Top Items:
Mark Gomez / Mercury News:
Widespread phone outage in Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties — Thousands of residents in southern Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties are without phone service this morning and can't call 911 in case of an emergency, according to law enforcement officials.
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Sam Diaz / Between the Lines:
Fiber optic line damaged in Silicon Valley; impact is far-reaching — No matter all of the advancements in wireless and mobile technology, at the end of the day, we're all still connected to a big wire somewhere. Early this morning, we discovered that one of those big wires is located under a busy Silicon Valley roadway.
Miguel Helft / Bits:
YouTube in Music Video Deal With Universal — YouTube and Universal Music Group, the world's largest music company, said on Thursday that they had reached an agreement to create a new online hub for music videos called Vevo. It will be the latest of many efforts by YouTube, which is owned by Google …
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Kara Swisher / BoomTown:
Who Will Be Twitter's Bestest Search Friend? Google and Microsoft Engage in Yet Another Pick-Me Face-Off. — [UPDATED: With added information about range of product discussions.] — In this digital era's version of “Spy Vs. Spy,” Microsoft and Google find themselves in yet another sharp-elbowed battle …
Discussion:
CNET News, Search Engine Land, eWeek, Mashable!, Silicon Alley Insider and APM's Future Tense
Benjamin Wayne / Silicon Alley Insider:
YouTube Is Doomed — YouTube, that incandescent tower of video Babel; monument to the sloughed-off detritus of our exponentially-exploding digital culture; a Technicolor cataract of skateboarding dogs, lip-synching college students, political punditry, and porn; has reached the zenith of its meteoric rise …
Tricia Duryee / mocoNews:
Research In Motion Quietly Hires The Mastermind Behind The iPhone User Interface — BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion has quietly scooped up Don Lindsay, one of the original masterminds behind the iPhone user interface, mocoNews has learned. In his new role, he will be charged with …
Eric M. Zeman / Phone Scoop:
Bluetooth 3.0 Is Ready for Prime Time — The Bluetooth Special Interest Group is set to announce the Bluetooth 3.0 specification later this month. Bluetooth 3.0 will feature dramatically increased speeds, allowing for the transfer of large video files, music collections and photo libraries wirelessly ‘within seconds’.
Discussion:
SlashGear, Electronista, Crave, Engadget, Unwired View, pocketnow.com, dailywireless.org, Electricpig.co.uk and GottaBeMobile.com
Joseph Tartakoff / paidContent.org:
Microsoft Breaks Up Its Live Labs Group — Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) is downsizing its high-profile Live Labs group, which was created three years ago to speed up innovation in the company's online business, paidContent.org has learned. — The group, whose mission has been to hatch new ideas …
Gmail Blog:
New in Labs: Sender time zone — Let's say your girlfriend sends you an angry email. It's mostly about how you behaved at the party last night and then left for a business trip without saying goodbye. You read it from the other side of the globe, jet-lagged after a 12 hour flight.
Discussion:
TechCrunch, PC World, CNET News, Obsessable, TG Daily, CloudAve, AppScout, Lifehacker, Electricpig.co.uk, Traffick, InformationWeek, geeksugar and Google Operating System, Thanks:atul
Svetlana Gladkova / Profy:
Twitter Is Huge? Yes. Twitter Is a Popular Marketing Tool? Probably no. — Twitter sometimes looks like it has been here forever with everyone seemingly using it everywhere and for just about every purpose. And of course we have all seen various marketing and promotion techniques employed …
Jason Kottke / kottke.org:
Extreme borrowing in the blogosphere — In the past week, both Joshua Schachter and Matt Haughey published articles that were excerpted in the Voices section of All Things Digital, a web site owned by Dow Jones and run by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg of the WSJ.
Dan Frommer / Silicon Alley Insider:
iPhone To Get Qualcomm's ‘FLO TV’ Mobile TV — One reason that Qualcomm's FLO TV mobile television division has had a slow start: It's only available on select phones that have a special chip inside them. That's currently about 9 phones of roughly 100-plus in the U.S. market …
Yahoo! Search Blog:
BOSS Update: Delicious, Advanced Language, and News Capabilities — Today we're adding several new tools to the Yahoo! Search BOSS developer war chest: Delicious content, advanced language capabilities, and news sorting functionality to the BOSS news service.
