Top Items:
Google Investor Relations:
Google Announces Fourth Quarter And Fiscal Year 2008 Results — Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced financial results for the quarter and for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2008. — “Google performed well in the fourth quarter, despite an increasingly difficult economic environment.
Discussion:
eWeek, MediaMemo, Search Engine Land, Tech Central, Microsoft Watch, paidContent.org, InformationWeek, VentureBeat, Neowin.net, mocoNews.net, Data Center Knowledge, Tech Beat, Search Engine Journal, GPS Obsessed, GigaOM, Industry Standard, Between the Lines, BloggingStocks and paidContent
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Miguel Helft / New York Times:Google Beats Forecast Even as Its Profit Tapers
Discussion:
TechCrunch
Kara Swisher / BoomTown:
Steve Ballmer's Entire Memo to the Microsoft Troops About Layoffs and Weak Results — Here is the full memo to employees from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer (pictured here) about the 5,000 layoffs and other cost cuts just announced, due to economic slowdown, which also resulted in weak financial results for the second quarter.
Discussion:
Microsoft Pri0, The Register, Electronista, All about Microsoft, TidBITS, GPS Obsessed, AppleInsider, Microsoft Watch and Tech Beat
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InfoWorld:
Vista main culprit in Microsoft layoffs — Windows Vista has been trouble for Microsoft perhaps since the operating system's beginning. And this last quarter was certainly no exception. Despite a dip in client software revenue, however, one analyst says the workforce reduction Microsoft detailed …
Microsoft:
Microsoft Reports Second-Quarter Results — Modest revenue growth despite difficult economy; announces cost management initiatives. — Microsoft Corp. today announced revenue of $16.63 billion for the second quarter ended Dec. 31, 2008, a 2% increase over the same period of the prior year.
Jay Adelson / Digg the Blog:
Brief update on Digg — Wanted to reach out to folks with an update on Digg and our priorities for 2009 as well as address some of the recent speculation about our business. — As we've often stated over the past couple of months, given the current economic climate, we've made the decision …
Discussion:
L.A. Times Tech Blog, Furrier.org, rizzn's socnets, Silicon Alley Insider and Storage Station
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Laszlo Bock / The Official Google Blog:
Announcing Google's Employee Option Exchange Program — Today we announced our plans to do something more for the people who are responsible for Google's success — our employees. Recognizing that about 85% of our employees have at least some stock options that are underwater (i.e. …
Discussion:
Digits, VentureBeat, The Register, L.A. Times Tech Blog, Silicon Alley Insider and TG Daily
Intego:
Mac Trojan Horse OSX.Trojan.iServices.A Found in Pirated Apple iWork 09 — Exploit: OSX.Trojan.iServices.A Trojan Horse — Description: Intego has discovered a new Trojan horse, OSX.Trojan.iServices.A, which is currently circulating in copies of Apple's iWork 09 found on BitTorrent trackers …
PC Pro:
Q&A: Microsoft defends return to DRM — Microsoft yesterday unveiled its MSN Mobile Music service - and a surprise return to digital rights management (DRM). — While companies such as Apple and Amazon have finally moved to music download services free of copy protection …
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Feedburner Needs To Get It Together — Complaints about Feedburner, a service that helps websites manage their RSS feeds, have been around as long as the company itself. But you'd think that when Google spent $100 million to buy the company, they'd get it together. — But things haven't gotten better.
Simon Sage / IntoMobile:
Screenshots of Android's Cupcake Update in Action, Still Not Ready for Public — So after shoveling through T-Mobile (NYSE: DT)'s thread on what the deal is with the Android Cupcake update, I finally got a straight answer. … The short version? The Cupcake development branch …
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Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land:
Yahoo: Obama Is A “Miserable Failure” — I told you so. Or I told anyone who cared. I even tried to reach the Obama administration in four or five different ways. Do a search on Yahoo right now for miserable failure, and you'll find President Barack Obama's page ranking either in the top spot or the second spot.
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Stanford Students Release A Cool Batch Of iPhone Apps — Students from Stanford's Fall 1008 iPhone class CS193P created a nice crop of apps that are now available or will be soon for the iPhone (see our Stanford Facebook apps posts here and here). — A list of them is here, and some of them I'm going to keep on my phone.
James Urquhart / CNET News:
Is Google App Engine successful? — The original title of this post was going to be “Why isn't Google App Engine successful?” You see, I've been frustrated of late at the lack of followup press about the PaaS offering since Google's announcement about it last April.
Discussion:
InformationWeek
Andrew Sinkov / Evernote Blog:
Welcome You Fine Google Notebook Users — Recently, Google announced that they were stopping development on Google Notebook. We're big fans of Google Notebook, in fact many of used it before Evernote came along. When we heard the news, we immediately began work on a Google Notebook import tool.
