Top Items:
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Decision Time For Facebook: Term Sheet Received At $2 Billion Valuation — Facebook has been pitching for a new round of funding these last few months to bridge itself to an IPO sometime in the future. We've known that since October, when (former) CFO Gideon Yu was in Dubai.
Discussion:
Silicon Alley Insider, Electricpig.co.uk, Smalltalk Tidbits … and DealBook, Thanks:mrinaldesai
RELATED:
Eric Eldon / VentureBeat:
Facebook rejects funding at $4 billion valuation, may not raise more — Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg just had a board-level conversation about possibly accepting money at a $4 billion valuation, but decided against doing so. — Facebook isn't commenting directly …
Clay Shirky:
The Failure of #amazonfail — In 1987, a teenage girl in suburban New York was discovered dazed and wrapped in a garbage bag, smeared with feces, with racial epithets scrawled on her torso. She had been attacked by half a dozen white men, then left in that state on the grounds of an apartment building.
Scott M. Fulton, III / BetaNews:
One extra week for Microsoft to defend tying IE to Windows — After a Financial Times report this morning cited April 28 as the deadline for Microsoft to comply with a request by the European Commission to respond to its latest Statement of Objections, reporters close to the story wondered why that seemed like one week too many.
Discussion:
The Register
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Bloomberg:
Sun Said to Be Willing to Resume IBM Talks With Assurances Deal Will Close — Sun Microsystems Inc. would be willing to resume takeover talks with International Business Machines Corp. if IBM makes a stronger commitment to close the acquisition, two people familiar with the matter said.
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Ernesto / TorrentFreak:
Pirate Bay Supporters Throw Street Party in Moscow — Pirate Bay supporters can be found everywhere. Aside from tens of millions of ‘regular’ site users, there are other more prominent supporters too. Novelist Paulo Coelho, who wrote the 65 million-selling book “The Alchemist” …
Dan Frommer / Silicon Alley Insider:
CNN Acquires CNNbrk Twitter Account With Nearly 1 Million Followers — Hard to believe, but the CNN Twitter account racing Ashton Kutcher to 1 million subscribers wasn't even under CNN's (TWX) control until recently. — CNN confirms that it has has taken control of the @cnnbrk account — and its 944,000 followers.
Discussion:
CNN, Guardian, TechCrunch, Pulse2, ABCNEWS, DealBook, Mashable!, TheNextWeb.com and Lost Remote
RELATED:
Chris Morris / CNBC.com:
GameStop Wants Cheaper Consoles, Predicts Hot Titles — Consumers hoping for a price cut on video game hardware have a new—and powerful—ally. — While the video game industry has proved relatively resistant to the recession so far, the CEO of GameStop [GME Loading...
Claire Cain Miller / Bits:
Twitter Wants Distribution Deals, Not a Buyout — Yes, Twitter is talking to big Internet companies about forming partnerships with them. No, it is not looking to sell itself. — That is the latest from Fred Wilson, the Union Square Ventures partner who was an early investor in Twitter …
John C Abell / Epicenter:
Wall Street Journal iPhone App Sets Content Free — The Wall Street Journal, one of the few newspapers that charges for content online, released an app for the iPhone Wednesday which sets their content free, poking another hole in one of the internet's oldest pay walls.
Robin Wauters / TechCrunch:
TwitPic Hits 1 Million Users, Brick Wall — Sharing photographs and other images on Twitter is a fairly natural and thus wildly popular extension of the micro-sharing service's main reason for being. We've earlier noticed how TwitPic seems to have emerged as the leader of the pack.
Microsoft:
Next Wave of Microsoft Office Products Will Redefine How People Work — Q&A: Chris Capossela, senior vice president of Microsoft's Information Worker Product Management Group, discusses what people and businesses can expect from the upcoming release of Microsoft Exchange Server, Office, SharePoint Server, Visio and Project.
