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9:00 AM ET, November 20, 2008

Techmeme

 Top Items: 
Joshua Topolsky / Engadget:
BlackBerry Storm review  —  By now most of us have heard this story in one fashion or another: when Steve Jobs and Apple were in the planning stages of the iPhone, the first carrier they brought the device to was America's largest network, Verizon.  Even if you haven't heard how the tale ends …
RELATED:
The Boy Genius / Boy Genius Report:
Verizon BlackBerry Storm review  —  The BlackBerry Storm.  It feels like ages ago since we first broke news of this bad boy, but the release is finally right around the corner.  Literally, it's tomorrow!  Need we say more?  Heck yeah!  We've got a pretty substantial review on the device …
Wall Street Journal:
BlackBerry's Storm Joins Touch-Phone Fray
Discussion: Gizmodo and Gear Diary
The Official Google Blog:
Lively no more  —  In July we launched Lively in Google Labs because we wanted users to be able to interact with their friends and express themselves online in new ways.  Google has always been supportive of this kind of experimentation because we believe it's the best way to create groundbreaking products …
RELATED:
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Google Kills Lively  —  Even Google is getting into the downsizing spirit.  It just announced that it is killing Lively, its browser-based virtual worlds that could be embedded into other Websites.  Lively launched just last July.  The death notice on the site says it will shut down on December 31 …
Ina Fried / Beyond Binary:
Microsoft, labels try to revive subscriptions  —  With fewer consumers than hoped for signing up for all-you-can-eat music subscriptions, Microsoft and the record industry are trying to make the option more appealing.  —  As of Wednesday, those who pay for the $14.95 a month Zune Pass subscription …
RELATED:
Sakthi Prasad / Reuters:   Microsoft modifies Zune subscription model
Nick Wingfield / Wall Street Journal:   Microsoft Modifies Zune Service
Apple:
Apple TV: About Apple TV software updates  —  Products Affected  —  Apple TV  —  Refer the table below for Apple TV Software Update 2.3 features:  —  How To  —  AirTunes Streaming from Apple TV  —  Music can be streamed via AirTunes to Airport Express speakers or other Apple TVs in your house.
RELATED:
Cory Bohon / TUAW:
Apple TV update 2.3 released
Discussion: Moonwatcher and Insanely Great Mac
John Gruber / Daring Fireball:
Google Mobile Uses Private iPhone APIs  —  Google's just-released and much-publicized update to their Google Mobile iPhone app features some very clever interaction design for the voice search feature.  There is an on-screen button you can tap to initiate a voice search manually, but …
Yahoo! Search Blog:
Gluing Together the Best Content on the Web  —  You may have heard about our experimental visual display of search results on Yahoo! India, called Glue™ Pages.  Tonight we're launching a similar, but slightly different experience in the U.S. with Yahoo! Glue™ beta.
RELATED:
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Yahoo Brings Glue To U.S.: A Plethora of Aggregated Topical Third Party Content
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Google Makes Up 88 Percent Of Mozilla's Revenues, Threatens Its Non-Profit Status  —  Today, the (for-now) non-profit Mozilla Foundation released its financial statements for 2007 (embedded below).  Revenues for the organization behind the open-source Firefox browser were up 12 percent to $75 million …
RELATED:
Brooke Crothers / CNET News:
Samsung launches 256GB solid state drive  —  Samsung said it has begun mass producing 256GB solid state drives.  This size tops the largest-capacity SSDs found in laptops today.  —  Samsung currently offers 64GB and 128GB SSDs for laptops.  —  The new 256GB drives are faster too …
Discussion: Gizmodo, Inquirer and Engadget
Kate Greene / Technology Review:
How Google's Ear Hears  —  The new voice-search application for the iPhone marks a milestone for spoken interfaces.  —  If you own an iPhone, you can now be part of one of the most ambitious speech-recognition experiments ever launched.  On Monday, Google announced that it had added voice search …
Mobispine AB:
