Top Items:
Leslie Cauley / USA Today:
AT&T: 'We're all about wireless' — DALLAS — Wonder why the smoking-hot 3G Apple iPhone only costs $199, less than half the price of the original? Here's a two-word hint: Randall Stephenson. — Stephenson, who became AT&T's (T) chairman and CEO a year ago, championed the idea of paying Apple …
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MG Siegler / VentureBeat:
AT&T iPhone deal extended to 2010. Did Apple mortgage its future for a subsidy? — If I were to take a poll of everyone I've talked to about the iPhone, my guess is that most would say its biggest problem is not related to the device or even Apple at all, but rather its carrier …
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Don Reisinger / The Digital Home:
Apple extends contract with AT&T, forgets about you — According to USA Today, AT&T and Apple have agreed to extend their exclusivity relationship through 2009, meaning the next iPhone will be made specifically for AT&T service. — The report claims that Apple originally signed the deal …
Frederic Lardinois / ReadWriteWeb:
AOL is Getting Serious About Lifestreaming: Buys SocialThing — SocialThing, a lifestreaming/social aggregation site, has been acquired by AOL. We currently have no information about the final price of the acquisition, but given that SocialThing was still in private beta, we assume that it was relatively low.
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Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Suddenly, AOL Loves Lifestreaming; Buys Socialthing! — AOL is getting into the lifestreaming business. Like Friendfeed or Facebook's News feeds, it recently launched AIM BuddyUpdates, which lets AIM users keep up with what their instant-messaging buddies are doing on social services such as Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Digg.
Josh Lowensohn / Webware.com:
Facebook's auto-tagging feature could be tip of tagging iceberg — One of my favorite Facebook features is auto-tagging. It happened to me last night by accident and ended up being one of those very rare moments of using a product where I got a big grin on my face.
Cade Metz / The Register:
Privacy watchdog hoists Google by its own petard — Spews Street View pics of Larry Page Lexus — In an effort to prove that Google is a serious threat to the personal privacy of people everywhere, the National Legal and Policy Center has exposed countless Google Street View pics that detail …
Stephen Shankland / CNET News.com:
Live blog: Yahoo CEO faces shareholders — SAN JOSE, Calif.—The Yahoo shareholders meeting here has commenced and adjourned. And CEO Jerry Yang and his board did end up getting an earful about the company's share price and its handling of Microsoft's attempted acquisition. — I blogged live from the meeting.
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Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
We Know How Many Kindles Amazon Has Sold: 240,000 — Ever since Amazon launched the Kindle last November, we've been wondering about just how successful it's been. The electronic book initially sold out and supplies have been tight. The Kindle is such a small part of Amazon's overall business …
PBS:
The Eyes Have It — So little real information leaks out of Apple these days that we tech pundits tend to jump on any crumb we can get and munch it to death. That's certainly the case with this week's story about Apple possibly dumping Intel chipsets for the new MacBooks expected to be announced in September.
Ben Kuchera / Opposable Thumbs:
Mole attack: 360 price cuts on all hardware in September — It's hard to describe what it's like to wake up with a knife between your teeth. You try to spit, because the taste of steel makes you think you've bitten down on your tongue and you're tasting the bitter copper of your blood, but the blade keeps your lips peeled apart.
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last100, Destructoid, Nintendo Wii Fanboy, Xbox 360 Fanboy, TechSpot, Kotaku, Engadget, Gizmodo Australia, Gizmodo, Bink.nu, Joystiq and Geek Gestalt
Peter Whoriskey / Washington Post:
Instant-Messagers Really Are About Six Degrees from Kevin Bacon — Big Microsoft Study Supports Small World Theory — Turns out, it is a small world. — The so-called small world theory, embodied in the old saw that there are just “six degrees of separation” between any two strangers on Earth …
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Smart Mobs
Robert McMillan / Computerworld:
Apple bails on Black Hat talk — Engineering blames marketing department — IDG News Service) Apple Inc. has pulled its security engineering team out of a planned public discussion on the company's security practices, which had been set for next week's Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.
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Matt Richtel / New York Times:
Don't Want to Talk? New Service Sells Missed Calls — When Alexis Gorman, 26, wanted to tell a man she had been dating that the courtship was over, she felt sending a Dear John text message was too impersonal. But she worried that if she called the man, she would face an awkward conversation or a confrontation.
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Silicon Alley Insider
Peter Kafka / Silicon Alley Insider:
Time Warner (TWX) Killed Jon Miller/Yahoo (YHOO) Board Deal — The mystery of Jon Miller's disappearing Yahoo board appointment has been gotten a little less mysterious. He isn't taking the job because Time Warner (TWX), his former employer, won't let him. What we're not sure about: Whose story to believe.
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BoomTown, Tech Ticker, VentureBeat, Tech Confidential, New York Post, paidContent.org, GMSV, Valleywag, Between the Lines and Los Angeles Times
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Chris Gaither / L.A. Times Tech Blog:Time Warner blocks Jonathan Miller's appointment to Yahoo board
Jeremiah Owyang / Web Strategy:
How “Janet” Fooled the Twittersphere She's the Voice of Exxon Mobil — The game is up, “Janet” is not an official Exxon representative — A few days ago, the Twittersphere was curious, interested, and excited to see a member of Exxon Mobil's employee ranks to join the twitter conversation …
Richard Bennett / CircleID:
FCC's Comcast Ruling Inconsistent and Incoherent — After voting on the Comcast order today, Kevin Martin and his Democratic Party colleagues issued press releases telling us how they saved the Internet from Comcast's discriminatory practices, but they've failed to release the actual order they adopted and subsequently re-wrote.
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