Top Items:
Michael Liedtke / Associated Press:
Facebook appraisal pegs company's value at $3.7B — Facebook Inc. quickly concluded it wasn't worth anywhere near the $15 billion market value implied in a 2007 investment made by Microsoft Corp., according to confidential information obtained Wednesday from court documents.
Discussion:
TechFlash, Contentinople, Digital Daily, Dealscape, Between the Lines, Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim, Mashable!, AppScout, Inside Facebook, Gawker and All Facebook
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Caroline McCarthy / The Social:Facebook valuation ‘shocker’ another reason to be skeptical of media hype
Discussion:
TG Daily
Nate Anderson / Ars Technica:
Doomed: why Wikipedia will fail — A cyberlaw professor argues that Wikipedia is doomed. The online encyclopedia will need to choose between being “high quality” and “open,” but both choices are fraught with risk. — Law professor Eric Goldman loves Wikipedia, but he's also convinced …
Discussion:
Between the Lines
Wilson Rothman / Gizmodo:
Garmin-Asus Nuvifone M20: A Surprisingly Cute WinMo 6.1 GPS Phone — Garmin-Asus will launch the M20, a Windows Mobile 6.1 phone, sometime this year. True to the name, this cute touchscreen handset comes with car dock and a full set of GPS maps for deep-country use.
Discussion:
CNET News, Garmin-Asus, Engadget, The Apple Core, Gearlog, Electronista, MobileCrunch, SlashPhone and Boy Genius Report
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Latest Adrian's Rojak Pot Updates:
The Microsoft Windows 7 Upgrade Program Rev. 2.1 — The Microsoft Windows 7 Upgrade Program — Microsoft issued a draft of the Windows 7 Technical Guarantee Program to their OEM partners on December 10, giving them exactly one month to provide their feedback before Microsoft finalizes the program details.
Discussion:
SlashGear, Boing Boing Gadgets, TweakTown News, Lifehacker, Maximum PC all, CrunchGear and bit-tech.net
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Wall Street Journal:
Facebook, Nokia Discuss Alliance — Battle Over Social-Networking Users Extends Into Cellphone Market — Facebook Inc. is stepping up its efforts to integrate its social network into an array of mobile phones, including those made by Nokia Corp., the world's largest handset maker.
Discussion:
last100, BoomTown, Mashable!, FierceMobileContent, The Social, Music Ally, SlashGear, paidContent.org, GigaOM, Phone Scoop, Bloomberg and Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim
Wall Street Journal:
More Tech Start-Ups Call It Quits — As Funding Dries Up, Fledgling Silicon Valley Firms Are Shutting Down; Fears of Chill on Innovation — The deepening recession is speeding up the shakeout in Silicon Valley, forcing droves of start-ups to shut down or sell themselves at fire-sale prices.
Benjamin Grol / Gmail Blog:
Four changes to Gmail contacts — Over the past few days we've made a lot of small changes to Gmail's contact manager which, combined, should make it easier to organize the contacts you want and get rid of some of the cruft. Here's a quick summary: — 1. Contact merge (and an important caveat about auto-complete)
Nokia Beta Labs blog:
Contacts on Ovi beta database failed - my deepest and most sincere apologies — Written by: Kristian Luoma, Product Manager, Contacts on Ovi. — Hey, — Something bad happened yesterday. A cooler broke down in the hosting center that we run the Chat service in.
New York Times:
DirecTV Owner Said to Seek Deal for Sirius XM — Sirius XM Radio, the satellite radio giant that is on the brink of bankruptcy, is in preliminary talks with Liberty Media, the conglomerate controlled by John C. Malone, people briefed on the negotiations said on Wednesday.
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Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch:
Innovative iPhone Developer Smule Raises $3.9 Million — Smule is one of our favorite iPhone developers - besides putting together ridiculously addictive apps like Ocarina (iTunes Link), the team is also especially adept at tapping into the iPhone's network effect, even on something as basic as a virtual lighter.
Tarmo Virki / Reuters:
Google plans data centre at old Finnish paper mill — * Stora sells old paper plant to Google — * Google says plans to open data centre at site (Releads, adds Google comments) — Google (GOOG.O) said on Thursday it aimed to build a data centre at an old paper mill in southeastern Finland …
Discussion:
TechCrunch, Search Engine Land, paidContent, Data Center Knowledge, Stora Enso, Beyond Search and BuzzMachine
Tarmo Virki / Reuters:
Qualcomm, HP, MySpace to join Symbian camp — HELSINKI (Reuters) - Qualcomm (QCOM.O), MySpace (NWSA.O) and 12 more companies joined the Symbian camp on Thursday, giving the mobile operating system larger scale than Google's (GOOG.O) Android in the handset software battleground.
