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10:05 PM ET, October 12, 2009

Techmeme

 Top Items: 
John Herrman / Gizmodo:
T-Mobile Lets Furious Sidekick Users Ditch Their Contracts for Free  —  T-Mobile's initial apologia to Sidekick users grieving their lost data was a joke.  A month of free data service?  To access what?  Now they've manned up, giving affected customers something they might actually want: A way out of their contracts.
RELATED:
Ina Fried / CNET News:
Sidekick users share their horror stories  —  After suffering through a weeklong outage, T-Mobile Sidekick users got even worse news on Saturday, when the company advised them that any data not on their phone was likely gone forever due to a hardware failure.
Ina Fried / CNET News:
T-Mobile halts sales of Sidekick  —  Wireless carrier T-Mobile USA has, at least temporarily, stopped selling all models of the Sidekick in the wake of a massive hardware failure that resulted in many customers losing their e-mail, contacts, and other data.  —  As of Sunday, all models …
John Cox / InfoWorld:
Some Sidekick users report data has been restored  —  A server failure had lost the user data, which was feared to be unrecoverable  —  Nearly a week after what started out as a service disruption, a few users of T-Mobile's Sidekick device are reporting that personal data feared lost forever …
Ina Fried / CNET News:
T-Mobile says Sidekick data may yet return  —  T-Mobile said late on Monday that it may yet be able to recover Sidekick users' information that it had previously thought was lost as part of a massive server failure by Microsoft's Danger subsidiary.  —  “Recent efforts indicate the prospects …
Discussion: PC World, Ars Technica and Digits
Vijay Bangaru / Docs Blog:
Shared folders and more in Google Docs  —  Today, we are happy to announce the updates to the Google Docs docs list that we promised in July.  We're rolling out these update gradually, so they should be available to everyone soon.  The biggest update is the introduction of shared folders …
Erica Ogg / CNET News:
Apple acknowledges Snow Leopard data loss issue  —  For the past month, some Mac OS X users have been reporting their personal data missing after logging into their guest accounts, and Apple now says it's working on finding a fix.  —  “We are aware of the issue, which occurs only in extremely rare cases …
Robin Wauters / TechCrunch:
Genentech's (And Apple Board Member) Arthur Levinson Leaves Google Board  —  Genentech chairman Arthur D. Levinson is resigning from Google's Board of Directors, the Mountain View company announced earlier this morning.  His departure comes shortly after Google Chairman and CEOEricSchmidt resigned …
RELATED:
Neil Hughes / AppleInsider:
Levinson resignation means Apple, Google boards sever last tie
Discussion: TG Daily and 9 to 5 Mac
MG Siegler / TechCrunch:
Chrome OS Peeks Out Its Head A Bit Further.  And What Is The Touchpad?  —  Pretty much every morning and every night I download the newest build of Chromium for Mac (the open source builds that will eventually turn into Chrome for Mac).  While we made an auto-updater to do it for you, you can also manually find the latest builds here.
Discussion: Maximum PC
Gregg Keizer / Computerworld:
Apple immune to Windows 7 impact, analyst says  —  Analysis shows Mac sales typically climb after Microsoft unveils a new OS  —  Computerworld - Microsoft's introduction of Windows 7 later this month won't cost Apple any Mac sales, a Wall Street analyst said today.
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Venture Funds Raise Only $1.6 Billion In Third Quarter.  Most Of That Went To Vinod Khosla.  —  More evidence that venture exits and fund raising are related.  We already know that venture exits were anemic in the third quarter of 2009, and now the National Venture Capital Association …
MG Siegler / TechCrunch:
Aiming To “Make Meaning,” Jaiku Co-Founder Leaves Google  —  In October 2007, Google bought the Finnish social networking site Jaiku.  In the following couple of years, they somehow managed to do absolutely nothing with it, even as rival Twitter rose in popularity.  Today, co-founder Jyri Engeström is leaving Google.
Caroline McCarthy / The Social:
Mystery Facebook outage affected about 150K users  —  Thousands of Facebook users who have been unable to access their accounts for nearly a week and a half now are now seeing their profiles restored—but some data related to recent profile updates may have been lost.  —  What happened?
Discussion: Maximum PC
Michael Learmonth / AdAge:
He Can Haz Big Blog Empire  —  Cheezburger Network CEO Ben Huh Takes Over the Net One Kitteh at a Time  —  NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Who knew pictures of cats with funny misspelled captions would evolve into one of the bigger indie blog networks in the world?
