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12:50 AM ET, November 18, 2009

Techmeme

 Top Items: 
The Official Google Blog:
Explore images with Google Image Swirl, now in Labs  —  Back in 2001, to give people a new, quicker way to find images, we launched Image Search.  When you do a search for [eiffel tower] you'll find an array of images of the tower in the daytime, in black and white, at sunset and more.
Anthony Ha / VentureBeat:
Microsoft's Ray Ozzie: Apps don't make your phone special  —  Microsoft's chief software architect Ray Ozzie weighed in at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference today on the battle between different smartphone platforms (including Windows Mobile).  It's not the applications available …
Discussion: TechFlash, Gizmodo, Daring Fireball and MSDN, Thanks:ilamont
RELATED:
Robert Scoble / Scobleizer:
Ray Ozzie is wrong about smartphone apps  —  Microsoft exec Ray Ozzie, at a lunchtime session with bloggers at its PDC conference told the bloggers that apps won't be a differentiating factor on smart phones.  —  He is wrong.  Totally wrong.  —  Why is Mike Arrington so passionate about his Droid …
Thanks:atul
MG Siegler / TechCrunch:
Google Holding Chrome OS Event Thursday.  Complete Overview And Launch Plans To Be Revealed.  —  Google is planning to hold a special Chrome OS event at its headquarters in Mountain View, CA this Thursday morning, we've just been notified.  The plan is to give some technical background information …
BBC:
T-Mobile staff sold personal data  —  Staff at mobile phone company T-Mobile passed on millions of records from thousands of customers to third party brokers, the firm has confirmed.  —  Details emerged after the firm alerted the information commissioner, who said his office was preparing a prosecution.
Greg Sandoval / CNET News:
Feds: Top e-tailers profitting from billion-dollar Web scam  —  Note 1:09 p.m. PT: This post is being updated as the Senate hearing takes place Tuesday afternoon.  —  Three companies have generated more than $1.4 billion by “misleading” Web shoppers into signing up for so-called loyalty program memberships …
RELATED:
Brian X. Chen / Gadget Lab:
How Microsoft Blew It With Windows Mobile  —  Microsoft Windows continues to dominate the PC market with a 90 percent market-share stronghold, but when it comes to smartphones, Microsoft is getting beat up worse than a mustachioed villain in a Jackie Chan movie.
Discussion: Electronista and MacDailyNews
Venture Capital Dispatch:
Digg CEO: Profitability Is Not A Problem Anymore  —  Digg.com launched as experiment in 2004 to let people post articles from various news sources, which are then either selected by other users for inclusion on the main page or passed over.  Now with about 40 million users …
Discussion: ReadWriteWeb
Michael Richter / Facebook Blog:
New Privacy Policy Adopted  —  On Nov. 5, we wrapped up a week-long notice and comment period for a proposed revision to our privacy policy.  This was a continuation of our ongoing effort to run Facebook in an open and transparent way.  The goals of the revised policy were to make it more accessible and easier to understand.
Ina Fried / CNET News:
Internet Explorer 9 not coming at PDC  —  LOS ANGELES—Although Microsoft intends to talk a bit about its plans for the future of Internet Explorer this week, the company won't offer preview code of its next browser, CNET has learned.  —  The software maker is also not planning to announce …
Discussion: Asa Dotzler, ParisLemon and TechSpot
RELATED:
Leena Rao / TechCrunch:
Yahoo Go Is A No Go  —  Before there was an iPhone, Android and App Store, there was Yahoo! Go.  Launched in 2006, Yahoo! Go was an application offered news, mail, weather, traffic, and Yahoo! search from a mobile device.  Today, Yahoo is announcing that Yahoo! Go will be shutdown on January 12, 2010.
Anurag Acharya / The Official Google Blog:
Finding the laws that govern us  —  As many of us recall from our civics lessons in school, the United States is a common law country.  That means when judges issue opinions in legal cases, they often establish precedents that will guide the rulings of other judges in similar cases and jurisdictions.
Om Malik / GigaOM:
Norwest Closes $1.2 Billion Venture Fund  —  Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), one of the most respected funds in Silicon Valley says that it has closed NVP XI, a $1.2 Billion fund that would invest in diverse sectors and geographies.  NVP, which recently recorded a major hit with the $405 million sale …
Discussion: VentureBeat and PE Hub Blog, Thanks:atul
Joe Wilcox / BetaNews:
Windows Azure opens for business on Jan. 1, 2010  —  This morning, Microsoft kicked off its 2009 Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles.  Typically, Microsoft times PDC around new operating systems that are testing and launching in the near future.  Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 launched less than a month ago.
Ernesto / TorrentFreak:
The Pirate Bay Tracker Shuts Down for Good  —  In the fall of 2003, a group of friends from Sweden decided to launch a BitTorrent tracker named ‘The Pirate Bay’.  It soon became one of the largest BitTorrent trackers on the Internet, coordinating the downloads of more than 25 million peers at its height.
RELATED:
Electronista:
ASUS best, HP worst for notebook reliability  —  A new study published by SquareTrade revealed that the smaller name brand notebook manufacturers are usually more reliable than their larger rivals.  Of the top nine, ASUS has the lowest tracked breakdown rate with fewer than 10 percent of its notebooks failing in the past two years.
