Check out Mini-Techmeme for simple mobiles or Techmeme Mobile for modern smartphones.
5:40 PM ET, January 6, 2009

Techmeme

 Top Items: 
Tom Neumayr / Apple:
Changes Coming to the iTunes Store  —  Apple® today announced several changes to the iTunes® Store (www.itunes.com).  Beginning today, all four major music labels—Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, Warner Music Group and EMI, along with thousands of independent labels …
RELATED:
Ethan Smith / Wall Street Journal:
ITunes to Change Pricing Strategy  —  Apple Inc. said it is making changes to its iTunes Store, representing significant shifts in its longstanding approach to the business of selling songs online.  —  The changes, unveiled during a speech Tuesday at the Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco …
Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:
Confirmed: iTunes Going DRM-Free.  Unclear: Does Anyone Care?  —  In 2007, Apple CEO Steve Jobs predicted that half the music offered at his iTunes store would be sold without digital rights management-the lock-and-key system that the music labels wrap their songs-by the end of that year.
AppleInsider:
Apple unveils 17-inch MacBook Pro with 8-hour battery  —  Presenting at the Macworld Expo on Tuesday, Apple unveiled the new 17-inch MacBook Pro featuring a durable and precision aluminum unibody enclosure, and a revolutionary new built-in battery that delivers up to eight hours of use …
RELATED:
Joshua Topolsky / Engadget:
MacBook Pro 17-inch first hands-on (update: video added)  —  Yep — it looks just like its little brothers!  Feels like 'em too, except the obvious bit of heft added by that 17-inch display.  Of course, they don't have that sweet, gigantic battery inside, or that matte display option (until we torch Curpertino, of course... in love).
Discussion: Gizmodo and techeblog.com
Bill Evans / Apple:
Apple Introduces 17-inch MacBook Pro With Revolutionary New Built-in Battery That Delivers Eight Hours of Use & 1,000 Recharges  —  Apple® today unveiled the new 17-inch MacBook® Pro featuring a durable and beautiful precision aluminum unibody enclosure, and a revolutionary new built …
Wilson Rothman / Gizmodo:
Apple Revamps iLife for '09 with iPhoto Facial Recognition and More  —  Today at Macworld 2009, Apple showed off a new iPhoto with true facial recognition, a better iMovie and other iLife updates—$79 solo, $99 for family, requires Leopard, available late January.  —  It's a good solid upgrade full of very nice features.
RELATED:
Mark Wilson / Gizmodo:
Sting Teaches You to Play Guitar in Garageband '09
Discussion: geeksugar and Lifehacker
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:   iPhoto Gets A Facelift
Owen Thomas / Gawker:
The Russian Bear Slashes a Social Network  —  The bubble in social networking has burst, decisively.  LiveJournal, the San Francisco-based arm of Sup, a Russian Internet startup, has cut 12 of 28 U.S. employees — and offered them no severance, we're told.  —  The quirky site …
Joshua Topolsky / Engadget:
Live from the Macworld 2009 keynote  —  9:07AM “If you wanna hear some new things today — I have three new things...”  —  9:07AM “The last year was our biggest ever, 9.7 mil Macs.  We did it by growing twice as fast as the rest of the industry.”  “The hardware THE leopard (!)...”
RELATED:
Nicholas Deleon / CrunchGear:
Say hello to iWork 09: Like iWork 08, but plus one  —  Whoever predicted that Apple would introduce iWork '09 today gets a gold star.  Keynote, Pages and Numbers all received what I would consider minor updates; no need to run around all willy nilly for these, methinks.
Discussion: Telegraph, Obsessable and SlashGear
RELATED:
Josh Lowensohn / Webware.com:
Apple takes another small step on to the Web
Discussion: Apple Watch and TechFlash
Jack Shafer / Slate:
How Newspapers Tried to Invent the Web  —  But failed.  —  A moment of sympathy, please, for newspapers, whose readers and advertisers have been fleeing at a frightening rate.  —  It would be easy to accuse editors and publishers of being clueless about the coming Internet disruption …
Discussion: Scripting News
PC World:
AMD: Creating a New Laptop Category  — Netbooks have their appeal—tiny budget machines with just enough oomph to run Windows XP.  Ultraportables have horsepower in spades, but they cost too much to suit some people.  This year we're going to see a whole new category of notebook take shape …
RELATED:
Karen Jacobs / Reuters:
Best Buy offers used iPhones at lower price  —  ATLANTA (Reuters) - Retailer Best Buy Co, seeking new ways to appeal to cost-conscious shoppers, said on Tuesday it is selling refurbished versions of Apple Inc's iPhone 3G at its stores that are priced about $50 less than new iPhones.
Mary Jo Foley / All about Microsoft:
Report: PC makers to provide free Vista-to Win-7 upgrades starting July 1  —  In yet another indicator as to the progress of Windows 7, the Tech ARP site reported that Microsoft plans to allow PC makers to offer customers who buy Windows Vista machines as of July 1 free upgrades to Windows 7 once it ships.
Caroline McCarthy / The Social:
Hackers hit MacRumors keynote coverage  —  Some nasty pranksters, likely associated with Web forum 4Chan, have hacked into Apple gossip mainstay MacRumors' live-blog coverage of Tuesday's Macworld keynote.  Hosted on a separate domain, MacRumorsLive.com, the site was plagued by offensive messages …
Macky Cruz / TrendLabs:
Bogus LinkedIn Profiles Harbor Malicious Content  —  The LinkedIn professional networking site connects more than 30 million users from across many different industries.  The advantages of maintaining a list of trusted business contacts for career planning purposes is not lost on LinkedIn's users.
Robin Wauters / TechCrunch:
Clearspring Lays Off 20%, President And COO Jay Rappaport Leaving  —  Seems like widget distribution startup Clearspring is another victim of the economic meltdown forced to make some tough decisions.  We heard rumors floating that the company laid off about 20% of its staff in early December …
Discussion: Webware.com
Emil Protalinski / One Microsoft Way:
Microsoft promotes Bob Muglia to president  —  After working for 21 years for Microsoft, Bob Muglia has been promoted from vice president to president of Microsoft's Server and Tools Business (STB), which generated some US$13 billion in FY08, or about 20 percent of the company's total revenue.
Gavin Clarke / The Register:
Curl taps Adobe RIA infrastructure  —  The perils of open source  —  One of the side effects of Adobe Systems releasing code under open-source, the company said last year, has been to let competitors into its Rich Internet Applications (RIA) back yard.  —  One such competitor is Curl …
Discussion: InfoWorld
Twitter Status:
Delivery delays  —  We're experiencing some delays in the amount of time it takes for updates to appear in timelines.  Working on this now.
Discussion: Mashable!
Anne Thomas Manes / Application Platform …:
SOA is Dead; Long Live Services  —  SOA met its demise on January 1, 2009, when it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession.  SOA is survived by its offspring: mashups, BPM, SaaS, Cloud Computing, and all other architectural approaches that depend on “services”.
Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:
Forbes Layoffs Finally Arrive: 19 Fired From Magazine, Web  —  Like their colleagues at Time Warner's Time Inc. (TWX), the editorial staff at Forbes has known that layoffs were coming to the company's magazine and Web site for quite some time.  But at least they're getting it over with in one fell swoop …
Discussion: paidContent.org and Gawker
 
