Top Items:
Florian Mueller / FOSS Patents:
Motorola fairly likely to win German patent injunction against iCloud in February — Apple demands 2 billion euro ($2.7B) bail — The German city of Mannheim is slowly but surely giving Cupertino some serious headache. — After a default judgment against Apple Inc. over two patents …
Discussion:
Business Insider, 9to5Google and SlashGear
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Nicholas Carlson / Business Insider:
Facebook Employees Go Nuts As Zuckerberg Tells Them The IPO Is Coming — A source close to Facebook employees emailed us yesterday to say that the rumor flitting from employee to employee is that “a Facebook S1 filing is coming really soon. Possibly as soon as next month.”
Discussion:
Friending Facebook Blog and WebProNews
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Eric Eldon / TechCrunch:
Facebook's IPO Motive: Keeping Employees, Not Compliance — Many people have believed that Facebook's initial public offering is due in 2012 since the company announced its giant funding round from Goldman Sachs at the start of this year. At that point, the company said in a press release that it …
Marco Arment / Marco.org:
A human review of the Kindle Fire — I expected the Kindle Fire to be good for books, great for magazines and newspapers, great for video, and good for apps and games. — In practice, it's none of these. Granted, I've only spent two days with it, so I can't share any long-term impressions.
Discussion:
Computerworld, ZDNet, Forbes, OmLinks, @johnolilly, Daring Fireball, parislemon and MacDailyNews
Matt McGee / Search Engine Land:
Wolfram Alpha Offers New Twist On Flight Search: Literal Answers To What Planes Are Overhead — You may not love this as much as I do, but that's okay. Wolfram Alpha has just launched what I'd have to put on any year-end list of the coolest search technologies of 2011: a tool that tells you …
Discussion:
VentureBeat, Computerworld, Pulse2, Wolfram, The Verge, WebProNews, SlashGear and The Next Web
Alex Wilhelm / The Next Web:
Which tech companies back SOPA? Microsoft, Apple, and 27 others — After writing a rather lengthy and somewhat firey post on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) yesterday, I realized this morning that I didn't know Microsoft's position on the matter. As I edit our Microsoft channel …
Discussion:
Ubergizmo, dentcat, VentureBeat, 9to5Mac, Gizmodo, Techland and Geek.com, Thanks:bradmccarty
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Peter Voskamp / The Wrap:
Online Piracy Act Dead? Nancy Pelosi, Darrell Issa Both Come Out Against (Updated)
Discussion:
TorrentFreak, GMSV, Techdirt, @benhuh, Ars Technica, Threat Level, TechCrunch and TorrentFreak
Rachel Webber / Tumblr Staff Blog:
Yesterday we did a historic thing. We generated 87,834 phone calls …
Discussion:
CNN, @dannysullivan, CNET News, Hillicon Valley, The Next Web, techPresident and Adam Laiacano
Jeff Bercovici / Mixed Media:
TechCrunch CEO Reported Out After Clashing with HuffPost-ers — The resignations keep coming at AOL. The latest to give notice, according to Business Insider, is TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde. Harde, a former News Corp. executive who joined TechCrunch five years ago …
Discussion:
Digits, @coopeydoop, Gawker, WebProNews, Pulse2, Business Insider, Mixed Media, VentureBeat, @sarahcuda and mediabistro.com, more at Mediagazer »
Christian Zibreg / 9to5Google:
Google patents Android pattern unlock — One of the treats that immediately set apart the first version of Android from Apple's iOS software (besides the notification center invoked with a pulldown gesture) is the pattern unlock feature on the lock screen. Whereas Apple opted for a slide gesture …
Discussion:
Mashable!, TechCrunch, AndroidGuys, Android Phone Fans and AndroidOS.in, Thanks:jordankahn
The SF Egotist:
The end of an era: The Yahoo! billboard comes down. — It's been a San Francisco icon for more than a decade. It's graced our skyline through the dot.com boom and bust. And it's one of the most recognizable pieces of advertising the city has seen in a long time.
Discussion:
Digital Trends, Business Insider, TechCrunch, Gizmodo, Boing Boing, Laughing Squid, NBC Bay Area, GMSV and ChasNote
David Sarno / L.A. Times Tech Blog:
Google+ continues battle with fading user interest, data say — One of technology's big unresolved dramas is whether Google can still cut into the giant social networking lead now held by rival Facebook — or if its Google+ service is already sunk. — Data on the subject have been sparse …
Discussion:
The Register, Search Engine Land, NBC Bay Area, SlashGear and @niemanlab
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Heather Dougherty / Hitwise Intelligence:
Google+ records 3rd biggest week since launch
Discussion:
Digital Trends, Search Engine Watch, WebProNews, msnbc.com, CNET News, Computerworld, Softpedia News and PSFK
Barry Collins / PC Pro:
Up to 50 Ultrabooks “to be launched at CES” — As many as 50 Intel Ultrabooks will be launched at next January's CES, according to the show's organisers. — Speaking at a CES Unveiled event in London, Shawn DuBravac, director of research for show organisers the Consumer Electronics Association …
Discussion:
PC World, VentureBeat, TechCrunch, AllThingsD, The Verge, Ubergizmo, Electronista and Softpedia News
AppleInsider:
Apple reportedly prepped AMD-powered MacBook Air, dropped it at last minute — Apple is said to have developed a MacBook Air running Advanced Micro Devices' Fusion Llano processor last spring, but scrapped it at the last minute because of production issues, according to an unverified report.
