Top Items:
Claire Cain Miller / Bits:
Vacation Rental Site Raises $250 Million — HomeAway, the largest online vacation rental marketplace, announced Tuesday that it has raised $250 million in venture capital, an extraordinarily large amount of money for an Internet company. The new round, which is the biggest a tech company …
Chrix Finne / Google Reader:
Is Your Web Truly World-Wide? — The Reader team is happy to announce that another 20% project has come to fruition: automatic translation in Reader! Post by 20% volunteer and glottology expert, Brett Bavar. — Believe it or not, the web truly is world-wide.
Discussion:
ReadWriteWeb, SitePoint, Lifehacker, VentureBeat, Josh Bancroft's …, Googling Google, TechCrunch, The Blog Herald and Mashable!
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Spot.Us Experiments With Citizen-Funded Community Journalism — Newspapers are dying across the country. Local papers are shutting down, Gannett is laying off 3,000 people, the Christian Science Monitor will no longer put out a print edition, and even the New York Times is facing a serious cash crunch.
RELATED:
John Mahoney / Gizmodo:
How To: Max Out Apple TV's Potential With Boxee — This is a guide that, if followed, will unchain your Apple TV from its cruel iTunes tether, turning it into the useful living room conduit of music, video and web-based content it should have been all along via the media center software Boxee.
Discussion:
MAKE Magazine
Jesus Diaz / Gizmodo:
MacBook Nano Looks Like It Came from Cupertino — I don't know if these MacBook Nanos are a custom hack or if they come from some kind of shady outlet selling retrofitted MSI U100 laptops made to look like shiny—and fictional—Apple notebooks with Mac OS X installed.
Discussion:
MacRumors, Boing Boing Gadgets, PalmAddicts, Guardian, JustinFlood.com, Gadget Lab, LAPTOP Magazine, MacBlogz, Liliputing, 9 to 5 Mac and TUAW
Jacqui Cheng / Infinite Loop:
Parallels Desktop 4.0 gets a 50 percent speed boost over 3.0 — Don't look now, but Parallels is back with the final release of Parallels Desktop 4.0 today. The release, which we heard a little bit about in September, does indeed now have full support for DirectX 9 and OpenGL 2.0, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Kara Swisher / BoomTown:
Van Natta Takes Playlist CEO Job, With New Investment By Pittman — Former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta will take the CEO job at a music discovery site called Playlist, a move that had been speculated last week, after he did not end up taking another position as head of MySpace Music.
Jessica Dolcourt / Webware.com:
Opera Mini 4.2 beta is a mini update — With so much energy and progress in the mobile browser space these past two months (see here and here), you would expect the makers of the venerable Opera Mini browser to release an update that makes real progress on its free browser for Java phones.
Eric Krangel / Silicon Alley Insider:
Rock Band Creators Score $300 Million-Plus Payday (VIA) — When Harmonix founders Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy — the guys behind mega-hit games Guitar Hero and later, Rock Band — sold their company to Viacom's (VIA) MTV for a reported $175 million in 2006, the deal didn't end there.
Wayne Chang / Facebook Blog:
A Rush for Mobile — When we recently added the ability to comment on your friends' status updates to the Facebook mobile site, we didn't expect that we would receive nearly a million status comments in the first 24 hours. — This may not seem like much, but it was actually part of a really important change.
Google Watch:
Sun, Microsoft Search Deal Underscore Google's Growing Monopoly — Update: Funny how things evolve in high-tech, with some deals lasting what seems like ages and others, announced with so much enthusiasm, dying out. I want to talk about an example of the latter.
RELATED:
Kate Holton / Reuters:
Vodafone to focus on cost control after revenue cut — LONDON (Reuters) - Mobile phone group Vodafone cut its full-year revenue outlook for the second time in four months on Tuesday but said it would maintain profits and boost free cash flow by cutting 1 billion pounds ($1.6 billion) of costs.
Anthony Ha / VentureBeat:
Yahoo's BrowserPlus continues to dismantle wall between browser and desktop — BrowserPlus, Yahoo's Google Gears competitor for allowing web applications to work with your desktop, rolled out two cool new features today: Drag-and-drop file uploads and desktop notifications. — These are smart additions.
