Techmeme: Firefox 4 Beta for Mobile is Now Faster and Sleeker (Stuart Parmenter/The Mozilla Blog)

7:25 AM ET, November 5, 2010

Top Items:

Steve Kanefsky / The Official Google Blog:

The power of Google Instant, now in your pocket — Google Instant makes search faster by displaying not just predictions but actual search results as you type. This saves valuable time on a desktop browser, but wouldn't it be great to have Google Instant on mobile devices …

Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch:

Google To Facebook: You Can't Import Our User Data Without Reciprocity — The war between Google and Facebook is heating up: Google just made one small tweak to its Terms of Service that will have a big impact on the world's biggest social network. From now on, any service …

Discussion: Google Code, Softpedia News, The Next Web, Silicon Republic, Gizmodo, VentureBeat and Techie Buzz

ifixit:

Microsoft Kinect Teardown — The Kinect is a horizontal bar of sensors connected to a small base with a motorized pivot, and is designed to be positioned lengthwise below the video display. We picked up and tore down our Kinect on launch day — November 4, 2010.

Discussion: Geek.com, Computerworld, adafruit industries blog, Gizmodo, Joystiq, Erictric, Engadget, technabob and New York Times

Consumer Reports Electronics Blog:

Consumer Reports debunks the ‘racist’ Kinect — Is Kinect “Racist”? — Video: Consumer Reports — Shortly after the first Microsoft Kinect for Xbox reviews starting appearing in the wee hours last night, another Kinect story cropped up. It seems some testers encountered difficulty …

Discussion: TechEye, Silicon Republic, TechFlash, PC World, DailyFinance, Digits, Gadgetwise, Product Reviews Net, Between the Lines Blog, Black Web 2.0, Kotaku, Gadget Lab, Neowin.net, ZDNet, SAI, GameLife and GameSpot

Cory Doctorow / Boing Boing:
$2K bounty for free/open Kinect drivers (Microsoft thinks this is illegal!)

Discussion: Digitizor, Kotaku, adafruit industries blog, Hack a Day, CNET News and Gadget Lab

Chris Foresman / Ars Technica:

Feature: The future of notebooks: Ars reviews the 11" MacBook Air — Apple CEO Steve Jobs is no stranger to superlatives. Every product Apple makes is “insanely great,” “amazing,” or even “magical.” So when he unveiled the latest MacBook Air models, declaring them to be the “future of notebooks …

Discussion: TUAW, Electronista, Engadget, Insights on the tech industry, Geekosystem, The Atlantic Online, BGR, Gadget Lab, Geek.com and SAI

Daniel Eran Dilger / AppleInsider:
Dropping Adobe Flash boosts Apple's MacBook Air battery life by 2 hours

Discussion: Podcasting News and Ars Technica

Shayndi Raice / Wall Street Journal:

Dell to Ditch 25,000 BlackBerrys in Bid to Promote Own Service — In a direct shot at BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd., Dell Inc. plans to move its 25,000 employees over to its own line of smartphones and then aggressively market a service to help other companies do the same.

Discussion: InformationWeek, The Next Web, Reuters, Gizmodo, Engadget, GottaBeMobile, WMPoweruser.com, Electronista, WPCentral.com and ITworld.com, Thanks:rawmeet

Tom Krazit / Relevant Results:

How one company games Google News — Note the second cluster of stories produced by a Google News search for “iTunes” yesterday afternoon. All of those Red Label News stories were basically the same: spammy SEO-keywords alongside Web ads. — (Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)

Discussion: Google Webmaster Central Blog, Techdirt, TeleRead, parislemon and PC World

Alexia Tsotsis / TechCrunch:

What Your Phone Says About You [Graphic] — Sometimes the guys in our office like to get in stupid fights about phones. Yeah I know they do it on the blog, but they also do it in private as well times 1000. It is essentially the song that never ends, with Mike Arrington and Jason Kincaid erring …

Discussion: C-Section Comics, IntoMobile, Mike Industries, Geekologie, displayblog and Erictric

Stuart Parmenter / The Mozilla Blog:

Firefox 4 Beta for Mobile is Now Faster and Sleeker — We are happy to bring you the latest release of Firefox 4 Beta for mobile. The beta is now available for download in 10 languages on your Android or Maemo device. — We received a lot of great feedback on the previous beta and addressed …

Sarah Perez / ReadWriteWeb:

State of the App Industry 2010 (Report) — Mobile advertising firm Millennial Media has just released its comprehensive report on the state of the mobile application industry, which includes a look at growth trends, platform diversification, platform popularity, 2011 trends and more.

