Top Items:
Kathleen Richards / East Bay Express:
Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0 — Local business owners say Yelp offers to hide negative customer reviews of their businesses on its web site ... for a price. — Send a letter — The phone calls came almost daily. It started to get creepy. — “Hi, this is Mike from Yelp,” the voice would say.
Discussion:
PC World, Pulse2, blogs.chron.com, The Apple Core, Gadgetell, Obsessable and Techcraver.com, Thanks:atul
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Larry Dignan / Between the Lines:
Sprint: Customer defections continue; Can Palm's Pre reverse the slide? — Sprint Nextel showed some signs of improvement in its fourth quarter, but is still losing customers at a rapid clip. Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said the company has “high expectations” that the Palm Pre handset can attract customers to the wireless provider.
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Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog:
Your Ads, Richer — Yahoo! adds video, images and custom links to search ads — Ever since we launched pay-per-click advertising, the ads have looked more or less the same: A headline, a line of ad copy, a link. They haven't changed because, frankly, the combination works pretty well.
Fred / A VC:
Why Hulu Should Embrace Boxee — For those that don't know, Union Square Ventures is an investor in Boxee and I am on the board. For the past several weeks I have watched Boxee's management try their hardest to convince Hulu that Boxee is a big step forward for Hulu and Hulu's content partners.
Discussion:
The Register, Ars Technica, last100, WebProNews, InformationWeek, techblog.dallasnews.com, PC World and It's Rishi
Eliot Van Buskirk / Epicenter:
The Presidents of the United States of America Unleash Multiple-Album iPhone App — Dave Dederer, former singer and guitarist for nineties hitmakers The Presidents of the United States of America, has fashioned quite a second career for himself as the vice president of business development for Melodeo …
Discussion:
PC World, Ars Technica, Mashable!, Obsessable, iPhone Buzz, AppScout, mocoNews.net, Digital Noise and TechCrunch
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Arn / MacRumors:
Apple Discontinues 20" Cinema Display, Product Refreshes Coming? — Apple has removed the 20" Cinema Display from the online Apple Store and has notified resellers that the product has been “end of life'd” and can no longer be ordered. — While it may be possible that Apple has simply chosen …
Discussion:
AppleInsider, 9 to 5 Mac, CrunchGear, The Apple Core, I4U News, MacDailyNews, MacBlogz, Gadget Lab and Macsimum News
Enigmax / TorrentFreak:
Day 4 - Pirate Bay Defense Calls Foul Over Evidence — Prosecutor Håkan Roswall began the day by again referencing the case in Finland against the administrators of Finreactor. Fredrik's lawyer Jonas Nilsson requested a copy of the case notes for the defense.
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Arn / MacRumors:
Turn-By-Turn iPhone GPS App Already Available in iTunes — It seems despite all the anticipation about Turn-by-Turn GPS routing for the iPhone, an App already exists in the App Store that delivers this basic functionality. — XRoad Co.'s G-Map U.S. West and G-Map U.S. East apps were released …
Leena Rao / TechCrunch:
DocStoc Does Its Part To Rid The Web Of Download Links — Document sharing site DocStoc has launched DocShots, a free service that allows publishers to convert any document on a website into a hoverable link that provides an instant online document preview.
Sydney Morning Herald:
Telstra executive sparks Microsoft security scare — Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer speaks during a news conference at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and (inset) Telstra Chief Executive Sol Trujillo. — Asher Moses — An unnamed Telstra executive has sparked a major security scare …
Discussion:
Industry Standard
Prince McLean / AppleInsider:
Apple buying up available flash RAM supplies for next iPhone — A report issued on the flash RAM market indicates that Apple is inhaling supplies of memory components in preparation for the next generation iPhone, causing part shortages and raising the spot price for memory.
The Boy Genius / Boy Genius Report:
Upcoming Verizon news: BlackBerry Niagara, Hub updates, Netbooks, Apex — One of our trusty ninjas just hit us up with a couple details on some of Verizon's upcoming products and product offerings. First off.. Netbooks. We've been told that Verizon Wireless will 100% start selling Netbooks in stores around May of this year.
