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Say Tello For Presence — Jeff Pulver, wireless pioneer Craig McCaw, telecom banker Michael Price and former Apple CEO John Sculley have teamed together in a new VoIP focussed start-up called Tello, based in San Mateo, California. Doug Renert, a former executive at Oracle Corp heads up the start-up.
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Say Hello to Tello — The startup promises to revolutionize business communications. The involvement of four tech veterans lends that grandiose claim some credence — The months after the stock market crash of 2000 were tough ones indeed for tech startups. And for communications startups, things were even worse.

Sculley, Pulver, McCaw and Price team up on communications start-up
Discussion:
John Cook's Venture Blog

And now, News — We're taking Google News out of beta! When we launched the English-language edition in September 2002, we entered untested waters with a grand experiment in news browsing - using computers to organize the world's news in real time and providing a bird's eye view of what's being reported on virtually any topic.
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Bye Bye Beta: Google News is a Beta No More — And you thought that Google News would always be in beta. (-: Well, that's no longer the case. As of today, approximently 1219 days (29,256 hours) after the Google News that we know today launched in beta, Google has gone ahead and removed …

The Search Is Over: Google Wins in 2005 — Global: Google Tops Ranking (view results) — In 2005's results, Google took the lead from Apple in what is shaping up to be a back and forth contest through the years for these two innovative tech companies. Each year one out-does the other, and this time it is Google's turn to shine.
Discussion:
IT Facts, rev2.org, Publishing 2.0, Fast Company Now, Share Skype, Alice Hill's Real Tech News, InsideGoogle and Online News Squared
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Supreme Court rejects BlackBerry patent appeal — Since its introduction in 1999, the BlackBerry has revolutionized communications, allowing business travelers and government employees to send and receive e-mail outside their offices and away from their stationery computers.
Discussion:
Alice Hill's Real Tech News, Life On the Wicked Stage, Gizmodo and Peter Zura's Two-Seventy …
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Monday morning catchup in Silicon Valley; lot's happening — Google to miss Q4 earnings? Notable analysis here by a Yahoo employee, Amr Awadallah, who we know from several meetings over the years, about why Google will miss earnings expectations. Google recently increased the font size of the right search ads.
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Yahoo's Social Circle — In a bid to challenge search giant Google, the Web's most-used portal is betting on the wisdom of crowds … Yahoo! (YHOO) is on a quiet acquisitions tear. First, it snapped up photo-sharing site Flickr in March. In December, it acquired del.icio.us …

Yahoo Answers to integrate YPN for contributors — Yahoo Answer accounts have something new in the control panel, namely a section for contributors to include their YPN login information, which is currently labelled as coming soon. You need to signup for Yahoo Answers, which is currently in beta …

The Long Snout — Chris Anderson famously named the long tail— the idea that in the internet era, success belongs to companies that can address the end of the demand curve that is populated by millions of low-volume products, rather than a small number of high-volume products.

Like This? You'll Hate That. (Not All Web Recommendations Are Welcome.) — SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 22 - On Amazon.com, a customer interested in buying the novel "The Life of Pi" is also shown "The Kite Runner" because other Amazon customers - presumably with similar tastes - also purchased that book.

Did Sam Bulte Plagiarize Her Explanation For Stricter Copyright Laws? — from the now-wouldn't-that-be-ironic dept. — Michael Geist continues to make good points concerning Sam Bulte, the Canadian politician who has been accused of being too close to major entertainment companies …
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Yahoo hires top internet scientist — Yahoo has hired a leading Chilean computer scientist to head its first research centres in Europe and Latin America, notching up a victory in the intense global competition for top engineering talent between the leading internet search engines.
Discussion:
Search Engine Watch Blog

Protecting Your Search Privacy: A Flowchart To Tracks You Leave Behind — Wired's "How to Foil Search Engine Snoops" is a nice guide to protecting your search privacy, but it doesn't really go far enough. In particular, anyone who assumes they've protected themselves by using an anonymizing tool …

What's Holding Back Corporate Blogging? — Why did the much-predicted 2005 stampede by corporate America into the blogosphere fail to materialize? — The number of Fortune 500 companies with strategic public blogging initiatives, after all, is still quite small — somewhere between 3-4%, depending on how you figure it.