Top Items:
Jonny Evans / 9 to 5 Mac:
Apple execs book flight time for mystery product, ‘not iPhone’, bafflement follows — We're deciphering Apple executives and their fourth quarter statements right now - but the initial take away at this stage is the company's mysterious admission that “air freight costs” are set to rise “abnormally” in the company's first quarter.
Discussion:
Seeking Alpha, AppleInsider, Computerworld, Wall Street Journal, Apple, paidContent and broadstuff
RELATED:
Anthony Ha / VentureBeat:
Apple's Tim Cook scoffs at iPhone competitors — The iPhone was the hot new thing a year or two ago, but now it's seeing increasing competition from Google, Palm, and others — for example, my editor Matt Marshall just declared that he's abandoning his iPhone for Droid, the Android phone coming at the end of the month.
Peter Burrows / BusinessWeek:
How Low Will Apple Go On Price? — Apple had plenty of highlights to impart on its earnings conference call with analysts today. The company enjoyed its highest profit margins ever, recorded record Mac and iPhone sales, and posted revenue growth of 12% and profits growth of 18% for the full year.
Discussion:
Computerworld
Tim Conneally / BetaNews:
The new iPod nano: A flop? — The good news in Apple's earnings call this afternoon, according to CFO Peter Oppenheimer, is that the Cupertino company has sold more Macs and iPhones than it ever has in the past, beating previous Mac sales records by 444,000 or 17% year over year …
AppleInsider:
Apple profits surge 46% on record sales of 3M Macs, 7.4M iPhones — Apple said Monday that fourth-quarter profits rose more than 46 percent to 1.67 billion, or $1.82 per diluted share, on sales of $9.87 billion for the three-month period ended September 26, 2009.
Nilay Patel / Engadget:
Apple to introduce host of new machines, new multitouch input devices tomorrow? — We're not sure why John Gruber and Dan Lyons are having some sort of megalomaniacal Apple super-pundit standoff, but we'll sit here and take the spoils: Gruber's just one-upped Lyons's earlier vague tease …
Discussion:
Daring Fireball, MacRumors, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, T3.com News, Electricpig.co.uk, SlashGear, Erictric, TUAW and Electronista
Ross Miller / Engadget:
Barnes & Noble ‘Nook’ e-reader with color touchscreen out Tuesday for $259, says WSJ (update: Best Buy connection?) — Looks like the cat's out of the bag. The Wall Street Journal's had a glimpse at what it says is an upcoming ad for Barnes & Noble's impending announcement …
Kevin Michaluk / CrackBerry.com blogs:
First Images: BlackBerry Watch is FOR REAL! — * Update - Just to be clear as I've seen some confusion in the commments, but as far as we know at this time the inPulse watch is not being made by/for BlackBerry (it won't feature a BlackBerry logo), but is being made for use with BlackBerry Smartphones.
Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog:
This shouldn't be the image of Hack Day — I love hack days. I was working in the vicinity of Chad Dickerson when he organised the first internal Yahoo! Hack Day back in 2005, and I've since participated in hack day events at Yahoo!, Global Radio and the Guardian.
Discussion:
Yahoo! Developer Network Blog, BoomTown, Gawker, VentureBeat, broadstuff, Villagers with Pitchforks and Praetorian Prefect
Ben Parr / Mashable!:
LEAKED: Details of the Facebook Home Page Redesign [Screenshots] — A few weeks ago, we caught wind that Facebook was testing a new homepage design. Screenshots revealed a few interesting changes, such as a decrease in size for the Facebook Publisher box and a new, Friendfeed-like “Top News” filter for the news feed.
Steve / The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs:
Why the Borg's copycat business model no longer works — So I had brunch with Larry yesterday and he showed up carrying the Sunday Times and we were talking about the huge and incredibly embarrassing photo (above) of Ballmer that they ran on the front of their business cover.
Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch:
The New Twitter Hole That Probably Isn't — Earlier this evening the LA Times Tech Blog ran a post claming that Google has unrestricted access to Twitter's protected tweets, or, as the Times put it, the “key to the city”. And you can apparently search those tweets with a not-too-difficult advanced Google search.
Steven Levy / Wired News:
Mob Rule! How Users Took Over Twitter — Last August, the people who putatively run Twitter — the small crew that three years ago launched the world's fastest-growing communications medium — announced a relatively minor change in the way the site functions.
