Top Items:
Nick O'Neill / All Facebook:
Facebook Patents The News Feed (Updated) — On Tuesday, Facebook was awarded a major patent for “Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network”. This is a huge deal for a number of reasons, most significantly that it grants Facebook the opportunity to pursue …
Discussion:
Guardian, Scripting News, Softpedia News, GigaOM, Pocket-lint, VentureBeat, Shooting at Bubbles, Mashable! and The Social, Thanks:atul
RELATED:
Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:
Facebook Granted Patent on the News Feed - This Could Be Very Big — Facebook has been granted a patent on the Newsfeed, “displaying a news feed in a social network environment.” Nick O'Neill at AllFacebook found the patent first and says it could be “one of the most significant social web patents” in a decade.
Yukari Iwatani Kane / Digits:
Palm CEO's Letter to Employees — Palm said on Thursday that its phones aren't selling as well as it had hoped and that revenues for its fiscal year would be “well below” its forecasts. In an internal company-wide email, Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein elaborated further about the reasons behind …
Discussion:
Engadget, Business Week, WebOS Arena, Electricpig, Wall Street Journal, eWeek, PreCentral.net, Phones Review, Silicon Alley Insider, TG Daily, EverythingPre, Gizmodo and Digital Daily
Philip Elmer-DeWitt / Brainstorm Tech:
Inside Apple's shareholders meeting — The press, as usual, was barred from bringing communication devices into the Apple (AAPL) shareholders meeting that began at 1 p.m. EST (10 a.m. PST) Thursday. — But, as often happens, word is leaking out despite the blackout thanks to iPhones in the hands of shareholders who shall go unnamed.
Discussion:
Reuters, IBD Click, internetnews.com, Ars Technica, Dow Jones Newswires, Digital Daily, 9 to 5 Mac, AppleInsider, Epicenter, CNET News, MacNN, The Loop and iLounge
RELATED:
Bloomberg:
Apple Chief Jobs Prefers Holding Cash to Dividends — Feb. 25 (Bloomberg) — Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs said he prefers having cash for investments to paying dividends or doing stock buybacks. — Apple is holding onto cash to take “big, bold” risks, Jobs said at the company's shareholder meeting today.
Discussion:
Bloomberg, Gearlog, TG Daily, Tech Trader Daily, IBD Click, AppleInsider, 9 to 5 Mac, MacRumors and Silicon Alley Insider
John Gruber / Daring Fireball:
Tits and Apps — So with this whole thing where Apple has removed and banned like 5,000 “sexy apps” from the App Store, I think I've figured out the reason why, including why they're granting exceptions to established names like Sports Illustrated, Playboy, and Victoria's Secret. It's about branding.
RELATED:
Business Week:
And Google Begat... The search giant's former employees are seeding tech startups—and shaping another wave of innovation — During the holidays last year, Aydin Senkut and Elad Gil gathered 50 of their friends at a health-food restaurant in Palo Alto. Over turkey burgers and tofu wraps …
Thanks:atul
Greg Sandoval / CNET News:
Pandora spurs music sales; Spotify not so much — NEW YORK—Free on-demand music sites haven't fared very well when it comes to driving song sales. — Russ Crupnick, an analyst with market researcher NPD Group, told a crowd of music and tech executives here Wednesday that free streaming-music sites …
RELATED:
Jesse Stay / Stay N' Alive:
Is Google Stealing Authors' Copyright With Buzz? — 2 years ago I shared about a blogger and follower/friend of mine, Ali Akbar, who purchased the domain, googleappsengine.com (he still owns it) in order to create an AppEngine-related blog (since Google apparently forgot to purchase the domain).
