Top Items:
Brad Stone / New York Times:
Site Lets Writers Sell Digital Copies — SAN FRANCISCO — Turning itself into a kind of electronic vanity publisher, Scribd, an Internet start-up here, will introduce on Monday a way for anyone to upload a document to the Web and charge for it. — The Scribd Web site is the most popular …
Discussion:
ITworld.com, O'Reilly Radar, Rex Hammock's RexBlog.com, Imaging Insider and PersonaNonData
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David Kaplan / paidContent.org:
Social Publishing Site Scribd Adds E-Commerce; 80 Percent Revenues To Publishers — Document-sharing site Scribd will begin beta tests of an e-commerce platform today in an effort to tap into publishers' increasing interest in charging consumers directly for digital content.
Dan Ackerman / Crave: The gadget blog:
Acer's next-gen Aspire One Netbooks available now — We've already seen them previewed with the rest of Acer's upcoming lineup back in April, but the official release of the next generation of Aspire One Netbooks is finally here. Most notable is the inclusion of a new, bigger 11.6-inch model …
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Stand Firm Craig (and Jim) — South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster is giving even the normally sleazy Attorney General title a bad name. This is an office that has little to do with protecting the public and everything to do with making high profile attacks on targets that will generate a lot of positive press.
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Thomas Ricker / Engadget:
Napster relaunching, again: $5 per month streaming plus five free downloads — Like subscription music services? You know, like Microsoft's Zune Pass where you pay $14.99 monthly and keep up to 10 tracks each month forever. Sure, renting music at $180 per year can be a drag for those stuck …
Todd Bishop / TechFlash:
J Allard and Microsoft group try to get patent on a ‘magic wand’ — Attention Harry Potter, we'll be needing some prior art. — We've been hearing rumors and reading speculation lately about what Microsoft executive J Allard has been doing. Apart from reports about a possible Zune/Xbox linkup …
AppleTweets:
Adium 1.4 beta with Twitter support — Adium is a popular free instant messaging client for Mac OS X that supports multiple protocols through diferent libraries. What Adium isn't, however, is a Twitter client. That's about to change, starting with Adium's version 1.4 …
Discussion:
Adium Blog
Michael Masnick / Techdirt:
San Jose Mercury News: No One Reads Us Any More, So Let's Start Charging — When I first moved to Silicon Valley, the newspaper of record was the San Jose Mercury News. Everyone read it. It did a great job covering the local startup scene, and had some fantastic columnists and writers.
Robert Lemos / Technology Review:
Are Your “Secret Questions” Too Easily Answered? — Research finds that the answers to secret questions used to retrieve forgotten passwords are easily guessed. — Brian Green's experience with not-so-secret questions began when he logged on to his World of Warcraft account in March …
Joseph Tartakoff / paidContent.org:
Inside Microsoft's M&A Strategy — Here's what the CFO of Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) says the company is looking for in an acquisition target: Companies that could bolster Microsoft's position in categories that it is already a player in but does not dominate. So don't look for Microsoft to buy …
Eric Lai / Computerworld:
Buy an app via Windows Marketplace, share with four friends or family members — Microsoft readies challenge to rivals in mobile apps market — Computerworld - In a potentially market-changing move, Microsoft Corp. plans to let customers of its upcoming Windows Marketplace …
Abbey Klaassen / AdAge:
Twitter Proves Its Worth as a Killer App for Local Businesses — New Orleans Pizza Joint, Chicago Yogurt Chain See Results From Promos on Microblogging Service — NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — All those brands trying to figure the ROI of Twitter? They might do well to follow the lead of the local pizza joint.
Mike Butcher / TechCrunch Europe:
The REAL story behind the 104-Year-Old who joined Twitter — Dear reader, TechCrunch owes you an apology. We thought the “104-Year-Old joins Twitter” story last week was Digg bait created by the media. It turns out it was all just old fashioned re-hashed PR.
Danny Sullivan / Daggle:
Dammit, I'm A Journalist, Not A Blogger: Time For Online Journalists To Unite? — The public relations war of newspapers against both Google and blogs shows no signs of ebbing. Today, we get a proposal that newspapers deserve special laws to protect them.
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Mark Guim / The Nokia Blog:
Nokia N97 For North America Arriving June 2nd — I told you a couple days ago the Nokia N97 NAM was coming soon, but I wasn't sure of the exact date. Well, Nokia just notified one of their major North American distributors of the estimated shipping date: June 2nd, 2009! How accurate are we?
Discussion:
Engadget Mobile
Rafe Needleman / CNET News:
BillMyParents makes it easy for kids to spend parents' money — There's a cute new payment service just launching: BillMyParents. It's a way that kids ("tweens," according to the founder) can shop in online stores and easily spend their parents' money—if their parents later agree to buy them the stuff they want.
Matt Richtel / New York Times:
Cellphone Makers Hope for a Blockbuster Summer — The hype machine started months ago. Opening weekends are upon us. High up in executive suites, the hope is that this summer's new releases will cause lines to snake around the block. — The cellphone industry looks a lot like the movie industry nowadays.
Discussion:
PreCentral.net
Amazon Web Services Blog:
New Features for Amazon EC2: Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, and Amazon CloudWatch — We are working to make it even easier for you to build sophisticated, scalable, and robust web applications using AWS. As soon as you launch some EC2 instances, you want visibility into resource utilization and overall performance.
Discussion:
Simon Willison's Weblog
