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4:25 PM ET, August 20, 2010

Techmeme

 Top Items: 
Wall Street Journal:
LG Readies Tablet, Optimus Smartphones  —  SEOUL—LG Electronics Inc., which was late to the smartphone game, said it plans to launch 10 more smartphones and sell five million devices by the end of the year in a scramble to compete with rivals.  —  The South Korean company also plans to launch …
RELATED:
Matt Burns / CrunchGear:
LG To The WSJ, “Our tablet will be better than the iPad.”
Discussion: GeekSugar
Eric Slivka / MacRumors:
Jobs: Software Update to Address iOS 4 Performance Issues on iPhone 3G ‘Coming Soon’  —  A new email from Apple CEO Steve Jobs appears to confirm that the company will soon be issuing a software update to address issues with the iPhone 3G's performance under iOS 4.
Robin Wauters / TechCrunch:
Confirmed Hot Potato: Yup, Facebook Bought 'Em, Will Soon Shut Them Down  —  As we noted nearly a month ago now, Facebook has acquired social activity and ‘check-in’ service provider Hot Potato for about $10 million in cash.  —  Facebook, fresh from announcing its entry into the location game …
Discussion: DailyFinance and silicontap.com
RELATED:
MG Siegler / TechCrunch:
The Facebook Effect: Foursquare Had Its Most Signups Ever Today  —  Leading up to Facebook's location announcement, there were two schools of thought.  Either you thought Facebook Places was going to destroy Foursquare.  Or you thought that this new service would help the startup by bringing more awareness to the location field.
RELATED:
Owen Thomas / VentureBeat:
Foursquare's record check-ins aren't because of Facebook  —  Facebook's latest feature, Places, mimics the core function of another hot startup, Foursquare: announcing to your friends where you are.  The long-expected competition stirred a lot of buzz in Facebook's Silicon Valley turf and Foursquare's home base, media-soaked Manhattan.
Discussion: paidContent and JayWeintraub.com
Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg / Wall Street Journal:
Textbooks Up Their Game  —  Inkling Adapting College Best Sellers for iPad, Capitalizing on Interactive Features  —  Maybe the iPad will move digital college textbooks out of theory and into practice.  —  Although electronic book sales have exploded, digital college textbooks have been slow …
Discussion: MacNN, TeleRead and iLounge
RELATED:
Leena Rao / TechCrunch:
Digital Textbook Startup Inkling Scores Sequoia Funding, Publisher Deals
Discussion: VatorNews, Business Wire and jkOnTheRun
Liz Shannon Miller / NewTeeVee:
Auto-Tune the News Hits the Billboard Top 100  —  Online video stars The Gregory Brothers continue making strides towards world domination.  Their latest hit Auto-Tune the News single, Bed Intruder, debuted at number 89 on the Billboard Hot 100 today.  —  Billboard uses a number …
RELATED:
Richard MacManus / ReadWriteWeb:
Is Ultimate Chart Overhyped?  Its Top 10 is Nearly Identical to Billboard's
Discussion: The Huffington Post
Carolyn Penner / Twitter Blog:
Tweet Button Bookmarklet: Share links from any page  —  Last week, we announced an easy-to-install and lightweight Tweet Button that allows publishers to make it easy for users to share a link to their content on Twitter.  Thousands of sites have implemented the Tweet Button already.
Discussion: The Next Web
Ari Levy / Bloomberg:
Digg's Founder Kevin Rose Says New CEO, Website Are Both About a Week Away  —  Digg Inc., the Web service that lets people rate news stories, is about a week away from hiring a new chief executive officer and will soon overhaul its site to make the content more relevant to users, founder Kevin Rose said.
Discussion: The Next Web
John Leyden / The Register:
Trojan-ridden warning system implicated in Spanair crash  —  Cascading fail  —  Malware may have been a contributory cause of a fatal Spanair crash that killed 154 people two years ago.  —  Spanair flight number JK 5022 crashed with 172 on board moments after taking off from Madrid's Barajas Airport …
Stephen Shankland / Crave:
Google Runs out of Nexus Ones for developers  —  Google scrapped its plan to sell the Nexus One through its own store in July, six months after trying to rewrite the phone market's rules.  With Android developers, though, to whom Google still sells the phone, it's become a bit too desirable at least measured by Google's inventory.
Adam Frucci / Gizmodo:
Here's a Much More Realistic Facetime iPhone 4 Commercial  —  Those Facetime-based iPhone 4 ads sure are shmaltzy!  This one is a little closer to what people are actually experiencing with the service.  And yes, that's an older iPhone.  Try to look past it.  [Funny or Die]
Pew Social & Demographic Trends:
The Fading Glory of the Television and Telephone  —  One day you're the brightest star in the galaxy.  Then something new comes along — and suddenly you're a relic.  It's a turn of fate that awaits sports heroes, movie stars, political leaders.  And, yes, even household appliances.
Richard Lawler / Engadget:
Google TV demo shows off Dish Network integration, universal search (video)  —  For those still wavering over the possibility of dropping a few Ben Franklins on something rocking the Google TV logo this fall, maybe the best idea is to get to know this new flavor of Android a bit better.
Joseph Tartakoff / paidContent:
Analyst: Yahoo Should Invest In Hulu  —  Enough with Yahoo's spate of small-scale deal making; Stifel Nicolaus analyst Jordan Rohan suggests in a report today that Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) should either buy Hulu or take a “significant stake” in the video site, saying that Hulu's reported interest …
MG Siegler / TechCrunch:
Foursquare Has Been Trying (And Failing) To Trademark “Check-In”  —  You'd be hard-pressed to find a hotter term in technology right now than “check-in.”  Following Facebook's entry into the location space with Places, it will soon be a term that hundreds of million of web users know well.
Discussion: ReadWriteWeb, SheGeeks.net and Salon
Michael Yang / iSuppli:
Will $1 Per Gigabyte NAND Resuscitate Solid State Drives?  —  After two years of inflated prices, NAND flash memory at the end of 2010 is set to return to the key $1 per gigabyte level considered a key threshold to drive adoption of Solid State Drives (SSD), but the cost reduction may come …
Nate Anderson / Ars Technica:
ISP's top data hog gobbles 2.7TB of data in a month  —  ISPs sometimes complain about “data hogs,” often in the service of ridiculously tight-fisted data caps on Internet service.  But there are users who deserve the porcine label, and Belgian ISP Telenet recently offered a rare picture of them.
Discussion: Geek.com and Tech Eye
Stefan Constantinescu / IntoMobile:
Verizon invests $400,000 into CardStar to help you carry fewer loyalty and membership cards  —  Verizon has invested $400,000 into a small startup called CardStar according to The Wall Street Journal.  CardStar, who's based out of Boston, has already received a $1 million investment round …
Motley Fool:
Why Apple and Facebook May Be BFFs  —  On Wednesday, Facebook introduced a new location-based service that allows users to share their location with friends.  With more than 500 million members, Facebook is now the third-most-popular video site on the Web according to comScore, trailing only Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Yahoo!.
Discussion: 9 to 5 Mac
Sean Hollister / Engadget:
Exclusive: Dell Thunder prototype preview (video)  —  Christmas came early at Engadget HQ this year, as evidenced by the picture above — you're looking at two Dell Thunder prototype smartphones, each with some surprising quirks, and hints that they might include global HSPA, AWS for T-Mobile, and maybe even a dash of CDMA support.
Chris Ziegler / Engadget:
T-Mobile G2 again, this time with less Mr. Blurrycam  —  So we just got a second batch of T-Mobile G2 shots dropped in our mailbox — and this time, you can get a much better look at the inner workings of the carrier's version of the upcoming HTC Vision.  [Looks like this bad boy slides and tilts …
Esther Dyson / Project Syndicate:
The Future of Internet Search  —  print recommend Send link clip secure rights  —  NEW YORK - Imagine that Googling an address gave you a list of the closest buildings, ranked by distance.  Not exactly what you were looking for, most likely.  But that is pretty close to what we still accept for most Internet searches.
Thanks:atul
Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch:
The Confusing Stages Of Opting Into Facebook Places  —  Earlier today we had a bit of a fire-drill at TechCrunch Headquarters.  As I checked into TCHQ on Facebook Places, I also tagged a few of my coworkers, fully expecting their checkins to be delayed until they actually opted into the feature …
 