Ryan Lawler / NewTeeVee:
Chatroulette: 71% Boys, 15% Girls, 14% Perverts — Chatroulette has become all the rage among folks in the online video and social media scene, prompting coverage in the NY Times, CNN and other major national news outlets. Well if you've ever wanted to learn more about Chatroulette …
Zhang Lei / Global Times:
Publish and be deleted — He couldn't take it anymore. — When Hong Kong writer and poet Liao Weitang found his online photo album had been deleted by douban.com, he quit, leaving behind the 3,000 friends he had made over two years. — “I had a great time here,” he wrote in his leaving statement …
Cory Doctorow / Boing Boing:
School administrator boasts to PBS about his laptop spying … This is pretty amazing footage — especially (as Scott notes) the absence of any questions about student privacy from the interviewer. I keep trying to imagine what my education would have been like if all my conversations …
Rafat Ali / paidContent:
Online Music Service Mog Raises About $10 Million; UK Expansion Planned — Berkeley, CA-based music service Mog.com, which recently launched its subscription music service with good review, is taking a new VC round to finance an entry to the UK market, promising to undercut the much-hyped Spotify …
Tom Perkins / Wall Street Journal:
Silicon Valley Is Not Wall Street — Too often, there is confusion between investment banking and venture capital. This isn't helped by investment bankers' occasional assertions that they too do venture capital. They don't. In light of the attention both of these activities …
Seth Weintraub / 9 to 5 Mac:
Opera 10.50 for Mac brings HTML5 video support, Multitouch gestures, crazy speed — Update: Whoa! Opera just beat stock Safari in its own Webkit Javascript benchmarking tests. — Frankly, we mostly use Opera for its in-line (legal!) Torrent downloading ability, but it is always …
Discussion:
PC World, My Opera, Geekword, The Register, Technologizer, Mashable!, Download Squad, Computerworld, Webmonkey, MacRumors, Gizmodo, Lifehacker and Web Browsers
Jolie O'Dell / ReadWriteWeb:
Facebook Discloses How Much Money It Makes From Facebook Credits — Over the past several months, Facebook has been testing and rolling out new features for Facebook Credits - a virtual currency that collected and exchanged users' real-world money for on-site credits that could be used …
MG Siegler / TechCrunch:
FriendFeed Goes Down Hard. Both Remaining Users Pissed. — FriendFeed is down right now. It has been down for the past 30 minutes or so. Sadly, that's not news anymore. Not because, like Twitter of old, it's down all the time, but rather, because it seems like no one really uses it anymore.
Bloomberg:
Nokia CEO Stinging From IPhone Aims to Out-Jobs Apple With Apps and Maps — Feb. 25 (Bloomberg) — Sitting in a meeting room that looks out on a frozen Baltic bay, Nokia Oyj Chief Executive Officer Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo mentions a biography he's reading. It's about Mauno Koivisto …
Allison Mooney / AdAge:
DIY LBS: Create Your Own Foursquare — Looking beyond the web, marketers are considering location-based services as a way to extend their reach and engage consumers in the “real world.” — Some, including Bravo, HBO and Warner Brothers, are partnering with consumer-facing location-based services (LBS) like Foursquare to do so.
Bloomberg:
TiVo May Offer Box to Combine Web Fare, TV Listings — Feb. 25 (Bloomberg) — TiVo Inc., pioneer of digital video recorders, may introduce a set-top box next week that provides Web search results alongside TV listings, said Tony Wible, an analyst at Janney Montgomery Scott.
Eric Engleman / TechFlash:
Verizon wields Myhrvold patent in dispute with TiVo over DVR tech — TiVo made headlines last year for suing Verizon and AT&T for patent infringement over time-shifting DVR technology. Now Verizon is fighting back — with help from a patent from former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold's firm.
Scott M. Fulton, III / BetaNews:
Define ‘monopoly:’ Foundem's argument against Google linking to Google — Yesterday, after the European Commission announced it had sent Google earlier in the month copies of complaints it had received from three search providers that Google refused to rank their search results highly in its index …
Thanks:atul
Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:
Microsoft to Withdraw Copyright Complaint, Cryptome Coming Back Online — Great news from Web hosting company Network Solutions this morning. A company representative tells us that Microsoft will withdraw the copyright complaint against long-time watchdog website Cryptome.org, and the site will be back online later today.
Discussion:
The Register, The Microsoft Blog, internetnews.com, Guardian, PC World, CNET News, Computerworld, PlagiarismToday, Help Net Security, Krebs on Security, p2pnet, Techdirt and Gizmodo, Thanks:marshallk
Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:
Location Data Sensitive Like Medical Information, Says Congressional Witness — “The writing is on the wall that there will be baseline privacy legislation introduced,” said John Morris, general counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology at a Congressional hearing on location data and privacy yesterday.
RELATED:
Alexander B. Howard / Regulatory compliance …:Congress hears testimony on location-based services and online privacy
