Top Items:
Apple:
Apple Announces Safari 4—The World's Fastest & Most Innovative Browser — New Nitro Engine Runs JavaScript More Than Four Times Faster — Apple® today announced the public beta of Safari® 4, the world's fastest and most innovative web browser for Mac® and Windows PCs.
Discussion:
Between the Lines, Digital Daily, Softpedia News, MacRumors, Webware.com, PC World, The Apple Core, Mashable!, TheAppleBlog, The iPhone Blog, Incremental Blogger, atmaspheric, GeekSmack, blogs.telegraph.co.uk …, The Toybox, Neowin.net, I4U News, GottaBeMobile.com, SlashGear, World of Apple, TheNextWeb.com, MacDailyNews, TUAW, O'Grady's PowerPage, AppScout, Electronic Pulp, GartenBlog and Ubergizmo
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John Biggs / CrunchGear:
Safari 4: Finally a reason to come back UPDATE — Welcome to the future, Safari fans, because the Safari 4 beta just hit the download shelves and it's ready to tear some things up in Tiger and Leopard and even Windows. The download requires the latest security patch (2009-01) but other than that you're ready to ride.
Katie Marsal / AppleInsider:
Apple releases public beta of Safari 4 browser — Apple on Tuesday announced a public beta of Safari 4, a new version of its share-gaining web browser that packs a powerful new JavaScript engine and support for the latest web standards. — Dubbed “Nitro,” the engine in Safari 4 …
Discussion:
Byte of the Apple, 9 to 5 Mac, Download Squad, PC World, The Tech Report, The Mac Observer and Gizmodo
MG Siegler / VentureBeat:
Where were you during the great Gmail outage of February 2009? — If you live in the United States, chances are, you were asleep. But for those in other parts of the world, and those of us who are nocturnal, Google's email service, Gmail, was down for several hours on Tuesday morning.
Discussion:
Softpedia News, WebProNews, The Official Google Blog, Tech Beat, GigaOM, The Register, InfoWorld, Guardian, Telegraph, TechCrunch, Pocket-lint.co.uk, Webware.com, Digital Daily, BetaNews, Neowin.net, Tech Central, GottaBeMobile.com, WebWorkerDaily, Profy, p2pnet, Mashable!, Search Engine Roundtable, BBC, TechRadar.com, AppScout, PC Pro and vnunet
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BBC:
Google users hit by mail blackout — Business and consumer users of Google's popular e-mail service were hit by a blackout on Tuesday. — The service went offline at 0930 GMT and began to return for many users after four hours, one of the longest downtimes ever suffered by Google.
Official google.org Blog:
The Next Chapter for Google.org — When Larry and Sergey laid out their vision for Google.org, they hoped that this “experiment in active philanthropy” would one day have an even greater impact on the world than Google itself. They committed resources from Google's profits …
Discussion:
Jobwire, Network World, paidContent.org, BuzzMachine, ReadWriteWeb, CNET News and Googling Google
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Owen Thomas / Gawker:
WSJ Conference Organizer's Wife Secretly Running Google — Megan Smith, a Google executive little known outside Silicon Valley, is taking a high-profile role running the search engine's in-house charity. She's part of a power couple whose louder half is AllThingsD blogger Kara Swisher.
David Pogue / New York Times:
The Kindle: Good Before, Better Now — In the high-tech industry, you live for the day when your product name becomes a verb. “I Googled him.” “She's been Photo- shopped.” — Amazon, however, is hoping that its product name, a verb, becomes a noun. “Have you bought the new Kindle?”
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Ina Fried / Beyond Binary:
Designing the Kindle 2 — SEATTLE—Amazon wanted to make the Kindle 2 hot, but not too hot. — It gave it a slimmer design and more storage, but there are a lot of things Amazon could have added, but didn't. Things like a color display not only would make the device pricier and give …
Discussion:
WebProNews
Mary Jo Foley / All about Microsoft:
Ballmer: Office 14 not this year — During his annual “Strategic Update” briefing with Wall Street analysts on February 24, CEO Steve Ballmer said Office 14 won't be shipping in 2009. — “Office 14 will not be this year,” Ballmer told analysts. — Microsoft officials have been careful …
Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:
Apple's Upsell: The iTunes Pass — At Steve Jobs' insistence, the iTunes music store proposition to customers has always been simple: You pay us 99 cents, you get a song. But that's starting to change. — Earlier this year, the music labels finally got Apple (AAPL) to agree to a tiered pricing plan …
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Eric Savitz / Tech Trader Daily:
Nokia To Staff: Hey, Who Wants To Quit? — Nokia (NOK) this morning said that it offering employees a “voluntary resignation package” in an effort reduce its staff by 1,000 people. The company also said it “encourages” workers to take time off instead of cashing in days off for extra pay.
