Top Items:
Vasanth Sridharan / Silicon Alley Insider:
Ballmer Tells Microsoft Troops He's Not Insane: Willing To Walk Away From Yahoo — Steve Ballmer said there's nothing new to report about Microsoft-Yahoo!, but he did use the presentation to the employees to explain the motivation for going after Yahoo!, take some shots at a Google-Yahoo! …
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Kara Swisher / BoomTown:
MicroHoo: Decision Time at 1 p.m. PDT Today? — Memo to Yahoo from Microsoft: We will begin bombing in 30 minutes! — Whether it is love-bombing or the other kind, it's still a mystery to BoomTown. — But, according to sources close to Microsoft (MSFT), as early as today …
Discussion:
Silicon Alley Insider
Henry Blodget / Silicon Alley Insider:
Ballmer to Microsofties: “Yahoo Announcement in Very Short Order” — Steve Ballmer held a Town Hall conference call with Microsoft (MSFT) employees today—reported minute-by-minute by our Vas Sridharan. — Not surprisingly, the topic employees most wanted to talk about was Yahoo.
Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed:
Age and the Entrepreneur — A while back Fred Wilson started a firestorm with a series of three posts (1, 2 and 3) about age and the entrepreneur. The gist: He was seeing more and more young tech entrepreneurs, most of them under 30, and some even in their teens, and he wondered aloud …
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Apple:
Purchase New Movies on iTunes Same Day as DVD Release — Apple® today announced that new movie releases from major film studios and premier independent studios are available for purchase on the iTunes® Store (www.itunes.com) on the same day as their DVD release.
Discussion:
Bit Player, GigaOM, Apple Watch, GMSV, Between the Lines, Homotron.net, Apple 2.0, Valleywag, Macsimum News, DVICE, CrunchGear, CyberNet, Today @ PC World, MacUser, Bits, Webomatica, Digital Daily, Digital Trends, InformationWeek, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, NewTeeVee, Download Squad, Gadget Lab, Life On the Wicked Stage, Parks Associates, Mashable! and Silicon Alley Insider
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Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Twitter Said To Be Abandoning Ruby on Rails — We're hearing this from multiple sources: After nearly two years of high profile scaling problems, Twitter is planning to abandon Ruby on Rails as their web framework and start from scratch with PHP or Java (another solution is to stick …
Nate Anderson / Ars Technica:
Judge: Big webcasters owe songwriters millions in royalties — A federal judge has just set the rate to be paid for a blanket music license by Yahoo, AOL, and RealNetworks. The three companies could owe songwriters as much as $100 million over seven years as payment for streaming their songs on the web.
Discussion:
ZDNet Government
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Greg Sandoval / CNET News.com:What the ASCAP music decision means for consumers
Discussion:
TechCrunch
James Lewin / Podcasting News:AOL, RealNetworks, Yahoo Owe $100 Million For Digital Music Services
Discussion:
Techdirt, Download Squad, Listening Post, E-Commerce Times, ascap.com, DygiScape, CNET News.com, AppScout, The Register and WebProNews
Nick O'Neill / The Social Times:
MySpace Begins Charging for Application Promotion — Last week, MySpace opened up their applications for everybody. By adding an “apps” link to the top of the MySpace header, they began driving users to the applications page. The initial applications page used to be a simple directory.
Michael Masnick / Techdirt:
Will Grand Theft Auto IV Hurt Iron Man's Opening Weekend Sales? — from the the-media-landscape-has-expanded... dept — While Marvel's lawyers have been doing plenty of work on their own to hurt interest in the new movie Iron Man, some are suggesting an even more interesting scenario …
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Erica Sadun / The Unofficial Apple Weblog:Flickr Find: Grand Theft Auto hides Apple and iPhone parody
Discussion:
MacUser
Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Electronic Border Searches: An Open Letter — Dear Chairman Thompson and Ranking Member King: — We are writing to urge the House Committee on Homeland Security to hold hearings on the Department of Homeland Security's practice of searching and seizing Americans' digital information and electronic devices at U.S. borders.
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Eric Taub / Bits:
Blu-ray: The Future Has Been Delayed — Hot on the heels of last week's report from ABI Research noting that many consumers may not see the picture quality difference between Blu-ray and standard DVDs comes the latest Blu-ray sales figures from NPD Group. And they're not pretty.
Discussion:
Techdirt, DailyTech, TECH.BLORGE.com, Lefsetz Letter, VentureBeat, Electronista, The Tech Report, TechSpot, NewTeeVee and Silicon Alley Insider
Randall Kennedy / Enterprise Desktop:
Streaming Office: Death knell for Google Apps? — It's the holy grail of punditry: You make a bold, unconventional prediction that's way out in front of an emerging trend, then get to gloat as that prediction comes true. In my case, the prediction involved Microsoft's recently (at the time) acquired SoftGrid technology.
Brian Caulfield / Forbes:
Found: Yang's Lost Microsoft Money — Note to Yahoo! Chief Executive Jerry Yang. — Word is that you are trying to wring a few more bucks out of Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) for your struggling Web portal. — Maybe this will help: The state of California says you have $3,008.46 worth …
Discussion:
Silicon Alley Insider
Neil McAllister / PC World:
Microsoft Backpedals on Windows Updates — Microsoft has withdrawn Vista SP1 from automatic delivery in the wake of news that XP SP3 can cause data corruption in business apps. — Earlier this week, Microsoft announced that it was delaying the release of Windows XP Service Pack 3 due …
Josh Lowensohn / Webware.com:
Get multiple Web chat services on your desktop with 1 application — The other day we told you how to get Facebook chat in your browser's sidebar, but what about if you want to run it as a standalone desktop application? If you're a Mac user you're in luck with Gabtastik from Mesa Dynamics.
Arianna Huffington / Time:
Michael Arrington — Michael Arrington, a former corporate attorney who, via his TechCrunch blog, has become one of the most influential figures on the Web, is the quintessential blogger: intense, passionate, consumed with his subject, opinionated, sleep-deprived, forward-thinking, easy to irritate and apt to air his grudges in public.
Ryan Paul / Ars Technica:
Adobe seeks to extend reach of Flash, nukes licensing fees — Adobe has announced a new initiative called Open Screen, which aims to make the company's Flash multimedia technology ubiquitous on mobile and embedded devices. Adobe plans to eliminate the licensing fees required to distribute …
Discussion:
LinuxInsider, Computerworld, Dana Gardner's BriefingsDirect, Mike Cane 2008 and Online Dating Insider
Wayne Richardson / Ars Technica:
Deluded SCO CEO on witness stand: “Linux is a copy of UNIX” — SALT LAKE CITY—Last August, the nail was poised over SCO's coffin when Judge Dale Kimball ruled that Novell never relinquished the copyrights to UNIX, but nobody really knew when it would be driven home.
