Top Items:
Michael Bazeley / siliconvalley.com:
Yahoo's new online phone calls near — Yahoo is expanding its reach in the fast-growing Internet calling market, offering a service that will allow people to make and receive low-cost computer calls to and from regular phones. — The long-expected move could make the Sunnyvale company …
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Bruce Meyerson / Associated Press:
Yahoo adds Skype-like ability to IM service — NEW YORK — Yahoo Inc. is entering a suddenly crowded field, offering Skype-like capabilities through its instant-messaging service that will let people dial regular phone numbers using their computers or receive calls from conventional phones.
Davis D. Janowski / PC Magazine:
Yahoo! Messenger Phones Home — Yahoo! is rolling out two new fee-based services, under the overall name of Yahoo! Messenger with Voice, that deviate a bit in their structure from the unlimited calling plans of many voice over IP (VoIP) services such as AT&T Callvantage, VoicePulse, and Vonage.
Discussion:
VoIP Watch
Ed Felten / Freedom to Tinker:
MediaMax Bug Found; Patch Issued; Patch Suffers from Same Bug — iSEC, EFF, and SonyBMG issued a joint press release yesterday, announcing yet another serious security bug in the SunnComm MediaMax copy protection software that ships on many SonyBMG compact discs.
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David / Signal vs. Noise:
Don't scale: 99.999% uptime is for Wal-Mart — David Dec 06 — Jeremy Wright purports a common misconception about new companies doing business online: That you need 99.999% uptime or you're toast. Not so. Basecamp doesn't have that. I think our uptime is more like 98% or 99%.
Discussion:
Ensight, Feh! v2, What's New, Labnotes, Business Logs, Smalltalk Tidbits …, The Stalwart, IP Democracy and Ross Mayfield's Weblog
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Danny / Danny Ayers, Raw Blog:
Web 2.0 and Scale — The point made by Jeremy Wright (currently 404ing), and supported by Om Malik on the need for Web 2.0 startups to consider scalability of their systems is valid, as far as it goes. But I believe the argument is, in part at least, misdirected and doesn't goes far enough.
Dan Goodin / Wired News:
The Digital Audiophile's Toolbox — So you want to be an audiophile? Great, but you need to realize this is an elite designation and that joining the ranks will take work. The key is having the right tools, and not all of those listed here are easy to figure out, at least not the first time you use them.
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Mike Antonucci / A+E Interactive:
Best Buy's new outreach over the Xbox 360 launch controversy — I'll also add this to the previous post about Best Buy, but this deserved a separate headline. Here's a new letter to consumers from Best Buy's President of Retail in North America, Brian Dunn: — TO: Open Letter to Customers
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Ben / Ben Metcalfe Blog:
Les Blogs: Me + Mena — (Health Warning: this is a rant) — Mena Trott (co-founder and president of Six Apart) gave, in my opinion, a badly toned and way-off-base speech at the Les Blogs conference in which she requested for more civility in the blogosphere.
CNET News.com:
CBS goes mad: free college hoops online — CBS Sports will offer out-of-market basketball games for free online during NCAA March Madness. — It's the fourth year that CBS Sports will offer the mostly regional games—ones that wouldn't appear across the whole network.
signal15.com:
How to stop filesharers from stealing hotel bandwidth — Starts out with some geeky stuff, keep reading, the funny part is later on. — So, I'm in Milwaukee at ye olde Holiday Inn Express. They have a wireless internet connection here and it's been suckin' all night, like I couldn't even do anything on it.
Kenneth Li / Reuters:
Microsoft, Google still vying for AOL — NEW YORK (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. are in a "two-horse" race to strike an Internet advertising partnership with Time Warner Inc.'s AOL online unit, sources familiar with the talks said. — Industry experts say AOL is a critical swing factor …
Discussion:
Search Engine Lowdown
Individualist / Dot Tactics:
what does the future hold for communities? — Search has, thanks to Google, dominated Internet innovation for years. But, while search has made our lives easier and put hundreds of gigabytes of useful data at our finger tips, it has also served to sterilize the Internet.
David Carnoy / CNET News.com:
Ten things I hate about the Xbox 360 — OK, so we've been through this drill before. Carnoy reviews a product, gives it a high rating, then writes a column talking about all the things he doesn't like about it. Worse, he starts referring to himself in the third person, which can only mean the ego's just running a little too high.
Thomas Hawk / Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection:
Starbucks: Using Confrontational Marketing to Build Brand Awareness in a Saturated Market — Today as I was crossing the Embarcadero I noticed that this gentleman had left his coffee on the roof of his car. Midway through the cross walk I turned and pointed at him and he just waved at me.
Discussion:
Creating Passionate Users
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