Discussion:
CNET News, Softpedia News, TechSpot, thinq_, SlashGear, Gizmodo UK, Gizmodo, SemiAccurate and MacRumors
Leena Rao / TechCrunch:
Personal Is A Secure Vault For All Of Your Private, Digital Data — We wrote about stealthy startup Personal earlier this year when the company announced $7.6 million in funding from Steve Case's Revolution LLC, Allen&Company, and others. This week, Personal finally launched its service …
Terrence O'Brien / Engadget:
BlackBerry Playbook gets massive, temporary $300 price cut in Canada — So, PlayBooks haven't exactly been flying off the shelves... anywhere. Not even in RIM's native Canada. But that might actually change over the nex few days as BestBuy, Walmart, Staples and Future Shop have chopped $300 off the price of the QNX-based slate.
Discussion:
Digits, AllThingsD, PadGadget, Techland and Softpedia News
Royal Pingdom:
Apple's iPad owns 88% of global tablet web traffic — There should be no doubt in anyone's mind that Apple's iPad is the biggest seller in the tablet space, but we have seen many iPad competitors come out over recent months, including Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, Blackberry PlayBook, Amazon Kindle Fire, and many more.
Discussion:
VentureBeat, SlashGear, Newlaunches.com, Electronista, The Next Web, FT Tech Hub, SiliconANGLE and iDownloadBlog.com
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Nathan Pensky / VatorNews:
Dell, HP, and Acer scaling back tablet manufacturing
Discussion:
Forbes, Computerworld, GMSV, thinq_, Guardian, Fudzilla, dailywireless.org, Fortune, Mobile Entertainment, PhoneArena, Shiny Objects, ConceivablyTech, DigiTimes, BetaNews, The Tech Report, TechCrunch, Appolicious Advisor, Softpedia News, @cisco_mobile, I4U News, Business Insider and TechEye
Business Week:
What Is Sony Now? — At 69, Sir Howard Stringer's time as CEO of the unwieldy electronics giant is running out. Can he and heir apparent Kazuo Hirai turn it around? — Sir Howard Stringer remembers when 2011 was going to be wonderful. “This was the first year of the payoff,” he says, “and next year was going to be the second.”
Discussion:
Gizmodo, The Verge, SplatF and Company Town
Steven Millward / Tech in Asia:
Apple Launches Local Currency Payments For its China iTunes App Store — Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) iTunes App Store has rolled out a major upgrade this morning in China, and now, for the first time, it actually accepts payments in the local currency, the renminbi (RMB).
Discussion:
Apple, MacStories, Wall Street Journal, MacRumors, GigaOM, MacDailyNews, TUAW, paidContent, iPodNN and The Next Web
David Goldman / Edible Apple:
Apple asks to see Samsung's call center records — By David Goldman: — Samsung and Apple are currently in the pre-trial phase of litigation known as Discovery. During the discovery process, each side asks the other for documents and other materials it feels will help its case.
Discussion:
Softpedia News, iClarified, The Next Web and TechCrunch
Michael Kan / PC World:
US Committee to Investigate China's Huawei, ZTE — A U.S. House Intelligence Committee is launching an investigation against Chinese telecommunication equipment suppliers Huawei and ZTE to find whether the companies pose a security threat to the country. — The investigation will examine …
Discussion:
Inquirer, Mike Rogers, IntoMobile, Bloomberg, FierceWireless, MobileBurn.com and The Next Web
Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch:
3D Printing Startup Shapeways Raises $5.1 Million, Plans NYC Production Facility — Of all the cool things going on in technology, one of my favorites is 3D printing. It's got such a futuristic quality to it: input a digital schematic, and you get a physical product custom cut to your exact specifications.
Discussion:
Shapeways Blog and Betabeat
David Kaplan / paidContent:
Major Newspaper Publishers Band Together On Social Shopping Portal — A group of eight newspaper publishers—Advance Digital, A. H. Belo Corporation, Cox Media Group, Gannett (NYSE: GCI), Hearst, MediaNews Group, The McClatchy Company (NYSE: MNI), and The Washington Post Co. (NYSE: WPO) …
Discussion:
Venture Capital Dispatch and Local Onliner, more at Mediagazer »
Katie Fehrenbacher / GigaOM:
Facebook scores LEED gold for Oregon data center — Facebook unveiled its green data center and energy efficient servers in Oregon this Spring, but now the social network giant has achieved another milestone: it's been granted a LEED gold certification for the Oregon data center …
Discussion:
TechFlash, ZDNet, Facebook, Green (Low Carbon) … and GeekWire
