Top Items:
Fred / A VC:
Why Hulu Should Embrace Boxee — For those that don't know, Union Square Ventures is an investor in Boxee and I am on the board. For the past several weeks I have watched Boxee's management try their hardest to convince Hulu that Boxee is a big step forward for Hulu and Hulu's content partners.
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Jason / Hulu Blog:
Doing hard things — “I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.” — Walt Disney — Later this week, Hulu's content will no longer be available through Boxee. While we never had a formal relationship with Boxee …
Discussion:
PC World, BrianOberkirch.com, Todd Watson, Between the Lines, TECH.BLORGE.com, ClickZ, Pocket-lint.co.uk, Zatz Not Funny!, NewTeeVee and Out of the Box, Thanks:andrewpascoe
Kathleen Richards / East Bay Express:
Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0 — Local business owners say Yelp offers to hide negative customer reviews of their businesses on its web site ... for a price. — Send a letter — The phone calls came almost daily. It started to get creepy. — “Hi, this is Mike from Yelp,” the voice would say.
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Jeremy / Yelp Official Blog:
Kathleen Richards - East Bay Express — Today the East Bay Express ran a lengthy story that accuses Yelp of manipulating review order for money. As we've said many-a-time we do not do this and you don't have to take my word for it. Let's take a quick look at an advertiser...
Michael Masnick / Techdirt:
Band Puts All Its Music (Plus More) Into A $3 iPhone App — The pop band The Presidents of the United States of America have released a special iPhone app that contains all of the music from all of their albums, as well as additional rare and unreleased music and images.
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Eliot Van Buskirk / Epicenter:
The Presidents of the United States of America Unleash Multiple-Album iPhone App — Dave Dederer, former singer and guitarist for nineties hitmakers The Presidents of the United States of America, has fashioned quite a second career for himself as the vice president of business development for Melodeo …
Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog:
Your Ads, Richer — Yahoo! adds video, images and custom links to search ads — Ever since we launched pay-per-click advertising, the ads have looked more or less the same: A headline, a line of ad copy, a link. They haven't changed because, frankly, the combination works pretty well.
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Larry Dignan / Between the Lines:
Sprint: Customer defections continue; Can Palm's Pre reverse the slide? — Sprint Nextel showed some signs of improvement in its fourth quarter, but is still losing customers at a rapid clip. Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said the company has “high expectations” that the Palm Pre handset can attract customers to the wireless provider.
Discussion:
Digital Daily, Silicon Alley Insider, CNET News, Wall Street Journal, GPS Obsessed and Electronista
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Arn / MacRumors:
Turn-By-Turn iPhone GPS App Already Available in iTunes — It seems despite all the anticipation about Turn-by-Turn GPS routing for the iPhone, an App already exists in the App Store that delivers this basic functionality. — XRoad Co.'s G-Map U.S. West and G-Map U.S. East apps were released …
Enigmax / TorrentFreak:
Pirate Bay Plea: Stop Hacking the Music Industry! — There can be no doubt. This week has seen a level of support for The Pirate Bay that has taken almost everyone by surprise. Sure, everyone knows it is the biggest BitTorrrent site and sure, the people who run it are some of the biggest characters …
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Eric Krangel / Silicon Alley Insider:
Tumblr Ditches Anonyblogger Ban Amidst User Revolt — That was fast. Yesterday, blogging service Tumblr moved to ban five accounts the site's admins judged were “harassing” users — the so called “anonybloggers.” But after receiving “several hundred responses from users who are upset,” …
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Arn / MacRumors:
Apple Discontinues 20" Cinema Display, Product Refreshes Coming? — Apple has removed the 20" Cinema Display from the online Apple Store and has notified resellers that the product has been “end of life'd” and can no longer be ordered. — While it may be possible that Apple has simply chosen …
InfoWorld:
Dell calls for Psion ‘netbook’ trademark to be removed — Dell has enlisted the help of the US courts in a bid to remove Psion's trademark of the term ‘Netbook’. — Netbook is the term used to describe low cost and low spec small laptops that are ideal for surfing the web on-the-go.
Prince McLean / AppleInsider:
Apple buying up available flash RAM supplies for next iPhone — A report issued on the flash RAM market indicates that Apple is inhaling supplies of memory components in preparation for the next generation iPhone, causing part shortages and raising the spot price for memory.
Michael Learmonth / AdAge:
MTV Pioneer Launches $99 Music Videos on the Web — Verizon is sponsoring latest channel from web studio Next New Networks — Back in 1981, Fred Seibert helped create MTV. Now he'd like to recreate it on the web with a new network devoted to music videos made in a day for $99 or less.
Discussion:
Digits
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
DEMO Gets Desperate: Shipley Out, Marshall In — Things are changing at DEMO, the startup and product-launch conference owned by IDG that competes with our own TechCrunch50 conference. After 13 years, conference organizer Chris Shipley will make way for Matt Marshall, editor of VentureBeat.
Randall C. Kennedy / Enterprise Desktop:
Windows 7: Cutting corners in the rush to market? — Is Microsoft ignoring beta tester feedback in its quest to ship Windows 7 come hell or high water in 2009? — Is Microsoft moving too fast with Windows 7? That's the complaint coming from some members of the technical beta program.
Discussion:
TechSpot
Gary / HDGURU.Com:
New HDTV Makers Enter The US Market With LCD Flat Panels Up to 82″ Part I-HD Guru Exclusive — Honeywell's 82″ LCD HDTV (Outside Dimensions 52.9″ H x 79.6″ W) — Plagued by low profits (or outright losses), sagging sales, and enormous competition …
Rory Cellan-Jones / dot.life blog:
Has MySpace lost its cool? — I'm not entirely sure that Chis DeWolfe enjoyed our encounter at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The affable American, co-founder and chief executive of MySpace, was jet-lagged, having stepped off a flight from Los Angeles that morning into a punishing schedule …
Anthony Ha / VentureBeat:
YouNoodle scores the buzz on 25,000 startups — YouNoodle, the company that made a splash last year by claiming to predict the future value of startups, is continuing its efforts to turn startup evaluation into a science. Now it's adding a YouNoodle Score that tracks news stories to determine a startup's …
Bloomberg:
Hewlett-Packard's Hurd Cuts Employees' Pay as Silicon Valley Retrenches — Feb. 19 (Bloomberg) — Hewlett-Packard Co. Chief Executive Officer Mark Hurd spent three years cutting costs to lift profit. Now he's targeting employee pay to ride an economic slump he says will last the rest of the year.
Saul Hansell / Bits:
I.B.M. Delivers Rural Broadband Over Power Lines — With $7 billion of government money on the line, it's no surprise that all kinds of companies are claiming they can wire the most isolated ranchers and cave dwellers with broadband Internet service. — On Thursday, I.B.M. piped …
