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:
MacRumors, Gizmodo, AllThingsD, 9to5Google, PhoneArena and SlashGear
RELATED:
Ingrid Lunden / mocoNews:
Rain Falls On iCloud? Apple Could Lose Motorola Case To The Tune Of $2.7B — Motorola (NYSE: MMI) Mobility today made a crucial advance against Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) in an ongoing patent case in Europe concerning iCloud and MobileMe. The news comes a day after Motorola Mobility came …
Discussion:
Electronista and Business Insider
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 …
Discussion:
All Facebook
RELATED:
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
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, OmLinks, Forbes, @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, Softpedia News, App Advice, Mashable!, WebProNews, SlashGear, Pulse2, The Verge, Wolfram and The Next Web
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, Gizmodo, VentureBeat, TechCrunch, AllThingsD, The Verge, Ubergizmo, Electronista and Softpedia News
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, Pulse2, WebProNews, Gawker, Business Insider, VentureBeat, @sarahcuda and Mixed Media, more at Mediagazer »
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
Jolie O'Dell / VentureBeat:
Google co-founder Sergey Brin gives $500,000 to help Wikipedia — The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, has just received a $500,000 grant from the Brin Wojcicki Foundation, an organization started by Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his wife, 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki.
Discussion:
Wikimedia Foundation, AllThingsD, Ars Technica and Mercury News
Peter Voskamp / The Wrap:
Online Piracy Act Dead? Nancy Pelosi, Darrell Issa Both Come Out Against (Updated) — The tide seems to have turned against the Stop Online Piracy Act, as both Nancy Pelosi and Darrell Issa have come out against passage. — “Need to find a better solution than #SOPA #DontBreakTheInternet …
Discussion:
TorrentFreak, GMSV, Techdirt, @benhuh, Ars Technica, Threat Level, TechCrunch and TorrentFreak
RELATED:
Alex Wilhelm / The Next Web:
Which tech companies back SOPA? Microsoft, Apple, and 27 others
Discussion:
Ubergizmo, dentcat, Gizmodo, VentureBeat, 9to5Mac, Techland and Geek.com, Thanks:bradmccarty
Rachel Webber / Tumblr Staff Blog:
Yesterday we did a historic thing. We generated 87,834 phone calls …
Discussion:
CNN, @dannysullivan, CNET News, Hillicon Valley, Boing Boing, The Next Web, techPresident and Adam Laiacano
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:
TechCrunch, Mashable!, IntoMobile, AndroidGuys, Android Phone Fans and AndroidOS.in, Thanks:jordankahn
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:
paidContent, Digits, AllThingsD, PadGadget, Techland and Softpedia News
Brad McCarty / The Next Web:
Google+ adds Trending topics for discovery and Filtering to search results — If there's one odd part about Google+ it's the fact that true search has taken a while to come to the service. It wasn't long ago that we got wind of searchable hashtags inside of the service …
Discussion:
CNET News, TechCrunch and Google+
John Gruber / Daring Fireball:
Getting Steve Jobs Wrong — Exhibit A in the case against Walter Isaacson's flawed Jobs biography: Malcolm Gladwell in last week's New Yorker, arguing that Jobs was “a tweaker”: … Jobs was neither. These men make for a poor comparison to Jobs because Jobs didn't really “invent” …
Ryan Lawler / GigaOM:
Klip raises another $8 million for social, mobile video sharing app — It was just two months ago that Palo Alto-based startup Klip released a mobile app for shooting videos on your iPhone and sharing them with friends. At that point, Klip had raised $2 million in Series A funding from Matrix Partners and CEO Alain Rossman.
Discussion:
TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Business Insider, VatorNews, CNET News, AllThingsD and silicontap.com
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 …
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
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:
Ars Technica, CNET News, SemiAccurate, TechSpot, Softpedia News, thinq_, SlashGear, Gizmodo and MacRumors
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:
CNN, Business Insider, Gizmodo, Digital Trends, Boing Boing, Laughing Squid, GMSV, NBC Bay Area, TechCrunch and ChasNote
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
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, Wall Street Journal, MacStories, MacRumors, paidContent, TUAW, GigaOM, MacDailyNews, iPodNN and The Next Web
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:
Mike Rogers, Inquirer, IntoMobile, Bloomberg, MobileBurn.com, FierceWireless and The Next Web
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
