Top Items:

Mergers: Commission clears proposed acquisition of DoubleClick by Google — Mergers: Commission clears proposed acquisition of DoubleClick by Google … Google operates an Internet search engine that offers search capabilities for end users free of charge and provides online advertising space on its own websites.
Discussion:
WebProNews, Business Wire, Digital Daily, paidContent.org, Digital Destiny and Tech Trader Daily
RELATED:

EU approves Google's DoubleClick acquisition; Here comes the display ad ripples — European regulators on Tuesday approved Google's purchase of DoubleClick setting up the search giant's big splash in the display advertising market. — According to the EU's competition committee …

Testing Over, Hulu.com to Open Its TV and Film Offerings This Week — SAN FRANCISCO — Hulu.com, the long-gestating Internet joint venture between NBC Universal and Fox, emerges from limited testing on Wednesday to make its catalog of TV shows and video clips available to anyone on the Web.
RELATED:


Hulu Launches Free Internet Television Service — Internet video site Hulu launches today, offering full-length episodes of more than 250 TV series, including Lost and The Simpsons, along with older hits like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In addition, Hulu will feature content …

Hulu Launches with Warner, Lionsgate
Discussion:
Webware.com, MethodShop, CrunchGear, The Boy Genius Report, TechCrunch, Electronista, paidContent.org, I4U News, Ryan Stewart and GigaOM


Searchme: A New Visual Search Engine — [Updated with correct funding of $31 million and note that Google has a similar effort in its labs.] — Today, Sequoia Capital, which has been a key investor of search giant Google, as well as Yahoo, will unveil its latest investment in search, a visual search engine called: Searchme.
RELATED:


SearchMe Launches New Search Engine With Heavy Backing From Sequoia — Mountain View based SearchMe has been around since 2005 and has raised $31 million from Sequoia, DAG Ventures and Lehman Brothers. But until last weekend when I met founders Randy Adams and John Holland I knew next to nothing about them.
Discussion:
Gizmodo

A WordPress 2.5 Upgrade Guide — As you might know, WordPress 2.5 is about to be released, and we wanted to encourage WordPress users to upgrade. To Movable Type. — The truth is, there are lots of good blogging tools out there, and they're all good at different things.
Discussion:
TechCrunch, STARTUP CHATTER, Bb's RealTech, Favorite {fvrit} Blog, Like It Matters, David Dalka, The Blog Herald and Changing Way


Hostility Has Its Rewards — MENLO PARK, Calif. — “It's crazy to say you will only grow through innovation,” Larry Ellison, the hard-charging chief executive of Oracle, was telling me last week. “It's bizarre that there's a stigma to buying something rather than building it yourself.”
Discussion:
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs

Wal-Mart ends test of Linux in stores — NEW YORK - Computers that run the Linux operating system instead of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows didn't attract enough attention from Wal-Mart customers, and the chain has stopped selling them in stores, a spokeswoman said Monday.
RELATED:

Wal-Mart ends Linux trials: “This really wasn't what our customers were looking for”
Discussion:
InformationWeek Weblog


The “Nuclear Disaster” At SXSW Was Nothing More Than A Witch Burning — Based on the Twitter messages and blog posts I saw yesterday emerge real time from the SXSW conference, it sounded like Sarah Lacy's interview of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was, truly, a career ending, never seen before train wreck of epic proportions.

IFPI's New Strategy: Sue ISPs For Not Stopping File Sharing — from the making-life-even-worse-for-themselves dept — Earlier this year, the IFPI was successful in convincing a court to force a Danish ISP to block access to the Pirate Bay. Rather than recognizing that this only helped drive …
RELATED:


Mozilla releases Firefox 3.0 beta 4 — The fourth beta of the Firefox 3.0 browser was released Monday and includes more than 900 enhancements over the previous beta, Mozilla announced. — The creator of the open-source browser said the new beta includes performance and memory usage …
Discussion:
OSDir.com, Computerworld, Tom Raftery's Social Media, Mozilla, p2pnet, Mozilla Developer News and Download Squad
RELATED:


Google's drop in paid clicks: Part of the grand plan — After ComScore reported a recent decline in Google's paid clicks, the Net ratings service followed up, noting evidence that the drop was due to “Google's own quality initiatives that result in a reduction in the number of paid listings and …


Microsoft Wireless Laser Desktop 7000 and Digital Media Keyboard 3000, WOW! — Microsoft continues to step up their design game with two keyboards to follow last month's good-looking mice. The Wireless Laser Desktop 7000 bundle includes a 2.4GHz wireless keyboard and the previously available 7000 wireless laser mouse.


MacPro, Mac Book Air get software updates — While we slept last night, Apple released two updates for two of their less common hardware offerings: the MacBook Air and select Mac Pros. They aren't terribly exciting and, as always, the descriptions are fairly vague.


CBSSports.com Opens March Madness On Demand Video For Easy Access From Any Site — Seeking more online viewers for games and ads, CBSSports.com and the NCAA are announcing a “developer platform” for March Madness on Demand. It's not the kind of developer concept where people are encouraged to build apps …
Discussion:
Computerworld