Top Items:
Kevin Michaluk / CrackBerry.com blogs:
Exclusive: First Real Photos of the BlackBerry 9630! — FINALLY!!!!! What you're looking at above are the first real photos of the BlackBerry “Niagara” 9630. As you can see, this CDMA full-QWERTY BlackBerry is looking sweet and very much has the appearance of the BlackBerry Curve 8900 and BlackBerry Bold morphed into one.
John Paczkowski / Digital Daily:
Perhaps if They Think of Their Win Mobile Devices as Broken iPhones... What an uncomfortable moment for Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at the CIO Summit Wednesday. Fielding questions at Microsoft's annual event for government and education sector IT workers, Ballmer was asked how best …
Discussion:
9 to 5 Mac, The Register, iLounge, The iPhone Blog, WMExperts, mocoNews, Neowin.net, TechFlash and ParisLemon
Stephanie Condon / CNET News:
Obama names D.C. official as federal CIO — Updated 5:52 a.m. with details from the official announcement. — President Obama on Thursday named Vivek Kundra, Washington, D.C.'s chief technology officer, to the position of federal chief information officer.
Discussion:
blogs.ft.com, The White House, The Register, Electronista, Computerworld, Digits, Between the Lines, Silicon Alley Insider, techPresident, ReadWriteWeb and Jobwire
RELATED:
Saul Hansell / Bits:
The Nation's New Chief Information Officer Speaks — Reforming the entire health care system may be easier than doing everything Vivek Kundra says he wants to do when it comes to reforming the government's computer systems. — Mr. Kundra, the 34-year-old former chief technology officer …
Kim Hart / Washington Post:D.C. Tech Chief Tapped for White House Slot
Discussion:
The Caucus, VentureBeat, TechFlash, Digital Daily, Silicon Alley Insider, CircleID, L.A. Times Tech Blog, EE Times, techPresident and Oatmeal Stout
Rick Aristotle Munarriz / Motley Fool:
Game Over for GameStop? — GameStop (NYSE: GME) probably doesn't see Toys “R” Us as much of a competitor in video game retailing, but that is about to change. — Toys “R” Us is starting to buy and resell used games in a few test stores, according to Forbes.
RELATED:
Arik Hesseldahl / Business Week:
At DEMO, VCs Have Stern Advice for Startups — With less money available to entrepreneurs and with fewer startups being bought, VCs are pushing portfolio companies to focus on frugality — Watch the Video... Venture capital investor Christine Herron has a bit of advice for technology startups …
Discussion:
HipMojo.com
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
It's Time To Start Thinking Of Twitter As A Search Engine — At a dinner tonight with a friend the conversation turned to Twitter. He just didn't get it, and he's certainly not the first person to tell me that. Specifically, my friend didn't understand the massive valuation …
Discussion:
Epicenter, Search Engine Watch, The Noisy Channel, Regular Geek, SiliconAngle, the Econsultancy blog, Microblink, SheGeeks and Mashable!
Brian Prince / eWeek:
Security Consultant Turned Hacker Gets Prison for Running Botnet — Former security consultant John Schiefer was sentenced to four years in federal prison for running a botnet that infected as many as 250,000 and stole passwords and account information. Schiefer was one of eight defendants nabbed …
Discussion:
Ars Technica
RELATED:
David Pogue / New York Times:
It Rings, It Shoots, It Stumbles — I'll never forget the time I visited a Riverwalk restaurant in San Antonio and ordered risotto: rice that's been stirred in broth until it's rich, creamy and perfect. — But what the waiter brought to the table wasn't risotto. It was just rice.
Discussion:
Electronic Pulp
Raju Vegesna / Zoho Blogs:
Zoho Writer 2.0 launches with fresh look — Refreshing changes don't come often. Today, we are launching a new major version of our word processor - Zoho Writer 2.0 - with a fresh and elegant user interface & significant improvements. This important upgrade comes with hundreds of improvements, mostly on the user interface.
Discussion:
Technologizer, Download Squad, ReadWriteWeb, Between the Lines, Webware.com, Lifehacker, SiliconAngle, RotorBlog.com, TechCrunch and Mashable!, Thanks:zoho
David Evans / Online Dating Insider:
PlentyOfFish Starts Charging Premium Membership Fees … Free dating sites have had a good run the past few years. Everyone starting a free dating site jumped, and continues to jump, on the free dating bandwagon. Meanwhile, top paid dating sites are making hundreds of millions of dollars …
Thanks:daveevans
Mike Butcher / TechCrunch UK & Europe:
Sky News realises news breaks first on Twitter, not TV - Creates a Twitter Correspondent — TechCrunch has been saying for a long time - at least since November last year - that Twitter is an emerging source of news. Recent tragic events have only served to emphasise this.
Discussion:
Guardian, Jobwire, TheNextWeb.com, broadstuff, Mobile Industry Review and Telegraph, Thanks:mazi
Heather Hopkins / Hitwise Intelligence:
Yahoo! Mail More than One Third of Yahoo! Traffic — Tuesday, Yahoo!'s new CEO, Carol Bartz spoke to analysts and one comment in particular caught my attention. According to an article on ZDNet, she said “Yahoo Mail is becoming increasingly critical to the company.
