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9:25 AM ET, May 20, 2009

Techmeme

 Top Items: 
John Paczkowski / Digital Daily:
Microsoft Expected to Debut Updated Search Engine at D: All Things Digital  —  The long-awaited upgrade to Microsoft's search engine will soon make its debut.  —  Sources with knowledge of the situation said the company is expected to demonstrate it at our D: All Things Digital conference next week.
RELATED:
Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land:
Forget Kumo — Will Microsoft's New Search Engine Launch Soon As Bing?
Thanks:atul
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
Movie fans to get a TV-friendly Netflix experience on Windows Media Center  —  Microsoft is announcing today that its Windows Media Center can now show more than 12,000 movies and TV shows from Netflix's library of online video rentals.  —  The videos are now available to watch instantly …
RELATED:
Brandon LeBlanc / The Windows Blog:
Netflix comes to Windows Media Center
Todd Bishop / TechFlash:   Microsoft adds Netflix streaming to Windows Vista Media Center
Greg Sterling / Search Engine Land:
Yahoo: We're Moving From Web Of Pages To Web Of Objects  —  Yahoo held a search event today in San Francisco at which the company connected the dots among a number of search initiatives that it has rolled out over the past couple of years: Search Assist, BOSS, Search Monkey, Search Pad and oneSearch.
RELATED:
MG Siegler / TechCrunch:
Yahoo Search, As We Know It, Is Over  —  Earlier today, we were at Yahoo's “End of the 10 Blue Links” event.  Basically, it was their state of search gathering, similar to the “Searchology” event that Google had last week.  But there was a key difference, as anyone who was following along …
Alexei Oreskovic / Reuters:
Facebook CEO says IPO a few years out  —  NEW YORK (Reuters) - Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hopes to eventually take his company public but said it won't be for a few years, and stressed that the world's largest online social network is in no immediate need of capital.
RELATED:
Nicholas Carlson / Silicon Alley Insider:
Facebook CEO Zuckerberg Confirms Ad Network Plans  —  Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave something of a state-of-the-startup at the Reuters Global Technology Summit yesterday.  —  Three nuggets worth noting:  — The startup would take more investment but doesn't need to.
Discussion: MediaFile
Eric Eldon / VentureBeat:
Tweeting Too Hard: A site for shaming the twitteringly self-important  —  For people like me who were raised to believe that being shamelessly self-absorbed is a bad thing, we finally have a site.  For Twitter (many self-important types' new platform of choice).  Maybe.  —  It's called Tweeting Too Hard.
Discussion: Switched
Nilay Patel / Engadget:
Palm Pre to run $549 off-contract  —  We'd ventured a guess that the Pre would run close to $500 off-contract, and it looks like we were in the ballpark — Sprint customer service is apparently telling people that Palm's first WebOS device will run $549 without a two-year commitment.
Ed Lu / The Official Google Blog:
Energized about our first Google PowerMeter partners  —  Earlier this year I blogged about energy information and a tool our engineers developed called Google PowerMeter, a Google gadget that can show consumers their personal electricity consumption right on a home computer.
MG Siegler / TechCrunch:
Amazon Updates The Kindle App To Be More iPhone-ified  —  As a Kindle owner, I love the fact that Amazon released an iPhone app to allow me to continue reading my content even when I don't have the actual Kindle with me.  Of course, the experience of reading on the iPhone's much smaller …
Discussion: jkOnTheRun and GottaBeMobile.com
Gmail Blog:
New in Labs: Automatic message translation  —  Back in the early days of human existence, before language had fully developed, our caveman ancestors probably did a lot of grunting.  Language, and thus life, were pretty simple: watch out for that saber-toothed tiger ("Blorg!  AIYA!!!")
Connie Loizos / PE Hub Blog:
The Real Deal with Peter Thiel  —  Earlier this week, before heading off to a business dinner, Peter Thiel gave me a call.  It's not the first time we've talked, but Thiel doesn't typically rush to return phone messages, either; he doesn't have the time.  As most know, the 41-year-old …
Thanks:atul
MG Siegler / TechCrunch:
The Freemium Model And A Desktop App Get The Thumbs Up With Pandora One  —  You'd be hard pressed to find someone who tries the online streaming radio service Pandora that doesn't like it.  In fact, some users like it so much that they actually ask for ways to pay the company …
Mike Butcher / TechCrunch Europe:
MP tweets “election in weeks” then deletes Twitter account.  Fake or real?  —  Why would someone create a Twitter account for a UK MP which was fake, say the next general is “in weeks”, but then delete the account?  Was it a real account or a fake one created out of mischief?
Liz Gannes / NewTeeVee:
Elemental Shakes Up Video Servers With Parallel Processing  —  Elemental Technologies — aka the smart young startup in Portland that makes video processing better by doing it in parallel — is beta-releasing a video encoding and transcoding server.  —  In the last year, Elemental has put GPUs …
Discussion: Between the Lines and VentureBeat
The Independent:
File share programmer sued by record companies  —  Record companies went to court yesterday claiming €13 million from a Spaniard they claim profited from computer programs he designed to allow free music downloads from the internet.  —  The Promusicae association of Spanish record firms …
Discussion: p2pnet
Darren Waters / BBC:
Wiping data ‘hits flu prediction’  —  Forcing Google to delete user data after six months could dent its ability to predict pandemics such as swine flu, said the search giant's co-founder.  —  Larry Page said he thought more debate was needed around the issue of storing user data.
Mihai Parparita / Official Google Reader Blog:
Latest round of Reader improvements  —  The Google Reader team has just finished releasing a new version of Reader with a bunch of small changes and tweaks that we thought you'd like to know about.  —  If you've added enough friends in Reader that you're feeling overwhelmed, we're here to help.
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
HP's earnings offer some evidence that downturn has run its course  —  Hurt just a little by the downturn, Hewlett Packard hit its expected financial targets as it reported net income fell 17 percent to $1.7 billion for the second fiscal quarter ended April 30.
RELATED:
Kate Greene / Technology Review:
A Laptop Cooled with Ionic Wind  —  The thin and efficient technology could replace bulky cooling fans.  —  Anyone who uses a laptop will be familiar with the whir that the fan makes as it kicks in when the processor's temperature reaches around 100 °F. As laptops and other electronics …
Mark Sigal / O'Reilly News:
Built-to-Thrive - The Standard Bearers: Apple, Google, Amazon  —  When you think of companies that are not only built to last, but rather, built to thrive - in boom times and tough times; in times when incumbents rule and times when disruptors rule - what companies logically sit at the top of the pyramid?
Thanks:atul
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Former MySpace Execs Get Funding For New Venture; Some Details Leak  —  Remember when MySpace lost three key execs before the whole chaotic reorganization?  They announced their departure in March.  And we've now confirmed that they are closing a substantial round of funding, even before they've picked a final name for the company.
Groklaw NewsPicks:
Terms of Use: A Real Difference Between Wolfram|Alpha and Google  —  Google and Wolfram|Alpha are providing utterly different services, and as you might expect, that means the terms of use are also utterly different.  —  Wolfram's Terms of Use are not at all what I would expect from a search engine …
Discussion: InformationWeek, Slashdot and Guardian
Sharon Gaudin / Computerworld:
Google News stutters for second day in a row  —  Glitches plague Google again; Multiple sites hit with three slowdowns in the past week  —  Computerworld - For the second day in a row, Google News had a glitch that derailed Google Inc.'s news aggregation site for a short time this morning.
Discussion: The Register
internetnews.com:
Gumblar: Biggest Threat on the Web Today?  —  A new trojan has grown quickly, and experts aren't mincing words in describing the danger.  —  A new worm is propagating across the Web, and a growing chorus security experts are warning that the Gumblar worm might be the biggest danger now facing the Net.
Discussion: The Register and PC World
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
Second Life generates 15 billion minutes in web voice calls  —  When you think of phone companies, Linden Lab's Second Life virtual world doesn't come to mind.  But the company is announcing today that its users have used its web-voice calling feature to talk to each other for a total …
 
