Techmeme: How a Physically Aware Internet Will Change the World (Pete Hartwell/Mashable!)

6:45 AM ET, October 14, 2010

Top Items:

AOL, Private-Equity Firms Explore Bid for Yahoo — AOL Inc. and several private equity firms are exploring the possibility of buying Yahoo Inc., according to people familiar with the matter. — Silver Lake Partners and Blackstone Group LP are among the firms that have expressed interest …

Kara Swisher / BoomTown:

Yahoo's Stock Acts Like It's In Play-Because It Kind-of Is, As Predators Circle — Make no mistake, there are no definitive offers on the table to do a variety of takeover deals of Yahoo by either private equity moneybags or from big media giants such as News Corp. and smaller Web firms such as AOL.

Discussion: Agence France Presse, paidContent and CNET News

Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:

When All Else Fails, Put Up The AOL-Yahoo Trial Balloon — On the face of it, this whole idea of AOL somehow buying Yahoo seems absurd. AOL's market cap ($2.6 billion) is about one eighth the size of Yahoo's ($20 billion). But as the Wall Street Journal reports, private equity firms Silver Lake Partners …

Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land:

Bing, Now With Extra Facebook: See What Your Friends Like & People Search Results — At long last, Facebook's social data is coming to search in a big way. Bing is now making use of it to show new “Liked By Your Friends” matches and Facebook-powered people search results.

Discussion: The Register, MediaPost, PC World, Technologizer, BoomTown, Silicon Alley Insider, All Facebook, Tech Trader Daily, paidContent, GigaOM, Relevant Results, Ars Technica, Gizmodo, Bits, LiveSide.net, The Microsoft Blog, Inside Facebook, TechFlash and WMPoweruser.com, Thanks:rawmeet

Bing / Search Blog:

Bing Gets More Social with Facebook — As you read in Satya's post, today we announced a significant expansion of our partnership with Facebook, where Bing will provide much more personalized experiences to you by allowing you to bring your Facebook friends into your search experience.

Satya Nadella / Bing Community:

New Signals in Search: The Bing Social Layer — The technology search engines employ to retrieve that needle in the information haystack is staggering and humbling; it's one of the things that get us fired up to come to work at Bing every day. — Today we announced an exciting expansion to our long-term partnership with Facebook.

Discussion: Mashable!, eWeek, FM Blog, LiveSide.net, Digital Trends, Between the Lines Blog, All about Microsoft Blog, Interactive Marketing, Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim, Simply Zesty, BetaNews, VentureBeat, Altimeter Group, Seattle Times, LAPTOP Magazine, Download Squad and Search Engine Land

Caroline McCarthy / The Social:
Microsoft's Facebook stake: Maybe not so crazy

Discussion: Shelly Palmer Digital Living, ClickZ and MSDN Blogs

Matt Rosoff / Silicon Alley Insider:
Suddenly, Bing Has What Google Doesn't: Data From 500 Million Facebook Users

Discussion: Tech Report

Walter S. Mossberg / Personal Technology:

Mac Users Are Getting New Outlook From Rival — A new, faster, better version of Microsoft Office is coming out Oct. 26. But it isn't for Microsoft's own Windows operating system. It is for the Macintosh computers made by the software giant's archrival, Apple.

Discussion: AppleInsider

MG Siegler / TechCrunch:

Will OS X 10.7 “Lion” Be The King Of The Apple Jungle, The Last Of Its Kind, Or Both? — As you're well aware by now, this morning, Apple sent out invites to an event taking place in one week at their headquarters in Cupertino, CA. The invite reads, “Back to the Mac.” and asks those invited to …

Discussion: The personal blog …, Technologizer, Gizmodo and Between the Lines Blog

Andrew Munchbach / Boy Genius Report:
Apple holding ‘Back to the Mac’ event on October 20

TmoNews:

T-Mobile Reducing Data Cap, Will Throttle Speeds After 5GB Of Usage — Bad news for those of you that use more than 5GB of data each month. Starting October 16th, T-Mobile will enforce a new policy that will reduce data speeds once the subscriber exceeds 5GB of data usage in a billing cycle.

Discussion: Android Community, The Next Web, WPCentral.com, MobileCrunch, Engadget and ThinkMobile

Glenn Fleishman / Wi-Fi Networking News:
T-Mobile Plans Prepaid Data Plans

Discussion: IntoMobile, PC World, InformationWeek, DSLreports and jkOnTheRun

Espen André Øverdahl / My Opera:

Opera 11 will have Extensions — Good news, everybody! Today, at Up North Web, Opera Extensions was confirmed to be a feature of Opera 11. — What are Opera Extensions? — Extensions in Opera is a way for you to easily add new functionality to your Opera browser experience.