Michael C / Techdirt:
Want To Know Why Newspapers Are Dying? Maureen Dowd Shows Us — In her recent New York Times op-ed, Maureen Dowd takes aim at Google, blaming it for the sorry state of the newspaper industry. Perhaps in hopes of winning people over to the newspapers' side in the argument over how much Google …
Tiffany Sparks / PR Newswire:
IBM Technology Alliance Announces Availability of Advanced 28-Nanometer, Low-Power Semiconductor Technology — International Business Machines Corp. - , STMicroelectronics NV — IBM, Chartered, GLOBALFOUNDRIES, Infineon, Samsung and STMicroelectronics Expand Technology Agreements
Discussion:
Between the Lines
Plamere / Music Machinery:
Inside the precision hack — There's a scene toward the end of the book Contact by Carl Sagan, where the protagonist Ellie Arroway finds a Message embedded deep in the digits of PI. The Message is perhaps an artifact of an extremely advanced intelligence that apparently manipulated …
Bloomberg:
Nokia Profit Declines 90%, Misses Estimates as Demand for Handsets Falters — Nokia Oyj, the world's biggest maker of mobile phones, reported its lowest profit in more than a decade as handset demand slumped. — First-quarter net income declined to 122 million euros ($160 million) …
Discussion:
mocoNews
Joseph Menn / Financial Times:
Yahoo ready to sell Hot Jobs — Three months into her stint at the head of Yahoo, Carol Bartz is hastening her drive to streamline operations by disposing of ancillary businesses. — The Silicon Valley company is seeking buyers for the HotJobs employment site, people familiar …
Discussion:
Virtual Economics
Arn / MacRumors:
Apple Researching Movement-Aware Interfaces for iPhones, Depicts Front-Facing Video Camera — Apple has been conducting ongoing research into how to further improve their mobile device interfaces as evidenced by a couple of patent applications published over the past couple of weeks.
Discussion:
The iPhone Blog
Todd Bishop / TechFlash:
Microsoft revives Spitfire pub under compromise arrangement — Microsoft has reached an agreement to move forward with a new campus pub — reversing course after having second thoughts and surprising the bar owner with a lease termination last week. Under the compromise plan …
The Boy Genius / Boy Genius Report:
SlingPlayer for iPhone rejected at AT&T's request? — Some feared it might happen, others thought it would pass with flying colors, but unfortunately we've got a tip that tries to shed some light on the situation. This was from an anonymous tipster and we're posting it for information sake.
David Wood / Symbian Foundation Blog:
Redesigning the Smartphone Show — The main annual gathering of the Symbian community has had several different names over the years: — In the early years after the formation of Symbian Ltd, the event was called the Developer Conference ("DevConf") or the Developer Exposition ("DevExpo");
Nick / Rough Type:
The big company and the cloud — In an analysis released today, and covered by Forbes and the New York Times, the consulting firm McKinsey & Company provides a useful, if flawed, counterweight to some of the more excited hype about cloud computing. While granting that “clouds are very cost-effective” …
Farhad Manjoo / Slate:
Do You Think Bandwidth Grows on Trees? — User-generated content may have changed the Internet, but sites like YouTube are suffocating under the costs of storing it. — Everyone knows that print newspapers are our generation's horse-and-buggy; in the most wired cities, they've been pummeled by competition from the Web.
Steve Espinosa / Silicon Alley Insider:
How Twitter Will Win Local Search — (This post was originally published on Local Search News) — Almost everything on Twitter is inherently local. The simple question “What are you doing?” implies that because, unless you are at home watching TV, you are doing something that is local …
Mark Spoonauer / LAPTOP Mag:
RIM CEO: Storm Just First Touch Product, Our Push Technology Crushes the Competition — The best way to describe RIM's year so far? Very good, but a bit rocky. One the one hand, the company has much to reason to celebrate. It recently shipped the fifty-millionth BlackBerry …