Stacey Higginbotham / GigaOM:
Android Gets Some Serious Support for Consumer Devices  —  ARM and more than 35 other companies have banded together to create an alliance dubbed the Solution Center for Android, which is aimed at increasing the resources available for developers trying to build for the relatively young OS on top of ARM hardware.
Elinor Mills / CNET News:
Report: Countries prepping for cyberwar  —  Major countries and nation-states are engaged in a “Cyber Cold War,” amassing cyberweapons, conducting espionage, and testing networks in preparation for using the Internet to conduct war, according to a new report to be released on Tuesday by McAfee.
Discussion: Associated Press, BBC and eWeek
Brad Stone / Bits:
Hulu Steps Into Music With EMI and Norah Jones  —  Hulu, the joint online venture between NBC, Fox and ABC that mostly offers free TV shows and movies, is about to start singing a different tune: music videos.  —  On Wednesday the company plans to announce a somewhat limited deal with EMI …
Discussion: paidContent
Elizabeth Armstrong Moore / Crave:
A stethoscope app?  Be still my beating heart  —  If you're the kind of person who likes to take scissors to old gadgets, this one's for you.  Start-up RidRx is now selling an adapter to connect old stethoscopes to an iPhone or iPod Touch, along with a phone dock/holder and an app that translates …
Discussion: Medgadget
Dave Parrack / TECH.BLORGE.com:
Stephen Fry talks Twitter - “human shaped, not business shaped”  —  Twitter is a massively popular social networking and micro-blogging site that has gained an inordinate amount of headlines and copy over the past year or so.  But what is the nature of Twitter?
Discussion: Telegraph
David Kaplan / paidContent:
PalTalk Buys Virtual Phone-Number Provider Vumber  —  Video-based chat service Paltalk has acquired Vumber, a service that provides “disposable” phone numbers.  Terms weren't disclosed.  New York-based PalTalk began working with Vumber last February.  Vumber's service promises privacy …
Discussion: GigaOM
Priya Ganapati / Gadget Lab:
Android's Rapid Growth Has Some Developers Worried  —  A year after its release, Google's open source Android operating system has become a sensation.  After a slow start, it is now available on at least 12 phones, with more devices waiting in the wings.  —  Good news for Android fans, right?
Thomas Ricker / Engadget:
Microsoft Store employees perform dance of the cringe (video)  —  Why is it that whenever Microsoft tries to have a little “fun” it comes across as creepy or overly controlled?  This time it's Microsoft's Mission Viejo Store employees engaged in a fit of awkward boogie that some would call the Electric Slide.
MG Siegler / TechCrunch:
Over A Year After Android Launch, ShopSavvy Finally Comes To The iPhone  —  ShopSavvy was one of the best early Android applications.  It launched in October of last year after winning one of the initial Android Developer Challenge top prizes (when it was still known as GoCart).
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
Intel Capital invests $25M in 7 new startups  —  Intel said today that it has invested $25 million in seven new startups as part of its goal of increasing demand for its own products.  —  The investments were led by Intel Capital, which is the investment arm of the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip maker.
MG Siegler / TechCrunch:
Online Subscription Billing Is A Pain.  Recurly Wants To Alleviate It.  —  Most startups have about a billion things to worry about.  For many of them, this includes execution of their business model.  With online ad networks depressed, increasingly, a number of those companies are starting to explore subscription-based models.
Thanks:recurly
Agence France Presse:
Court rules against Microsoft in China font case  —  BEIJING — A Chinese court has ruled Microsoft Corp. infringed a Chinese company's intellectual property rights by including certain fonts in its operating systems, the companies confirmed Tuesday.  —  Beijing's No.1 Intermediate People's …
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
Zynga raises more venture capital for social gaming expansion  —  Zynga has become the hottest social gaming company with more than 196 million users on Facebook alone.  Today, the San Francisco company has raised $15.18 million in an extension to its second round of funding, according to a regulatory filing.
 
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 More Items: 
Craig Settles / Daily Yonder:
Rewiring an Old Fund for Rural Broadband
Discussion: TELEPHONY Magazine
Bill Ray / The Register:
EU sweeps up dodgy ringtone companies
Discussion: mocoNews and BBC
Mike Masnick / Techdirt:
Brazilian Hacking Attempts Fail To Break Brazilian E-Voting …
David Needle / internetnews.com:
IBM Offers Lotus Symphony to Go
James Kendrick / jkOnTheRun:
eReader for Android Available
Don Reisinger / CNET News:
Report: Twitter still ‘missed opportunity’ for Fortune 100s
Discussion: WebProNews
 Earlier Items: 
Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:
Betaworks, Cuban Invest in Real-Time Transformer Superfeedr
Discussion: Superfeedr Blog and paidContent
Harry McCracken / Technologizer:
TypePad Takes on Tumblr With Free Microblogging Feature
Discussion: Everything TypePad
DeWitt Clinton / Open Web Foundation:
Introducing the Open Web Foundation Agreement
Philip Elmer-DeWitt / Brainstorm Tech:
The great Belgian iPhone robbery