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11:55 AM ET, October 14, 2009

Techmeme

 Top Items: 
Olga Kharif / Business Week:
Wi-Fi Is About to Get a Whole Lot Easier  —  A consortium that includes Intel, Cisco, and Apple is set to release new technology called Wi-Fi Direct that will turn a slew of gadgets into hotspots  —  Going Wi-Fi is about to get a lot easier.  For many consumers, setting up an in-home Wi-Fi connection point is something of a hassle.
RELATED:
Wi-Fi Alliance:
Wi-Fi Alliance® announces groundbreaking specification to support direct Wi-Fi connections between devices  —  Upcoming Wi-Fi CERTIFIED™ Wi-Fi Direct program will make it easy to connect devices directly to one another in a new kind of Wi-Fi network
New York Times:
BlackBerry, Upgraded, Aims to Suit Every User  —  The Storm was supposed to be the smartphone that would keep Verizon Wireless customers from deserting to Apple's iPhone, which runs on AT&T's network.  —  Research In Motion, the company that created the BlackBerry phones that business users find …
Andrew Munchbach / Boy Genius Report:
Apple shipping iPhone 3GS' resistant to jailbreaking?  —  To be perfectly honest we're surprised it took this long.  Reports are surfacing that Apple is now shipping a new bootrom with the iPhone 3GS that is resistant to the 24kpwn exploit used by the Dev-Team and others to jailbreak the iPhone.
The Anti LumberJack / Gizmodo:
Barnes and Noble's E-Reader Like a Kindle/iPhone Chimera: First Photos and Details  —  Barnes and Noble's late to e-books.  But the company's new gadget—first seen here—should address the weaknesses of all other readers with multiple screens, each playing to tech strengths.
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
The New Technorati  —  Technorati relaunched its site tonight, changing and adding key features.  Most notable is an expanded and fresher top 100 blogs list, and a new feature that lets authors post their content directly to the site.  —  In 2007 Technorati redesigned the look and functionality of its home page three times.
Jim Dalrymple / CNET News:
iMovie update reveals new Apple video format  —  Like most companies, Apple periodically releases software updates for its applications, fixing minor issues.  However, an iMovie update released on Tuesday revealed a brand new video format the company has been developing.
RELATED:
Cade Metz / The Register:
Michael Dell: Netbooks go sour after 36 hours  —  You'll be happier if you give me more money  —  According to Michael Dell, a netbook is a dream purchase - until it's about 36 hours.  —  “If you take a user who's used to a 14- or 15-inch notebook and you say 'Here's a 10-inch netbook,' they're gonna say 'Hey, this is so fantastic.
Seth Weintraub / 9 to 5 Mac:
In-house Radio.app in the works for iPhone and iPod touch  —  We've just received a tip that an iPhone radio.app is being developed in-house by Apple for use on the iPhone and iPod touch.  From what we know, the app will be allowed to operate in the background like iPod.app and will offer …
Ben Sillis / Electricpig.co.uk:
Acer Android smartphone hands-on!  —  UPDATE: The Acer Android smartphone is the A1, and it comes with Android version 1.6 - AKA Donut.  Acer's talking about it right now at its London prezzer, so more details to come.  —  UPDATE 2: Acer's dancing to two different tunes here.
RELATED:
Brad Stone / New York Times:
Still Hoping to Sell Music by the Month  —  SAN FRANCISCO — The idea of selling monthly subscriptions to a vast catalog of online music has met with only limited success.  That isn't stopping a new batch of entrepreneurs from trying to make it work.  —  The latest and perhaps …
Tom Lowry / Business Week:
Bloomberg Wins Bidding For BusinessWeek  —  Bloomberg LP, the global financial data and news empire created by New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, is the winning bidder for BusinessWeek.  —  Terms of the offer will not be disclosed by Bloomberg and BusinessWeek parent McGraw-Hill Cos.
Joanna Stern / Gizmodo:
Acer Slaps a Multitouch Screen On Its $800 Aspire 5738PG  —  You wouldn't know it by looking at it, but that is Acer's new multitouch laptop.  Sort of like Lenovo has done with the T400s, Acer has put a multitouch screen on an existing clamshell notebook.  —  Besides its long ass model number …
Discussion: GottaBeMobile.com and Maximum PC
RELATED:
Chad / That Smith:
Google Wave Add-on for Firefox  —  Google probably isn't going to be happy about this, but I present to you the first ever Google Wave Notifier... for Firefox.  —  This is the first version of the add-on which reuses code from my other add-on, the Google Voice Add-on for Firefox (I'm great with names).
Robin Wauters / TechCrunch:
Applause For Finland: First Country To Make Broadband Access A Legal Right  —  Kudos to the Finnish government, which has just introduced laws guaranteeing broadband access to every person living in Finland (5.5 million people, give or take).  —  This is reportedly a first worldwide.
Claire Cain Miller / Bits:
Shazam's Newest Fan Is Kleiner Perkins's iFund  —  For cellphone owners, Shazam has abolished the nagging question about which song is playing.  Its cellphone application lets people simply hold the phone toward the source of the music to identify it.  —  It will soon be able to do a lot more …
Jeff Atwood / Coding Horror:
The State of Solid State Hard Drives  —  I've seen a lot of people play The Computer Performance Shell Game poorly.  They overinvest in a fancy CPU, while pairing it with limited memory, a plain jane hard drive, or a generic video card.  For most users, that fire-breathing quad-core CPU …
Oliver Lindberg / TechRadar.com:
The secrets of Google's design team  —  Google's Director of User Experience reveals all  —  When Google's renowned visual design lead, Douglas Bowman, left the search giant at the end of March, he wrote a passionate blog post about his reasons for quitting.
Nate Anderson / Ars Technica:
The Internet is about to die.  Literally die!  —  In 2007, Nemertes Research released a dire report on Internet traffic.  By 2010, it said, the “exponential” growth in demand for bandwidth will butt up against the “linear” investment in networking technology, and that whole Internet thing you've come …
Discussion: DSLreports
Derek Powazek:
Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists  —  Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing.  It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls.  If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.  —  First came the web, and it was a mess.
RELATED:
Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land:
An Open Letter To Derek Powazek On The Value Of SEO
Seth Rosenblatt / CNET News:
Opera prepares Unite for release  —  Opera Unite was going to change the Web, according to the hype from the Norwegian browser maker.  Despite only being available for a number of months in a beta separate from the main Opera build—and the Internet looking more or less like the same place in the aftermath …
Abbey Klaassen / AdAge:
Microsoft Taps ‘Family Guy’ to Help Sell Windows 7  —  Inks Branded-Entertainment Deal With Seth MacFarlane for Commercial-Free Variety Show on Fox  —  NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — To sell people on the merits of its latest operating system, Windows 7, Microsoft has employed good old-fashioned PR …
Leena Rao / TechCrunch:
As Facebook Nears 100M U.S. Visitors, Twitter Falls Further Behind In The Rear-View Mirror  —  Although Facebook recently admitted that Twitter was in its rear-view mirror, it appears that Twitter may be moving out of eyeshot.  September's U.S. comScore data has just been released and it appears …
Discussion: Softpedia News
MG Siegler / TechCrunch:
A First Glimpse Of Chrome OS In The Flesh  —  Following our post about Chrome OS yesterday, it looks like those wily folks at Google have removed the “chromeos” folder from the Chromium build folder.  Too bad.  But luckily, before they did, TechCrunch reader and Linux user, Jonathan Frederickson …
Theo Valich / Bright Side Of News:
nVidia Tegra wins contract for next-gen Nintendo DS  —  When Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and CEO of nVidia announced that he expects to see Tegra capturing 50% of nVidia's revenue within the next couple of years, a lot of people thought that this is a smoke screen to sway the attention from its battles against AMD and Intel.
Austin Modine / The Register:
Internet coalescing into lump of Google  —  And P2P is so 2007  —  The internet is looking much lumpier than it was just a few years ago.  In 2007, the majority of internet traffic was more evenly distributed across tens of thousands of networks.  Now, just 300 networks contribute …
Discussion: Arbor Networks
Jennifer Martinez / GigaOM:
Aardvark to Answer More Questions With Vark.com  —  Aardvark today expanded its answer service beyond its iPhone and instant messenger application offerings with the launch of Vark.com, a social search web site.  Unlike Yelp and Yahoo Answers, Aardvark's service lets you tap into your social graph to get answers to your questions.
 