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 More Items: 
Gregg Keizer / Computerworld:
Google patches 10 Chrome bugs, pays out $10K in bounties
Gautham Nagesh / Hillicon Valley:
FCC member blasts Google-Verizon plan, says it favors the rich
Discussion: GamePolitics News
Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Land:
Official: Google Now Lets One Domain Dominate Search Results
Andy Greenberg / The Firewall:
Senators Demand Huawei Cyberespionage Answers
Thanks:forbestech
Dow Jones Newswires:
McAfee another weapon for Intel's mobile battle
Keith Winstein / Ksplice:
Essay: 3G and me  —  In 2002, I got my first cell phone.
Ryan Lawler / NewTeeVee:
Studios Giving Up on DVD, Pushing VOD Instead
Sangwon Yoon / Associated Press:
North Korea reportedly joins Facebook
Discussion: THINQ.co.uk, ITworld.com and Mobilized
 Earlier Items: 
Sarah Perez / ReadWriteWeb:
Travel Rewards Program Topguest Integrates with Facebook Places
Stefan Constantinescu / IntoMobile:
Nokia just bought mobile analytics firm Motally
Alexia Tsotsis / TechCrunch:
Hey Verizon, Whoever Made This Is Going To Hell
Discussion: adweek.blogs.com
Chris Matyszczyk / CNET News:
How to get stars to follow you on Twitter
Marco Arment / Marco.org:
A smartphone retrospective  —  This is what high-end smartphones looked like in 2007:
Discussion: Scripting News
 

 
From Mediagazer:

Alex Sherman / CNBC:
Analyzing Comcast's spinoff of cable networks, purposefully structured with low debt: the move might be a signal to the industry that it's time to consolidate

Daniel Thomas / Financial Times:
James Harding says the Tortoise-Observer deal could create a profitable media group and there isn't a guaranteed future for the Observer with the Guardian

John Gruber / Daring Fireball:
Substack, very deliberately, tries to have it both ways by saying publications on their platform are independent while presenting them all as parts of Substack

 
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