Discussion: 901am, Digits and Gawker
Jason Notte / TheStreet.com:
Microsoft's Ad Blitz Targets Wrong Enemy  —  REDMOND, Wash. (TheStreet) — Within the last year, Microsoft(MSFT Quote) has been Jerry Seinfeld's pal, a PC, a party planner and a four-year-old girl.  It has been a costly identity crisis.  —  It has also been a long 18 months of ad wars that's …
Discussion: Maximum PC
Emily Steel / Wall Street Journal:
Web Ads Hidden Under Cloak of Invisibility  —  Kraft Foods, Greyhound Lines and Capital One Financial have bought some strange ads on the Internet lately.  What's so strange about them is that they're invisible.  —  The companies might not have known about their invisible display ads …
Discussion: ClickZ, WebProNews and AdExchanger.com
Jackson West / NBC Bay Area:
More Layoffs Rumored at Current TV  —  Al Gore's news outlet moving production to LA, possibly outsourcing it entirely  —  San Francisco-based Current Media, cofounded by former Vice President Al Gore, is looking to lay off more local employees, according to a source familiar with its plans.
Discussion: Gawker, Thanks:nbcbayareacom
Anthony Ha / VentureBeat:
The Founder Institute's Adeo Ressi on his plans to leave no entrepreneur behind  —  Adeo Ressi is best known as the founding member of TheFunded, the site where entrepreneurs can rate venture capitalists.  Earlier this year, he got into the startup training business, with the launch of the Founder Institute.
Discussion: TechCrunch
Joanna Stern / Gizmodo:
Nokia Booklet 3G Hands On: Nice Netbook, But How Much?  —  The Nokia Booklet 3G has touched down on US soil.  The cell phone manufacturer's first laptop is made of sturdy stuff and is mobile broadband/SIM-card friendly.  I'd buy one if the price is right.  But chances are it's not.
Discussion: GigaOM
Electronista:
BlackBerry Storm 2 to show this week?  —  The BlackBerry Storm 2 should finally appear this week and represent RIM's best hope for challenging the iPhone, leaks claim today.  British newspaper The Guardian states as a matter of fact that the touchscreen BlackBerry is due to launch this week …
Harry McCracken / Technologizer:
Windows Vista: A Review Recap  —  Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer isn't so sure about how folks are going to respond to Windows 7.  As Mary-Jo Foley says in a ZDNet blog post, Ballmer told Bloomberg that “The test feedback (on Windows 7) has been good, but the test feedback on Vista was good.
Eric Eldon / Inside Facebook:
Facebook Asks Page Owners to Prove Authenticity  —  Creating a page on Facebook is pretty easy — so easy, in fact, that a lot of “unofficial” pages have sprung up for brands and celebrities.  But Facebook is trying to make pages an integral part of its advertising products …
Discussion: Lonely CEO Media
Wendy Davis / MediaPost:
Facebook Hit With Another Beacon Lawsuit  —  Facebook probably thought its Beacon problems were behind it last month, when it announced an agreement to settle a class-action privacy lawsuit.  But three Texas residents who have a pending lawsuit against Blockbuster for participating …
Mike Butcher / TechCrunch Europe:
The $1.5 billion scramble for Vente Privee by Gilt, eBay and Amazon  —  [France] On stage at last year's Le Web an argument broke out between co-founder Loic Le Meur and TechCrunch's Michael Arrington over whether Europe was capable of producing a ‘big win’ Web company or whether Skype was, perhaps, just a one-hit wonder.
Discussion: Quintura blog
Martin Ivens / Times of London:
From Twitter to MySpace, social networks are now run by women over 35  —  Social-networking sites, like much of the internet, were once a playground for young men.  They were drowning in obscure jargon, long rants and, of course, pornography.  But nowadays, it is a growing brigade of thirty …
 
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 More Items: 
Claire Cain Miller / New York Times:
Closing the Deal at the Virtual Checkout Counter
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Yahoo Loses Connected TV Leader Patrick Barry.  Is Bartz Paying Attention?
Discussion: paidContent and NewTeeVee
Tameka Kee / paidContent:
Comparison Shopper Become.com Acquires German E-commerce Firm Pangora
Erik Kirschbaum / Reuters:
Merkel criticizes Google for copyright infringement
Patrick Smith / paidContent:
Guardian Hiring Bloggers For Local News Network
Discussion: HyperlocalBlogger
Matt Marshall / VentureBeat:
Glam steals Yahoo's head of display advertising, Josh Jacobs
 Earlier Items: 
Olga Kharif / Business Week:
M-Commerce's Big Moment
The Steve Rubel Lifestream:
Posterous Catches Friendfeed
Charlie Sorrel / Gadget Lab:
Crippleware Alert!  International Kindle Gets No Web Access Outside U.S.
Discussion: Maximum PC
Jason Hiner / Between the Lines:
Ellison rips IBM, shows off Sun-Oracle benchmarks, offers $10M prize