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, mocoNews, iLounge, WMExperts, The iPhone Blog, Neowin.net, TechFlash and ParisLemon
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.
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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.
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Kim Hart / Washington Post:D.C. Tech Chief Tapped for White House Slot
Discussion:
Digits, Digital Daily, Silicon Alley Insider, CircleID, EE Times, techPresident, Jobwire and Oatmeal Stout
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, Mashable! and AdAge
Jason Calacanis / The Jason Calacanis Weblog:
Why I employed a felon — Yesterday, I joined one of our Mahalo employees at Federal District Court as he was sentenced to 48 months in jail for crimes related to computer security. — Before my employee John Schiefer was sentenced, a violent career criminal was facing 60 months for beating up a prison guard.
RELATED:
Brian Prince / eWeek:Security Consultant Turned Hacker Gets Prison for Running Botnet
Discussion:
Ars Technica
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
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
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
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?
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Alan Patrick / broadstuff:FACEBOOK BLINKS, COPIES TWITTER, STILL GETS IT WRONG.
Discussion:
Datamation, Contentinople, Search Engine Watch, Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life and The Equity Kicker
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:
Download Squad, ReadWriteWeb, Between the Lines, SiliconAngle, Webware.com, Lifehacker, TechCrunch, RotorBlog.com and Mashable!, Thanks:zoho
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.
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
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
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
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, Mobility Site, SlashGear, DisplayBlog, jkOnTheRun, CrunchGear, UMPCPortal, NaviGadget, GottaBeMobile.com and The Toybox
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.
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.
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 …
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.
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 …
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 …
Sam Churchill / dailywireless.org:
WiMAX: Passive/Aggresive? — ABI Research's new study, WiMAX Market Analysis and Forecasts, forecasts big growth for 802.16-2004 and 802.16e-2005. — While Clearwire and UQ Communications will receive much of the attention given to WiMAX services, there are many 802.16e networks …
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 …
