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5:30 PM ET, August 16, 2011

Techmeme

 Top Items: 
Eric Savitz / The Tech Trade:
Google: S&P Cuts Rating To Sell From Buy; Sees Risks In Deal  —  Citing concerns about about Google's plan to spend $12.5 billion to buy Motorola Mobility, Standard & Poor's analyst Scott Kessler today cut his rating on the search engine's stock to Sell from Buy, slashing his price target on the stock to $500, from $700.
RELATED:
Olga Kharif / Bloomberg:
RIM Left in 'No Man's Land' By Google Deal  —  Research In Motion Ltd. (RIMM), maker of the BlackBerry smartphone and PlayBook tablet computer, may have the most to lose from Google Inc. (GOOG)'s deal to acquire Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc.  —  Google's proposed $12.5 billion acquisition …
Andrew Ross Sorkin / DealBook:
Is Google Turning Into a Mobile Phone Company?  No, It Says  —  Back in 2004, Eric E. Schmidt, then Google's chief executive, proclaimed, “We're not going into the phone business, but we're going to make sure Google is on those phones.”  —  Less than a year later, however, Google did the opposite.
Ina Fried / AllThingsD:
U.S. Carriers Silent on Motoroogle, but France Telecom Gives It a Thumbs Up
Donald Melanson / Engadget:
Why is LTE equipment being installed in an Apple Store?  —  Well, this is certainly interesting.  While rumors of an LTE-enabled iPhone had died down for a little while, they sprung back to life yesterday with a report that just such a device was being tested by carriers.
Reuters:
Taiwan's HTC sues Apple over patents  —  (Reuters) - Smartphone maker HTC Corp sued Apple Inc, claiming infringement of three patents through Apple's sale of Macintosh computers, iPads, iPods, iPhones and other devices.  —  The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Delaware seeks …
John Martellaro / The Mac Observer:
Calculating the Size of Apple's Spaceship HQ  —  TMO TALK (25)  —  New architectural information has been released about Apple's proposed, so-called spaceship headquarters in Cupertino.  There are lots of things to know about it, but one interesting fact is the diameter.
Mark Gurman / 9to5Mac:
Apple releases $69 OS X Lion thumb drive, ships in 1-3 business days  —  As expected, Apple has released OS X Lion on a USB thumb drive via their online store.  The $69 thumb drive ships in 1-3 business days and requires 7GB of available storage space.  One caveat for users that install OS X Lion via …
RELATED:
Josh Lowensohn / Crave: The gadget blog:
Starbucks serves up free iPhone apps  —  Starbucks is now serving up paid applications for free as part of its “Pick of the Week” program.  —  The next time you go into a Starbucks for a drink or snack, you could end up walking out with a free iPhone app too.
Daniel Rocha / Inside Search:
The evolution of sitelinks: expanded and improved  —  (Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)  —  When you're searching, you often have a specific task in mind, like figuring out which exhibits are showing at a nearby museum.  Despite this narrow goal, people often start with a broad query …
Peter Kafka / AllThingsD:
Fox Starts Its Web Pullback, and ABC Gets Ready to Follow  —  Fox has formally kicked off the The Great Free TV Web Pullback of 2011.  Now get ready for ABC to do the same.  —  Yesterday Fox followed through with its previously announced plans to keep its new shows off the Web for eight days …
Florian Mueller / FOSS Patents:
Galaxy Tab 10.1 injunction suspended for all EU countries except Germany  —  Dutch website Webwereld, which also raised issues yesterday concerning pictures of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 presented by Apple to the Düsseldorf court, was first to break the news that the Landgericht (district court) …
Harry McCracken / Time:
Techmeme  —  Want to know what's new in the world of tech?  You could visit one of the big news sites or blogs.  Or you could go right to the site that reporters and bloggers check obsessively throughout the day.  Gabe Rivera's Techmeme pulls together articles from around the Web …
Discussion: Beet.TV and @jason
Mark Gurman / 9to5Mac:
Apple currently plans to start pre-orders for next iPhone on Sept. 30, launch Oct. 7  —  We've independently heard that Apple has plans to begin selling the next-generation iPhone on Friday, October 7th; the date first reported by TiPB.  According to our sources, Apple has been weighing between launching …
Todd Yellin / Netflix Blog:
Netflix Launches “Just for Kids”  —  Watch kids watch a movie or TV show.  Notice how they differ from adults.  First, kids love to watch the same thing over and over again.  More importantly, kids identify with shows more by the characters than by the title.  —  Todd Yellin here.
Kinnari Jhaveri / The Official Google Blog:
Shop your favorite catalogs with Google Catalogs  —  (Cross-posted on the Commerce and Mobile blogs)  —  For years, shoppers have enjoyed flipping through glossy print catalogs to be inspired, discover new trends and find great products.  Today, mobile technologies can make catalog shopping more engaging, social and creative.
Leena Rao / TechCrunch:
LinkedIn Redesigns Android, iPhone Apps With Groups And More; Debuts HTML5 Mobile Site  —  LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner explained on the company's first earnings call a few weeks ago that the company is planning to make a big investment in its mobile strategy.  Today, the professional social network …
Leena Rao / TechCrunch:
AWS Launches GovCloud, A Secure Region For U.S. Government Agencies And Contractors  —  Many government agencies have been slower to adopt the cloud because of the specific regulatory requirements, compliance issues and security regulations.  To mitigate this, Amazon Web Services is launching AWS GovCloud …
Frederic Lardinois / SiliconFilter:
Mozilla Officially Launches Firefox 6  —  Mozilla today officially launched Firefox 6, the latest stable version of its popular browser.  Since its switch to a more frequent release schedule, Mozilla has already pushed out a number of releases, so version numbers themselves …
Alexia Tsotsis / TechCrunch:
Live From 500 Startups Demo Day: McClure's Second Batch Of Startups, Unleashed  —  We're in Mountain View at Dave McClure's 500 Startups HQ where the second ever 500 Startups Demo Day is about to start.  Today 31 startups will present to press and investors here in McClure's bright …
Discussion: VatorNews, CNET News and LAUNCH
Emily Steel / MorningStar:
WSJ(8/15) AOL Growth Comes At A Cost  —  AOL Inc. has no shortage of websites, with more than 800.  They range from hundreds of little hometown-news sites in the Patch network to its 37 bigger-name properties, including the Huffington Post, TechCrunch, MapQuest and Moviefone.
Discussion: The Business Insider and MediaPost
Emil Protalinski / Friending Facebook Blog:
Yahoo, Facebook test “six degrees of separation” idea  —  Summary: Yahoo and Facebook have teamed up to figure out whether the “six degrees of separation” idea is valid or not.  —  Yahoo has partnered with Facebook to test the iconic social experiment known as “six degrees of separation” …
Kashmir Hill / The Not-So Private Parts:
Facebook Offers Court ‘Smoking Gun’ Against Paul Ceglia  —  This would have been easier had Mark Zuckerberg held onto his copy of the Streetfax contract  —  Facebook knows how to fend off lawsuits.  After vanquishing the Winklevoss twins, the company's lawyers turned their full attention to Paul Ceglia …
Discussion: Digits
Audrey Watters / Hack Education:
Android App Inventor Saved!  Finds a New Home at MIT  —  Last week, I broke the news that Google plans to shut down Android App Inventor, its DIY tool for building mobile phone apps.  Google did indicate that it will open source the code for App Inventor and said that due to App Inventor's adoption …
 