Discussion:
Between the Lines
Alex Chitu / Google Operating System:
Google Chrome, Bundled with RealPlayer — If you try to install RealPlayer, a media player available at real.com, you'll notice that the setup downloads Google Chrome. The option to install Google's browser is enabled by default and I assume that most people will not bother to disable it.
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Yahoo's Inquisitor Makes Search Shine On The iPhone — Last May, Yahoo acquired a startup called Inquisitor which offers a search plug-in for all the major browsers. Today, Inquisitor is available as an iPhone app and it shows how certain features, such as Yahoo's Search Assist …
Discussion:
CNET News, Yahoo! Search Blog, Search Engine Land, IntoMobile and TheNextWeb.com, Thanks:aseidman
Rebecca Buckman / Forbes:
VC View From The Rockies — Tough sledding for most Colorado venture firms. — AVON, Colo.—Even in this dismal economy, venture capitalist Chris Onan can spot lots of high-quality start-ups he'd like to fund. There's only one problem: Onan's firm, Appian Ventures, doesn't have any cash in its pockets.
Colby Ranger / The Official Google Blog:
Tipping points — Ideas are everywhere, but how do we know which ones actually work? At Google, we put a lot of stock in both the wisdom of crowds — the idea that lots of people responding to a given question can collectively find the best answer — and the value of community.
Discussion:
Google Blogoscoped, Rocky Fu, Search Engine Journal and Network World, Thanks:brickandclick
Monica Hesse / Washington Post:
Offbeat Name? Then Facebook's No Friend — What Caitlin wanted did not seem that hard. She had signed up for Facebook after she married, as Caitlin Shaw. Now, to make it easier for old friends to find her, she wanted to add her maiden name. Her maiden name is Batman.
Justin Smith / Inside Facebook:
When Will Facebook Open Up the Public Timeline? — Facebook announced yesterday that it is merging user profiles and fan profiles starting now and allowing users to make their updates public if they so choose at some point in the (presumably not too distant) future. — One major possible result of these changes?
Thomas Ricker / Engadget:
Samsung's Nano-powered Q1EX UMPC loses its QWERTY, gains 4.5-hour battery at the FCC — Meet the latest iteration of the Samsung Q1 handheld: the NP-Q1EX. First spotted at CES in January, Sammy's going back to its UMPC roots by ditching the split QWERTY in favor of a clean …
Discussion:
DailyTech, SlashGear, DisplayBlog, jkOnTheRun, CrunchGear, UMPCPortal, Mobility Site, NaviGadget, GottaBeMobile.com and The Toybox
John Leyden / The Register:
Zero-day Adobe PDF peril goes click free — Thumbnail preview threat — Free whitepaper - Lower security risks and costs by minimizing the time to protection — An unpatched flaw in Adobe Acrobat and Reader might be exploited without even needing to trick a surfer into opening a maliciously constructed file.
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
Enthusiasts keep pushing Smule's Ocarina iPhone app to higher numbers — Ge Wang, the quirky Stanford assistant music professor who co-founded iPhone music app maker Smule, delivered an update yesterday on his company's growth since starting out just eight months ago.
Douglas MacMillan / Business Week:
Amazon's Apple Deal: Kindle Cannibal? — Customers may have less incentive to buy a Kindle, now that they can download e-books onto the iPhones and iPods they already own — A new tool that lets consumers download digital books onto Apple devices could spur demand for some of the 240,000 …
Business Week:
Twitter Has Potential Buyers Atwitter — As the microblogging service explodes in popularity, the suitors are lining up. Facebook has already made a play—others will likely follow — The microblogging service Twitter has caught on with everyone from celeb Ashton Kutcher to CEOs.
Dan Frommer / Silicon Alley Insider:
Tacoda, Real Media Founder Dave Morgan Back With Another Ad Startup — Dave Morgan (SA 100 #48) is back. — He is, if you recall, the guy who started Tacoda, which he sold to AOL (TWX) in 2007 for $275 million, and Real Media. His new company: Simulmedia, which is stocked with former Platform …
Stuart Dredge / Music Ally:
The Beatles: Rock Band confirmed for 09/09/09 release date — Harmonix has confirmed that its Beatles-themed music game will be released on 9 September this year, and will be called The Beatles: Rock Band. An official site has gone live today inviting gamers to sign up for alerts when pre-ordering begins.
Discussion:
Silicon Alley Insider, Ars Technica, Contentinople, Epicenter, VentureBeat, Crave, Engadget, MacDailyNews, CrunchGear, Electronista and Gearlog
Paul Biba / TeleRead:
Fictionwise acquired by Barnes & Noble for $15.7 million in cash — Fictionwise has been acquired by Barnes & Noble, said to be the world's largest bookseller, for $15.7 million in a stock deal that TeleRead revealed earlier today. — I spoke with Scott Pendergrast of Fictionwise at 7:20 …
