Techmeme: Luxury PCs for the curio cabinet (Mike Yamamoto/Crave)

5:35 PM ET, January 31, 2008

Top Items:

Saul Hansell / Bits:

Spectrum Auction: C Block Hits Reserve Price — A bid of $4.7 billion this morning for the most valuable group of wireless licenses in the Federal Communications Commission auction for 700Mhz spectrum pushed the price over the minimum price the government set.

Discussion: Epicenter, Search Engine Watch Blog, WebProNews, Tech Beat, The Register, eWeek, IP Democracy, Googling Google, Wi-Fi Networking News, Washington Post, InformationWeek Weblog, dailywireless.org, Forbes, Phone Scoop, Silicon Alley Insider, Computerworld and Valleywag

Michal Lev-Ram / Techland:

Google gets its way with new wireless network — Somewhere in the Googleplex, Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt are celebrating right about now. — That's because the Internet search giant Thursday scored its first big win in the mobile business: The minimum $4.6 billion bid …

Discussion: New York Times, Epicenter and The Technology Chronicles

Eric Bangeman / Ars Technica:

Open access for all: prime 700MHz Block C hits reserve price — After 17 rounds, the 700MHz spectrum auction has finally hit its one of its most closely watched targets: bidding on Block C has surpassed the Federal Communications Commission's mandated $4.638 billion reserve …

Discussion: Good Morning Silicon Valley, Digital Daily and CircleID

Saul Hansell / Bits:

Spectrum Auction: The C-Block Bidding Stalls at $4.7 Billion — UPDATE: This post was wrong in saying that rules prohibit anyone from bidding higher than $4.7 billion for the C Block. There are some rather complex ways that another company could in fact raise the bid in coming days.

Discussion: TechCrunch, Gizmodo and Silicon Valley Watcher

Thomas Ricker / Engadget:
700MHz auction exceeds $10 Billion, open-access just one bid away

Discussion: Electronista

Tim Coulter / Joyeur:

Twitter and Joyent: Update — By David Young 31 January 08 — Twitter has been officially off Joyent since 10PM last night. This may come as a surprise to some after yesterday's posts here and here regarding the two companies working together. Those of us at Joyent appreciate …

Discussion: TechCrunch, Download Squad, Twitter Blog, Data Center Knowledge and The Last Podcast

Twitter Blog:

We had a rough night. But now we're back. — I just left the office, at 6am, with most of our engineering and technical operations team. That's only a handful of people, but we were all there all night. — You may have noticed we had an outage last night/stretching into this morning.

Discussion: WinExtra, Scripting News, ParisLemon and Irregular Enterprise

MG Siegler / VentureBeat: Twitter's struggles harm more than just the users

Yahoo! Finance:

Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2007 Results — MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG - News) today announced financial results for the quarter and fiscal year ended December 31, 2007. — “We're very pleased with our performance this quarter,” said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.

Discussion: mathewingram.com/work, HipMojo.com, Epicenter, Tech Trader Daily, Digital Daily and Silicon Alley Insider

Larry Dignan / Between the Lines:

Google's quarter falls short of expectations; Social networking not monetizing well — Google on Thursday reported fourth quarter net income of $1.21 billion, or $3.79 a share, on revenue of $4.83 billion, up 51 percent from a year ago. Excluding charges Google reported earnings of $4.43 a share.

Discussion: Tech Check with Jim Goldman, paidContent.org and eWeek

Doug Sherrets / VentureBeat:

Google's Marissa Mayer: Social search is the future — At an event in August, Marissa Mayer, Google's leading VP in search, said social search hasn't shown much promise, but if it does, Google would be in a good position to incorporate it. I wrote about that here.

Discussion: Search Engine Watch Blog, Search Engine Land, Mashable! and John Battelle's Searchblog

Amazon.com:

Amazon.com to Acquire Audible.com — Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), today announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire Audible Inc. (NASDAQ:ADBL). — Audible.com is the leading online provider of premium digital spoken word audio content, specializing in digital audio editions of books …

Discussion: VentureBeat, Wall Street Journal, Good Morning Silicon Valley, GigaOM, Silicon Alley Insider, Between the Lines, Download Squad, paidContent.org, I4U News, Rev2.org, TechSpot News, last100, Gadgetell, Digital Trends, Joe Wikert's Publishing …, The Unofficial Apple Weblog and Zatz Not Funny!

Larry Dignan / Between the Lines:
Amazon.com buys Audible; March into digital content distribution continues

Chris Williams / The Register:

‘Facebook fatigue’ kicks in as people tire of social networks — Shhh! Can you hear a hiss? That's the sound of naughty facts deflating the social networking balloon a tad. — Whisper it, but numbers from web analytics outfit comScore have confirmed what the chatter in bars and cafes …

Discussion: Tech Beat, HipMojo.com, The Constant Observer, Mashable!, The Last Podcast, Valleywag, Silicon Alley Insider and The Social Times

Eric Savitz / Tech Trader Daily:

Gartner: Apple To Double U.S., Europe PC Share By 2011 — Apple (AAPL) will double its share of the U.S. and Western European PC market share by 2011, the research firm Gartner said today. “Apple's gains in computer market share reflect as much on the failures of the rest of the industry as on Apple's success,” Gartner says.

Discussion: Electronista and Insanely Great Mac

Christy Pettey / Gartner:
Gartner Highlights Key Predictions for IT Organisations and Users in 2008 and Beyond

Discussion: Between the Lines

Ernesto / TorrentFreak:

Pirate Bay Admins Charged with Assisting Copyright Infringement — “The operation of The Pirate Bay is financed through advertising revenues. In that way it commercially exploits copyright-protected work and performances,” said prosecutor Hakan Roswall in a statement.

Agam Shah / Macworld:

PC makers to adopt chips used in MacBook Air — Processors specially developed by Intel for Apple's new MacBook Air laptop will soon be used by other PC vendors in systems, possibly creating competition for what Apple calls the world's lightest and thinnest notebook.

Discussion: Gizmodo, Infinite Loop, PC World, MacRumors and The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Tom Krazit / Crave: The gadget blog:
Lenovo, Fujitsu planning to use Intel's MacBook Air chip

Discussion: Electronista and Engadget

Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:

Google, Facebook Battle For Computer Science Grads. Salaries Soar. — Google and Facebook are fighting hard to hire this years crop of computer science graduates, we've heard, and ground zero is Stanford. Most of the class of 2008 already have job offers even though graduation is months away.

Discussion: Business Technology and The Chronicle

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