Sarah Perez / ReadWriteWeb:
Android Vulnerability So Dangerous, Users Warned Not to Use Phone's Web Browser — Over the weekend at the Schmoocon hacker conference in Washington D.C., security researcher Charlie Miller presented a new vulnerability in Google's mobile OS Android which allows hackers to remotely …
Discussion:
Open Gardens
Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:
New Tweetdeck Out Tomorrow, Here's What It Will Include — We got our hands on the new version of popular Twitter desktop app Tweetdeck that will be delivered to all users tomorrow and we're pretty excited about what's been added. — If you've never used Tweetdeck, it's …
Richard Wray / Guardian:
Samsung delays launch of Android phone — Samsung has delayed the release of its first mobile phone based on Google's Android operating system until the second half of this year. — There had been speculation that Samsung, which recently leapfrogged Nokia to become market leader in the UK …
Zach Spear / AppleInsider:
Apple Stores shifting focus to software in bid for switchers — Apple plans to rearrange the layout of its retail stores to place a greater emphasis on its consumer software offerings in an effort to convert even more customers to the Mac. — ifoAppleStore claims that the front section …
Alex Chitu / Google Operating System:
Download and Buy Videos from YouTube — YouTube includes a new section for “My Videos”: a list of purchased videos. A YouTube help page has more details about the new feature: … Videos are available to download in the MP4 format and some of them can be downloaded for free and they're …
Robin Goad / Hitwise Intelligence:
The Telegraph: how to pick up traffic from Digg — The Telegraph recently ran an excellent story that included our recent Twitter data. While reading the article I noticed the Digg widget illustrated in the picture below on the newspaper's homepage. Launched last October it lists …
Discussion:
WebProNews
PC World:
Skype Growing by 380,000 Users a Day — Ross O. Storey, CIO Asia — The number of its users is growing by the population of Singapore (more than four million) every 12 days and nearly a third of its registered subscribers now use it for business purposes.
Telegraph:
The Royal Website: The Queen's new website SEO review — The British Royal Family's new official website is reviewed for Search Engine Optimisation. — By Julian Sambles, Head of Audience, Telegraph.co.uk — I was honoured to be asked by colleagues to review the British Royal Family's …
PR Newswire:
Netflix Passes 10 Million Subscribers, With 600,000 Net Additions Since the First of the Year — Netflix, Inc. , the world's largest online movie rental service, today announced it has surpassed 10 million subscribers, a milestone that reflects the widespread and growing appeal of the company's service.
Esteban Israel / Reuters:
Cuba launches own Linux variant to counter U.S. — HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuba launched its own variant of the Linux computer operating system this week in the latest front of the communist island's battle against what it views as U.S. hegemony. — The Cuban variant, called Nova …
Darren Murph / Engadget:
Verizon Wireless adopts Alltel's My Circle as ‘Friends & Family’ — It was the number one concern of about-to-be-swallowed Alltel customers going into this merger deal, and now it's finally time for those individuals to breathe a huge sigh of relief. In a prime example of great decision making …
Discussion:
Boy Genius Report, DSLreports, Gizmodo, Associated Press, MobileCrunch, Obsessable and Gearlog
Lewis Page / The Register:
NSA offering ‘billions’ for Skype eavesdrop solution — Business model for P2P firm at last? — Counter Terror Expo News of a possible viable business model for P2P VoIP network Skype emerged today, at the Counter Terror Expo in London. An industry source disclosed that America's …
Duncan Graham-Rowe / Technology Review:
Sniffing Out Illicit BitTorrent Files — A new tool promises to detect illegal files without slowing network traffic. — A new technique has been developed for detecting and tracking illegal content transferred using the BitTorrent file-trading protocol.
Dan Goodin / The Register:
New Windows virus attacks PHP, HTML, and ASP scripts — Virut gets around — Researchers have identified a new strain of malware that can spread rapidly from machine to machine using a variety of infection techniques, including the poisoning of webservers, which then go on to contaminate visitors.