 Archived Page Info: 
This is a snapshot of Techmeme at 5:40 PM ET, January 6, 2009.

View the current page or another snapshot:


 
 Techmeme Sponsor Posts: 
Tribe AI:
Is AI just hype?  —  Find out how top enterprises use Tribe to get real business results.
Techmeme Leaderboards:
Discover the top reporters on AI, VR, policy, and much more  —  We've analyzed Techmeme's news crawl to identify the most influential and prolific writers on 48 news topics.  Download reports immediately for just $100.
Zoho:
Authy killed their desktop apps.  Time to switch to a reliable authenticator.  Time to switch to Zoho OneAuth.  —  Twilio's Authy recently announced end of life (EOL) for their desktop apps on March 19, 2024—five months ahead of schedule.
Comprehensive.io:
Browse salary data from 3,000 startups for free  —  Click for FREE, immediate access to real-time compensation benchmarking data.  Paid version helps HR automate comp reviews and communicate total compensation to employees.
Sponsor Techmeme
 
 See Also: 
Techmeme: site main
Techmeme River: reverse chronological Techmeme
Techmeme Mobile: for phones
Techmeme Leaderboard: Techmeme's top sources
 
 Subscribe: 
Techmeme RSS feed
Techmeme on X
Techmeme on Mastodon
 
 
 More Items: 
eMarketer:
Will Search Ad Gains Get Lost in Bad Economic Numbers?
Philipp Lenssen / Google Blogoscoped:
On Google Disallowing Crawling of Their LIFE Hosting
PC World:
Via's Dual-core Nano Processor on Track for Late 2009
Brian Krebs / Washington Post:
Data Breaches Up Almost 50 Percent, Affecting Records of 35.7 Million People
Dana Blankenhorn / Open Source:
Android in a cloud  —  Since the start of the year we've talked …
Discussion: IntoMobile
Newsosaur / Reflections of a Newsosaur:
Five fatal flaws in local Internet ad sales
Joseph Tartakoff / The Microsoft Blog:
Microsoft's MacBU touts the ‘software + services’ mantra
Discussion: Macworld
 Earlier Items: 
Stacey Higginbotham / GigaOM:
Clearwire Launches WiMAX in Portland
Discussion: eWeek and Unstrung
Enigmax / TorrentFreak:
Anonymous BitTorrent Service VPN4Life is a Scam
Philipp Lenssen / Google Blogoscoped:
Checkout Icon Makes Ads 10% More Clickable, Google Says
Discussion: Search Engine Land
Matthew Lasar / Ars Technica:
Comcast starts new year with new network management system
Staska / Unwired View:
Apple patents iPhone Mobile Navigation / Mapping App
Discussion: MacNN and GPS Obsessed
Stacey Higginbotham / GigaOM:
Netbooks and the Death of x86 Computing
Discussion: NewTeeVee, jkOnTheRun and Know It All
 

 
From Mediagazer:

Charlotte Tobitt / Press Gazette:
Ofcom rules that five GB News programs presented by Conservative politicians have broken its due impartiality rules and puts the channel “on notice”

Benjamin Mullin / New York Times:
Authentic Brands licenses Sports Illustrated's publishing rights to The Players' Tribune owner Minute Media for 10 years, with plans to keep the print edition

Todd Spangler / Variety:
YouTuber MrBeast announces a deal with Prime Video for Beast Games, a reality-competition show with 1,000 contestants, promising the winner a $5M cash prize

 
Sister Sites:

Mediagazer
 Top news and commentary for media professionals from all around the web
memeorandum
 What US political commentators are discussing online right now
WeSmirch
 The top celebrity news from all around the web on a single page