Top Items:
Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:
How Low Will Online Ads Go? Lower, Says J.P. Morgan. Very, Very Low, Says Gawker's Nick Denton — A year ago, the conventional wisdom said that the online advertising market would still grow in an economic slump because online ads were cheaper and more effective. — And they are.
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Business Wire:
Amazon Announces Beginning of Multi-Year Frustration-Free Packaging Initiative — Amazon.com has launched “Frustration-Free Packaging,” a new initiative designed to make it easier for customers to liberate products from their packages. Amazon is focusing first on two kinds of items …
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Jacqui Cheng / Ars Technica:
Amazon takes on “wrap rage” with packaging initiative — Down with obnoxious packaging that takes longer to free from the ten thousand twistie ties than it took to arrive at your house in the first place! Everyone has experienced this kind of frustration with items ranging from kids' toys …
Discussion:
CNET News
Larry Dignan / Between the Lines:
Microsoft: Third party apps killing our security — Why would hackers target Microsoft directly when there is so much low hanging fruit hanging from the Windows operating system? — The short answer is that hackers won't attack Microsoft directly because they have plenty …
Discussion:
InfoWorld, VentureBeat, Computerworld, Valleywag, Guardian, Global Nerdy, New York Times, blogs.chron.com and InformationWeek
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Bernard Lunn / ReadWriteWeb:
Salesforce.com Says Hello World — Salesforce.com was founded less than 10 years ago, in March 1999. This is hard to remember when you walk into the Dreamforce event at the Moscone and see all the companies, both large and small, proclaiming that they are part of their ecosystem.
Discussion:
CNET News, Feeds, IT Project Failures, SmoothSpan Blog, Software as Services and TechCrunchIT
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Kara Swisher / BoomTown:
Yahoo Media's Scott Moore and Al Warms to Depart This Week — Aside from upcoming layoffs, it seemed as if Yahoo had stanched the flow of major execs from the company. — Not so, it seems, as several sources with knowledge of the situation confirm that the two top execs …
Kelly Hodgkins / Boy Genius Report:
Verizon Wireless kills Pay as You Go data plans, data plans now mandatory — This has been rumored to be coming but VZW E dropped the bomb on us all by leaking a Verizon Wireless document detailing some drastic changes to Verizon's data plans. Starting November 14th, 2008 …
Mary Jo Foley / All about Microsoft:
Microsoft confirms MinWin is in Windows 7, after all — MinWin — the core of the Windows operating system — is, indeed, in Windows 7. It's just not part of it in the way many people (including yours truly) initially assumed. — Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich, who detailed via …
Eric Eldon / VentureBeat:
Irrepressible widget-maker RockYou aims at Asia, raises $17M — RockYou, a company that started out two years ago making simple slideshow widgets for MySpace, and more recently applications on Facebook and other rival social networks, is now invading Asia. — It has taken on strategic funding …
Discussion:
FaceReviews, paidContent.org, BoomTown, VC Ratings, Market Wire, Mashable!, PE Hub News, GigaOM, The Social and metarand
Dan Frommer / Silicon Alley Insider:
Apple Slashes iPhone Production, Says Chip Analyst (AAPL) — Is demand slowing for Apple's (AAPL) red-hot iPhone 3G? — Apple has cut its calendar Q4 iPhone production plans significantly more than originally estimated, according to a report by Friedman Billings Ramsey analyst Craig Berger.
James Sherwood / The Register:
Motorola legal tie to pull pricey Aura phone off eBay — Exclusive Once you've grown tired of your mobile phone then it's your prerogative to flog it on eBay, right? Not if you buy Motorola's upcoming Aura phone, because the firm's penned a contract to prevent secondhand sales.
Jessica Guynn / Los Angeles Times:
MTV Networks in deal to monetize uploaded videos — The company plans to pair ads with clips on MySpace using Auditude's technology. — Reporting from San Francisco — Hollywood used to fume when fans uploaded video clips to the Internet to share with their friends. Now it's looking to cash in on them.
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Ted Dziuba / The Register:
What Ray Ozzie didn't tell you about Microsoft Azure — Behind the whiteboard of confusion — Fail and You Unveiled earlier this month at Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference by Chief Whiteboard Operator Ray Ozzie, the Azure Services Platform confused damn near everyone.
Simon Sage / IntoMobile:
Verizon BlackBerry Storm site updated, treasure hunt announced — The BlackBerry Storm notification page set up by Verizon back during the announcement has received a significant overhaul, showing off not only specs and 360°-worth of pictures, but also something of a treasure hunt from November 6th. to the 15th.
Discussion:
Boy Genius Report, Mobilewhack.com, Electronista, BlackBerryNews.com and CrackBerry.com blogs
John Oates / The Register:
Virgin sacks the Facebook 13, BA customers stink — Social networking for fun and P45s — Virgin Atlantic has sacked the thirteen staff who labelled customers “chavs” and criticised the maintenance record of the airline's fleet of Boeing 747s which fly from Gatwick.
Noam Cohen / New York Times:
Censorship, or What Really Weirds Out Weird Al — Visitors to MTV's new online music video site can listen to songs with plenty of crass and vulgar lyrics, but may be surprised to find that certain other language had once been deemed too nasty for broadcast — that is, the names …
Cherise Fong / CNN:
Internetting every thing, everywhere, all the time — (CNN) — It's called “The Internet of Things” — at least for now. It refers to an imminent world where physical objects and beings, as well as virtual data and environments, all live and interact with each other in the same space and time.
Om Malik / GigaOM:
Dash Charts a New Course, Cuts 50 Jobs — The credit crunch and the subsequent economic slowdown has everyone — from large corporations to individuals — reassessing their fiscal future, and many are taking drastic actions. The latest moves from the world of Silicon Valley startups comes …
David Adewumi / VentureBeat:
Weebly scores 1 million users, reaches profitability — Weebly, an AJAX-based drag and drop web page creator, today announces it has reached a million registered users — and perhaps more importantly — that the three-year-old company is now profitable. — The San Francisco …
New York Times:
Campaigns in a Web 2.0 World — Shortly after 9 a.m. on Oct. 19, Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama for president during the taping of “Meet the Press” on NBC. Within minutes, the video was on the Web. — But the clip was not rushed onto YouTube; it was MSNBC.com, the network's sister entity online …
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
Western Digital pushes into living room with WD TV — Western Digital may have uncovered the trick to getting into your living room: simplicity. Today, the company is launching its WD TV HD Media Player, a box that makes it very easy to listen to music or watch movies, home videos, and pictures on your TV.
