Top Items:
Wall Street Journal:
In Major Shift, Apple Builds Its Own Team to Design Chips — Apple Inc. is building a significant capability to design its own computer chips, a strategy shift that the company hopes will create exclusive features for its gadgets and shield Apple's work from rivals.
Discussion:
9 to 5 Mac, AppleInsider, Gizmodo, The Register, MacRumors, CrunchGear, mocoNews, Gearlog, GMSV, VentureBeat, Electronic Pulp, Network World, TechVi, Between the Lines, TUAW, Forbes and digg.com, Thanks:mrinaldesai
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Wayne Schulz / Gear Diary:
Amazon starts charging by the megabyte for delivering personal documents to your Kindle - adds support for DOCX and RTF file formats — Amazon just revealed a few changes to their Kindle supported documents as well as modifications to their whispernet fee structure.
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Amazon Kindle / Amazon Kindle's Blog:
Kindle Personal Documents — For anyone who has recently sent personal documents to your Kindle, we'd like to let you know about some updates to our Personal Document Service (via Whispernet). — Starting May 4, in addition to the existing list of supported file types (DOC, HTML, JPEG …
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Forget The Pre, Palm's Got A Second Device Coming Out This Year. We're Calling It The Mini-Pre — I came across some very interesting news today. I was mostly minding my own business, hammering away at our various sources in the hardware industry and trying to dig up some sort of information …
BBC:
Web tool ‘as important as Google’ — A web tool that “could be as important as Google”, according to some experts, has been shown off to the public. — Wolfram Alpha is the brainchild of British-born physicist Stephen Wolfram. — The free program aims to answer questions directly …
Om Malik / GigaOM:
Flickr Hit Hard By Yahoo Layoffs — Updated: Yahoo layoffs have started and seem to have hit the Flickr team. Many engineers from the service have been either laid off or are leaving on their own. Rev Dan Catt, Ashot Petrosian and Neil Kandalgaonkar were amongst those who tweeted about their exits.
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Kara Swisher / BoomTown:
Flickr Co-Founder Butterfield and Chief Architect Henderson Working on Stealth Start-Up — Yesterday, several Flickr engineers posted news of their layoffs from the Yahoo photo-sharing unit on Twitter, which caused GigaOm's Om Malik to notice that Flickr architect Cal Henderson (pictured here) was also no longer on its About page.
Discussion:
Thomas Hawk Digital Connection
Peter Lauria / New York Post:
FACE(BOOK) VALUE — SOCIAL NETWORK CAN'T GET FRIENDLY FUNDING NUMBERS — Facebook has been holding exploratory meetings with private-equity firms about raising another round of funding, but the two sides are $3 billion apart on what the popular social-networking Web site is worth, The Post has learned.
Discussion:
TechCrunch
Alexis Madrigal / Wired Science:
Google Could Have Caught Swine Flu Early — Google's search data may have been able to provide an early warning of the swine flu outbreak — if the company had been looking in the right place. — Last week, at the request of the Centers for Disease Control, Google took a retroactive look at its search data from Mexico.
Joshua Topolsky / Engadget:
Flip Video Ultra HD video review — What better way to give you a look at Flip Video's new Ultra HD camcorder than by reviewing it on video... shot with the Ultra HD. The specs are simple: 720p / 30 FPS, 8GB of storage on-board, HDMI out, and pretty much nothing else.
Discussion:
Crave, Electronista, Obsessable, NewTeeVee, Ars Technica, MobileContentToday, rossrubin.com and Joystiq
Eric Rabe / Verizon:
Some Thoughts on Cablevision's 101 Mbps Speed — Verizon first demonstrated the ability to deliver 100 Mbps to the home over our FiOS system nearly two years ago. Now Cablevision is offering that speed - oh, yeah, 101 Mbps — over its DOCSIS cable system, it claims, to customers across its footprint in the New York area.
