Techmeme: RIM: The inmates have taken over the asylum (Jean-Louis Gassée/Monday Note)

12:00 AM ET, March 28, 2011

Top Items:

Jean-Louis Gassée / Monday Note:

RIM: The inmates have taken over the asylum — Once upon a time, the Blackberry was the king of smartphones. After a succession of Psion PDAs and Palm devices, I loved my Blackberry, it was the perfect PIM (Personal Information Manager). Email, contacts and calendar functions worked well together …

Discussion: datasecurityblog.wordpress.com, Daring Fireball and WMPoweruser.com

Larry Dignan / Between the Lines Blog:

RIM: The obits are a bit premature — Days before Research in Motion launches its PlayBook tablet analysts and tech observers are scrambling to predict the demise of the company. The gloom and doom may be misplaced. — Look, it's obvious that RIM has a few issues. Consider:

Tom Krazit / mocoNews: Lukewarm Reaction To Playbook Could Force Drastic Measures For RIM

New York Times:

Is It a New Tech Bubble? Let's See if It Pops — Banks pouring money into technology funds, wealthy clients and institutions clamoring to get pieces of start-ups, expectations of stock market debuts building — as Wall Street's machinery kicks into second gear, some investors with memories …

Discussion: Scripting News, andrew hillman dot com, @alexia, @cdixon and @om

Chris / cdixon.org:

A few points about the “tech bubble” debate — Pretty much every day now a major blog or newspaper writes an article asking whether we are experiencing another tech bubble (e.g. see today's NYTimes). I don't know whether successful private companies like Groupon, Zynga …

Discussion: Launching Tech Ventures and VentureBeat

Paul Kedrosky / Bloomberg:
Dear Warren: Here are the Overvalued Social Networking Companies

Discussion: Howard Lindzon and Webware.com, Thanks:pkedrosky

Wall Street Journal:

Google Pursues Role in Mobile Payments — Google Inc. is teaming up with MasterCard Inc. and Citigroup Inc. to embed technology in Android mobile devices that would allow consumers to make purchases by waving their smartphones in front of a small reader at the checkout counter, according to people familiar with the matter.

Discussion: @amir_efrati

Michael Gorman / Engadget:

WSJ: Google teams with MasterCard and Citigroup for NFC payments, also files patent app — Ever since the Nexus S and its nifty little NFC chip hit the market, there's been speculation that El Goog was planning a foray into the mobile payment arena currently occupied by the likes of Charge Anywhere.

Katie Hafner / New York Times:

Paul Baran, Internet Pioneer, Dies at 84 — Paul Baran, an engineer who helped create the technical underpinnings for the Arpanet, the government-sponsored precursor to today's Internet, died Saturday night at his home in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 84. — The cause was complications from lung cancer, said his son, David.

Discussion: GigaOM, Network World and @psaffo

Casey Newton / San Francisco Chronicle:

S.F. tech jobs climb near level of dot-com peak — As technology companies' soaring valuations draw comparisons to the dot-com days, a new analysis highlights another similarity: The number of tech workers in San Francisco today is nearing its peak in 2000.

Discussion: Paul Kedrosky's …, New York Times and L.A. Times Tech Blog

Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:

Nintendo 3DS review: Is it worth $249 and $40 per game? — Nintendo has done its best to launch a new era in video games with the launch of its 3DS portable gaming system, which goes on sale for $249 on Sunday. The appeal of this device, which can display games in stereoscopic 3D without glasses, is growing on me.

Discussion: Joystiq

Jared Newman / Technologizer:
Nintendo 3DS Launches, Haunted by Smartphones

Discussion: Digital Trends, The Business Insider and CrunchGear

Andrew Ross Sorkin / DealBook:

Facebook May Hire Robert Gibbs, Former Obama Aide — Facebook is in talks to hire Robert Gibbs, President Obama's former White House press secretary, for a senior role in helping to manage the company's communications, people briefed on the negotiations said.

Sean Bonner / Boing Boing:

iPhone app store of “Color” may be best app store review ever — Sean Bonner has been involved with blogs and hackerspaces and art galleries and record labels of the punk rock variety. Now he's on Twitter. — The photo sharing/social network app Color launched last week …

Discussion: TechCrunch, mike's posterous and Don't go outside

Chester Wisniewski / Naked Security:

Comodo hacker outs himself, claims “no relation to Iranian Cyber Army” — The alleged hacker of Comodo stepped forward this weekend to explain how he generated bogus SSL certificates for login.skype.com, mail.google.com, login.live.com and other popular internet websites.

Discussion: Computerworld, Errata Security and Computerworld

MG Siegler / TechCrunch:

iOS 5 Likely Pushed To The Fall After A Cloud Unveiling At WWDC — Many people (including myself) were a bit disappointed that Apple didn't devote any time during the iPad 2 unveiling to talking about iOS 5, the next major revamp of the software. But there may be a very good reason for that: it's not coming anytime soon.

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