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 More Items: 
Lidija Davis / ReadWriteWeb:
Digg: Shouts Out, Share on Facebook and Twitter In
Discussion: TheNextWeb.com
Washington Wire:
Obama's CTO Nominee Offers Some Thoughts
John Koblin / New York Observer:
Bill Keller's Best Frenemy
Rik Myslewski / The Register:
Apple patents all-seeing display
Discussion: MacNN, Thanks:sinkercat
Wall Street Journal:
Who Owns Your Name on Twitter?
Discussion: GigaLaw.com Daily News, Thanks:mrinaldesai
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Financial Exposure: Rudder Inadvertently Shows Users Each Other's Bank Account Info
 Earlier Items: 
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Vish Makhijani Leaves Operating Role At Yandex, Moves To Zynga
Discussion: paidContent.org, Thanks:mrinaldesai
Michael Masnick / Techdirt:
YouTube Ordered To Pay $1.6 Million To ASCAP
Discussion: NewTeeVee
Nate Anderson / Ars Technica:
Next up for France: police keyloggers and Web censorship
Discussion: Techgeist and ZeroPaid.com
Noah Shachtman / Danger Room:
Video: iRobot Rolls Out One-Pound Machine, Ready to Swarm
Cory Doctorow / Guardian:
We must ensure ISPs don't stop the next Google getting out of the garage
Discussion: broadstuff and digg.com
 

 
From Mediagazer:

The New York Times Company:
The New York Times names Dick Stevenson as Washington bureau chief; Stevenson has been at the paper for nearly 40 years and Washington editor since 2021

Caitlin Huston / The Hollywood Reporter:
Internal memo: Hearst Magazines president announces layoffs as part of a decision to “reallocate resources” to “continue our focus on digital innovation”

Ayodeji Rotinwa / Columbia Journalism Review:
A look at the Agora Center for Research, a Ugandan newsroom sitting between activism and investigative reporting, posting its work on various social media sites

 
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