Top Items:
Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:
New York Times: November Was So Terrible, Even Our Internet Ads Were Down — Earlier this month, executives at the New York Times (NYT) warned investors that they had a miserable November. They weren't kidding. — The grim details are here, but I'll save you some time:
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Rochelle Garner / Bloomberg:
Silicon Valley Braces for Firings as Technology Outlook Worsens — A A A — Dec. 24 (Bloomberg) — Silicon Valley, the technology mecca once considered immune to fallout from the global financial meltdown, now faces the biggest cutbacks since the dot-com crash.
Scott Duke Harris / Mercury News:
Two Expressos show how Silicon Valley reinvents the familiar — Silicon Valley invented itself through sheer inventiveness. So when I recently received two e-mails minutes apart pitching something called Expresso, a thought flittered: Could this finally be the technology that delivers a jolt of caffeine over the Web?
Saul Hansell / Bits:
Future Bits: Google's Machiavellianism — Defining Moment of 2008: Google's offer to help Yahoo fend off Microsoft's hostile takeover bid. — Google's response to Microsoft's bid for Yahoo may represent one of the most brilliant acts of corporate Machiavellianism in recent history.
Discussion:
Beyond Search
Jessica E. Vascellaro / Wall Street Journal:
OMG, We're Not BFFs Anymore? Getting ‘Unfriended’ Online Stings — Users of Social-Networking Sites Delete Friends Who Don't Keep in Touch, Misbehave — JoAna Swan recently purged her profile on social-networking site Facebook Inc. of friends she hadn't spoken to for a while.
Discussion:
Gawker
Sarah Perez / ReadWriteWeb:
The Rise of Cloud Agents — It was only this morning that we were lamenting about the lack of the perfect social tool when what did we stumble across but Twitchboard? No, no, it's not the perfect tool, silly, it's a Twitter app. Yet what it does is something that no other Twitter apps have done before …
Ed Bott / Ed Bott's Windows Expertise:
A Yule Log for your LCD — I confess I had completely forgotten about the Yule Log visualization for Windows Media Player, which originally appeared as part of the Windows Media Bonus Pack for XP back in 2002. Like most visualizations, it hadn't been updated in years and didn't work with newer Media Player versions.
Discussion:
Addicted to Digital Media
Monica Chen / DigiTimes:
Intel insists Atom only for Intel chipsets, does not want to share Nvidia's Ion — Nvidia's recent move to try to extend Intel's Atom ecosystem to its recently announced Ion platform appears to have been knocked back by Intel, according to a response primarily directed at PC manufacturers as seen by Digitimes.
Discussion:
Gizmodo, Liliputing, TechSpot, Maximum PC all, Mobility Site, TG Daily and internetnews.com
Om Malik / GigaOM:
Is Time Warner Having Second Thoughts About Bebo? — Most would agree that Time Warner overpaid when it bought social network Bebo back in March. Given the challenges faced by the company's online businesses since then, among them declining ad sales and the difficulty of monetizing social networks …
Discussion:
Wall Street Journal
Times of London:
Christmas presents? Let me check my e-mails first — Instead of switching off during the holiday season, owners of the device will check work messages before opening presents — Children may have to wait just a little bit longer than usual before ripping open their Christmas presents tomorrow morning …
Kevin Kingsbury / Wall Street Journal:
Verizon Wins ‘Cybersquatting’ Case — Verizon Communications Inc. said it has been awarded $33.2 million in a “cybersquatting” case against a San Francisco firm that registered Internet domain names purposely similar to the telecommunications giant's trademarks.
Richard Behar / Fox News:
World Bank Admits Top Tech Vendor Debarred for 8 Years — For months, the World Bank has been stonewalling and denying a series of FOX News reports on a variety of in-house scandals, ranging from the hacking of its most sensitive financial data to its own sanctions against suppliers found guilty of wrongdoing.
Ezra Klein / American Prospect:
THERE IS NOTHING ANYONE CAN DO ABOUT IT. — Over at BoingBoing, Clay Shirky engages in a bit of self-congratulatory schadenfreude for predicting the collapse of the newspaper business model back in 1993. And no doubt: He was prescient. But like a lot of folks (many of them named Jeff Jarvis) …
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internetnews.com:
Acer, Best Buy Slash XP Netbook Price to $299 — At ever-cheaper prices, netbooks are looking like a big holiday seller. But can it last? — Experts and PC industry insiders have long wondered whether bare-bones netbooks were too cheap for manufacturers' own good. — But don't tell that to Acer.
Dale Dougherty / O'Reilly Radar:
Admiring Bill Gates — Dare I say this on O'Reilly Radar? I admire Bill Gates. If I had a vote for Person of the Year, Gates would get mine. Let me explain why. — This year, Gates made an important and potentially difficult transition at age 52, leaving Microsoft as CEO and devoting …
Discussion:
Charlie Rose
internetnews.com:
Sun's Unwired Motherboard Plans — Cutting the wires doesn't just work on networking, it could also greatly increase CPU-to-memory communications. That's if Sun has its way. — Sun Microsystems is researching ways to make massive supercomputers even faster, including wireless connections between CPU and memory.
David / TmoNews:
Blackberry 8900 release date... We've previewed this highly anticipated follow up to the uber popular blackberry curve. We've been gifted with a hands on video from our friends at crackberry.com who gave us a great walkthrough. Now, we have a HOPEFUL release date...February 18th.
Discussion:
CrunchGear, Gizmodo, Electronista, ChannelWeb, Boy Genius Report, PhoneDog.com Cell … and MobileBurn.com
Stacey Higginbotham / GigaOM:
Wireless Built the Notebook Boom — Yesterday's news that notebooks had overtaken PCs in the number of units sold last quarter owes a huge debt to Wi-Fi and a smaller one to 3G cellular networks. Without those Intel unwired commercials and images of folks surfing the web at Starbucks or sitting in parks …
Discussion:
VoIP Watch
InfoWorld:
Microsoft kicks fake security software off 400,000 PCs — In the second month of a campaign against fake security software, Microsoft has booted the rogue application “Antivirus 2009” from almost 400,000 PCs, the company recently claimed. — December's version of the Malicious Software Removal Tool …
Alan Patrick / broadstuff:
FUTURE OF MEDIA PART 1 - WILL USER GENERATED CONTENT DROWN IN ITS OWN OUTPUT? — One of the prime tenets of the Web 2.0 movement has been the democratisation of content creation, leading to Time Magazine's declaration of 2006's Personality of the Year being YOU!
