Top Items:
Mark Bittman / New York Times:
I Need a Virtual Break. No, Really. — I TOOK a real day off this weekend: computers shut down, cellphone left in my work bag, land-line ringer off. I was fully disconnected for 24 hours. — The reason for this change was a natural and predictable back-breaking straw.
Discussion:
Memex 1.1
Om Malik / GigaOM:
Will RealNetworks Buy Scrabulous? — Scrabulous is like Danger Mouse's The Grey Album of Facebook Apps. Everyone loves it except the guys who own Scrabble (Mattel and Hasbro), the board game that inspired Scrabulous. — The legal troubles of the game cooked up by Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla …
RELATED:
Heather Timmons / New York Times:
Online Scrabble Craze Leaves Game Sellers at Loss for Words — NEW DELHI — The latest bane of office productivity is Scrabulous, a virtual knockoff of the Scrabble board game, with over 700,000 players a day and nearly three million registered users. — Fans of the game are obsessive.
Nick / Rough Type:
Rumor: Microsoft set for vast data-center push — I've received a few more hints about the big cloud-computing initiative Microsoft may be about to announce, perhaps during the company's Mix08 conference in Las Vegas this coming week. One of the cornerstones of the strategy, I've heard …
Robert Scoble / Scobleizer:
The Offline Wars about to heat up? — Ryan Stewart (who works at Adobe) wonders if Microsoft is bringing an offline version of Silverlight out this week at Mix. — I'm hearing that Google is about to ship something major offline too. — So, for the next month we might hear “go offline” …
Discussion:
Ryan Stewart
Laura M. Holson / New York Times:
Hollywood, Silicon Valley and AT&T? It's a Deal — Hollywood and Silicon Valley have something of a Mars/Venus problem: the two sides are talking but they don't speak each other's language. A new venture involving a phone company may just add Pluto into the mix.
Dave Winer / Scripting News:
The verdict is in: The Pownce API kicks Twitter's ass — Sorry Ev and Biz and Jack, but they got your number over there at Pownce. — I've been asking Twitter to support payloads for months now, and now I have what I was asking for, but it came from Pownce, and it's beautifully implemented …
Scott Ferguson / eWeek:
Intel Drops an ‘Atom’ Brand — The chip maker's new Atom brand includes its Diamondville chip for low-cost laptops and its Silverthorne processor for mobile Internet devices. — Intel's latest branding scheme is truly atomic. — Starting March 3, Intel will corral all its processors for MIDs …
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Microsoft Office Online and Attacking The Innovator's Dilemma — Nick Carr has a lead on the story that we all knew was coming eventually: Key Microsoft applications, including Office, may be moving online, soon. Carr's source says to look for enterprise applications to move online …
Discussion:
CNET News.com, Irregular Enterprise, Silicon Alley Insider, Scobleizer, Team Think, Mike Stopforth and SmoothSpan Blog
RELATED:
Ryan Stewart / The Universal Desktop:Is an offline version of Silverlight coming at MIX next week?
Discussion:
Brandon LeBlanc
Chris Ziegler / Engadget:
i-mate's US outpost implodes, most laid off — We've caught wind from a number of employees — or ex-employees, as the case may be — that i-mate's US division in Redmond, Washington has all but disintegrated after a Friday bloodbath that saw the entire engineering, QA, and tech writing departments laid off, among others.
Dan Farber / CNET News.com:
Google CEO Schmidt practices the art of stonewalling — It's been a busy week in the tech world, but the newsroom highlight of the week had more to do with what was not said. Our own Elinor Mills was dispatched on short notice from San Francisco to Orlando, Fla., to interview Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
RELATED:
Hiroko Tabuchi / Associated Press:
Japanese robots enter daily life — TOKYO — At a university lab in a Tokyo suburb, engineering students are wiring a rubbery robot face to simulate six basic expressions: anger, fear, sadness, happiness, surprise and disgust. — Hooked up to a database of words clustered by association …
Allen Stern / CenterNetworks:
Twitter Details SXSW Traffic Preparation Measures — We've written about Twitter and their server/capacity issues since day 1. This week we saw downtime which could be related to heavy usage at the future of web apps conference. Next week is Twitter's superbowl: SXSW.
