Top Items:
Ina Fried / Beyond Binary:
Microsoft looks to ‘Mojave’ to revive Vista's image — REDMOND, Wash.—After months of searching for ways to defend its oft-maligned Windows operating system, Microsoft may just have found its best weapon: Vista's skeptics. — Spurred by an e-mail from someone deep in the marketing ranks …
RELATED:
Mary Jo Foley / All about Microsoft:Ballmer seeks to justify Microsoft's bottomless-pit online spending
Daisuke Wakabayashi / Reuters:Microsoft CEO backs Web spending, “done” with Yahoo
Discussion:
PC World
Mary Jo Foley / All about Microsoft:Microsoft confirms IE 8 will ship this year
Discussion:
One Microsoft Way
Andru Edwards / Gear Live:
Apple beta testing iPhone 2.1 firmware, adding more GPS features — We just got word that Apple has released a beta version of iPhone OS 2.1 to developers. Along with the 2.1 firmware, a new version of the iPhone SDK has been seeded as well, but the new SDK can't be used for submitting applications to the App Store at the moment.
RELATED:
Arn / MacRumors:
Apple Seeds iPhone 2.1 Firmware with GPS Features — GearLive reports that Apple has seeded a beta version of iPhone 2.1 Firmware (Beta 1, Build 5F90) to developers. — According to the site, Apple has included new Core Location features that might suggest that turn-by-turn GPS could become a reality.
Discussion:
The iPhone Blog
David Pogue / New York Times:
Apple's MobileMess — Two weeks ago, Apple launched MobileMe, the successor to its.Mac service, which costs $100 a year. Among other benefits, it can keep multiple Macs, PCs and iPhones in sync. E-mail, calendars and address books are wirelessly kept up to date. Very cool idea.
Discussion:
MacUser, Gadget Lab, Macworld, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, MacDailyNews and The Mac Observer
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Full Text Of AOL Email: XDrive, AOL Pictures, MyMobile And Bluestring To Shut Down — Below is the full text of the email AOL EVP Kevin Conroy sent out to staff on July 14, outlining the reorganization of his product groups and announcing the “sunsetting” of XDrive, AOL Pictures, MyMobile and Bluestring.
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Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
AOL To Shutter A Slew Of Products, EVP Kevin Conroy's Future Uncertain — Update: Full text of email is here. — While researching the AOL blogs budget cuts story this afternoon we stumbled on a much bigger story unfolding at AOL. The company is planning to shut down a number of non-performing products …
Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land:
The Day After: Looking At How Well Knol Pages Rank On Google — We've been assured that just because content sits on Google's Knol site, it won't gain any ranking authority from being part of the Knol domain. OK, so a day after Knol has launched, how's that holding up?
Discussion:
WebProNews
Greg Sterling / Search Engine Land:
Microsoft Live Search Coming To Facebook — When Microsoft made its investment in Facebook I always had thought that Live Search would come to the site, together with search monetization. Later it appeared that search wasn't part of the deal. Facebook's competitors all have web search …
Brad Stone / Bits:
Hasbro Notches Triple-Word Score Against Scrabulous With ‘Lawsuit’ — UPDATED — Looking to cut down its main competition and most high profile copycat in the growing market for social gaming, Hasbro has sued the two Indian brothers behind the popular Web game Scrabulous …
MG Siegler / VentureBeat:
Blockbuster remembers it bought Movielink for a reason — While company after company enter the digital movie download realm including former outsiders like Apple and Microsoft, the company once synonymous with movie rentals has been noticeably absent: Blockbuster.
Discussion:
paidContent.org
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Andrew D. Smith / Dallas Morning News:Blockbuster adds Movielink's video downloads to Web site
Discussion:
Zatz Not Funny!
Kara Swisher / BoomTown:
Steve Ballmer: Killing Apple and Google With Kindness? — BoomTown is flatly fascinated by the rather incredible memo Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer penned to his troops yesterday, with news of the reorganization of its massive Platforms and Services Division and the departure of its president, Kevin Johnson.
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Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:
The Final Days of DRM: Yahoo Music Store Closing, Will Eat Your Purchased Music — Digital Rights Management technology is dying, it's becoming understood that hobbling tunes to enforce scarcity isn't the best way to monetize the music business online. What about all the suckers who bought DRM laden music in recent years, though?
Microsoft:
Microsoft to Acquire DATAllegro — Leaders in data warehousing team to provide large-scale business intelligence solutions. — Microsoft Corp. today announced that it intends to acquire DATAllegro Inc., a provider of breakthrough data warehouse appliances.
Eric Eldon / VentureBeat:
Source: Facebook's internal valuation is $4 billion. But so what. — Tech bloggers and investors have come up with a new parlor game: Guessing Facebook's “real” valuation. Nobody seems to believe the company's official $15 billion valuation that it announced when it raised its most recent …
Discussion:
The PE Data Center
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Zimbra Releases Version 3 Of Open Source Email Client, And It's Awesome — Yahoo's Zimbra launches version 3 of its open source desktop email client this morning that is designed to compete with Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, Mac Mail, etc. This is a new iteration of their browser-based offline product announced in March 2007.
RELATED:
Mike Morse / Zimbra :: Blog:Zimbra Desktop Beta 3's New Features
Discussion:
PC World, LAPTOP Magazine, Yahoo!, webmonkey, Download.com editors, BetaNews and ReadWriteWeb
Brian Stelter / New York Times:
Griping Online? Comcast Hears You and Talks Back — PHILADELPHIA — Brandon Dilbeck, 20, a student at the University of Washington, was complaining recently on his blog, Brandon Notices, about Comcast's practice of posting ads in its on-screen programming guide. — He assumed he was writing for his own benefit.
Gmail Blog:
Making security easier — From the day we launched, Gmail has supported something called https. Https keeps your mail encrypted as it travels between your web browser and our servers, so someone sharing your favorite coffee shop's public wifi can't read it.
James Kendrick / jkOnTheRun:
Zune phone really in the works at Microsoft? — The success of the iPhone, both the original and the recently released 3G model, has fueled rumors that Microsoft is working internally on a similar phone built on the Zune audio player. The Zune player has failed to compete against the iPod family …
Discussion:
Gizmodo, CrunchGear, TECH.BLORGE.com, Boy Genius Report, The iPhone Blog, One Microsoft Way, InformationWeek and WMExperts
Garett Rogers / Googling Google:
Google creates a new market and wreaks havoc on another — When they first announced it, I was certain Knol was simply a way for Google steal some of the attention away from Wikia search — and I'm still sure that's what was actually happening. Google doesn't normally pre-announce applications months in advance.
