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2:40 PM ET, February 19, 2009

Techmeme

 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.
RELATED:
Jason / Hulu Blog:
Doing hard things
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.
RELATED:
Kara Swisher / BoomTown:   The Little Engine That Could? …
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.
RELATED:
Jeremy / Yelp Official Blog:
Kathleen Richards - East Bay Express
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.
Discussion: TechCrunch and Macworld
RELATED:
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 …
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.
RELATED:
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 …
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:
Day 4 - Pirate Bay Defense Calls Foul Over Evidence  —  Prosecutor Håkan Roswall began the day by again referencing the case in Finland against the administrators of Finreactor.  Fredrik's lawyer Jonas Nilsson requested a copy of the case notes for the defense.
Discussion: p2pnet
RELATED:
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.
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.
Discussion: Engadget, Electronista and jkOnTheRun
The Boy Genius / Boy Genius Report:
Upcoming Verizon news: BlackBerry Niagara, Hub updates, Netbooks, Apex  —  One of our trusty ninjas just hit us up with a couple details on some of Verizon's upcoming products and product offerings.  First off.. Netbooks.  We've been told that Verizon Wireless will 100% start selling Netbooks in stores around May of this year.
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: InfoWorld, TechSpot and Zoli's Blog
Leena Rao / TechCrunch:
DocStoc Does Its Part To Rid The Web Of Download Links  —  Document sharing site DocStoc has launched DocShots, a free service that allows publishers to convert any document on a website into a hoverable link that provides an instant online document preview.
Discussion: Webware.com
Chris Soghoian / CNET News:
Recovery.gov blocked search engine tracking  —  Update: As of 8 a.m. PST, within three hours of this story first going live, it appears that President Obama's Web team has (silently) pulled the robots.txt file from the Recovery.gov Web site.  The site is now open to Web crawlers of all kinds.
Discussion: techPresident and TG Daily
Paul Miller / Engadget:
Stantum's mind-blowing multitouch interface on video!  —  We just got a look at some amazing touchscreen interaction, running on a humble resistive touchscreen with some OMAP hardware backing it up.  Stantum's technology is a software-based refinement to resistive touchscreens that allows …
Discussion: GottaBeMobile.com and jkkmobile
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.
Jeremy Mullman / AdAge:
Anheuser-Busch Pulls the Plug on Bud.TV  —  Legal Difficulties, Trouble Producing Content Led to Video Site's Demise  —  CHICAGO (AdAge.com) — Bud.TV, one of the boldest, most groundbreaking and least successful online video plays by a major marketer, has officially died.
Discussion: NewTeeVee, VatorNews and ClickZ
Etgar Lefkovits / Jerusalem Post:
‘Kosher’ GPS device gets official launch  —  It lists thousands of kosher restaurants and includes the Book of Psalms, the three daily prayer services, the Traveler's Prayer, a Hebrew calendar, and two versions of Grace After Meals.  —  Welcome to the “kosher” GPS device.
Discussion: Gizmodo, GPS Obsessed and CrunchGear
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 …
Leena Rao / TechCrunch:
Flip Or Bust?  FlipGloss Debuts Glossy Digital Photo Magazine  —  FlipGloss, a Forbes Media-funded digital magazine focused purely on editorial and advertising photo content, has launched the beta version of its site.  Featuring “lifestyle” based photography focused on fashion, design and travel …
Discussion: paidContent.org, MediaMemo and 901am
NokiaPressServices / Nokia Press Bulletin Board:
Nokia completes EUR 500 million R&D loan agreement with EIB  —  Nokia has completed a EUR 500 million loan agreement with the European Investment Bank (EIB).  The five-year loan will be used to part-finance software research and development (R&D) projects Nokia is undertaking during 2009-2011 …
Discussion: GigaOM and OStatic blogs
Monica Chen / DigiTimes:
Asustek to completely phase out 8.9-inch Eee PCs in 2009, says Asia-Pacific president  —  Asustek Computer will completely phase out its 8.9-inch Eee PC netbooks in 2009 since 10-inch models are becoming the mainstream specification in the market, according to Benson Lin, president of Asustek's Asia-Pacific division.
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 …
Discussion: SlashGear, Gizmodo and Engadget HD
 
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 More Items: 
Ryan Singel / Threat Level:
Wikileaks Forced to Leak Its Own Secret Info — Update
Discussion: Ars Technica and DailyTech
Paul Miller / Engadget:
Palm confirms games are in development for Pre, drops a few other tidbits
iFixit:
MacBook Pro 17" Unibody First Look
Discussion: Macworld and TUAW
Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch:
Coghead Grinds To A Halt, Heads To The Deadpool
Discussion: InfoWorld and Portals and KM
Stephen J. Dubner / Freakonomics:
What Would Micropayments Do for Journalism? A Freakonomics Quorum
Discussion: mathewingram.com/work
Saul Hansell / Bits:
I.B.M. Delivers Rural Broadband Over Power Lines
Discussion: Yahoo! Finance and DSLreports
 Earlier Items: 
Rory Cellan-Jones / dot.life blog:
Has MySpace lost its cool?
Discussion: Mobile Industry Review, Thanks:dreamsketcher
Asa Dotzler:
how many linux users are there  —  Counting users for a browser …
Anne Loucks / OLDaily:
The Agreeable Cat
Discussion: Gadget Lab and GamePolitics News
Dan Goodin / The Register:
Hacker pokes new hole in secure sockets layer
Discussion: Forbes
 

 
From Mediagazer:

Alex Sherman / CNBC:
Analyzing Comcast's spinoff of cable networks, purposefully structured with low debt: the move might be a signal to the industry that it's time to consolidate

Daniel Thomas / Financial Times:
James Harding says the Tortoise-Observer deal could create a profitable media group and there isn't a guaranteed future for the Observer with the Guardian

John Gruber / Daring Fireball:
Substack, very deliberately, tries to have it both ways by saying publications on their platform are independent while presenting them all as parts of Substack

 
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