Techmeme: Central To The Facebook-Zynga Deal: Credits (Leena Rao/TechCrunch)

4:45 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: Mashable!, Computerworld, Beyond Binary, eWeek, Macworld, TNW Microsoft, The Business of Search and WebProNews

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: Boy Genius Report, Financial Times, Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim, Disruptive Telephony, Mashable!, ReadWriteWeb and Daring Fireball

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, Digital Daily, CNET News, GigaOM, blogs.ft.com, Joystiq and SecondShares

Nicholas Carlson / Silicon Alley Insider:
Zynga Saved! Five Year Deal Keeps Farmville-Maker On Facebook

Discussion: All Facebook, L.A. Times Tech Blog, Inside Facebook, VentureBeat, paidContent, Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim, ClickZ, Inside Social Games and Pulse2

Leena Rao / TechCrunch:
Central To The Facebook-Zynga Deal: Credits

Discussion: Silicon Alley Insider

Edmund Lee / AdAge:

Yahoo Buys Associated Content for $100 Million — Deal Will Shore Up Portal's Content Offerings, Help Produce Low-Cost Media — NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Yahoo has acquired startup Associated Content for slightly more than $100 million in a deal that gives the portal new technology and a new strategy for producing low-cost media.

Discussion: BoomTown, paidContent, CNET News, Silicon Alley Insider, Tech Trader Daily, Beet.TV, Mashable!, TNW Social Media and The Associated Content Blog

Yahoo / Yodel Anecdotal:

Welcoming Associated Content to the Yahoo! Family — Interview with Luke Beatty, Associated Content @ Yahoo! Video — Today we announced we are acquiring Associated Content, a pioneer in delivering crowd sourced content. We are at their headquarters today talking with employees and I spent …

Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch:

Google To Launch Amazon S3 Competitor ‘Google Storage’ At I/O — Amazon's cloud storage services are going to be getting another major competitor this week: Google. We hear that this week during its I/O conference, Google will be announcing a new service that is a direct competitor with Amazon's S3 cloud storage.

Discussion: PC World, Erictric, TNW Apps, Electronista, Google Code Blog and ZDNet, Thanks:auralab

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, DailyTech, Geek.com, I4U News, AppleInsider, PadGadget, SlashGear, CrunchGear, O'Grady's PowerPage and fierceonlinevideo.com …

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

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, Gawker, TeleRead, CrunchGear, GottaBeMobile, Tech Eye and MacNN

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: Techdirt, DSLreports, Erictric, PC World, Mashable!, Ars Technica, Pulse2, CNET News, The Register, Geekosystem, PlagiarismToday, p2pnet, Softpedia News and Netcraft

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

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.

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 and Apple Gazette

Joseph Tartakoff / paidContent:

Best Buy's Digital Movie Service Launches Under CinemaNow Name — Best Buy's long-awaited entry to the online video download market is here. Best Buy said last June that under an agreement with Sonic Solutions' CinemaNow movie service it would make movies and TV shows available for download …

Discussion: Business Wire

Michael Liedtke / Associated Press:
Best Buy's Internet video service ready to debut

Discussion: Ars Technica, Company Town, Engadget, PC Magazine, Wall Street Journal, NewTeeVee, Bloomberg, Mashable!, ReadWriteWeb, SlashGear and Erictric

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: Digits, Spotify, The Register, Ewan Spence's All New Musings, Fast Company, TechCrunch Europe, Tech Eye, THINQ.co.uk, Download Squad, Telegraph, blogs.ft.com, Music Ally and T3.com News

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: I4U News, Free People Search …, Softpedia News, The Register and Gadgetell

Chandrashekar Raghavan / Google Enterprise Blog:

Putting email in context with Gmail contextual gadgets — Since launching the Google Apps Marketplace in March, Google Apps administrators have deployed integrated third party apps to more than one million users, and today we're excited to build on this momentum with the launch of a new Gmail API …

Discussion: VentureBeat 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: paidContent, Music Ally, Mashable! and Pulse2

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