Techmeme: RIM Responds to Apple's ‘Distortion Field’ (Jim Balsillie/Inside BlackBerry)

9:20 PM ET, October 19, 2010

Top Items:

RIM Responds to Apple's ‘Distortion Field’ — For those of us who live outside of Apple's distortion field, we know that 7" tablets will actually be a big portion of the market and we know that Adobe Flash support actually matters to customers who want a real web experience.

Discussion: Velocity, Macworld, PC World, Boy Genius Report, Between the Lines Blog, Silicon Alley Insider, CrackBerry.com blogs, CNET News, Fortune, Gizmodo, BlackBerry Cool, IntoMobile, MacStories, TiPb, Digital Daily, Bloomberg and Reuters

Joe Wilcox / BetaNews:

What is Steve Jobs so afraid of? — There's a saying that the more you have, the more you fear losing it. — Apple's CEO made a surprise appearance during yesterday's fiscal 2010 fourth quarter earnings call. Jobs said he couldn't resist participating, given Apple's record $20.34 billion revenue.

Discussion: The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, 37signals and Computerworld

MG Siegler / TechCrunch:

Android Chief Andy Rubin Sends His First Tweet — And It's Aimed At Steve Jobs — Well would you look at that. Earlier today, Apple CEO Steve Jobs went on a bit of a tirade against Google and Android in particular. And you know that couldn't have made Android chief Andy Rubin too happy.

Microsoft:

Microsoft Announces Office 365 — New cloud service brings together Office, SharePoint, Exchange and Lync for organizations of all sizes. — Microsoft Corp. today announced Microsoft Office 365, the company's next generation in cloud productivity that brings together Microsoft Office …

Ina Fried / CNET News:

Microsoft to offer hosted version of Office — SAN FRANCISCO—Aiming to bolster its hosted software for businesses, Microsoft announced on Tuesday it is adding the Office Web Apps to its collection of hosted software for business. As expected, the company also rebranded the product.

Ina Fried / CNET News: Making sense of Microsoft's subscription Office plan

Joshua Topolsky / Engadget:

webOS 2.0 review — When it comes to webOS 2.0 (now actually called HP webOS), it almost felt like we'd never see the version number, let alone get to review it. It's been an intense few months for Palm: after floundering in the early part of the smartphone wars, it was scooped up by HP for a tidy sum of $1.2b.

Discussion: Ars Technica, internetnews.com, Computerworld, Gearlog and techno.blog

Derek Kessler / PreCentral.net:
HP introduces feature-packed webOS 2.0

Kara Swisher / BoomTown:

Yahoo Tops Earning Expectations, While Revenues Remain Weak (and Outlook Even Worse) — Yahoo turned in a much-needed solid quarter in its third-quarter earnings report, with solid earnings, though still weak revenues. — Wall Street has been watching Yahoo's performance closely …

Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch: Bartz On Blogging: “An Extremely Hard Engineering Feat”

Kara Swisher / BoomTown:
Yahoo 3Q Earnings Slides: The Good, the Bad and the Revenue Ugly

Discussion: Digits and Tech Trader Daily

Jay Sullivan / The Mozilla Blog:

Prototype of an Open Web App Ecosystem — The open Web is a great platform for rich applications. It would be even better if it had additional capabilities to ease discovery, acquisition, installation and use of apps, while also enabling monetization for developers.

Discussion: InformationWeek, GigaOM, Download Squad, Lifehacker, TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, BetaNews, techno.blog and Epicenter

Roger Cheng / Wall Street Journal:

Verizon Wireless to Offer $15 Data Plan — Verizon Wireless plans to introduce a less expensive, but restricted, data plan for smartphone customers next week, according to a person familiar with the matter, in a move that follows AT&T Inc.'s own capped offerings.

Discussion: DSLreports, SiliconANGLE, The Next Web, Neowin.net, Between the Lines Blog and I4U News

Declan McCullagh / CNET News:

Google ditches all Street View Wi-Fi scanning — Google has no plans to resume using its Street View cars to collect information about the location of Wi-Fi networks, a practice that led to a flurry of privacy probes after the company said it unintentionally captured fragments of unencrypted data.