Daniel Burka / Digg the Blog:
Digg Search: Now With 99.987% Less Suck — An apology is due - until today, Digg's search has been pretty terrible. I'm really excited to announce that our search no longer sucks. In fact, I think it's awfully good but you should try it out and judge for yourself.
Eric Pfanner / New York Times:
France Rejects Plan to Curb Internet Piracy — PARIS — In a major blow for President Nicolas Sarkozy's plan to crack down on Internet piracy, the French National Assembly on Thursday rejected legislation that would have cut off the Internet connections of persistent copyright violators.
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Todd Bishop / TechFlash:
Bill Gates and friends apply for electromagnetic engine patents — Bill Gates has always been fond of his cars, but new patent applications suggest Microsoft's founding geek is becoming even more of a gearhead. Gates is listed among 10 inventors on a series of filings seeking patents …
Aidan Malley / AppleInsider:
Apple to disable .Mac website tools in July — MobileMe subscribers using legacy .Mac website tools have been warned by Apple that the .Mac Groups and HomePage features will be discontinued in July, leaving existing pages live but taking away the ability to edit or update them.
Business Week:
Sheryl Sandberg on Facebook's Future — In an exclusive BusinessWeek interview, the social networking site's chief operating officer talks about controversies and strategy — Watch the Video... The social networking site Facebook has proven wildly popular, with the company announcing …
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narcissistic infarction:
Did Arrington actually pull off the Crunchpad WiFi tablet? — When he announced it a few months ago, I thought there was a slim chance that Arrington's CrunchPad would come to fruition. A $200 12" touchscreen with WiFi and Firefox seemed pretty difficult to imagine.
Nate Anderson / Ars Technica:
The price-gouging premiums of Time Warner Cable's data caps — Time Warner Cable is expanding its test markets for paltry Internet data caps. Ars breaks down the obscene price per gigabyte that the company thinks is “fair.” — Time Warner Cable, stung by online criticism of its paltry traffic caps …
Brandon LeBlanc / The Windows Blog:
Avoid the Apple Tax - Cash in on the value of Windows — With the ailing global economy, I am looking at ways I get better value for my money. One way I can do this if I need to replace a computer is by avoiding the “Apple Tax.” — Microsoft sponsored a new whitepaper (PDF) …
Stacey Higginbotham / GigaOM:
Cisco to Buy Tidal as Part of Its Data Center Rush — Cisco this morning said it plans to acquire Tidal Software for $105 million in cash as part of its expansion into the data center. Tidal, which raised venture money from investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Panorama Capital …
Discussion:
investor.cisco.com, CNET News, VentureBeat, The SiliconANGLE, Between the Lines and VatorNews
Larry Dignan / Between the Lines:
Amazon launches BlackBerry app; Leaves Storm out — Updated: Amazon followed up its iPhone application with one for the BlackBerry, but only folks with trackball devices need to bother with the download. The BlackBerry Storm isn't supported. — The company said in a statement Thursday …
Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch:
Viewers Flock To CBS Sports For March Madness: 8.6 Million Total Hours Watched — CBS Sports has just released the final tally of their traffic figures for this year's NCAA March Madness, and the results are pretty impressive. Over the course of the tournament, viewers watched a total …
Investment Ireland:
Big Fish Games expected to create up to 100 jobs in Cork — Big Fish Games — Leading Online Games and Entertainment Company to establish European Headquarters — Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Mary Coughlan, TD, announced jointly with Jeremy Lewis …
Claire Cain Miller / Bits:
Yelp Gives Small Businesses a Louder Voice — Small businesses will soon feel a little more love in their love-hate relationship with Yelp, the review site. — Yelp will begin allowing small business owners to respond publicly to reviews they think are incorrect.
Kaspersky Lab Weblog:
The neverending story — Last night the Kido (aka Conficker/ Downadup) botnet kicked into action - what everyone's been on the lookout for since 1st April. — The computers infected with Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Kido (aka Conficker.c) contacted each other over P2P, telling infected machines to download new malicious files.
Discussion:
eWeek, CNET News, ITworld.com, ReadWriteWeb, Zero Day, Threat Level, blogs.chron.com and The Register
MG Siegler / VentureBeat:
12seconds crowd-sources commercials for a business model on top of Twitter — While Twitter itself may not have a final business model yet, the hot thing these days is for third-parties to use the service to create their own business models. Short-form video startup 12seconds is the latest to do this …