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 More Items: 
Cade Metz / The Register:
AutoCAD LT arrives on the Mac
Discussion: MacRumors
Joshua Topolsky / This is my next:
BlackBerry Bold 9930 review
Discussion: Engadget and Fonehome
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Audio Magazine Shuffler.fm Gets Big Update, Gives Us Sneak Peek at iPad App
Discussion: iPhone and Evolver.fm
Chris Ziegler / This is my next:
AT&T's LTE device launch dates: Momentum 4G and Elevate 4G coming August 21st (but LTE coming later)
 Earlier Items: 
John Markoff / New York Times:
Virtual and Artificial, but 58,000 Want Course
Tricia Duryee / AllThingsD:
BuyWithMe Scoops Up New York City's Scoop St.
Todd Bishop / GeekWire:
Microsoft adding more voice to Xbox, Windows Phone, and pretty much everything else
Discussion: WinRumors
Monica Chen / DigiTimes:
Intel rejects 50% Ultrabook CPU price cut demand from notebook players
Discussion: eWeek and Softpedia News
Guardian:
MI5 joins social messaging trawl for riot organisers
Discussion: Gizmodo and The Daily What
 

 
From Mediagazer:

Rick Edmonds / Poynter:
Gannett fires an experienced editor overseeing 26 community newspapers for “sharing proprietary information” with a “competing media company”, which was Poynter

Georg Szalai / The Hollywood Reporter:
WBD reports a $86M profit in Q1 for its DTC unit, which includes streaming, up from $50M in Q1 2023, and 99.6M streaming subscribers, up from 97.7M in Q4 2023

Sara Fischer / Axios:
Vice Media plans to create a joint venture with Savage Ventures, which will invest “tens of millions of dollars”, to relaunch its sites, including Vice.com
 
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