Top Items:
Sergey Brin / The Official Google Blog:
The 2008 Founders' Letter — Every year our founders take turns writing a letter that is included in our annual report. We originally published the 2008 Founders' Letter on our Investor Relations site. Since today is the annual Stockholders' Meeting at our Mountain View headquarters, we wanted to make it more widely available.
RELATED:
Larry Dignan / Between the Lines:
Google: Looking over shoulder at Wolfram|Alpha? — Google's Sergey Brin, co-founder and president of the search giant, on Thursday delivered the company's annual “Founders' Letter” and apparently is keeping a watchful eye on Wolfram|Alpha. — If you recall, Wolfram|Alpha …
Eric Slivka / MacRumors:
AT&T Considering $10 Drop in iPhone Monthly Plan Rates? — TheStreet.com reports on comments from analyst Michael Cote suggesting that AT&T is considering reducing the basic monthly iPhone plan from $69 to $59 alongside an announcement of the next-generation iPhone at next month's Worldwide Developers Conference.
RELATED:
Scott Moritz / TheStreet.com:Tech Rumor of the Day: Apple
Discussion:
PC World, CNET News, Unwired View, Mac|Life all, Gadgetell, AppleInsider, Ars Technica, 9 to 5 Mac, MacDailyNews, SlashGear, MobileCrunch, TheAppleBlog, DSLreports, TUAW, Ubergizmo, Gearlog, The Apple Core, World of Apple and Edible Apple
Zach Epstein / Boy Genius Report:
Internal Palm memo may reveal Pre launch timing — We're prefacing this by saying we're definitely not 100%, but it looks like Palm could be gearing up for a round of meetings that will lead up to the day we've all been waiting for — Palm Pre launch day. We just received what an anonymous …
Discussion:
Digital Daily, InformationWeek, Electronista, PreCentral.net, I4U News, MobileCrunch, Gizmodo, Palm WebOS, prethinking.com, jkOnTheRun, GottaBeMobile.com and tinyComb
Matthew Garrahan / Financial Times:
Hulu agrees international TV deals — Hulu, the US online video service owned by NBC Universal, Fox and Walt Disney, has signed its first batch of content deals with international television producers, the first step towards a full global launch of the service.
Discussion:
PR Newswire, MediaPost, NewTeeVee, Contentinople, Electronista, Hollywood Reporter and AppScout
Ryan Tate / Gawker:
David Simon: Dead-Wrong Dinosaur — The creator of the brilliant television series The Wire today asked Congress to legalize monopolistic collusion by newspapers. Only they can really cover City Hall, he said. Apparently he hasn't been there in a while.
RELATED:
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
Microsoft buys game developer BigPark to beef up Xbox 360 offering — Microsoft has been scaling back its internal staff across the board and in games. But the software giant showed today that it's still willing to invest in the game business by buying BigPark, a game development studio in Vancouver, Canada.
RELATED:
Eric Savitz / Tech Trader Daily:
Google: Schmidt Hasn't Considered Quitting AAPL Board — Speaking to reporters at a press briefing ahead of the company's annual meeting taking place this afternoon, Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt said he hadn't considered resigning from the Apple (AAPL) board in response …
Discussion:
Digital Daily, Macworld, The Register, TechCrunch, Associated Press, Tech Beat, Bits, Wall Street Journal and The Mac Observer
RELATED:
Stephen Shankland / CNET News:
Facing criticism, Google tries buffing its image — Google, having dealt with two major antitrust issues 2008 and facing the potential of more to come, has begun a program to try to spruce up its image and show that competition is alive and well. — Consumer Watchdog on Friday plans to tout …
Discussion:
ClickZ
RELATED:
Andrew Clark / Guardian:
Free web news era over, says Murdoch — Current days of free internet will soon be over, says media mogul — Rupert Murdoch expects to start charging for access to News Corporation's newspaper websites within a year as he strives to fix a "malfunctioning" business model.
Katie Marsal / AppleInsider:
Snow Leopard to support native 3G Wireless WAN hardware — Building on evidence that Apple is seeking to hire engineers to test new Macs with 3G Wireless WAN support, people familiar with the company's plans say Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard will incorporate new support for native WWAN hardware.