Discussion: Wi-Fi Networking News, Gizmodo, WebProNews, priv.gc.ca and ClickZ, more at Mediagazer »

CBC News:
Google breached Canada's privacy laws

Discussion: PC World, CNET News, Search Engine Land, ReadWriteWeb and The Next Web

Biz Stone / The Atlantic Online:

Exclusive: Biz Stone on Twitter and Activism — The New Yorker recently published a thoughtfully written article by Malcolm Gladwell titled, “Small Change: Why The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted.” Citing research done by Stanford sociologist Doug McAdam, Mr. Gladwell compares …

Discussion: Download Squad, Technology & …, Skype Journal, TechCrunch and Gawker, Thanks:jaredbkeller

malcolm coles:

Google adds shared by number to Google news results — Google seems to be experimenting with adding a “Shared by [number]” stat next to Google News results - so you can see how popular each story is on Twitter etc. Here's a screenshot - you can see “Shared by 5+” next to the news source:

Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land:
In The Wake Of Bing & Facebook, Google Web Search Tests Getting More Social

Discussion: ReadWriteWeb

Paul Graham:

The New Funding Landscape — After barely changing at all for decades, the startup funding business is now in what could, at least by comparison, be called turmoil. At Y Combinator we've seen dramatic changes in the funding environment for startups. Fortunately one of them is much higher valuations.

Monica Chen / DigiTimes:

Engineer samples of Android 3.0-loaded tablet PCs to be ready in December — Google has recently notified its partners that the Android 3.0 operating system (OS) will soon be completed with the related tablet PC engineer samples set to show up in December, according to sources from notebook players.

Discussion: Boy Genius Report, Electronista, Crave, Erictric, Droid Life, Liliputing, AndroidGuys, Androinica, PhoneDog.com, Computerworld, I4U News, Android Community and GottaBeMobile

Kara Swisher / BoomTown:

ATD Welcomes Ina Fried As Our New Mobile Reporter — Here at All Things Digital, we've always prided ourselves on our journalism efforts, while also fully embracing the fast-paced new world of blogging. — So we could not be more thrilled to announce the hiring of Ina Fried as our new reporter …

Jennifer Van Grove / Mashable!:

First Look: Starbucks Digital Network Is Here — Beginning Wednesday, Starbucks customers who use the free Wi-Fi at more than 6,800 U.S. company-operated stores will be greeted with the Starbucks Digital Network (SDN) — an exclusive content network curated by the company and designed to enhance the customer's in-store experience.

Discussion: TechFlash

Philipp Weis / Docs Blog:

Drag and drop images in documents — When writing a document, it often helps to augment text with images and diagrams. Google documents already has three ways to add images: you can choose them from your hard-drive, add them by URL, and you can find them using Google Image Search.

Discussion: Erictric, Switched and The Next Web

Josh Constine / Inside Facebook:

Facebook Changes Photo Memories to No Longer Show Your Ex-Boyfriends or Ex-Girlfriends — In response to numerous complaints, Facebook has changed its Photo Memories sidebar module to no longer display friends who a user was formally listed as in a relationship with.

Discussion: All Facebook

MG Siegler / TechCrunch:

What If Google's Social Layer Is Chrome? What If Facebook Builds A Browser? — Since being wrestled back from Microsoft's death grip, the web browser has thrived thanks to its openness. All of the popular browsers beyond IE — Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera — are either based on open-source …

Thanks:mmoorejones

Jean Harvey / TiVo Blog:

Pandora Now Available on TiVo Series3 and TiVo HD boxes — TiVo music lovers...it's time to rejoice! Pandora is now available on your TiVo box. The personalized internet radio service is free and available now to broadband-connected TiVo Series3 and TiVo HD box owners and it functions …

Alex Chitu / Google Operating System:

Chrome Web Store to Be Launched Soon? — Google Chrome's extension gallery started to display the price for each extension, which suggests that Chrome Web Store is going to be launched soon. All the extensions uploaded to the gallery can be installed for free, but web apps won't necessarily be free.

Discussion: CNET News, Google Chrome Blog, Google Chrome Releases, TechCrunch and Download Squad

Reuters:

Dead Sea scrolls going digital on Internet — (Reuters) - Scholars and anyone with an Internet connection will be able to take a new look into the Biblical past through an online archive of high-resolution images of the 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls. — Israel Antiquities Authority …

Discussion: DeviceMAG, Ars Technica and BaltTech

Horace Dediu / asymco:

60 percent of Apple's sales are from products that did not exist three years ago — This chart speaks for itself. Note the bottom two bands and the proportion of the total that they make up. — Also note the seasonality with the holiday spikes. This last quarter is not a holiday quarter.

Discussion: App Advice, Sramana Mitra, SlashGear and MacStories

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