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8:55 PM ET, March 3, 2011

Techmeme

 Top Items: 
Nielsen Wire:
Who is Winning the U.S. Smartphone Battle?  —  The answer depends on whether you're looking at operating systems or manufacturers.  —  The battle for the hearts and minds of consumer smartphone owners continues to be a heated one according to data just released by The Nielsen Company.
Garett Sloane / New York Post:
Facebook co-founder set to sell 10M shares  —  While deep-pocketed investors from New York to Beijing are clamoring to buy a piece of Facebook, news that a co-founder of the social networking giant is shopping around a portion of his stake is raising eyebrows on Wall Street, The Post has learned.
Fred / A VC:
Techmeme vs Hacker News  —  My two favorite tech news aggregators are Techmeme and Hacker News.  I visit both multiple times per day for a quick scan of what is going on in techland.  —  They are very different and you can see that in action this morning.  —  Here is the above the fold Techmeme right now (9am eastern):
Marco Arment / Marco.org:
A rare disagreement  —  John Gruber:  —  The root cause for so much of the subscription ruckus, I think, isn't that 30% number — it's that Apple pulled the rug out from under some major apps after the fact.  And unlike nearly every App Store rule change in the past, this is a major change …
Discussion: Daring Fireball
Andy Chu / Bing:
Bing Launches Deals  —  Calling all bargain hunters, deal lovers, Groupon groupies and Living Social fanatics!  Things just got easier.  —  Today we're launching Bing deals for the desktop and mobile (m.bing.com) - giving you access to more than 200,000 unique offers in over 14,000 cities …
RELATED:
Matt Rosoff / SAI: Silicon Alley Insider:
Microsoft Adds Daily Deals To Bing
Joe Wilcox / BetaNews:
iPad 2 wasn't Apple's big March 2nd announcement  —  It was the software — FaceTime, Garage Band, iMovie and Photo Booth — and the colorful Smart Covers.  I kid you not.  There are good reasons why so much of yesterday's launch event focused on software — hell, Apple even made a video …
MG Siegler / TechCrunch:
With “Quick Bar”, Twitter Has Figured Out How To Cram Ads Into The Stream  —  Twitter has just rolled out a pretty substantial new update to the iOS versions of its app today.  Several of the new features look nice, such as the new Tweet box design, and the easier way to find friends via phone contacts.
RELATED:
Seth Weintraub / Fortune:
Steve Jobs' reality distortion takes its toll on truth  —  Apple twisted facts and used an erroneous quotation to try to convince crowds that all other tablets had no shot at de-throning the iPad in 2011.  —  In what seems like a ritual at this point, I watched Apple's iPad 2 keynote in disbelief …
Discussion: Engadget and MacStories
MG Siegler / TechCrunch:
Ditto: The Social App For What You Should Be Doing  —  Think about Foursquare right now.  You can tell everyone what you're currently doing, but there's no good mechanism for planning something to do or for getting a recommendation for something to do.  Sure, you could use “shouts” that way.
David Kirkpatrick / Vanity Fair:
Twitter Was Act One  —  Considering that he invented Twitter and is about to launch another potential game changer with his new company, Square, Jack Dorsey has one of the lowest profiles in tech.  But from his childhood obsession (city maps) to his dream job (mayor of New York City) …
Discussion: eMoney, TechCrunch and @tedr
Charles Babcock / InformationWeek:
Why Sun Microsystems Failed  —  Former CEO Scott McNealy's allegiance to Sun's hardware culture shortchanged its software initiatives, and ultimately doomed the company.  —  Scott McNealy believes the best preparation for business is to play hockey.  The teamwork, the individual risk taking …
David Faber / The Faber Report:
Latest Facebook Investment Values Company at $65 Billion  —  General Atlantic, a $17 billion investment firm, will soon become the latest investor in Facebook, buying one tenth of one percent of the company in a deal that values the social networking giant at $65 billion, according to people with knowledge of the transaction.
Thomas Catan / Wall Street Journal:
Web Video Rivalry Sparks U.S. Probe  —  The Justice Department is investigating whether a group representing some top technology firms is unfairly trying to smother a free rival technology for delivering online video that is backed by Google Inc., according to people familiar with the matter.
Mike Butcher / TechCrunch Europe:
Disney acquires gaming engine startup to build HTML5 games outside of App stores  —  Disney has acquired an HTML5 gaming engine startup called Rocket Pack, based out of Helsinki, Finalnd.  A Disney spokesperson told us today, exclusively: “We can confirm that The Walt Disney Company has acquired Rocketpack …
Cecilia Kang / Post Tech:
Free messaging apps threaten wireless carriers' cash cow  —  Here's the dirty secret about text messages.  It costs a wireless carrier close to nothing to send and receive them — even though they charge about $10 a month for 500 to 1,000 texts.  —  Now, a new crop of messaging apps …
Discussion: dailywireless.org and DSLreports
Gina Trapani / Smarterware:
The Case Against Drop-down Identities  —  Human beings and their relationships are complex and nuanced, so the software that attempts to describe them must accomodate a wide range of expression.  Last night, Google rolled out an update to the Google Profiles product, which I've promoted for for almost 2 years.
Jennifer Allan / Electricpig.co.uk:
iPad price drop: Apple will refund the difference  —  If you recently bought an iPad, only to find that there's now a shiny new iPad 2 and a whopping great £100 reduction on the price tag of the original iPad, do not be alarmed!  Apple will refund you the difference, so you could still take advantage of that iPad price drop.
Florian Mueller / FOSS Patents:
Microsoft and Google jointly sue GeoTag Inc. in order to invalidate a patent asserted against more than 300 entities  —  Google and Microsoft have joined forces to take down a Texas company's geotagging patent that they claim has been used in lawsuits against more than 300 entities, many of which are customers of the two companies.
Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
The Twitter Story Fail  —  It's amazing to me how wrong The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times were on their Twitter fundraising stories last week.  All claimed multiple independent sources, but everyone got the story wrong in the same way.
Mary Jo Foley / All about Microsoft Blog:
A low-tech Microsoft slate for the masses  —  You can never be too thin or too fast ... or too pricey — if you're a slate/tablet targeted at the developed world.  But if customers in the developing world are your focus, iPads, Galaxy Tabs and Windows 7 business slates are probably out of the reach of most of them.
Nir Ben Yona / Technologer:
Did Apple Just ‘Borrow’ The Smart Cover Idea From Incase?  —  Apple has really blown our minds away with their latest and greatest Smart Cover revelation, yesterday morning.  Designed specifically for iPad 2 devices, the fabulous and colorful covers - soon to be offered in polyurethane or leather flavors …
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
Browser makers release standard to bring 3D graphics to web apps without plug-ins  —  An industry consortium including browser makers Apple, Mozilla, Opera and Google today announced it has created a final standard on how to deliver built-in 3D graphics in web pages that won't require a plug-in or add-on to the browser.
Discussion: The Register
WordPress.com / @wordpressdotcom:
Discussion: TechSpot
RELATED:
Alexia Tsotsis / TechCrunch:
WordPress.com Suffers Largest DDoS Attack In Its History
Cryptome:
Birgitta Jonsdottir Interview on Wikileaks  —  Icelander Birgitta Jonsdottir - poet, author, activist, and member of parliament - has now broken with WikiLeaks, but she is continuing to devote herself to making her country a haven for information, a Switzerland of the bytes.
Horace Dediu / asymco:
Apps are 15 times more popular than ebooks … The Passion of Steve Jobs - NYTimes.com  —  It was almost exactly three years ago that Steve Jobs dismissed the Kindle reader as a futile attempt to change user behavior.  —  Yesterday, Steve Jobs announced that the iBooks store served 100 million ebooks …
Discussion: Kindle Review
Lacey Rose / Hollywood Reporter:
CEO Tim Armstrong, Arianna Huffington Reveal AOL's Ambitious Hollywood Strategy  —  On the new cover of The Hollywood Reporter magazine with Huffington and new AOL partner Heidi Klum, Armstrong says, “We have a plan and we're executing as quickly as almost any company in our space.”
Discussion: GigaOM and Company Town
 
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 More Items: 
Nate Anderson / Ars Technica:
Illegal TV streamers, here's how the feds will hunt you down
Jim Popkin / Epicenter:
Robert Soloway Exits Prison, Disavows ‘Spam King’ Ways
Tiernan Ray / Tech Trader Daily:
INTC: Piper Sees Change Of Guard In Tech Wave
Eric Slivka / MacRumors:
‘Joint Venture’ Small Business Program Officially Launched
Discussion: The Next Web, TUAW, Macworld and 9 to 5 Mac
 Earlier Items: 
Larry Dignan / Between the Lines Blog:
Comcast's Roberts aims to make the cable box cool, take on Netflix
Discussion: CrunchGear and Electronista
Ryan Kim / GigaOM:
Instapaper's Arment: Seek Money From Customers, Not VCs
Nathan Olivarez-Giles / L.A. Times Tech Blog:
Gmail service fully restored after several days of problems, Google says
Discussion: NBC Bay Area
Desire Athow / ITProPortal:
Exclusive : Nvidia Confirms Samsung Tegra 2 Design Win
 

 
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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