Discussion: Opera Press Room, gHacks Technology News and Web Browsers

Vlad Savov / Engadget:
Opera Mobile coming to Android within a month, bearing hardware …

Discussion: CNET News, TechCrunch, The Register, My Opera, The Next Web, Eurodroid, Recombu, Android Community, Web Browsers and Ubergizmo

Jack Purcher / Patently Apple:

Apple Wins Three Colossal Multi-Touch Related Patents — The US Patent and Trademark Office officially published a series of 18 newly granted patents for Apple Inc. today. In this first report, we focus on one of the most important technologies that are empowering Apple's smart device revolution: Multi-Touch.

Discussion: Engadget, Gizmodo, Geeky-Gadgets, Fonehome.co.uk, PhoneDog.com, IntoMobile, Gearlog, App Advice, SlashGear, TUAW, Ubergizmo, Electronista and Computerworld

Pete Hartwell / Mashable!:

How a Physically Aware Internet Will Change the World — Pete Hartwell is a Distinguished Technologist in HP's Quantum Structures Research Laboratories. You can learn more on HP's Data Central Blog as well as on the HP YouTube channel. — If you think about it, the first “Internet” looked nothing like it does today.

Discussion: Data Central

BBC:

Two million US PCs recruited to botnets — Hi-tech criminals use botnets to send out spam — The US leads the world in numbers of Windows PCs that are part of botnets, reveals a report. — More than 2.2 million US PCs were found to be part of botnets, networks of hijacked home computers, in the first six months of 2010, it said.

Discussion: Graham Cluley's blog, Neowin.net, Softpedia News, Guardian and TechNet Blogs

Erik Sherman / BNET:

Twitter's Patent Strategy: Don't Bother. — Twitter co-founder Evan Williams predicted yesterday that the social media company will hit a billion users in time. It seems like wishful thinking if you look at the company's traffic trend lines, but there's no question that Twitter is big in social media.

Discussion: CNET News

Tom Simonite / Technology Review:

Improving Phones through Surveillance — Apps that track how people use their phones could help make the devices more efficient. — A cell-phone application that logs everything the phone's user does—from sending e-mail to playing games—may not sound so desirable.

Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:

Facebook's Notice To Shareholders On Stock Split And Transfer Fees — In the last week Facebook executed a 5 for 1 stock split and word leaked out that they've implemented a $2,500 fee for private stock transfers. The notice to shareholders is below.

Dan Goodin / The Register:

Microsoft confirms Russian pill-pusher attack on its network — Is there a Linux admin in the house? — Microsoft has confirmed that two devices on its corporate network were compromised to help a notorious gang of Russian criminals push Viagra, Human Growth Hormone, and other knockoff pharmaceuticals.

Discussion: Guardian, Krebs on Security, Softpedia News, CyberInsecure.com and Computerworld

Harry McCracken / Technologizer:

Roku Hits Retail, Thanks to Netgear — I once asked an executive from Roku whether the company planned to sell its little Internet TV boxes-available from Roku itself as well as Amazon.com-through retailers. The answer? Not really, since the device's low pricetag didn't leave much room for markup.

Discussion: SlashGear, Engadget and Electronista

Robin Wauters / TechCrunch:

SeatGeek Secures A Deal With The Wall Street Journal And $550k In Funding — Exclusive - SeatGeek, one of the finalists of TechCrunch50 2009, has raised another $550,000 in funding from previous backers (Founder Collective, NYC Seed, Stage One Capital, Trisiras Group, PKS Capital …

Thanks:kessler

Alexia Tsotsis / TechCrunch:

HasWifi Shows You Which Flights Have Wifi — We've all been there and I was just there, by there I mean making the grave mistake of booking a flight without Wifi. As a person who works primarily online, I pretty much feel entitled to doing my job from anywhere now that Gogo Inflight Internet allows me to blog from the skies.

Discussion: techblog.dallasnews.com

MG Siegler / TechCrunch:

With Their Own QR Code Trick, Bit.ly Eats Google's Balls — Back in April, Google added a very nifty feature to their URL shortener, goo.gl. If you simply add “.qr” to any shortened URL, you will be taken to a page with a QR code for that URL. If you scan that image with a QR code reader …

Discussion: bit.ly blog, Mashable!, VentureBeat, Techie Buzz, The Next Web, Simply Zesty and AppScout

Sarah Perez / ReadWriteMobile:

Mobile Barcode Scanning up 700% This Year — ShopSavvy, BarcodeHero, Stickybits, CheckPoints, Tecca, Microsoft Tag, RedLaser, SnapTell, Shopkick, the recently updated Amazon Mobile - if you're like many smartphone owners, you've used at least one (if not more) of these mobile barcode scanning applications.

Discussion: AppScout and TechFlash

Nick O'Neill / All Facebook:

Facebook Kills “Clear Chat History” Feature, Users Go Crazy — When Facebook pushed out their chat upgrades recently, they also killed of a feature that some people found to be extremely useful: “Clear Chat History”. The feature protected users who were concerned about others looking …

Discussion: Geek.com, TechCrunch, TechSpot and msnbc.com

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