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1:45 PM ET, January 4, 2011

Techmeme

 Top Items: 
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 …
RELATED:
Steven M. Davidoff / DealBook:
Facebook and the 500-Person Threshold
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 …
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.
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 …
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 …
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 …
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) …
Andrew Wallenstein / paidContent:
New iTunes Features Aim To Outdo DVD  —  Some of the coolest so-called “extras” embedded only on the iTunes' version of several recent film releases from Sony (NYSE: SNE) Pictures aren't even mentioned in their promotional materials.  That's because Sony Pictures Home Entertainment …
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.
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.
RELATED:
Hugo Miller / Bloomberg:   Motorola's Jha Seeks to Defy History After Phone-Unit Spinoff
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.
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 …
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.
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.
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.
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Facebook Considering A Leaseback Deal Worth As Much As $420 Million For New HQ  —  Faceook is considering moving its headquarters to the old Sun Microsystems campus in Menlo Park, as we previously reported.  Some new details about the transaction have come to light.
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.
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 …
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.
Discussion: Amazon.com, SAI, Softpedia News and Gizmodo
Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:
Big Data Giant Joins InfoChimps to Save the World's Structured Information  —  Sometimes highly accomplished people just have to join crazy little startups.  It's always exciting to see what happens when they do.  Data scientist Kurt Bollacker is one of those people; he's decided …
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 …
Thanks:kevinmarks
Bill Slawski / SEO by the Sea:
A Google Like Button: Adsense for Social Network Sharers?  —  A Google patent application published last week describes how Google might enable visitors to websites to share information that they've found with others on social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other sites.
 
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 More Items: 
Robin Wauters / TechCrunchIT:
Dell Acquires SecureWorks To Bolster Information Security Offerings
Reuters:
Skype's partner says it is legal in China
Discussion: TechEye
Adam DuVander / ProgrammableWeb:
API Growth Doubles in 2010, Social and Mobile Are Trends
Charles Ying / satine.org:
The Care and Feeding of the Android GPU
Jacqui Cheng / Ars Technica:
LimeWire seeks data from Amazon in bid to avoid big payout to RIAA
Gregg Keizer / Computerworld:
Windows 7 breaks 20% share barrier
Wall Street Journal:
Myspace Prepares Downsizing, Layoffs
Discussion: Variety, Company Town and CNBC
 Earlier Items: 
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
Paul Buchheit:
Angel investing, my first three years
Discussion: Victus Spiritus, VentureBeat and TechCrunch, Thanks:louisgray
Byron Acohido / The Last Watchdog:
Google discloses IE ‘cross fuzz’ flaw before Microsoft can issue patch
Discussion: Darknet, eWeek and The Register
Jessi Hempel / Fortune:
What the hell is going on with TV?  —  Google TV.  Xbox.  Apple TV.
Discussion: Stage Two and VentureBeat