Daniel Terdiman / CNET News:
Internet Archive's BookServer could ‘dominate’ Amazon — SAN FRANCISCO—An initiative in the works from the nonprofit Internet Archive to centralize the electronic distribution of commercially viable books could upend the publishing industry and declaw Amazon.com, an industry analyst said.
Chris Ziegler / Engadget:
T-Mobile Tap coming November 11, Samsung Behold II on November 18? — The CLIQ might be getting the lion's share of the Android spotlight on T-Mobile at the moment, but it's not the only Google-equipped gear in the carrier's pipeline — the other big news there would be the Behold II from Samsung …
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Photobucket To Be Valued At $60 Million In Sale To Ontela — Lots more details are coming in on the Photobucket fire sale by MySpace/News Corp. The sale is all but complete, say new sources. And the buyer is definitely Washington state based Ontela. — Ontela, a mobile photo upload …
Caroline McCarthy / CNET News:
Twitter hits five billion tweets — Former Current Media executive Robin Sloan appears to have posted Twitter's five billionth tweet, in the form of a reply to another user that otherwise read only “Oh lord.” — The landmark status of Sloan's tweet, which he has nicknamed “The Pentagigatweet …
Craig Newmark / The Huffington Post:
A Nerd's Take On The Future Of News Media — There are a lot of new technologies which already affect news consumption and future business models. As a nerd, I'm excited by the new tech, particularly mobile, including new display systems and pervasive connectivity.
Knot Pipatsrisawat / Facebook Blog:
Giving Groups a Stronger Voice — Facebook Groups have long been a part of the Facebook experience as a way for people to organize and discuss particular issues of interest. However, until now, Group activities have been isolated to the group page and it was often difficult to find out what currently was going on within a group.
Discussion:
TechCrunch, Softpedia News, The SiliconANGLE, Inside Facebook, VentureBeat, The Social, All Facebook and AppScout
Jeff Aguero / The Official Google Blog:
Flying in a WiFi wonderland: Free Internet from Google on Virgin America flights — We know the holiday season seems to come earlier every year (sorry, Halloween), but before you make your final travel plans, we're excited to let you know that we're partnering with Virgin America …
Discussion:
Googling Google, Wi-Fi Networking News, The Register, InformationWeek, VatorNews, IntoMobile, Technologizer, Switched, DSLreports, The SiliconANGLE, Internet2Go, Maximum PC, Mashable!, Softpedia News, I4U News, dailywireless.org, Search Engine Watch, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, The Next Web, Gearlog and silicontap.com, Thanks:jungleg
Dan Bricklin:
VisiCalc turns 30 and SocialCalc turns 1.0 — According to my notebook from 1979, 30 years ago today Dan Fylstra, head of Personal Software, our Bay Area publisher, told me that he had the first production VisiCalc packages in hand. I received mine the next day (Saturday delivery).
Apm / alarm:clock:
Tweet Ad Network Ad.ly Funded — LA-based Ad.ly, which has developed in-stream advertising on Twitter, has raised $500K. The round came from GRP Partners. Ad.ly monetizes Twitter feeds from people who have 7 figure followers, as well as those we have fewer.
Discussion:
TechCrunch
Noah Shachtman / Danger Room:
Exclusive: U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets — America's spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon. — In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community …
Matthew Lasar / Ars Technica:
Net neutrality pitting Web giants against state AGs, mayors — Most of the key online players came out for net neutrality on Monday. They wrote a letter to the Federal Communications Commission cheering the agency's impending Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on “policies to preserve the open Internet …
Tom Abate / San Francisco Chronicle:
Tech exports down this year - bottom unclear — Tech exports are down nationwide so far this year and it's not yet clear whether they have started to turn up, according to a report being issued today by a technology industry association. — In issuing its “Trade in the Cyberstates” report …
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
Scoreloop will help iPhone developers make their games social — Scoreloop is announcing today that it will make it easier than ever for iPhone game makers to put social networking features in their games. — This so-called CoreSocial technology, described as a white label social gaming platform …
Matt Asay / The Open Road:
EU's MySQL inquiry may backfire for open source — It takes time, leadership, and a fair amount of luck to successfully build an open-source community. It also takes money. Lots of it, if IBM's $1 billion commitment to Linux is any indication. — Unfortunately, the return …
MG Siegler / TechCrunch:
FriendFeed Not Dead, Just In A State Of “Chrysalis,” Says Co-founder — This weekend, a number of people had things to say about the decay and seemingly inevitable death of FriendFeed. That included us, twice. While this was going on, the FriendFeed team remained largely silent, even on their own product.
