Techmeme: Microsoft's Ballmer hints at PC support for Kinect (BBC)

10:40 PM ET, January 7, 2011

Top Items:

Verizon Finally Lands the iPhone — The iPhone is finally coming to Verizon Wireless. — The largest U.S. wireless carrier will make the long-awaited announcement at an event Tuesday in New York City, a person familiar with the matter said Friday. — The move will for the first time …

John Paczkowski / Digital Daily:

Verizon Event Set for Tuesday - iPhone Time — And there it is: Verizon will hold a special event at New York City's Lincoln Center (Frederick P. Rose Hall) on Jan. 11-next Tuesday. No details on its focus, but sources close to the company tell me this will indeed prove to be the long-rumored Verizon iPhone announcement.

John Paczkowski / Digital Daily:

Apple CEO Likely to Appear at Verizon iPhone Event — Verizon Wireless's Tuesday iPhone announcement will be headlined by President and COO Lowell McAdam, but there will likely be a special guest as well. Apple CEO Steve Jobs. While the appearance isn't 100 percent assured …

Discussion: BGR, AppleInsider, PhoneArena, SAI, RazorianFly, Engadget and The Loop

John Gruber / Daring Fireball:

Why Next Week's Event Is Hosted by Verizon, Not Apple — So why is next Tuesday's announcement of the Verizon iPhone a Verizon-hosted event in New York and not an Apple-hosted event in Cupertino? Here's my theory. Apple is fully aware that when they say “We're having an event next week” …

Discussion: TechCrunch, Gizmodo, IntoMobile, Neowin.net and RazorianFly

Jonathan S. Geller / BGR:
Verizon iPhone launch looks set for February 3rd

Discussion: VatorNews, BetaNews, TiPb, Crave, AppleInsider, Bits, Shoutpedia, Redmond Pie, RazorianFly, Computerworld, I4U News, TUAW, Examiner, VentureBeat, SAI, Geekword, Erictric, The Next Web, PhoneDog.com, MacStories, Pulse2, MacRumors, 9 to 5 Mac, Electronista, Geek.com, SlashGear, App Advice and MacNN

John Paczkowski / Digital Daily:

Apple Opposes Proposal on CEO Succession Planning — A few noteworthy nuggets from Apple's 2011 Proxy Statement, filed today with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. — In 2010 CEO Steve Jobs retained his $1 annual salary and some 5.5 million shares of Apple stock as well.

Discussion: Thomson IR, CNET News, paidContent, Between the Lines Blog, AppleInsider, MacNN and SAI

Sarah Rabil / Bloomberg:
Apple COO Makes $59 Million After Filling in for Jobs

Discussion: Bloomberg, GMSV, 9 to 5 Mac, Dow Jones Newswires, RazorianFly, 24/7 Wall St. and Pulse2

Apple:

Mac App Store Downloads Top One Million in First Day — Apple® today announced that over one million apps have been downloaded from the Mac® App Store℠ in the first day. With more than 1,000 free and paid apps, the Mac App Store brings the revolutionary App Store experience to the Mac …

Peter Cohen / The Loop:
Pixelmator goes exclusive to Mac App Store

Discussion: AppleInsider, Sophiestication Software, MacStories, PC World, TUAW, WebProNews and Erictric

Ryan Singel / Epicenter:

Obama's Solution for Online ID? Let Silicon Valley Take the Lead — To help solve the modern nightmare of trying to control your online identity and keep track your passwords, the government came to Silicon Valley Friday and said it was here to help. — But rather than propose …

Discussion: eSecurity Planet News

Howard A. Schmidt / White House.gov Blog:
A National Program Office for Enhancing Online Trust and Privacy

Discussion: eWeek, Bloomberg and Computerworld

Kevin Rose:

Rumor: iPad 2 is coming soon! — This was posted to my foundat.io/n newsletter this morning: From: Kevin Rose (Foundation Newsletter) I have it on good authority that Apple will be announcing the iPad 2 in the next “3-4 weeks”, possibly Tuesday February 1st. The iPad 2 will feature a retina display and front/back cameras.

Discussion: TechCrunch, MacStories, TiPb and Geekword

Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:

How to Steal Any Movie You Want on the Web: Wall Street Gets a How-To Guide — It's easier than ever to download any movie or TV show you want on the Web, for free. Just ask Rich Greenfield. Or better yet, let the Wall Street analyst show you, via a helpful four-minute video embedded at the bottom of this post.