Jim Goldman / Tech Check with Jim Goldman:
Bartz Gets Millions; Yahoo Bails on Pay Increases for Rank and File — For the first time in its history, Yahoo [YHOO Loading... () ] has suspended scheduled pay increases for the company's rank and file, even as it signs up new CEO Carol Bartz with a pay package that some say could be worth …
John Markoff / New York Times:
Worm Infects Millions of Computers Worldwide — A new digital plague has hit the Internet, infecting millions of personal and business computers in what seems to be the first step of a multistage attack. The world's leading computer security experts do not yet know who programmed the infection, or what the next stage will be.
Dan Primack / PE Hub Blog:
Brad Garlinghouse's Next Act — When we last heard from Brad Garlinghouse, he was stepping down as Yahoo's senior VP in charge of such massive properties as Mail, Messenger, Groups and Flickr. That was around six months ago - 20 months after his infamous memo - and it seems that he's finally working on a new project.
Saul Hansell / Bits:
Can Windows Mobile Get the Magic Back? — “Automagicly” is a word that Andrew Lees seems to use a great deal more than most people. — Mr. Lees, the senior vice president in charge of Microsoft's cellphone software, stopped by recently to drop hints about what will be in the next generation …
Amol Sharma / Wall Street Journal:
Verizon Web Phone Targets Home Users — Verizon Communications Inc. will market a snazzy Internet phone that works with any high-speed Internet service. — The new home phone, called the Hub, aims to retain existing landline customers and attract other carriers' customers, the company said.
Richard Waters / Financial Times:
Sony has lost what made it special — In the glory days of the 1970s and 1980s, Sony's Inazawa factory made cathode ray tubes and sent them down the road to Ichinomiya, where they were used in Trinitron televisions and exported. — After Sony announced an unexpectedly large operating loss …
The Technium:
Better Than Owning — Ownership is not as important as it once was. — I use roads that I don't own. I have immediate access to 99% of the roads and highways of the world (with a few exceptions) because they are a public commons. We are all granted this street access via our payment of local taxes.
Discussion:
Silicon Valley Watcher
Zach Spear / AppleInsider:
iPhone developer: App Store rewards “crap” apps — A software engineer who wrote what he calls a “terrible” and “crap” app in less time than it typically takes to eat lunch has since watched it shoot to the top of Apple's App Store, where it's now generating over $200 an hour despite being a free download.
InfoWorld:
Samsung records Q4 loss, annual profit slumps — South Korea's Samsung Electronics recorded a net loss for the last three months of 2008, while its net profit for the entire year fell 26 percent, it said Friday. — The company's net loss for the last three months of 2008 was 22 billion won …
Peter Ha / CrunchGear:
Fact: There is no HP Mini 1100 series — I've been exchanging e-mails with HP for the better part of the day and we have the final word on the supposed Mini 1100 series with an ExpressCard slot. It doesn't exist and it was mistake made by the Web team. This is straight from horse's mouth, people.
Eric Savitz / Tech Trader Daily:
Advanced Micro Devices Q4 Even Worse Than Expected — Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) this afternoon posted even worse fourth quarter results that the Street had expected. — For the quarter, the company posted revenue of $1.162 billion, below the Street consensus of $1.23 billion, down 35% sequentially and off 33% from a year earlier.
Discussion:
Ars Technica, Financial Times, Business Wire, The Register, VentureBeat, CNET News and Computerworld
John C Abell / Epicenter:
Wired.com Image Viewer Hacked to Create Phony Steve Jobs Health Story — A widely-circulated URL which points to an image that purports to be a Wired.com story about Steve Jobs' health is a hack job. We won't provide the URL here, but the Twitterverse quickly surmised that the item was not correct.
MG Siegler / VentureBeat:
Boxee now lets you get “Lost” in ABC content — The new season of ABC's hit show Lost premiered last night. Some people (me, for example) were busy and missed it. I was all set to buy the season pass on iTunes — but it's $50 (in HD). I'd rather watch it for free, streaming at ABC.com, but that leaves me chained to my desk.
Ben Lisbakken / Google Code Blog:
Playing around with Google's AJAX APIs — For me, documentation isn't always enough to learn about APIs; I need examples that I can play with. That's why I started a fun project recently—a tool for teaching developers how to use Google's JavaScript APIs: the AJAX API Playground.
Don Reisinger / Webware.com:
What would it take to beat Google? — The search engine space is filled with a slew of companies that are vying to become the next Google. What is the “next Google”? It's a search engine that captures the majority of the search engine market—a feat that hasn't been accomplished since Google claimed …
Rafe Needleman / Webware.com:
The spreadsheet of sunshine: Who's hiring (updated) — The story I kicked off in late October, Tech layoffs: The scorecard, is a real bummer. On it, we're tracking the current layoffs in the tech economy. I hate the story, since each line on the sheet stands for real people who have lost jobs.