David Kaplan / paidContent.org:
Earnings: Sirius XM Loss Balloons On $4.8 Billion Impairment Charge; Revs Grow 16 Percent — The newly merged Sirius XM satellite radio company took a big swallow of bitter medicine in Q3, reporting a loss of $4.88 billion ($1.93 per share) versus last year's loss of $119.6 million …
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
On its second try, Sandbridge promises a revolution with the Holy Grail of wireless chips — Sandbridge Technologies is announcing today that it has created a chip that could represent the Holy Grail of wireless computing: a processor that can perform software-defined radio with low cost and low power consumption.
Discussion:
CNET News
Michael Masnick / Techdirt:
Bill Gates' New Career? Patent Troll For Nathan Myhrvold? — from the kinder-capitalism? dept — Plenty of folks have been wondering just what Bill Gates is up to now that he's left his full-time position at Microsoft. Longtime rabble-rouser theodp has alerted us to one thing …
Hallyu Tech:
IRIVER CELL PHONE AVAILABLE MARCH 9TH — Reigncom's President, Myoung Woo Lee has announced that iriver will be releasing a cell phone early next year. The new iriver phone will be available from Korean carrier KT. The iriver phone concept had been spotted at CES 2008 …
Jessica E. Vascellaro / Wall Street Journal:
Facebook Tries to Woo Marketers — Firm's ‘Engagement Ads’ Amplify Its Push to Curry Favor With Madison Avenue — Despite its surging Internet audience, Facebook Inc. has yet to prove it can wring steady revenue out of advertisers. Now it's trying a new tactic to woo Madison Avenue.
Discussion:
paidContent.org
Priya Ganapati / Gadget Lab:
Google Fixes Embarrassing Android Bug — Google has fixed an a potentially devastating bug in its newly released Android operating system. — Some users of T-Mobile's G1 phone found that typing any word on the phone's keyboard — in any application — sent whatever they typed to the phone's command line shell.
The Boy Genius / Boy Genius Report:
Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1a hitting Best Buy next month — Thanks to our Best Buy ninjas, we've just got some screen shots showing that Sony Ericsson's X1a (North American model) will definitely be hitting best buy early next month. The actual in stock date as of now is December 7th. The price?
Discussion:
SlashPhone, Cell Phones etc., Unwired View, Engadget, wmpoweruser.com, pocketnow.com, Sony Insider, CrunchGear and Gizmodo
Guy Kawasaki / How to Change the World:
Looking for Mr. Goodtweet: How to Pick Up Followers on Twitter — At 10:15 pm I discovered that I had not brought a Macbook power supply on the trip. I was in a hotel on Coronado Island, and early the next morning I was flying to an aircraft carrier off San Diego for an overnight visit.
David Kravets / Threat Level:
Guns N' Roses Uploader to Plead Guilty — The Los Angeles man arrested on accusations that he uploaded nine pre-released Guns N' Roses songs from the upcoming Chinese Democracy album has agreed to plead guilty to one federal count of copyright infringement as part of a deal, authorities said Monday.
Discussion:
CNET News
Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:
Look Out Google Site Search, Lijit Says It's Right On Your Heels — Innovative search startup Lijit has done study of search widgets on pages around the web and says its widget is very close to becoming as popular as Google's own “site search”. We think Lijit is quite interesting and we're …
Discussion:
Venture Chronicles
Tameka Kee / paidContent.org:
AT&T's VideoCrawler: Part Of A Bigger, Three-Screen Content Distribution Plan — A strange launch at a strange time, and from a strange source: AT&T (NYSE: T) rolled out a beta version of VideoCrawler, an online video search and aggregation engine. The public beta comes about three months …
Electronista:
Study: new MacBooks likely 33% of US sales — Apple's recent MacBook lineup and the iPhone may make it one of the better-positioned companies to survive a likely steep drop in spending during the holidays, according to new data from ChangeWave. The analyst firm says that a full third …
Georgina Prodhan / Reuters:
“Idols” TV producer Fremantle seals YouTube deal — LONDON (Reuters) - FremantleMedia, producer of the “Idols” reality-TV show format and soap opera “Neighbours,” has agreed a deal to produce programs to be shown exclusively on YouTube and to split revenues with the video-sharing site.
Greg Linden / Geeking with Greg:
Tasks, not search, at DEMOfall08 — Philipp Lenssen points to a video of a DEMOfall08 panel on “Where the Web is Going” that included Peter Norvig from Google and Prabhakar Raghavan from Yahoo. — What is notable in the talk is that (starting at 12:32) Prabhakar and Peter agree that …
Discussion:
The Noisy Channel
