Techmeme: Is the iPad Driving E-Book Piracy, and Does It Matter? (Charlie Sorrel/Gadget Lab)

2:20 PM ET, May 18, 2010

Top Items:

Re-inventing Windows Live Hotmail - the next generation of personal email — If you've been following this blog, you know that we've spent a lot of time talking about how consumers are using their email and how they manage their inboxes. We've also talked about how we decide what to build based on what we hear from customers.

Paul Boutin / VentureBeat:

New Hotmail takes aim at Gmail's top features — Microsoft presented a sneak peek this morning of a massively overhauled Hotmail — Hotmail Wave 4 in Microsoft jargon — that will go into a public beta test this summer. — Hotmail Wave 4 adds several features that have until now been unique …

Discussion: Computerworld, Mashable!, Beyond Binary, Macworld, The Business of Search, WebProNews, TNW Microsoft, The Microsoft Blog and LiveSide.net

Liz Gannes / GigaOM: Hot or Not: New Hotmail Is No Knockout

Joseph Tartakoff / mocoNews:

Google To Buy VOIP Technology Firm Global IP Solutions For $68.2 Million — Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is offering $68.2 million to buy up publicly-traded Global IP Solutions, a San Francisco-based company which sells technology used to deliver voice and video over IP networks.

Larry Dignan / ZDNet:

Google buys VOIP engine behind Yahoo, AOL, WebEx, Lotus conferencing — Google on Tuesday said it will acquire Global IP Solutions Holding, which makes processing software for voice and video over IP, for $68.2 million. The deal means that Google will own the voice and video conferencing engine behind …

Discussion: Financial Times, Boy Genius Report, ReadWriteWeb, Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim, Daring Fireball, Know Your Cell, Mashable! and Guardian

Electronista:
Google buys VoIP firm, hints at possible Android video chat

Discussion: IntoMobile, I4U News and Android Central

Facebook Press Releases:

Facebook and Zynga Enter Into Long-Term Relationship — Facebook and Zynga announced today that they have entered into a five-year strategic relationship that increases their shared commitment to social gaming on Facebook and expands use of Facebook Credits in Zynga's games.

Discussion: TechCrunch, CNET News, GigaOM, blogs.ft.com and Gawker

Nicholas Carlson / Silicon Alley Insider:

Zynga Saved! Five Year Deal Keeps Farmville-Maker On Facebook — Facebook and Zynga have reached a five-year deal to keep Zynga games on Facebook and expand the use of Facebook Credits in Zynga's games. — A couple weeks back, it looked like Zynga might leave Facebook and host its games on ZyngaLive.com instead.

Discussion: Inside Facebook, paidContent, VentureBeat, Inside Social Games, Pulse2 and TNW Social Media

Thomas Ricker / Engadget:

MacBook refresh gets official with 10-hour battery — Weird, but there it is, the leaked MacBook refresh is now official, on Tuesday, just as we thought. The 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo refresh with NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics and longer 10-hour battery life (up from 7 hours) is sitting up …

AppleInsider:
Apple releases updated $999 MacBook with GeForce 320M graphics

Discussion: TG Daily

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

Waiting to Pay for Hulu? Wait a While Longer. — A public service announcement for those of you eager to start paying for Hulu: Be patient. You're going to have to keep waiting. — Last month, the Los Angeles Times said Hulu was set to roll out a subscription service “as soon as May 24.”

Discussion: Fast Company, AppleInsider, PadGadget, I4U News, Ubergizmo, SlashGear, CrunchGear, O'Grady's PowerPage, fierceonlinevideo.com …, Electronista and Lifehacker

Greg Kumparak / MobileCrunch:

Visa officially announces their case that turns your iPhone into a credit card (and we've got pics!) — Around two weeks ago, Visa announced that they'd partnered with a company called DeviceFidelity to build the iPhone case of our dreams: one that would allow us to use our iPhone as a credit card …

Discussion: PC World, SlashGear, MacRumors, Visa Corporate, Edible Apple, Geeky-Gadgets, I4U News, Engadget, iPhone Buzz, Gadget Lab, MobileContentToday and Erictric

MG Siegler / TechCrunch:

Kindle For Android Hits This Summer — And You Can Buy Books In It — Easily one of my favorite apps for the iPad is the Kindle app. Weird, I know. But in some ways it's superior to the iPad's own iBooks experience. You can sync it across multiple devices, for example.

Michael Finney / KGO-TV:

Cash not always welcome at Apple stores — PALO ALTO (KGO) — It is said that “cash is king” and that people can buy anything with U.S. currency. But, that is not always true and the red hot Apple iPad is a case in point. It is unbelievable but true. Apple Computer has come a long …

Discussion: ZDNet, TeleRead, GottaBeMobile, MacNN, CrunchGear, Tech Eye and The Huffington Post

Ryan Tate / Gawker:

Steve Jobs Is Opening Up Apple One Email at a Time — If there's one enduring lesson I took away from my late-night argument with Steve Jobs, it's that Apple's relationship with the public is undergoing a quiet revolution. Are we about to see a new, more open Apple?

Discussion: Media Decoder, Apple Gazette and PC World

Enigmax / TorrentFreak:

The Pirate Party Becomes The Pirate Bay's New Host — Following an injunction obtained by several major Hollywood movie studios, yesterday Pirate Bay bandwidth provider CB3ROB Ltd. & Co. KG took the decision to take the site offline while it digested the legal implications.

Discussion: PC World, Ars Technica, Technology News, The Register, Softpedia News, p2pnet, Geekosystem, PlagiarismToday, Mashable! and Netcraft

Robert Andrews / paidContent:

Spotify Halves Subscription Cost As Competitors Gather — Spotify is slashing the cost of its advert-free music streaming in Europe, in a bid to win more paying customers besides just mobile users. It comes in two new tariffs Spotify's introducing... —Spotify Unlimited …

Discussion: Spotify, Music Ally, Fast Company, TechCrunch Europe, Tech Eye, THINQ.co.uk, Download Squad, The Register, Telegraph, blogs.ft.com, T3.com News, MacNN, TNW Apps and open

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries / Digits:

Facebook Crosses the 500-Million Threshold, ComScore Says — Facebook crossed the 500-million-visitor mark for the first time in April, according to market-research firm comScore — providing some positive news for the social-networking site amid criticism over its privacy policies.

Discussion: Free People Search …, Softpedia News, The Register and Silicon Alley Insider

Ben Hardwidge / THINQ:

Exclusive: Seagate confirms 3TB drive — Needs UEFI, 64-bit OS and new partition table. After a few weeks of rumours, Seagate's senior product manager Barbara Craig has confirmed to Thinq that “we are announcing a 3TB drive later this year,” but the move to 3TB of storage space apparently involves …

Discussion: The Register, Digital Trends, I4U News, TG Daily, PC World, Neowin.net, Geeky-Gadgets, Softpedia News, fiercecio.comwatch, Fudzilla, Computerworld, Gearlog, HotHardware.com News, Gizmodo, Maximum PC, ExtremeTech, SlashGear and The Tech Report

Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:

Google Will Push Real-Time Feeds to Browser (Updated) — Updated at 9:30 PM PST with comment from Google. Google posted an unlisted video to YouTube tonight showing details of a 2.0 version of its Feed API, a simple tool for displaying recent headlines from a syndicated feed on any web page.

Discussion: Online Dating Insider, AppScout, WATBlog.com, Softpedia News, Fast Company and TNW Google

Robin Wauters / TechCrunch Europe:

Shazam shares big numbers: 75 million users, over 1 billion songs identified — Mobile music recognition and discovery startup Shazam this afternoon revealed that it has grown its user base from 50 million to 75 million members in the last six months. — Stunningly, the company …

Discussion: Mashable!, Music Ally and paidContent

Cecilia Kang / Post Tech:

Google deletes private data in Ireland; a complaint filed in U.S. — Google said Monday afternoon that upon the request of Ireland's Data Protection Authority, it has deleted private data it collected as part of its Street View application. — In a blog post, the company said that it deleted …

Discussion: PC World and Guardian

Financial Times:
Google set for probes on data harvesting

Discussion: New York Times, eWeek, Consumer Watchdog, Wall Street Journal, Digital Daily, SlashGear, Telegraph, DSLreports, broadstuff, Reuters and Macworld

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