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4:10 PM ET, January 4, 2011

Techmeme

 Top Items: 
Duff McDonald / Fortune:
Five reasons why I'm not buying Facebook  —  Before you start scrambling to get a piece of the Facebook pie, it's worth looking at a few glaring risk factors.  —  Would you give this guy $2 million?  —  Excuse me for raining on the Facebook parade, but yesterday's news about the $450 million investment …
RELATED:
Don Dodge / Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing:
Facebook, Twitter, & startup valuations - The best properties always look too expensive  —  The best properties always look too expensive.  Market leaders command the highest prices.  It is only a year or two later that they look like great deals.  The experts thought Microsoft was crazy …
Bloomberg:   Facebook Backer Helps Lure Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley to Silicon Valley
Olga Kharif / Business Week:
In the Works: A Google Mobile Payment Service?  —  “You'll be able to walk in a store and do commerce,” says Google's Eric Schmidt.  “You'd bump for everything and eventually replace credit cards”  —  Google (GOOG) is considering building a payment and advertising service that would let users buy milk …
Ed Bott / Ed Bott's Microsoft Report Blog:
Who owns your digital downloads?  (Hint: it's not you)  —  Steve Jobs once said, “People want to own their music.”  —  Someone better tell the folks who run the iTunes Store and its competitors.  If you buy a digital music track or album from the iTunes store or one of its competitors, you don't own it.
Discussion: Pulse2, Thanks:paulfallon
StatCounter Global Stats:
Firefox overtakes Internet Explorer in Europe in browser wars  — Internet Explorer loses crown in major market for first time  —  Boston, USA and Dublin, Ireland; Tuesday 4th January, 2011: Firefox overtook Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) to become the number one browser in Europe …
Brier Dudley / Seattle Times:
Consumer Electronics Show comes to Las Vegas this week  —  At CES, more than 2,500 companies are presenting new electronics and tech products.  At least 120,000 attendees from 130 countries are expected to peruse the show floor.  —  You'd think people would have enough gadgets …
Douglas Soltys / Inside BlackBerry:
BlackBerry PlayBook Web Fidelity Video (Multimedia, Games and Social Networking)  —  Check out our latest BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet video, just in time for CES 2011!  When we posted the BlackBerry PlayBook vs. iPad comparison video, many Inside BlackBerry readers posted comments suggesting …
Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch:
SCVNGR Raises $15 Million At $100MM Valuation  —  Location based game SCVNGR has raised another $15 million in a funding round led by European VC firm Balderton Capital, with participation from previous investors Google Ventures and Highland Capital Partners.
Kevin Marks / Epeus' epigone:
Two faces of Android  —  The most remarkable thing about Android is that it is the first widely adopted Open Source client operating system.  It's long been clear that Open Source is the best way to preserve infrastructural code from the vicissitudes of corporate and governmental volatility …
Discussion: TechCrunch, Thanks:kevinmarks
Avner Ronen / Boxee Blog:
Boxee partners with Iomega, NAS device running Boxee is coming  —  We are happy to announce that Iomega will be bringing out a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device running the Boxee software.  —  Boxee is a software company (even though some people mistake us for a set-top box maker) …
Dan Frommer / SAI: Silicon Alley Insider:
Microsoft Supposedly Showing Off Its Answer To Apple TV And Google TV At CES  —  Microsoft's Xbox 360 has been a big hit for entertainment and online video, and we've heard that Microsoft is trying to court more media companies to the Xbox.  —  But it looks like the company is also going to unveil …
DealBook:
Qualcomm Is Said to Be Near $3.5 Billion Deal for Atheros  —  Qualcomm is near a deal to buy Atheros Communications, a semiconductor manufacturing company, for about $45 per share, or $3.5 billion, according to two people with direct knowledge of the talks.  —  A deal could be announced …
Chris Ziegler / Engadget:
Sony's PlayStation Phone finally gets Xperia, PlayStation logos  —  We've heard of the mysterious, still-totally-unofficial PlayStation Phone running Android 2.2 in the past, but we'd also heard it could run 3.0 — thing is, that was back before we knew Gingerbread would be 2.3 …
Robin Wauters / TechCrunch:
Netflix' Next Destination: On Your Remote Control  —  Brilliant idea: Netflix and a number of consumer electronics companies have joined in a development effort to put Netflix-branded one-click buttons on remote controls that operate Internet-connected TVs, Blu-ray disc players and other devices.
Sascha Segan / PC Magazine:
Honeycomb to Require Powerful Processor, Screen: OEM  —  Google's new Android Honeycomb tablet OS will require a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor to run properly, said Bobby Cha, managing director of Korean consumer electronics firm Enspert.  —  That means that many existing Android tablets …
Kat Hannaford / Gizmodo:
Sprint's HTC EVO Shift 4G On Sale January 9th  —  After flurries of leaks, HTC's EVO Shift 4G smartphone has been introduced by exclusive carrier Sprint, which'll have it on shelves January 9th at $150.  As expected, it's a slide-out QWERTY keyboard phone with a 3.6-inch touchscreen.
Sarah Rotman Epps / Forrester Blogs:
US Tablet Sales Will More Than Double This Year  —  Today Forrester published its revised US consumer tablet forecast, updating its previous forecast from June 2010.  When Apple's iPad first debuted, we saw the device as a game-changer but were too conservative with our forecast.
Vlad Savov / Engadget:
Amazon promises tablet-specific Kindle app for Android and Windows slates  —  You can read your Amazon-bought ebooks on your Kindle, your PC, your Mac, your mobile, and even on your iPad.  Now, it's time to have them, contained in a tailor-made application, on your Android and Windows tablets as well.
Andrew Munchbach / BGR:
Garmin announces nüvi 2400 series GPS units, StreetPilot iPhone app  —  Today, via a barrage of press releases, navigation company Garmin announced its nüvi 2400 series of personal GPS devices and its first iPhone navigation application, StreetPilot.
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
With Fusion, AMD plans to stop being the underdog in chips  —  Making good on plans it laid in 2006, Advanced Micro Devices is finally announcing that its Fusion family of computer chips, which combine graphics functions with general computing power, are ready for prime time.
Jonathan S. Geller / BGR:
HP holding webOS event February 9th; PalmPad line may be revealed  —  Uh oh, it's definitely going down — in addition to the flood of tablet devices headed to CES and Apple's rumored next event detailing the new iPad around February, HP just sent out invites to a webOS event of its own happening on February 9th.
Rachael King / Business Week:
Ditch Your Wallet and Pay by Phone  —  Using 200 of its San Francisco staff, the bank will test mobile-phone payments for six months—and may launch a commercial service soon after  —  Wells Fargo (WFC) is again trying to make mobile payments at restaurants and retailers mainstream, three years after an earlier attempt lost steam.
Phil Nickinson / Android Central:
Verizon changing its upgrade policy; you'll have to wait 20 months for a new phone  —  Verizon's getting ready to change (they call it “simplifying") its upgrade policy starting Jan. 16, and it's not quite in favor of the consumer.  As you can see in the above training material …
Jonathan E. Skillings / CNET News:
Motorola's split takes effect  —  The long-planned breakup of Motorola is now a reality.  —  The two new companies both began trading this morning on the New York Stock Exchange, Motorola Mobility Holdings under the ticker MMI and Motorola Solutions as MSI.
Larry Hardesty / MIT News Office:
The surprising usefulness of sloppy arithmetic  —  Ask a computer to add 100 and 100, and its answer will be 200.  But what if it sometimes answered 202, and sometimes 199, or any other number within about 1 percent of the correct answer?  —  Arithmetic circuits that returned such imprecise answers …
 