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 More Items: 
Stuart Dredge / Music Ally:
Spotify's new frontiers: Facebook and games consoles
Discussion: hypebot and Pocket-lint.com
Jenna Wortham / Bits:
Digg's Vote-for-Ads Experiment Is Raising Revenue
Discussion: MarketingVOX
Mark Spoonauer / LAPTOP Mag:
Tegra-Powered Mobinnova Beam Smartbook Launching at CES
Discussion: SlashGear, Engadget and Netbooked
Amy Schatz / Wall Street Journal:
FCC Seeks Broad Open-Internet Rules
Discussion: The Precursor Blog
Breeanna Hare / CNN:
Does your social class determine your online social network?
Nicolas Mertens / The Next Web:
Tweetmeme takes in half of 3rd-party Twitter traffic
Thanks:zee
Maggie Shiels / BBC:
US city to start giant ‘mapathon’
Discussion: dailywireless.org
Robin Wauters / TechCrunch Europe:
Joost UK dissolves, office furniture already in the hands of another startup
Discussion: BoomTown and Beet.TV, Thanks:mgcreed
 Earlier Items: 
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Go.USA.Gov! Our Taxpayer Money Hard At Work Shortening URLs.
Discussion: Erictric and The Next Web
Farhad Manjoo / Slate:
The Google Wave chatting tool is too complicated for its own good.
Joe Flint / Company Town:
Weinstein Co. selling controlling stake in exclusive social networking site
 

 
From Mediagazer:

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

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”

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

 
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