Discussion: The Atlantic Online

Ben Worthen / Digits:

Facebook Versus Google Circa 2004 — Is Facebook worth $50 billion? As people ponder that question this week, we decided to look at Google, the Internet's previous wunderkind. — Google's market cap passed the $50 billion mark in October 2004. The company was exactly six years old …

Discussion: Venture Capital Dispatch

Peter Lattman / DealBook: The Facebook-Microsoft Parallels — A computer prodigy drops …

MG Siegler / TechCrunch:

Quora Answers The Question: How Will You Avoid Becoming Yahoo Answers? — As we're all well aware by now, the Q&A service Quora is exploding with growth. And while that may seem like a good thing, there are two distinct downsides. First, Quora is a pretty complex site and so scaling to accomodate huge user growth is difficult.

Discussion: WebProNews, Quora, Search Engine Land, Smart Mobs, The Social Path and The Diversity Blog

BBC:

Microsoft's Ballmer hints at PC support for Kinect — Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer has hinted to the BBC that he will formally support PC use of the Kinect motion controller in the near future, saying Microsoft “will support that in a formal way in the right time”.

Discussion: WinRumors, SlashGear, iThinkDifferent, GameLife, The Next Web, Erictric, VG247, Destructoid, Engadget, Joystiq, MTV Multiplayer and Pocket-lint

Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch:

Kleiner Perkins To Invest In Groupon's Massive $950 Million Funding Round — Last week we reported that Groupon was closing a massive $950 million funding round at an impressive $4.75 billion valuation in the wake of walking away from an acquisition offer from Google.

Kara Swisher / BoomTown:
First Half of Groupon Funding Done-DST, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity …

Discussion: Soshable and Pulse2

Sascha Segan / PC Magazine:

RIM CEO Details BlackBerry “Super Phone” Plans — LAS VEGAS—RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis further confirmed plans for QNX-powered BlackBerry “super phones” in an interview at CES where he said the BlackBerry maker is skating not to where the puck is today, it's heading for where the puck is going to be tomorrow.

Discussion: IntoMobile, BlackBerry Cool, pocketnow.com and PhoneDog.com

Frederic Lardinois / NewsGrange:

Why Your Next Car Will Have an IP Address — One trend that has become very clear at this year's CES is that the Internet is slowly making its way into our cars. Of course, you can already browse the Net and play music from Pandora through your smartphone, but the next generation of cars …

Discussion: Faster Forward, msnbc.com and The Next Web

Brooke Crothers / CNET News:

CES: Intel exec: Microsoft's tablet OS too long in coming — LAS VEGAS—Intel has urged Microsoft to tailor Windows for smaller devices, to no avail, an executive from the chipmaker said at the Consumer Electronics Show. — “Hey, we tried to get [Microsoft] to do a tablet OS (operating system) for a long time.

Discussion: Laptops and Desktops Blog, The Seattle Times, Gizmodo, Pulse2, The Microsoft Blog, MarketingVOX, Microsoft Watch and Inquirer

Adrian Chen / Gawker:

Courtney Love's Slanderous Twitter Account Suspended — Courtney Love's highly-entertaining Twitter account, CourtneyLoveUK, has been suspended! And this just days after she was hit with the world's first-ever Twitter defamation lawsuit, stemming from a 2009 tweet-based rant.

Jim Finkle / Reuters:

Amazon cloud can help hack WiFi networks: expert — (Reuters) - A security researcher says he has figured out a quick and inexpensive way to break a commonly used form of password protection for wireless networks using powerful computers that anybody can lease from Amazon.com Inc over the Web.

Discussion: The Next Web

Archived Page Info:

This is a snapshot of Techmeme at 10:40 PM ET, January 7, 2011.

View the current page or another snapshot:

Techmeme Sponsor Posts:

Meta:

Open Source AI: Available to all, not just the few — Meta's open source AI enables small businesses, start-ups, students, researchers and more to download and build with our models at no cost.

Tribe AI:

Build AI products that matter — Tribe AI helps organizations rapidly deploy AI solutions that have real business impact. We bring together world class AI talent and tooling to drive differentiated results.

Zoho:

CIO challenge 5: Can we find an effective solution that also minimizes operational costs? — Welcome to the next and final installment of our CIO series! After what feels like a thousand cups of coffee …

Hamming: