Top Items:
Dan Frommer / Silicon Alley Insider:
Hulu iPhone App Coming Soon, ‘Badass’ — Hulu is in the process of developing an app for Apple's (AAPL) iPhone and iPod touch, we have learned from a plugged-in industry executive. The app is coming soon (within a few months) and is “badass” — as excellent as Hulu's Web site.
Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch:
Obama Spurns Silicon Valley Vets, Names Virginia's Secretary of Technology As CTO — President Obama will be naming Aneesh Paul Chopra as his choice for CTO during tomorrow's weekly address, as first reported by the Washington Post and confirmed in this press release posted to the White House's official web site.
RELATED:
Micah L. Sifry / techPresident:
Obama Names Aneesh Chopra US's First CTO — Looks like instead of mocking Nancy Scola, we owe her kudos for predicting all the way back in November that Obama's pick for the nation's first Chief Technology Officer would be “someone out of the small but vibrant government CTO world …
Andy Greenberg / Forbes:
Why Google Is The New Pirate Bay — If the site goes away, search engines could become the new starting points for digital pirates. — This week has offered a hard lesson for pirates, both water- and Web-based: Keep a low profile and your illicit business can flourish.
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Eliot Van Buskirk / Epicenter:
Why File Sharing Will Save Hollywood, Music — To hear some tell it, file sharing gutted the music industry by encouraging people to gorge themselves on free, illegal content. Indeed, unless Friday's landmark verdict against The Pirate Bay is overturned, four Swedes will spend a year in jail …
Owen Thomas / Gawker:
Oprah Fails to Tweet on Her Big Twitter Show — How could one possibly make Twitter even more of an exercise in self-absorption? How about by broadcasting yourself on national TV while using Twitter? Oprah's big Twitter show is on right now and we're watching. — The show starts with Oprah excited about joining Twitter.
Chris Williams / The Register:
BT chief: People don't need fibre to the home — Ford not Ferrari for you — Digital Britain Summit BT chief executive Ian Livingstone defended his firm's limited plans for faster broadband today, arguing there is not enough demand for fibre to the home to justify its cost.
Anthony Ha / VentureBeat:
Good luck with that funding: Q1 sees lowest VC investment in more than a decade — There are two new reports about the state of venture capital investing during the first three months of 2009, and they're even bleaker than I expected. Remember when everyone was hoping that the economic downturn …
RELATED:
Bernard Lunn / ReadWriteWeb:VC Investment in Internet Deals Did NOT Fall Off A Cliff
Discussion:
GigaOM
Gmail Blog:
New in Labs: Suggest more recipients — Have you ever realized you mistakenly left someone important out of an email, or just spent too much time trying to decide who from your long list of contacts to include? Well, some of us on the Gmail team feel your pain, so we wrote a new Gmail Labs feature called “Suggest more recipients.”
Discussion:
TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Download Squad, CNET News, Lifehacker and Google Blogoscoped, Thanks:atul
Caterina.net:
Hunch data — We've been busy. Since we launched Hunch, over 4.3 million questions have been answered, counting both THAY questions (Teach Hunch About You) and topic question/answers. This is phenomenal, and gives us a ton of data to work with. In the past, statistical prediction …
Discussion:
TechCrunch
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
iPhone app lets you get away with napping at work — A new iPhone app lets you nap at work in your cubicle without fear of being caught. — The iNap@Work app makes office-like “productivity noises” so that your co-workers will hear a constant din of activity coming from your space.
Discussion:
textually.org
Andrew Hampp / AdAge:
Secret to Ashton Kutcher's Twitter Success? Billboards — Should He Be Disqualified for Such Old-School Advertising? — OAAA gets Twitterpated — Here's how Ashton Kutcher really won the Twitter war with CNN: digital billboards. — Lamar Advertising, the third-largest billboard company …
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Rafe Needleman / CNET News:How to unfollow Ashton Kutcher
Discussion:
Style Council, Android and Me, New York Times, Technology Review, AppScout, ReadWriteWeb, ITworld.com, Digits, VentureBeat and Gawker
Gillian Reagan / New York Observer:
‘Twitter Sucks!’ The Backlash Begins — Twitter has been hyped, obsessively covered by “gee-whiz!” journalists (O.K., including us), and even studied by experts. But now that the micro-blogging platform is the third most popular social network behind Facebook and MySpace …
Discussion:
Industry Standard
Paul Miller / Engadget:
Bridgestone's 13-inch color e-paper display handles pen input, has the future written all over it — While it'll always be difficult to accept innovative technology from a company that makes our tires, there's just no faulting Bridgestone's work in the e-paper space, or their latest color entry, above.
Rupal Parekh / AdAge:
WPP Sues Spot Runner for Securities Fraud, Breach of Contract — Accuses Agency of ‘Pump and Dump’ Stock Scheme — NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — WPP has filed a lawsuit against Spot Runner, the Los Angeles self-service ad creator in which it has a stake, as well as the agency's chairman-CEO …
Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:
A Better Calling Card: Twitter Challenges Facebook Connect — In the old days, self-important people use to carry calling cards. Now we have Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites to turn us all into mini-celebrities. So what's the new calling card online?
Jenna Wortham / New York Times:
Public Provides Giggles; Bloggers Get the Book Deal — After Duncan Birmingham, a comedy screenwriter in Los Angeles, got one too many holiday cards featuring miserable-looking pets wearing fake reindeer antlers, he realized the photos were great material for a blog.
Thanks:mrinaldesai
Fred / A VC:
The Power Of Passed Links — Links are the currency of the web. That's the reason that Google is the king of the web right now. Google generates more click thrus to more websites than any other web service out there. — But I've been ruminating on a comment that was left on my earned media post a few weeks ago by Ben Straley.
Thanks:sampad
Pamela Samuelson / O'Reilly Radar:
Legally Speaking: The Dead Souls of the Google Booksearch Settlement — Guest blogger Pamela Samuelson is the Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law and Information at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as a Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology …
Discussion:
Boing Boing
Mary Jo Foley / All about Microsoft:
Windows Mobile 6.5 launch: Pencil in May 11 — The first Windows Mobile 6.5 phones aren't expected to be available until this fall, but it looks like that isn't stopping Microsoft from “launching” the next version of its mobile operating system on May 11. — May 11 is the opening …
Discussion:
Electronista, Engadget, Gizmodo, Ars Technica, WMPoweruser.com, GigaOM, Download Squad, CNET News, ithinkdifferrent and BetaNews
Eric Engleman / TechFlash:
Amazon's Jeff Bezos on Kindle sales and The Karate Kid — Amazon.com released CEO Jeff Bezos' 2008 annual letter to shareholders today. Among the highlights: Bezos says sales of the electronic Kindle reader “have exceeded our most optimistic expectations.”
Sarah Perez / ReadWriteWeb:
This iPhone App Helps You Make iPhone Apps — Do you have a great idea for an iPhone app but not the coding skills to actually build it? Well, there's an app for that. The AppIncubator iPhone App from MEDL Mobile lets you submit your ideas which the company's development team will then build into apps for you.
Paul Boutin / Gadgetwise:
Welcome to Our Site, Sorry You Can't Use It — There are plenty of upstart social networks besides Facebook and Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn. But too many suffer from what I call Private Beta Disorder: Instead of letting you dive right in, they ask you to “sign up for our private beta program.”