Discussion:
MacRumors, Electronista, World of Apple, Gizmodo, O'Grady's PowerPage and Electricpig.co.uk
Ina Fried / CNET News:
Microsoft tweaks antipiracy tech for Windows 7 — With Windows 7, Microsoft is making some subtle changes to the ways it tries to thwart piracy. — As has been the case for some time, Microsoft's strategy hinges on requiring a user to electronically verify their copy of the software …
RELATED:
Adam Pash / Lifehacker:
Mozilla Weave to Integrate Auto-Login with Firefox — We've shown you how Mozilla Weave syncs your browsing experience—including bookmarks and passwords—in the past, but the folks at Mozilla are hoping to improve this experience with integration for automatic web site logins.
RELATED:
Philip Elmer-DeWitt / Apple 2.0:
iPhone App Store: 40,000 and counting — Noah's rain lasted 40 days and 40 nights, but the flood of submissions to the iPhone App Store — which hit the 40,000 mark in late April — continues unabated. — The current numbers, as of Thursday afternoon are as follows:
The Boy Genius / Boy Genius Report:
BlackBerry 8520's hitting T-Mobile in Q4 — We just got some hands on time with the now infamous BlackBerry 8520 (code-named Gemini). Optical trackball? Ooooh yeah. While there hasn't been too much time to play with them, early impressions are definitely fitting in with what CrackBerry reported …
Discussion:
CrackBerry.com blogs, Unwired View, Electronista, TmoNews, Cell Phone Signal and Engadget Mobile
Nick Mediati / PC World:
Speed Test: Windows 7 May Not Be Much Faster Than Vista — Though Windows 7 edged out Vista in our lab tests, you may not notice much of a difference. — Recommends — Improving performance is one of Microsoft's design goals with Windows 7, and many early reviewers (including ours) …
Elizabeth Woyke / Forbes:
Nokia's Gigantic App Store — Nokia is preparing an app store second in size only to Apple's. — Nokia is about to shake up the app store world. — The Finnish company is planning to roll out an online store for mobile applications later this month. Though Apple ( AAPL - news …
John Herrman / Gizmodo:
iPhone Beta 5 Odds and Ends: No More MMS, Better YouTube? — The official script may have minimized it as a maintenance release, but some users are finding out that iPhone Beta 5 contains more than bugfixes. So far: YouTube's improved, and hacked MMS is no more.
Discussion:
Ed Burnette's Dev Connection, winandmac.com, The iPhone Blog, Ars Technica, Mobile Roar, Rev2.org, TUAW, Neowin.net and MacRumors
Frederic Lardinois / ReadWriteWeb:
Microsoft Photosynth Goes to Work: Integrates With Virtual Earth — Microsoft announced today that it will now give its commerical partners the option to mash up Virtual Earth and Photosynth to create immersive 3D photo experiences. In order to facilitate this, Microsoft also announced …
Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:
Warner Music Group Walks Away From Digital Start-Ups Lala and Imeem, Loses $33 Million — It's par for the course for big music labels to boast about their digital music sales as their CD sales tank. And that's just what Warner Music Group (WMG) did that this morning …
Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:
3 Reasons Why Twitter Will NOT Index the Links You Share (Updated) — Techmeme is on fire this morning with discussion of Rafe Needleman's CNet post about Twitter's supposed plans to index the content of links shared over the microblogging service. Ex-Googler turned Twitter exec …
Om Malik / GigaOM:
eBay CEO: $2B Valuation for Skype Is “Low” — One thing is for sure: eBay, a disaster of an Internet company, really wants to rectify its megabillion-dollar mistake and get rid of Skype — even if it means taking a small haircut. But eBay CEO John Donahoe thinks the company is worth …
Nilay Patel / Engadget:
MPAA suggests teachers videotape TVs instead of ripping DVDs. Seriously. — So the Copyright Office is currently in the middle reviewing proposed exceptions to the DMCA, and one of the proposals on the table would allow teachers and students to rip DVDs and edit them for use in the classroom.
Frank Davies / Mercury News:
Good news, bad news for Silicon Valley leaders in D.C. — WASHINGTON — Silicon Valley executives ended two days of meetings with the Obama administration and Congress on Wednesday, expressing optimism that progress will occur this year on many issues, from climate change to bringing BART to San Jose.
Brandon Bailey / Mercury News:
Tech Notebook: HP exec hired from EMC sitting on sideline as legal battle plays out — There's been a further snag in Hewlett-Packard's effort to hire a former top EMC executive and put him in charge of HP's newly reorganized data center business, just as competition in that arena is heating up.
Aron Trimble / TUAW:
Breaking News: No new app submissions unless they run on OS 3.0 — iPhone OS 3.0 beta 5 was only released for general consumption yesterday, and already Apple is rocking our collective faces off with big news. While a cool new feature being uncovered would be great, what Apple has in store …