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Patrick Wintour / Guardian:
Facebook risks ‘infantilising’ the mind — Social network sites risk infantilising the mid-21st century mind, leaving it characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity, according to a leading neuroscientist.
Clive Thompson / Wired News:
The Netbook Effect: How Cheap Little Laptops Hit the Big Time — Netbooks prove that we finally know what PCs are actually for. Which is to say, not all that much. — Mary Lou Jepsen didn't set out to invent the netbook and turn the computer industry upside down. She was just trying to create a supercheap laptop.
Arnold Kim / MacRumors:
New NVIDIA-based iMacs Imminent? More Hints. — Over the past week, there have been an increasing number hints that the long-awaited iMac revisions are indeed imminent. Resellers have had low stocks of iMacs and educational Apple sales reps have been authorized to give special pricing on the current iMacs.
Philip Elmer-DeWitt / Apple 2.0:
Steve Jobs is 54 — Tuesday, Feb. 24, is Steve Jobs' birthday. — He turns 54. — To celebrate this very personal milestone, we thought we'd re-post what may be the most personal public speech this intensely private man has ever made: his 2005 commencement address to the Stanford University class of 2005.
Discussion:
Tech Trader Daily
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
InstantAction enables 3-D games in web browsers — InstantAction is announcing today the formal launch of its site that lets gamers play 3-D games in a web browser. — The site will have nine games that are available for free at the outset, with a half-dozen more games coming soon.
Andy Sternberg / netZoo:
To 90,000 Twitter Followers in 30 Days — Last month Twitter quietly launched a new feature that generated a list of suggested users to follow. Most likely as a result of this list, the followers to many Twitter accounts increased exponential over the course of the last month.
Cyril Kowaliski / The Tech Report:
Marvell unveils $99 wall-wart Linux PC — If you thought nettops were cheap, wait until you get a load of this: Marvell has announced the SheevaPlug, a $99 reference design based on the company's own “plug computer” concept. In short, this system plugs directly into a power socket …
Robert L. Mitchell / Computerworld:
When good browsers go bad — and they all do — Better browsers. Better standards. Better tools. So why are Web pages still breaking? — Computerworld) Jeffrey Zeldman must have thought he'd never live to see the day. Ten years after he co-founded the Web Standards Project …
Jacqui Cheng / Ars Technica:
Making sense of Mac market share figures — Apple's slice of the market share pie continues to grow, even during this economic downturn. But the numbers from different sources tend to be all over the place. What do they all mean, and what's the big picture for Apple's market share trajectory?
Discussion:
OSNews
Jessica Vascellaro / Digits:
Yahoo Loses a Deal-Maker, Point-Person in Microsoft Talks — By Jessica E. Vascellaro — As Yahoo chief executive Carol Bartz readies a company-wide reorganization, insiders are playing close attention to how she'll fill one critical hole. — Gerald Horkan, Yahoo's senior vice president …
Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Land:
Yahoo To Offer Day Parting, Demographic Targeting & Display Ads Based On Searches — Yahoo to Offer Tools To Match Users, Ads from the Wall Street Journal reports Yahoo is set to launch new ad features and tools today. What is expected to launch today is the ability for advertisers …
Amanda Hickman / MediaShift Idea Lab:
More thoughts on Times Open — I spent last Friday admiring the views of the Hudson from the 15th floor of the NY Times building, alongside Lisa Williams. Thought it was billed as a “hack day” there wasn't much actual hacking going on that I could find. There was a steady stream of presenters …
Mhtaylor Mhtaylor / Digits:
Intuit Defends its Threatening Letter to Mint.com — By Marisa Taylor — Does financial planning phenom Mint.com, one of the 34 tech pioneer companies invited to Davos for the World Economic Forum this year, have competitor Intuit shaking in its boots? — A letter sent to Mint CEO Aaron Patzer …
Discussion:
SmoothSpan Blog
Natasha Lomas / silicon.com:
“Android is not open. It's a marketing label” — Google, Symbian get claws out in ‘open’ cat fight — If you thought the rise of open OS platforms would herald a new era of peace and harmony in the mobile industry you'd be sadly mistaken, as rival players in the space Google and the Symbian Foundation …
InfoWorld:
VMware adds to cloud strategy — VMware has security for its cloud OS, an API for integrating internal and external clouds and improved management features in store for the visitors of VMworld Europe, which kicks off on Tuesday. — At the event, the company will continue to build …
