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3:45 PM ET, January 19, 2012

Techmeme

 Top Items: 
Tom Neumayr / Apple:
Apple Unveils All-New iTunes U App for iPad, iPhone & iPod touch  —  Entire Courses from Top Universities Now Available in One App  —  Apple® today announced an all-new iTunes® U app, giving educators and students everything they need on their iPad®, iPhone® and iPod touch® to teach and take entire courses.
RELATED:
Peter Kafka / AllThingsD:
Apple's New Math.  Or: Why A $15 E-Book Equals a $75 Paper Book.  —  McGraw-Hill normally sells high-school textbooks for $75 a pop. Now it says it will sell electronic versions of the same books, via Apple, for $15 apiece.  How can the publisher make that work?
Darrell Etherington / GigaOM:
Apple announces new iPad textbook experience with iBooks 2  —  On Thursday, Apple SVP of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller took the stage to talk about education, and announced Apple's ambitious plan to reinvent the textbook.  That plan includes iBooks 2, which Schiller called a “new textbook experience for the iPad.”
Jordan Kahn / 9to5Mac:
Apple's new iBook textbooks launch at $14.99 or less from partners Pearson, McGraw Hill …
Dana Wollman / Engadget:
Apple announces free iBooks Author app for OS X for publishing books to the App Store
Frederic Lardinois / SiliconFilter:
Hands-On With iBooks Author: eBook Authoring Made Easy, Not Just for Textbooks
Discussion: Technologizer and PC World
Summify:
Summify Joins The Flock At Twitter!  —  You've probably noticed we've been quiet lately.  Well, we're extremely excited to announce that Summify has been acquired by Twitter!  I know, right?  We can hardly believe it ourselves!  —  Roughly 2 years ago, we moved from Romania to Vancouver …
RELATED:
Matt Lynley / Business Insider:
Twitter Is Making A Gigantic Move (And Going To War With A Board Member)  —  Twitter is slowly finding a way to curate its own massive fire hose of information.  —  Twitter has typically been a pure stream of information that's gone uninterrupted.  Thousands of tweets fly across the Internet …
Devlin Barrett / Wall Street Journal:
FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy  —  WASHINGTON—The Federal Bureau of Investigation moved against a group of suspected online pirates Thursday, targeting the popular file-sharing website megaupload.com a day after Washington lawmakers were besieged by complaints about legislation designed …
RELATED:
The United States Department of Justice:
Justice Department Charges Leaders of Megaupload with Widespread Online Copyright Infringement  —  WASHINGTON - Seven individuals and two corporations have been charged in the United States with running an international organized criminal enterprise allegedly responsible for massive worldwide online piracy …
Discussion: Threat Level and The Verge
Billboard:   Swizz Beatz's Resume: The History of a Multi-Tasker
Nitasha Tiku / Betabeat:
Surprising New Figure in the Piracy Wars? Swizz Beatz, Megaupload.com's Secret CEO
The Politico:
On PIPA, Senate in talks to yank search  —  Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) are in discussions to exempt search-result blocking from the PROTECT IP Act, sources confirmed to POLITICO.  —  Kyl made the proposal to Leahy on Wednesday.  The measure is one of the biggest sticking points …
Discussion: GamePolitics blogs
RELATED:
Timothy B. Lee / Ars Technica:
SOPA protest by the numbers: 162M pageviews, 7 million signatures
Timothy B. Lee / Ars Technica:
PIPA support collapses, with 13 new Senators opposed
Matt Flegenheimer / Bits:
After Protest, Wikipedia Says 'We're Not Done Yet'
Carl Sjogreen / Facebook Blog:
Introducing New Apps for Timeline  —  New timeline apps are now available from Foodspotting, Foodily, Ticketmaster, Pinterest, Rotten Tomatoes, Pose, Kobo, Gogobot, TripAdvisor, and others.  You can now enhance your timeline with apps that help you tell your story, whether you love to cook, eat, travel, run, or review movies.
RELATED:
Adam Lashinsky / Fortune:
Larry Page: Google should be like a family  —  In an exclusive Q&A, Google's co-founder and CEO explains how he built a No. 1 workplace — and why it matters.  —  Google also claimed the top spot on our list in 2007 and 2008 - making it the only three-time champion.
RELATED:
Jeremy C. Owens / Mercury News:
The opposite of evil: Google named best place to work in America
Discussion: Business Insider
Eric Savitz / The Tech Trade:
Amazon Kindle Fire: More Profitable Than Expected?  —  The Amazon Kindle Fire might be a more profitable product than you think.  —  RBC Capital analyst Ross Sandler reached that conclusion in a research note this morning, after he assessed the results of a proprietary survey of 216 Kindle Fire owners.
RELATED:
Paul Graham:
A Word to the Resourceful  —  A year ago I noticed a pattern in the least successful startups we'd funded: they all seemed hard to talk to.  It felt as if there was some kind of wall between us.  I could never quite tell if they understood what I was saying.
Austin Carr / Fast Company:
Could Instagram Come To Windows Phone Before Android?  —  Instagram is one of the most popular apps on the iPhone.  The photo-sharing service, which lets users snap pictures and spruce them up with one-click filters, has rocketed to 15 million users, and was recently named iPhone app of the year by Apple.
Stuart Miles / Pocket-lint:
Bing Maps to get Nokia branding on all devices - including rivals'  —  Nokia CEO, Stephen Elop, has told Pocket-lint that we shall soon be seeing the Nokia brand name within other devices and not just the company's own phones.  —  “You'll starting seeing the word ‘Nokia’ on a map …
Jack Purcher / Patently Apple:
Apple introduces us to Siri, the Killer Patent  —  On October 4, 2011Apple launched the iPhone 4S with Siri, just one day prior to Steve Jobs passing.  Today, the first killer patent application behind Siri was published by the US Patent and Trademark Office.
Discussion: BGR, CNET, AppleInsider and SEO by the Sea
Leena Rao / TechCrunch:
LinkedIn Shutters Twitter Widget ