Top Items:
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Decision Time For Facebook: Term Sheet Received At $2 Billion Valuation — Facebook has been pitching for a new round of funding these last few months to bridge itself to an IPO sometime in the future. We've known that since October, when (former) CFO Gideon Yu was in Dubai.
Discussion:
Venture Capital Dispatch, Silicon Alley Insider, Electricpig.co.uk, Smalltalk Tidbits … and DealBook, Thanks:mrinaldesai
RELATED:
Eric Eldon / VentureBeat:
Facebook rejects funding at $4 billion valuation, may not raise more — Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg just had a board-level conversation about possibly accepting money at a $4 billion valuation, but decided against doing so. — Facebook isn't commenting directly …
Eyal Sela / ProductiveWise:Has Twitter Reached its peak? Google Insights Suggests it May Have
Discussion:
GMSV
Arn / MacRumors:
Apple Researching Movement-Aware Interfaces for iPhones, Depicts Front-Facing Video Camera — Apple has been conducting ongoing research into how to further improve their mobile device interfaces as evidenced by a couple of patent applications published over the past couple of weeks.
RELATED:
Sam Oliver / AppleInsider:
Apple exploring motion-adaptive iPhone with video chat — Patent requests from Apple continue to provide clues as to where the company may take its iPhone interface in the coming years, such as a new filing which depicts a version of the handset with a front-facing video camera …
Discussion:
O'Grady's PowerPage
Bloomberg:
Sun Said to Be Willing to Resume IBM Talks With Assurances Deal Will Close — Sun Microsystems Inc. would be willing to resume takeover talks with International Business Machines Corp. if IBM makes a stronger commitment to close the acquisition, two people familiar with the matter said.
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Marguerite Reardon / CNET News:
Nokia's net profit falls 90 percent — If you were wondering how bad things have gotten for the mobile handset market, just take a look at Nokia, the world's largest maker of cell phones. — The company on Thursday reported a 90 percent fall in first-quarter net profits as the global recession took …
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Farhad Manjoo / Slate:
Do You Think Bandwidth Grows on Trees? — User-generated content may have changed the Internet, but sites like YouTube are suffocating under the costs of storing it. — Everyone knows that print newspapers are our generation's horse-and-buggy; in the most wired cities, they've been pummeled by competition from the Web.
Clay Shirky:
The Failure of #amazonfail — In 1987, a teenage girl in suburban New York was discovered dazed and wrapped in a garbage bag, smeared with feces, with racial epithets scrawled on her torso. She had been attacked by half a dozen white men, then left in that state on the grounds of an apartment building.
Claire Cain Miller / Bits:
Twitter Wants Distribution Deals, Not a Buyout — Yes, Twitter is talking to big Internet companies about forming partnerships with them. No, it is not looking to sell itself. — That is the latest from Fred Wilson, the Union Square Ventures partner who was an early investor in Twitter …
Anthony Ha / VentureBeat:
Add Zoho to other sites with Zoho Gadgets — Zoho has done impressive work integrating its many web applications for productivity and business. Now it's integrating those apps with non-Zoho websites, in the form of gadgets that can be added to services like Gmail and Facebook.
Chris Morris / CNBC.com:
GameStop Wants Cheaper Consoles, Predicts Hot Titles — Consumers hoping for a price cut on video game hardware have a new—and powerful—ally. — While the video game industry has proved relatively resistant to the recession so far, the CEO of GameStop [GME Loading...
Stephen Lawson / Network World:
Stanford's Cinder OS tightens mobile power control — Researchers are using advanced power and security features to build the ideal mobile OS — Stanford University researchers are designing an operating system from the ground up to handle the power and security requirements of mobile devices.
Discussion:
IntoMobile
Caroline McCarthy / CNET News:
Open-source ad company OpenX launches platform — OpenX, a software company that makes an open-source ad serving product for online publishers, has launched a platform called OpenX Market to directly connect buyers and sellers. — The model is more or less a standard ad auction format …
Steve Espinosa / Silicon Alley Insider:
How Twitter Will Win Local Search — (This post was originally published on Local Search News) — Almost everything on Twitter is inherently local. The simple question “What are you doing?” implies that because, unless you are at home watching TV, you are doing something that is local …
Discussion:
Beyond Search
Dan Frommer / Silicon Alley Insider:
CNN Acquires CNNbrk Twitter Account With Nearly 1 Million Followers — Hard to believe, but the CNN Twitter account racing Ashton Kutcher to 1 million subscribers wasn't even under CNN's (TWX) control until recently. — CNN confirms that it has has taken control of the @cnnbrk account — and its 944,000 followers.
Discussion:
PC World, CNN, Guardian, TechCrunch, Pulse2, TechVi, ABCNEWS, DealBook, Mashable!, TheNextWeb.com and Lost Remote
RELATED:
The Boy Genius / Boy Genius Report:
SlingPlayer for iPhone rejected at AT&T's request? — Some feared it might happen, others thought it would pass with flying colors, but unfortunately we've got a tip that tries to shed some light on the situation. This was from an anonymous tipster and we're posting it for information sake.
Ernesto / TorrentFreak:
Pirate Bay Supporters Throw Street Party in Moscow — Pirate Bay supporters can be found everywhere. Aside from tens of millions of ‘regular’ site users, there are other more prominent supporters too. Novelist Paulo Coelho, who wrote the 65 million-selling book “The Alchemist” …
Joseph Menn / Financial Times:
Yahoo ready to sell Hot Jobs — Three months into her stint at the head of Yahoo, Carol Bartz is hastening her drive to streamline operations by disposing of ancillary businesses. — The Silicon Valley company is seeking buyers for the HotJobs employment site, people familiar …
Discussion:
Virtual Economics
Terrence Russell / VentureBeat:
Google's Q1 forecast looks cautiously optimistic — The economy has been chewing up tech companies left and right, but tomorrow will reveal the quarterly fate of one of the industry's biggest — Google. After a Wall Street-beating fourth quarter, the Mountain View, Calif.-based search giant …
Thanks:sampad
John C Abell / Epicenter:
Wall Street Journal iPhone App Sets Content Free — The Wall Street Journal, one of the few newspapers that charges for content online, released an app for the iPhone Wednesday which sets their content free, poking another hole in one of the internet's oldest pay walls.
Scott M. Fulton, III / BetaNews:
One extra week for Microsoft to defend tying IE to Windows — After a Financial Times report this morning cited April 28 as the deadline for Microsoft to comply with a request by the European Commission to respond to its latest Statement of Objections, reporters close to the story wondered why that seemed like one week too many.
Michael C / Techdirt:
Want To Know Why Newspapers Are Dying? Maureen Dowd Shows Us — In her recent New York Times op-ed, Maureen Dowd takes aim at Google, blaming it for the sorry state of the newspaper industry. Perhaps in hopes of winning people over to the newspapers' side in the argument over how much Google …
Robin Wauters / TechCrunch:
TwitPic Hits 1 Million Users, Brick Wall — Sharing photographs and other images on Twitter is a fairly natural and thus wildly popular extension of the micro-sharing service's main reason for being. We've earlier noticed how TwitPic seems to have emerged as the leader of the pack.