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 More Items: 
Pew Research Center:
Internet Gains on Television as Public's Main News Source
Robin Wauters / TechCrunch:
So You Just Bought Sex.com For $13 Million - Now What?
Diane Bartz / Reuters:
Court backs Uniloc in patent fight with Microsoft
Jonny Evans / 9 to 5 Mac:
Saudi Arabia blocks MobileMe?
Reuters:
Skype's partner says it is legal in China
Discussion: TechEye
 Earlier Items: 
Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:
Big Data Giant Joins InfoChimps to Save the World's Structured Information
Charles Ying / satine.org:
The Care and Feeding of the Android GPU
Bill Slawski / SEO by the Sea:
A Google Like Button: Adsense for Social Network Sharers?
Gregg Keizer / Computerworld:
Windows 7 breaks 20% share barrier
Discussion: Fast Company and TechEye
Horace Dediu / asymco:
How sticky is Android?  —  There is an assumption floating around …
Lydia Dishman / Fast Company:
Q&A Site Quora Builds Buzz With A-List Answerers
Andrew Munchbach / BGR:
Best Buy's new ‘Buy Back’ …
 

 
From Mediagazer:

Max Tani / @maxwelltani:
Memo: WaPo's Matt Murray lays out plans for WP Ventures, the “third newsroom”; Krissah Thompson will be editor and Samantha Henig will be general manager

Leo Schwartz / Fortune:
Sources: CoinDesk owner Bullish fired three editors, including EIC Kevin Reynold, amid controversy over forcing editors to take down an article on Justin Sun

Wall Street Journal:
Sources detail creative differences between the Broccoli family, which has creative control over the James Bond franchise, and Amazon, which owns the franchise
 
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