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Peter Burrows / BusinessWeek:
Making Movies: The Next Big Thing in iPhones? — Think back to a time before iPods. Back then, digital music was such a hassle that few people bothered to buy portable MP3 players. Until Apple made it easy. Then came photos. Other than using snapshots as wallpaper …
Discussion:
blogs.chron.com
Kate Greene / Technology Review:
A New Breed of Netbook? — Google's operating system could help usher in an era of ultra-cheap laptops. — Just a few years ago, many pundits expected consumers to shun netbooks. With less power than traditional laptops, a tiny screen and keyboard, and more bulk than a mobile phone …
James Kendrick / jkOnTheRun:
Peewee PC Launches Today- Convertible Netbook for Kids — I thoroughly enjoyed the time I had to play with the Intel Classmate Convertible, and that was timely as the folks at Peewee PC today are launching their commercial version of this netbook. The Peewee PC looks to be the same …
Discussion:
PeeWee PC Computers …, CrunchGear, Softpedia News, DisplayBlog, Boing Boing Gadgets, Crave, Pulse2, SlashGear, Liliputing, Pocket-lint.com and TeleRead
Michael Orey / Business Week:
Google's PR Campaign — The search giant hopes to counter charges of monopoly abuse with a charm offensive — Google (GOOG) is facing a rising tide of discontent about its market dominance. Take the ongoing lawsuit over its effort to digitize millions of books.
Macenstein:
I don't believe this guy has 6 friends — I'm not saying the MacBook Air isn't popular, but I have yet to see one in the wild, nor do I even know a guy who knows a guy who owns one. So forgive me if I don't believe that not only does this guy know six other people with MacBook Airs …
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes / Hardware 2.0:
Death to Windows AutoRun! — The economy might be in ruins, and swine flu might put us all in pine boxes, but there are still things that we can be happy about. One thing that has put a broad grin on my face over the past day or so is news that Microsoft plans to kill off AutoRun.
Sarah Lacy / Business Week:
Social Gaming Scores in the Recession — Zynga, the company behind Texas Hold 'Em on Facebook, and other game makers are attracting millions of users. Will the shine wear off? — Gaming goes gangbusters in a downturn. In 2001, the Nasdaq was plunging and such tech mainstays as telecom …
Steven Hodson / Shooting at Bubbles:
FeedDemon does Google Reader - Rock On! — I have been a FeedDemon fan for almost as long as Nick Bradbury has been coding it. For me it is one of the best RSS readers out there bar none. Today though it got even better. — FeedDemon now supports Google Reader synchronization and Google Reader Shared Items.
Jolie O'Dell / ReadWriteWeb:
IBM Launches World's Geekiest Social Network, My developerWorks — Many a neutech hipster looked askance at the huge IBM-plex situated front and center at this year's Web 2.0 conference. — No one could deny the hardware/software/services giant's place in tech history …
Jason Palmer / BBC:
Debut for world's fastest camera — The fastest imaging system ever devised has been demonstrated by researchers reporting in the journal Nature. — Their camera snaps images less than a half a billionth of a second long, capturing over six million of them in a second continuously.
Brian Caulfield / Forbes:
Intel's Pain Party — The worse the economy gets, the faster the chip giant plans to move. — BURLINGAME, Calif. — The economy is in the tank. PC sales are in a funk. And Intel shares have lost more than a third of their value over the past year. So why is Stacy Smith, the chip giant's chief financial officer, smiling?
Graeme Paton / Telegraph:
Primary schoolchildren will learn to read on Google in ‘slimmer’ curriculum — Computing skills will be put on an equal footing with literacy and numeracy in an overhaul of primary education that aims to slim down the curriculum - but not lose the basics. — Children will be taught …
Discussion:
BBC
Hiroshi Suzuki / Bloomberg:
Canon Raises Annual Profit Forecast by 12%, Exceeding Analyst Estimates — Canon Inc., the world's largest camera maker, unexpectedly raised its full-year profit forecast 12 percent, helped by deeper cost cuts and a weaker yen than the company previously estimated.
Discussion:
Imaging Insider
New York Times:
Panel Advises Clarifying U.S. Plans on Cyberwar — The United States has no clear military policy about how the nation might respond to a cyberattack on its communications, financial or power networks, a panel of scientists and policy advisers warned Wednesday, and the country needs to clarify …
Rich Miller / Data Center Knowledge:
Google Gets Patent for Data Center Barges — The U.S. Patent Office has awarded Google a patent for its proposal for a floating data center that uses the ocean to provide power and cooling. Google's patent application was filed in Feb. 2007, published in October 2008 and approved on Tuesday (and quickly noted by SEO by the Sea).
