Top Items:
Seth Weintraub / Fortune:
2011 will be the year Android explodes — (Not this kind of smartphone growth.) Image by @boetter via Flickr — Ever-improving networks and a big hardware announcement that will send handset prices plummeting both point to smartphone growth in 2011 that could totally eclipse anything we've seen before.
RELATED:
Fred / A VC:
The Smartphone Explosion — I've been dipping around the edges of this story with recent blog posts, but Seth Weintraub takes it a step further in this post in Fortune. Next year is likely to be the year that smartphones emerge as the default mobile device platform around the world …
Robert Scoble / Scobleizer:
Fred Wilson and Fortune are right about Android vs iOS (and everyone else), but I hate it — Fred Wilson is recommending developers invest first in Android and Fortune has a similar article about why 2011 is going to be the year that Android explodes. Why? Market share.
Thanks:scobleizer
Walt Mossberg / Mossblog:
Mossberg's Best and Worst Products of 2010 — This week on WSJ Digits, Walt shared his thoughts on his best and worst reviewed products for 2010. Taking Walt's top spot this year was none other than Apple's iPad. For a 1.0 product, the iPad was amazing.
Discussion:
Examiner, TUAW, bijan sabet, AppleInsider, Edible Apple, Electronista, MacDailyNews and 9 to 5 Mac
New York Times:
Banks and WikiLeaks — The whistle-blowing Web site WikiLeaks has not been convicted of a crime. The Justice Department has not even pressed charges over its disclosure of confidential State Department communications. Nonetheless, the financial industry is trying to shut it down.
Discussion:
Daring Fireball
RELATED:
Dave Winer / Scripting News:
Can we use S3 and EC2 to host free speech?
Discussion:
The Atlantic Online
Rosa Golijan / Gizmodo:
What Happens When You Steal a Hacker's Computer — Meet Melvin Guzman. He somehow ended up with a Mac stolen from Zoz, a rather crafty hacker who happens to love that computer “like his firstborn.” Here's a hilarious account of what happened—complete with some poorly censored nudity.
Discussion:
Hack a Day, Examiner, Pulse2 and Cult of Mac
MG Siegler / TechCrunch:
Flickr Should Have Built Instagram. But They Didn't. Here's Why. — Back in June, we reported on the departure of Kellan Elliott-McCrea from Yahoo. While not hugely known outside the developer community, we had received several tips indicating just how important Elliott-McCrea was to the Flickr team …
Discussion:
SAI
Steve Kovach / The Business Insider:
Score A Kindle This Morning? Here's How To Load It With Free Google Books — E-Readers like the Nook and the Sony Reader automatically give you access to the thousands of books in Google's online library. But for devices like the Kindle, you need to work around a few obstacles before you can gain access.
Discussion:
Mashable!
Ryan Flinn / Bloomberg:
IBM Expects to See Holographic Phone Calls, Air-Powered Batteries by 2015 — By 2015, your mobile phone will project a 3-D image of anyone who calls and your laptop will be powered by kinetic energy. At least that's what International Business Machines Corp. sees in its crystal ball.
Discussion:
IntoMobile, Examiner, PC Magazine, textually.org, AfterDawn.com and eWeek
Florian Mueller / FOSS Patents:
Microsoft versus Motorola: both parties filed new assertions, now 35 patents-in-suit — new visualization — This week I got the impression that high tech companies — especially if they're in the smartphone business — now send each other patent suits instead of Christmas cards.
Discussion:
Electronista
Adam Rifkin / TechCrunch:
What Facebook Can Give Back To The Web — Editor's note: Guest author Adam Rifkin is a Silicon Valley veteran who organizes a networking group for entrepreneurial engineers called 106 Miles. You can read his previous guest posts for TechCrunch here and follow him on Twitter @ifindkarma.
Cory Doctorow / Boing Boing:
Cambridge university refuses to censor student's thesis on chip-and-PIN vulnerabilities — After the UK banking trade association wrote to Cambridge university to have a student's master's thesis censored because it documented a well-known flaw in the chip-and-PIN system, Cambridge's Ross Anderson sent an extremely stiff note in reply:
Discussion:
Light Blue Touchpaper, Chilling Effects … and MSDN Blogs
