Techmeme: Mac Users Are Getting New Outlook From Rival (Walter S. Mossberg/Personal Technology)

9:35 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: Silicon Alley Insider, Guardian, Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim, paidContent, Agence France Presse, CNET News and The Next Web

Bloomberg:

Yahoo Said to Hire Goldman to Handle Takeover Approaches — Yahoo! Inc., which spurned an unsolicited offer from Microsoft Corp. in 2008, is working with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to help defend against possible takeover approaches, said three people familiar with the matter.

Discussion: DailyFinance

Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch: When All Else Fails, Put Up The AOL-Yahoo Trial Balloon

Business Wire:

Verizon Wireless Offers iPad at Stores Nationwide on October 28 — BASKING RIDGE, N.J. & CUPERTINO, Calif.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Verizon Wireless and Apple® today announced that iPad™ will be available at over 2,000 Verizon Wireless Stores nationwide beginning Thursday, October 28.

Discussion: Gizmodo, Boy Genius Report, BetaNews, Liliputing, The Next Web, Electronista and Engadget, Thanks:jasonhiner

Business Wire:
Apple's iPad Coming to AT&T Stores on October 28

Discussion: CrunchGear

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.

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

Discussion: Interactive Marketing, eWeek, Mashable!, FM Blog, Digital Trends, LiveSide.net, MSDN Blogs, All about Microsoft Blog, Simply Zesty, Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim, BetaNews, Between the Lines Blog, VentureBeat, Seattle Times, Altimeter Group, 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: MacStories and AppleInsider

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: Download Squad, gHacks Technology News, Opera Press Room and Web Browsers

Vlad Savov / Engadget:

Opera Mobile coming to Android within a month, bearing hardware acceleration and pinch-to-zoom — Forget all that Mini stuff, Opera is bringing its full-flavored mobile browser to Android some time very soon indeed. To tempt people on board, the new software will support hardware acceleration …

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: PC World, DSLreports, blogs.chron.com, TheUnlockr, WPCentral.com, pocketnow.com, Android Community, MobileCrunch, The Next Web, PhoneDog.com, Engadget and ThinkMobile

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

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

Mark Gurman / 9 to 5 Mac:

VLC for iPhone Hands-On — The popular media player, VLC, made its way to the iPad just a few weeks ago, and the company behind the application, Applidium, has just submitted a version for the iPhone. Here's our exclusive hands-on of VLC Media Player for iPhone: Oh, and as you see in the video …

Discussion: Covering Web and MacNN, Thanks:branden3112

Leena Rao / TechCrunch:

Skype 5.0 For Windows Debuts With Facebook Integration, Call Recovery And More — Skype is about to become much more social with the launch of Skype 5.0. Today, the company announced that the new version of Skype 5.0 for Windows will include a deep Facebook integration …

Discussion: Engadget, Mashable!, GigaOM, ReadWriteWeb and paidContent

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: Inquirer, Electricpig.co.uk, The personal blog …, Technologizer, eWeek, Gizmodo, Electronista, Engadget, Obsessable, BetaNews, Tech Trader Daily and Bits

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

Softpedia News:

Nokia N900 Gets MeeGo - Maemo Dual Boot — Nokia N900, the high-end Maemo-based device Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia unveiled officially last year, has just got a little better, as the MeeGo platform was announced as being capable of running on it. — One of the most interesting aspects …

Discussion: PC World, Engadget, Inquirer, MeeGo Blogs, IntoMobile, The Nokia Blog, SlashGear, T3.com News, Recombu, Ubergizmo and Phones Review

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.

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

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

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

Technology Review:

Why CPUs Aren't Getting Any Faster — Making computers faster means relying on the central processing unit (CPU) less than ever before. — The Central Processing Unit (CPU)—the component that has defined the performance of your computer for many years—has hit a wall.

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

Emil Protalinski / Ars Technica:

Microsoft posts video of customers criticizing OpenOffice — Instead of simply listing what it believes to be the advantages of Microsoft Office over the open source OpenOffice.org productivity suite, Microsoft has compiled comments from 15 customers who switched to Office after evaluating OpenOffice.

Discussion: The Register, Hardware 2.0 Blog, Neowin.net, The Next Web and Computerworld

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