Paul Miller / Engadget:
Stantum's mind-blowing multitouch interface on video! — We just got a look at some amazing touchscreen interaction, running on a humble resistive touchscreen with some OMAP hardware backing it up. Stantum's technology is a software-based refinement to resistive touchscreens that allows …
Michael Learmonth / AdAge:
MTV Pioneer Launches $99 Music Videos on the Web — Verizon is sponsoring latest channel from web studio Next New Networks — Back in 1981, Fred Seibert helped create MTV. Now he'd like to recreate it on the web with a new network devoted to music videos made in a day for $99 or less.
Randall C. Kennedy / Enterprise Desktop:
Windows 7: Cutting corners in the rush to market? — Is Microsoft ignoring beta tester feedback in its quest to ship Windows 7 come hell or high water in 2009? — Is Microsoft moving too fast with Windows 7? That's the complaint coming from some members of the technical beta program.
Loïc Le Meur / Loic Le Meur Blog:
Meetic acquires the European Business of Match.com and Makes History — It is a first ever in the european internet industry. It is not an american internet major player acquiring a european business but the other way round, as Meetic and Match.com just announced.
Etgar Lefkovits / Jerusalem Post:
‘Kosher’ GPS device gets official launch — It lists thousands of kosher restaurants and includes the Book of Psalms, the three daily prayer services, the Traveler's Prayer, a Hebrew calendar, and two versions of Grace After Meals. — Welcome to the “kosher” GPS device.
Philipp Lenssen / Google Blogoscoped:
Gmail With Custom Colors — You can now make Gmail as ugly or pretty as you want - by choosing your own colors. Go to Gmail -> Settings -> Themes, and click “Choose your own colors”. This opens a window where you can configure a template with instant preview. Hit Save & Close, and Gmail will appear in your custom colors.
Bloomberg:
Hewlett-Packard's Hurd Cuts Employees' Pay as Silicon Valley Retrenches — Feb. 19 (Bloomberg) — Hewlett-Packard Co. Chief Executive Officer Mark Hurd spent three years cutting costs to lift profit. Now he's targeting employee pay to ride an economic slump he says will last the rest of the year.
InfoWorld:
Dell calls for Psion ‘netbook’ trademark to be removed — Dell has enlisted the help of the US courts in a bid to remove Psion's trademark of the term ‘Netbook’. — Netbook is the term used to describe low cost and low spec small laptops that are ideal for surfing the web on-the-go.
Chris Soghoian / CNET News:
Recovery.gov blocked search engine tracking — Update: As of 8 a.m. PST, within three hours of this story first going live, it appears that President Obama's Web team has (silently) pulled the robots.txt file from the Recovery.gov Web site. The site is now open to Web crawlers of all kinds.
Om Malik / GigaOM:
INQ's Social Phone Rocks MWC — INQ's Facebook-oriented and web-centric budget phone that I love so much, INQ Social Mobile, has won some major kudos at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. It was voted best mobile phone/device, beating out its much bigger and more established competitors such as Nokia and Samsung.
Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch:
Coghead Grinds To A Halt, Heads To The Deadpool — Coghead, a visual web-based application editor that allowed users to develop enterprise applications using an intuitive GUI, is closing its doors. The company attributes its closing to the dire economic situation, and says that users …
Anthony Ha / VentureBeat:
YouNoodle scores the buzz on 25,000 startups — YouNoodle, the company that made a splash last year by claiming to predict the future value of startups, is continuing its efforts to turn startup evaluation into a science. Now it's adding a YouNoodle Score that tracks news stories to determine a startup's …
Paul Miller / Engadget:
Palm confirms games are in development for Pre, drops a few other tidbits — We sat down with Palm today and in addition to spotting that soft-touch cover we chatted them up on where things stand, how things are progressing, and various other clarifications about webOS and the Pre that have yet to be made.
Thanks:dreamsketcher
Leena Rao / TechCrunch:
Flip Or Bust? FlipGloss Debuts Glossy Digital Photo Magazine — FlipGloss, a Forbes Media-funded digital magazine focused purely on editorial and advertising photo content, has launched the beta version of its site. Featuring “lifestyle” based photography focused on fashion, design and travel …