Mobispine Delivers First Ever True MMS for iPhone  —  Mobispine AB (MOBS) the market leader in delivering mobile solutions to operators announced the availability of the world's first true Multimedia Messaging (MMS) for iPhone.  Mobispine is now offering a “white label” MMS service for iPhone to global operators.
Discussion: SlashGear and Engadget
Jeff Young / Chronicle of Higher Education:
Boston College Will Stop Offering New Students E-Mail Accounts  —  Many students don't even want a college e-mail address these days because they already have well-established digital identities before they arrive on campus.  That's the conclusion that officials at Boston College came to in a recent review of their online services.
Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch:
SnapTell: Instant Product Lookup From The iPhone.  You Want This.  —  If you have an iPhone, you'll probably want to check out SnapTell Explorer, a free application now available on the App Store.  The premise is simple: take a photo of the cover of any CD, DVD, book, or video game …
Discussion: jkOnTheRun and metarand
Mike Snider / USA Today:
‘Grand Theft Auto’ yields road to the ‘Lost and Damned’  —  The upcoming episode of the video game Grand Theft Auto IV looks to be a wild one.  —  GTA IV, which was released in April for the Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3, focused on former Eastern European soldier Niko Bellic …
IEBlog:
IE8: What's After Beta 2  —  The announcement of IE8 Beta 2 started an important and public phase of the product development cycle getting broad public feedback.  The team is providing detailed information and answering questions about the product in many different places.
Nicholas Carlson / Alley Insider:
Want In The Obama Administration?  Get A Blog  —  Obama is staffing his administration with bloggers.  — New Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Daschle's last post to “Travels With Tom” — a “travel web log” — is from August 2003.  It features a long quote from Monty Python's Holy Grail movie.
Noah Shachtman / Danger Room:
Under Worm Assault, Military Bans Disks, USB Drives  —  The Defense Department's geeks are spooked by a rapidly spreading worm crawling across their networks.  So they've suspended the use of so-called thumb drives, CDs, flash media cards, and all other removable data storage devices from their nets …
Discussion: The Register
Alex Chitu / Google Operating System:
Gmail Themes  —  Following the footsteps of Google's personalized homepage, Gmail added themes.  Once the new option is enabled in your account (as usually, Gmail's new features are slowly rolled out), you'll find a tab named “Themes” in the settings page and you'll be able to choose from 30 themes.
Discussion: Zoli's Blog and InformationWeek
RELATED:
Annie Chen / Gmail Blog:
Spice up your inbox with colors and themes
MG Siegler / VentureBeat:
SimCity for the iPhone may ruin my life (in a good way)  —  No game captured my imagination when I was growing up like SimCity.  Certainly, a part of it was my God complex, but more it was the open-ended nature of a game with few rules that let you build a city.
Discussion: Kotaku and Touch Arcade
 
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 More Items: 
Zach Epstein / Boy Genius Report:
Palm Treo Pro coming to Sprint in January
Michael Rose / TUAW:
MacBook Pro users getting bitten by HDCP
Discussion: TechSpot, Boing Boing, CNET News and open
New York Times:
Web Retailers Are Waging Seasonal Price Wars
Verne Kopytoff / San Francisco Chronicle:
Kids gain valuable skills from time online
Steve Lohr / Bits:
Hunting for a Brainy Computer
Discussion: VentureBeat
InfoWorld:
Yahoo OneSearch coming to T-Mobile USA
 Earlier Items: 
Dan Rayburn / The Business Of Online Video:
Akamai Cuts 7% Of Workforce, 110 Layoffs Across All Divisions Of The Company
Scott Ferguson / eWeek:
After the Layoffs: Collecting 52,000 Laptop and Desktop Computers
Dan Rayburn / The Business Of Online Video:
MLB.com's Switch To Flash Video Leaves More Questions Than Answers
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
First Guns N' Roses Album In 17 Years Debuts Tonight On MySpace Music
Signal vs. Noise:
Why the Drudge Report is one of the best designed sites on the web
Wilson Rothman / Gizmodo:
Windows 7 Touch Control Makes Media Center Interface Awesome