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.
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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:
VentureBeat, Boy Genius Report, Tech Beat, InfoWorld, jkOnTheRun, Computerworld, MobileCrunch, GPS Obsessed, I4U News, wmpoweruser.com, SlashGear, Mobile Roar, Mobility Site, NEWSFACTOR, AppScout, Phone Scoop and BetaNews
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:
Macworld, Unwired View, Computerworld Blogs, Gizmodo, Etan on Tech, TeleRead, Sam Harrelson, The iPhone Blog, GPS Obsessed, MacNN, SlashGear, Engadget Mobile, Gadgetell, FierceMobileContent, TechFlash, O'Grady's PowerPage, MediaMemo, Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim, RCR Wireless News, jkOnTheRun and dailywireless.org
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Dan Frommer / Silicon Alley Insider:
Amazon Announcing Kindle iPhone App Monday? (AMZN, AAPL) — Amazon (AMZN) will likely announce the new Kindle e-book reader Monday at a news conference in New York. We'll cover it live; join us at 10 a.m. ET for the latest. — But will Amazon also announce Kindle stores for other devices?
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:
GigaOM, The Register, Open Sources, 451 CAOS Theory, eWeek, LinuxWorld.com, CNET News, Jeremy's Blog, Computerworld and Simon's Blog
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?
Discussion:
Webware.com, PC World, Industry Standard, ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch, Search Engine Land, WebProNews and InformationWeek, Thanks:atul
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 …
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?
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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 …
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:
the Econsultancy blog, techblog.dallasnews.com, Obsessable, WebProNews, BlawgIT and Slashdot
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 …
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.
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.
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.
Discussion:
NewTeeVee
Declan McCullagh / CNET News:
Obama names Doerr, Phillips to economic board — Two Silicon Valley leaders have been appointed by President Obama to a 16-person committee that's charged with offering economic advice during what has become an unusually sharp and deep recession. — John Doerr, the billionaire venture capitalist …
Mark Hachman / Gearlog:
Report: Pioneer Exiting TV Business, Spinning Off DVD — Tags: — HDTV, Pioneer — A report in the Nikkei Japanese business journal Friday claims that “Pioneer Corp. will pull the plug on its loss-ridden television business and shift its DVD player operations to a new venture with Sharp Corp …
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
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.
Reed Hastings / New York Times:
Please Raise My Taxes — I'M the chief executive of a publicly traded company and, like my peers, I'm very highly paid. The difference between salaries like mine and those of average Americans creates a lot of tension, and I'd like to offer a suggestion. President Obama should celebrate our success …
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.
David Chartier / Ars Technica:
Facebook's “next steps in openness” raises questions — Facebook's wildly popular “Facebook Connect” service may be the polar opposite of OpenID's stumbling approach to providing online identity management with single sign-on convenience. The former is criticized for being a “walled garden …
Discussion:
eWeek
Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:
News Corp: We Spent $2.8 Billion Too Much on Dow Jones — A little more detail, via a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, on the $8.4 billion write-down announced by News Corp. yesterday: $2.8 billion of that charge is getting assigned to the company's $5.7 billion purchase of Dow Jones …
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
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 …
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 …
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 …
Michael Masnick / Techdirt:
Hollywood Takes Another Crack At Getting Permission To Break Your DVR — The movie studios and the MPAA have been pushing hard over the last year to get the FCC to let them use “selectable output control” to basically block DVRs from recording certain broadcasts of movies.
