Top Items:
Business Week:
In Some Virtual Worlds, the Thrill Is Gone — Zynga and other social game developers search for the next FarmVille-scale hit — Just a few weeks after Mafia Wars 2 went live on Facebook, Din Shlomi got tired of playing the game. A self-described hard-core gamer from northern Israel …
RELATED:
Eric Eldon / TechCrunch:
Zynga Builds Its CastleVille Walls, As Its Facebook Traffic Flattens And Falls — New Facebook game CastleVille is one of Zynga's fastest-growing titles ever, as it announced a few days ago. That's good news for the company, but maybe not good enough when you consider the trajectory …
Discussion:
Softpedia News, Thanks:eldon
Brian X. Chen / Bits:
A Look at Apple's Spot-the-Shopper Technology — A Black Friday visit to the Apple Store in Palo Alto, Calif., offered a glimpse of the new technology Apple is using to speed purchases. — A store employee, Diego Aguirre, demonstrated an internal iPhone application that, for the last few weeks …
Discussion:
Redmond Pie, CNET News, The Verge, iDownloadBlog.com and ifoAppleStore
Nick Bilton / Bits:
Disruptions: Fliers Must Turn Off Devices, but It's Not Clear Why — Millions of Americans who got on a plane over the Thanksgiving holiday heard the admonition: “Please power down your electronic devices for takeoff.” — And absolutely everyone obeyed. I know they did because no planes fell from the sky.
Randall Stross / New York Times:
Data Furnaces Could Bring Heat to Homes — TO satisfy our ever-growing need for computing power, many technology companies have moved their work to data centers with tens of thousands of power-gobbling servers. Concentrated in one place, the servers produce enormous heat.
Discussion:
GeekWire, Feld Thoughts and Gadgetopia
Kellex / Droid Life:
DROID 4 vs. DROID RAZR - The Evolution of DROID, Specs, and Official Pictures — The DROID 4 has come from out of no where to having us within just a couple of weeks away from launch. The current target date that we have seen from Verizon is December 8, the same day that we could potentially …
Discussion:
Droid Life, Business Insider, Neowin.net, MobileWhack.com, Pulse2, PhoneArena, Digital Trends, Engadget, Geek.com, 9to5Google, SmartKeitai, DailyTech and IntoMobile
Leena Rao / TechCrunch:
Black Friday E-Commerce Spending Up 26 Percent To A Record $816M; Amazon Most Visited Retailer — As we heard on Saturday, IBM reported a 24 percent increase in online sales for Black Friday this year. ComScore is announcing even stronger results for e-commerce, with Black Friday seeing $816 million …
Discussion:
comScore, Inc., PC Magazine, Reuters, VentureBeat, PR Newswire and ReadWriteWeb
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Seth Weintraub / 9to5Mac:
Apple's Black Friday Retail Store Sales were “off the charts” — We obviously had to white out numbers above - From Apple's Retail inventory system. — A source inside Apple Retail has shared with us the numbers for Apple's Black Friday sales event. Black Friday is always huge shopping …
Discussion:
ITProPortal
Om Malik / GigaOM:
My 10 years of blogging: Reflections, Lessons & Some Stats Too — Ten years is a long time. Sometimes it is so long that one forgets a lot more than one remembers — like the fact that it I have been blogging for a decade. I would have totally forgotten about the amount of time that has passed …
Discussion:
@scottbeale, @joshelman, @devindra, @cpen and @jason, Thanks:pkedrosky
Benjamin Wallace / Wired:
The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin — In November 1, 2008, a man named Satoshi Nakamoto posted a research paper to an obscure cryptography listserv describing his design for a new digital currency that he called bitcoin. None of the list's veterans had heard of him, and what little information could be gleaned was murky and contradictory.
Discussion:
The Verge, Daily Patricia, A VC and @nytimesbits
Dieter Bohn / The Verge:
More EXOdesk details surface: 10-point touch, custom HTML5 apps — After teasing the EXOdesk themselves in a YouTube video, the company has passed along some details on the “interactive desk” to The Long Climb. In addition to the (perhaps optimistic) rendering you see above …
Discussion:
Mike Halsey's The Long Climb
Steve Cheney / TechCrunch:
How to Make Your Startup Go Viral The Pinterest Way — On Thanksgiving, Pinterest's co-founder Ben Silbermann sent an email to his entire user base saying thanks. It was fitting, as Pinterest was born two years ago on Thanksgiving day 2009. Ben had been working on a website with a few friends …