Discussion: Appolicious Advisor, The Next Web, Softpedia News, The Register, Winrumors, VentureBeat and Google Watch

AppleInsider:
Android edges Apple iPad as second-most-popular mobile development platform

Discussion: IntoMobile and GeekSmack

Farhad Manjoo / Slate:

Will Netflix Destroy the Internet? — American broadband capacity might not be able to keep up with everyone who wants to stream movies. — On Sept. 22, Netflix began offering its streaming movie service in Canada. This was Netflix's first venture outside of the United States …

Discussion: The Steve Rubel Stream, DailyTech, NBC Bay Area and Fortune

Marco.org:

Developers don't rush to new platforms — A common fallacy is assuming that any new platform in an exciting market — recently, smartphones and tablet computers — will be flooded with developers as soon as it's released, as if developers are just waiting outside the gates, hungrily waiting to storm in.

John Abd-El-Malek / Google Chrome Blog:

PDF goodness in Chrome — With every Google Chrome release, we hope to bring new features and improvements that will make your life on the web speedier, simpler, and more secure. Today, we're excited to introduce the integrated PDF viewer to the beta channel.

Discussion: Google Chrome Releases, Softpedia News, Lifehacker, Mashable!, Techie Buzz, WebProNews and Google Operating System, Thanks:rawmeet

Ryan Lawler / GigaOM:

Big Cable Is Bleeding: 500K+ Subscribers Lost In Q3 — There's now even more evidence that subscribers are cutting the cord and opting out of paying for cable: By adding up subscriber losses from four of the top five cable companies, we found that more than half a million users have ditched their cable companies.

Discussion: Engadget, Time Warner Cable, PR Newswire, SAI, Associated Press and DSLreports

Dennis Fisher:

Attackers Now Using Honeypots to Trap Researchers — Attackers are constantly changing their tactics and adapting to what the security community and researchers are doing, and it's not unusual for the bad guys to adopt techniques used by their adversaries. The latest example of this is a malware gang …

Discussion: SC Magazine US

MG Siegler / TechCrunch:

Hey Gmail, 1994 Called, It Wants Its Dial-Up Level Performance Back — Something is rotten in the state of Gmail. At least for some of us. — I thought it was maybe just me when I tweeted a couple days ago about awful Gmail performance recently. But it's not just me.

Discussion: GeekSugar

Matt McGee / Search Engine Land:

Nicaragua Raids Costa Rica, Blames Google Maps — An error on Google Maps has caused an international conflict in Central America. — A Nicaraguan military commander, relying on Google Maps, moved troops into an area near San Juan Lake along the border between his country and Costa Rica.

Discussion: The Microsoft Blog, Fast Company, TechSpot, Fortune and CNN, Thanks:jstatad

Kara Swisher / BoomTown:

Exclusive: Yahoo CIO Kirwan Bids Adieu — As part of BoomTown's duty as internal jobs board for Yahoo, here's another departure: CIO Michael Kirwan (pictured here). — A terse email went out yesterday about Kirwan's leaving. — According to his Yahoo bio, he had “global responsibility for Yahoo! …

Discussion: Computerworld

Josh Taylor / CNET News:

Wi-Fi, meet the TV antenna — The first half of CSIRO's Ngara rural wireless broadband technology allows several users to upload material at the same time without compromising the data rate of 12 megabits per second each. — Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research …

Discussion: Sydney Morning Herald and FierceBroadbandWireless

Mathew Ingram / GigaOM:

Meet Google's Evangelist Army — We all know that Google is huge, right? Like, a globe-spanning colossus, in fact. But every now and then we come across a tangible sign of just how broad the company is and how many different pies it has its fingers in. For example, take a look at this list of the company's “developer advocates.”

Discussion: Google Code Blog and Singularity Hub

Shawn Ingram / Gadgetell:

Dell Inspiron Duo shown off in video, should be “coming soon” — The tablet market might be getting a bit crowded soon with all those Android tablets trying to compete with the iPad. Along with all those tablets, we keep hearing comments that the netbook market is dying.

Discussion: Engadget, SlashGear, CNET News, GottaBeMobile, The Tech Report and Electronista

Gavin Clarke / The Register:

Ex-Sun boss gives Ellison open source wedgie — 'You're a great capitalist, Larry' — Pg West 2010 Former Sun Microsystems chief and co-founder Scott McNealy has re-appeared to champion open source and rough up billionaire Larry Ellison, the man who bought his baby.

Evan Wexler / Mashable!:

Eric Schmidt on Google's Foreign Policy [VIDEO] — Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave insight into the company's burgeoning international policy on Wednesday night at a meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York City. Schmidt, who oversees the company's technical and business strategy …

Carl Malamud / O'Reilly Radar:

Patent database up and running — Just one year ago, I posted a piece on O'Reilly Radar about an unlikely group working happily together to vastly increase the amount of U.S. Patent information available at no charge on the Internet. I've done no heavy lifting whatsoever on this project …

Discussion: Science as Social Enterprise

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