone Scoop and BetaNews
Kim Zetter / Epicenter:
TED: MIT Students Turn Internet Into a Sixth Human Sense — Video — LONG BEACH, California — Students at the MIT Media Lab have developed a wearable computing system that turns any surface into an interactive display screen. The wearer can summon virtual gadgets and internet data at will …
Matt Asay / The Open Road:
Marten Mickos to leave Sun in reorg — Marten Mickos, former MySQL chief executive and current senior vice president of Sun Microsystems' database group, is transitioning out of the company in a planned reorganization. — I reached Mickos this morning for confirmation: he is definitely leaving.
Discussion:
Open Sources, eWeek, 451 CAOS Theory, LinuxWorld.com, CNET News, Jeremy's Blog, Computerworld, Simon's Blog and OStatic blogs
Stacey Higginbotham / GigaOM:
Job Losses: The Silicon Valley Perspective — Today's headlines trumpet the loss of 598,000 jobs last month — the worst in 34 years — but what does that mean for Silicon Valley, the home of technology? In order to get a sense of what's happening with venture-backed startups …
Miguel Helft / New York Times:
Google and Amazon to Put More Books on Cellphones — SAN FRANCISCO — More electronic books are coming to mobile phones. — In a move that could bolster the growing popularity of e-books, Google said Thursday that the 1.5 million public domain books it had scanned and made available free …
Discussion:
Silicon Alley Insider, Unwired View, Etan on Tech, Fast Company, Computerworld Blogs, Macworld, TeleRead, FierceMobileContent, Sam Harrelson, The iPhone Blog, SlashGear, MediaMemo, GPS Obsessed, jkOnTheRun, MacNN, TechFlash, Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim, Engadget Mobile, Gizmodo, dailywireless.org, O'Grady's PowerPage, RCR Wireless News, paidContent.org, Network World, Lifehacker, Xconomy and textually.org
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Dean Jackson / Surfin' Safari:
CSS Animation — WebKit now supports explicit animations in CSS. As a counterpart to transitions, animations provide a way to declare repeating animated effects, with keyframes, completely in CSS. — With a recent nightly build, you can see the above animation in action.
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Eliot Van Buskirk / Epicenter:
ESPN to ISPs: Pay for Your Customers to Play Video — For some sports fans, ESPN360, the online version of ESPN's television channel, is a cornucopia of more than 3,500 sporting events each year, viewable from the convenience of a computer. For others, it's a total bust. The only difference: their ISP.
Discussion:
WebProNews, BlawgIT, the Econsultancy blog, techblog.dallasnews.com, Obsessable, Slashdot and bit-tech.net
Chris Albrecht / GigaOM:
Why Does Everyone Heart Boxee? — The buzz has been building for Boxee lately. Mainstream news outlets like The New York Times, BusinessWeek and NPR are getting hip to the little open-source media center that could quite possibly change the way you experience TV.
Darryl K. Taft / eWeek:
Trouble at Salesforce.com? — Resource Library: — Steve Cakebread, president and chief strategy officer at Salesforce.com, has resigned, and reports say two top vice presidents have also left the company. — Is there trouble in the house that Benioff built?
Discussion:
Digits
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Judd Legum / Legum's New Line:
Maryland General Assembly Bans Facebook — The New Line has learned that the Maryland General Assembly, citing security concerns, has blocked Facebook and MySpace from the computers of state legislators and their staffs. — Here is the full text of the memo from Office …
Discussion:
GMSV, Baltimore Sun, Obsessable, All Facebook, WebProNews, Silicon Alley Insider, GigaOM and bub.blicio.us, Thanks:juddleg
Jeremy Laird / bit-tech.net:
The Dark Side of Overdrive — Faster is always better. Thanks to that simple philosophy, LCD pixel response times have been driven down to puny proportions in recent years. — Today, even the slowest panels are rated at 16ms or better and deliver adequate response for all but the most fanatical PC gamers.
The Official Google Blog:
Eye-tracking studies: more than meets the eye — Imagine that you need a refresher on how to tie a tie. So, you decide to type [how to tie a tie] into the Google search box. Which of these results would you choose? — Where did your eyes go first when you saw the results page?
Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:
StumbleUpon Hits 7 Million Users, Quietly 50% Bigger Than Twitter — What's got a button to push, knows how to make money while changing the world and is read all over? StumbleUpon! The social discovery network, like Pandora for webpages and videos, just passed 7 million users according to the site.
Jim Goldman / Tech Check with Jim Goldman:
Apple's Not So Quiet Rally And Why It Will Continue — On Wednesday, January 14, the day Apple [AAPL Loading... () ] CEO Steve Jobs announced he would be taking a 6-month medical leave of absence, Apple shares closed at $85.33. From the moment that news hit the tape, shares began to slide …
Greg Sandoval / CNET News:
Why Microsoft, labels cling to music subscriptions — LOS ANGELES—For anybody wondering why Microsoft and the top music labels continue to promote subscription music services, the answer was revealed Thursday. — David Ring, executive vice president of business development …
Benjamin J. Romano / Microsoft Pri0:
Microsoft digital ad shop Razorfish lays off 70 in Seattle, Portland, SF and LA — Razorfish, the digital advertising agency that Microsoft gained when it acquired aQuantive in 2007, is going through another round of layoffs. A spokeswoman confirmed that the company laid off about 70 people …
Discussion:
AdAge
Ernesto / TorrentFreak:
The Pirate Bay Plans to Sue IFPI — The decision to block The Pirate Bay has once again ignited a debate on Internet filtering, the responsibilities of Internet providers and the legal status of BitTorrent sites. The IFPI - the RIAA's global partner - has chalked up a small victory this week, but the fight is far from over.
Matthew Moore / Telegraph:
Police create wanted poster on Nintendo Wii — Japanese police have used a Nintendo Wii to generate a wanted poster of a hit-and-run suspect. — Rather than commissioning an artist or employing photofit software, officers put together a caricature of the man they want to trace using …
Venture Capital Dispatch:
Vinod Khosla Moves Beyond Personal Wealth — It just might be official: Vinod Khosla isn't heading back to Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers after all. — When Khosla started up his own venture capital firm in 2004 to invest his personal wealth in information technology and clean technology companies …
Thanks:atul
Philip Elmer-DeWitt / Apple 2.0:
Apple has NOT banned Facebook — How do these rumors get started? Or, more to the point, how do they get perpetuated? — Late Thursday, a site called tinycomb ("Hand-Picked Tech News") reported that Facebook had been banned “for life” from every Apple (AAPL) store in the United States …
Henry Blodget / Silicon Alley Insider:
New York Times Nuts Not To Charge Subscription Fee (NYT) — On the News Corp conference call last night, Murdoch hammered home our point about why the New York Times (NYT) should charge an online subscription fee. — Murdoch noted that the Wall Street Journal, which charges a subscription fee …
Discussion:
Industry Standard
Walter Isaacson / Time:
How to Save Your Newspaper — During the past few months, the crisis in journalism has reached meltdown proportions. It is now possible to contemplate a time when some major cities will no longer have a newspaper and when magazines and network-news operations will employ no more than a handful of reporters.
TOP 20 MSI News:
MSI Wind NetOn AP1900Not Just a Monitor, PC Inside It ! — Taipeiã€' MSI today announces Wind NetOn AP1900 in AIO family. The AP1900 is the world's very first personal computer that achieved the perfect balance through brilliant calculation of delicate design, energy-saving …
Vivian Yeo / CNET News:
Report: China IT spending remains strong — Boosted by government initiatives and green spending, China's IT market in 2009 will only be minimally affected by the global economic slowdown, according to a new report from Springboard Research. — IT spending in the country will reach $51.2 billion in 2009 …
Discussion:
TECH.BLORGE.com
Robin Wauters / TechCrunch:
Backup And Share Your iPhone Contacts For Free With IDrive Lite — We don't write about every iPhone application that we come across (there are other sites doing a great job at that), but sometimes we just have to. For instance, IDrive, which specializes in backup solutions …