Top Items:
Michael Bettiol / Boy Genius Report:
And we have lift off: AT&T Bold launches on the 27th — This is for real, kids. Information has been pouring in left, right, and center from AT&T and RIM ninjas and we can now say for sure that AT&T is planning to launch the Bold on October 27. We repeat, October 27!
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Keeping Count: The TechCrunch Layoff Tracker — After Silicon Valley woke up to the economic crisis last week and VCs rang the alarm bells, startups are starting to heed the call and tighten their belts for a long winter. As the slide above from Sequoia Capital illustrates …
Harry McCracken / Technologizer:
FireWire Isn't Alone: A Brief History of Features Apple Has Killed — Apple has a storied history of being the first company to introduce an array of new technologies in its computers, or among the very first, at least. It all started with color graphics in 1977's Apple II and continuied features …
RELATED:
Rebecca / Electronic Frontier Foundation:
EFF Challenges Constitutionality of Telecom Immunity in Federal Court — San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Thursday challenged the constitutionality of a law aimed at granting retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that participated in the president's illegal domestic wiretapping program.
Discussion:
InformationWeek, DSLreports, Business Wire, p2pnet, GMSV, Docu-Drama, Slashdot, Threat Level and Boing Boing
RELATED:
Chris Snyder / Epicenter:
Twitter to Get Down to Business in 2009, Investors Say — Major leadership changes Thursday at Twitter renewed questions about its business prospects — was the replacement of CEO Jack Dorsey by fellow co-founder Evan Williams a shuffling of deck chairs on the Titanic?
AppleInsider:
Due next from Apple: refreshed 20- and 24-inch iMacs — Assuming last minute snags are avoided, the coming weeks should bring new iMacs, rounding out Apple's 2008 hardware introductions as the company enters the holiday shopping season with one of its strongest product portfolios ever.
MG Siegler / VentureBeat:
See who knew how to quit you on Twitter with Qwitter — We all lose followers on the micro-messaging service Twitter from time to time. It happens to the best of us. Sometimes it's because we go on 25 tweet (Twitter message) political rants in 5 minutes.
Discussion:
RotorBlog.com, Webware.com, TechCrunch UK, PR 2.0, Things That, Mashable! and Download Squad
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Some Of These Layoffs Aren't Really Layoffs — I've spoken to a lot of CEOs this week who are going through layoffs or who are thinking of going through going through layoffs. The list of those who've pulled the trigger gets longer every day, and the unparty seems to just be getting started based on the email flow that we're seeing.
John Gruber / Daring Fireball:
Translation From Weasel-Speak to English of the Entirety of Duncan Riley's Second Post-MacBook-Introduction-Event Update to His Widely-Cited Week-Ago Report That Apple Was Going to Announce an ‘$800 Laptop’ — With regard to “Update 2” here. … The entire report was completely wrong.
Ellen Knickmeyer / Washington Post:
Al-Qaeda Web Forums Abruptly Taken Offline — Separately, Sunnis and Shiites Wage Online War — Four of the five main online forums that al-Qaeda's media wing uses to distribute statements by Osama bin Laden and other extremists have been disabled since mid-September, monitors of the Web sites say.
Kara Swisher / BoomTown:
What Yahoo's Looming Costs Cuts Actually Mean (Not as Many Layoffs as You Think) — A lot has been written about the need for drastic layoffs at Yahoo, including reports that the troubled company was preparing to fire from 3,000 to 3,500 of its 15,000 employees.
John / Primate Labs Blog:
MacBook and MacBook Pro Performance (October 2008) — Earlier this week Apple released new MacBooks and MacBook Pros. While the biggest changes are the new enclosures and the new graphics cards, the new laptops also have a new chipset (an NVIDIA chipset instead of an Intel chipset) and faster DDR3 memory.
Rich Barton / Zillow® Blog:
Difficult Times, Difficult Decisions — This week we are reducing our workforce by 25%. This was an incredibly painful decision for me and the leadership team, but, in the end, we concluded that we had no choice but to securely batten down the hatches as we sail into a major economic storm.
Discussion:
VentureBeat, TechCrunch, Xconomy, Bits, Valleywag, Webware.com, Lost Remote and Loic Le Meur Blog
Michael Masnick / Techdirt:
Is Web 2.0 About Exploitation Or Empowerment? — Earlier this year, at the Mesh Conference in Toronto, I had the pleasure of meeting Nancy Baym, a professor of communications at the University of Kansas. She's been doing tremendous research into questions concerning online “fan” communities around musicians.
Juan Carlos Perez / PC World:
Gmail Back After 30 Hours Down — A Gmail outage that lasted about 30 hours and affected some Google Apps customers was finally fixed late on Thursday. — At around 9:30 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time, a Google spokesman said via e-mail that the problem had been solved.
Stephen Shankland / CNET News:
Newer Chrome, Firefox show speed improvements — The SunSpider test shows the newest Chrome build beating all comers in JavaScript performance—for now at least. Test results reported in seconds, so smaller is better. — Correction 12:00 p.m. PDT: This report has been updated …
Kasper Jade / AppleInsider:
Apple's Snow Leopard to sport Cocoa Finder and ImageBoot — Apple next-generation Snow Leopard operating system will introduce a massive re-write of the Mac OS X Finder and debut a new feature called ImageBoot, AppleInsider has learned. — Cocoa-based Finder
Claire Cain Miller / Bits:
Venture Capital Investment Down 7 Percent in Third Quarter — Venture capital investment was down slightly in the third quarter, according to the MoneyTree Report released Saturday from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. Venture capitalists put $7.7 billion …
Peter Cohen / Macworld:
DisplayPort: What you need to know — With laptop updates, Apple supports emerging display standard — Apple didn't just introduce new laptops Tuesday; it also introduced a new term to the vocabulary of Mac users—DisplayPort. The Mini DisplayPort found on new MacBooks …
Discussion:
Salon
internetnews.com:
Ballmer Slaps Google, Ogles Yahoo, Anoints Vista — UPDATED: Microsoft's CEO outlines the company's thinking and provides a peek at what's coming down the line. — In a wide-ranging and sometimes-combative interview with two Gartner analysts yesterday, always-feisty Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer touched …
