Top Items:
Josh Ong / AppleInsider:
Google Chairman Eric tells US senators Apple's Siri could pose ‘competitive threat’ — Eric Schmidt, Google's chairman and former chief executive, admitted to the U.S. Senate antitrust subcommittee that Apple's new Siri personal assistant technology is a “significant development” …
James Temple / San Francisco Chronicle:
Google lawyer: Why the patent system is broken — Google stands at the center of the escalating mobile patent wars, as the developer of the Android operating system that triggered scores of lawsuits and countersuits. — Depending on whom you ask, the company is either the high-minded adult …
Discussion:
CNET News, Ars Technica, The Verge, Louis Gray and Slashdot
Ellis Hamburger / Business Insider:
Firefox 8 Launches In Two Days, But Here's How To Get It NOW — Firefox 8 won't hit the presses until November 8, but as always, Mozilla has uploaded the final version to the web a couple days early. — gHacks spotted the files on Mozilla's FTP servers. — Firefox 8, which comes …
Discussion:
Examiner, gHacks Technology News, Lifehacker, The Verge, Techie Buzz and Pulse2
Evelyn M. Rusli / New York Times:
Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn Has Become the Go-To Guy of Tech — THEY come for his money. They come for his advice. They come — duh — for his connections. — But mostly they come, with all the élan of Dorothy on her way to Oz, for a chance at some face time with Reid G. Hoffman, the start-up whisperer of Silicon Valley.
Discussion:
GigaOM, @danprimack, @karaswisher, Business Insider, Pulse2 and @sacca
Alexia Tsotsis / TechCrunch:
Instagram's Kevin Systrom On International Expansion, Instagram Video, Funding Rumors And More — With over 100K weekly downloads coming in just from China, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom had a lot to say during his TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing talk, tackling head-on the issue …
Discussion:
The Next Web, Business Insider, OmLinks, Pulse2, Gizmodo UK, The Next Web and Instagramers.com
Tricia Duryee / AllThingsD:
O.co Shutters At Least Three Businesses as It Questions New Commerce Models — O.co has shut down three of its product categories, and a fourth is on hold, after some of its experiments over the past couple of years have not penciled out. — In July, the Salt Lake City-based company …
Marc Bevand / Zorinaq:
1TB Hard Drive Prices up 180% in a Month — The Newegg price charts on Camelegg sum this up illustratively: — Thailand manufactures 25% of the world's hard drives, and the severe 2011 monsoon season floods affected some of its largest industrial parks, where many hard drive manufacturers …
Discussion:
Techie Buzz, New York Times, Pulse2 and Techie Insider
David Carr / New York Times:
Is the WikiLeaks Movement Fading? — IT appears all the more likely that Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, will be extradited to Sweden to be questioned on allegations of sexual misconduct from two women. A British court's ruling last Wednesday that he could be extradited …
Discussion:
Economist
Brooks Barnes / New York Times:
Disney and YouTube Make a Video Deal — LOS ANGELES — Two powerful media companies, the Walt Disney Company and YouTube, are betting that a new partnership will help them surmount separate but equally worrisome hurdles as they each strive for greater Web dominance.
Discussion:
@manan and The Next Web
Matt Rosoff / Business Insider:
Urban Airship Raises $15 Million From Verizon, Salesforce — Urban Airship, which helps companies add features like push notifications and in-app purchases to their mobile apps on multiple mobile platforms, has raised a $15 million Series C round with strategic investments from Verizon and Salesforce.
Discussion:
ReadWriteWeb, AllThingsD and Uncrunched
Ernesto / TorrentFreak:
Major Usenet Provider Shuts Down Following Court Order — Two years ago BREIN, representing the movie and music industries, took News-Service.com (NSE) to court. — Although the name NSE might not ring a bell with many people, it is the largest usenet provider in Europe and has many high-profile resellers such as Usenext.
Chris Williams / The Republic:
Anoka-Hennepin teachers write their own online textbook, save district $175,000 — MINNEAPOLIS — The new textbooks in Michael Engelhaupt's statistics class at Blaine High School are kind of cheap and won't last long, but he doesn't mind. After all, he wrote them.
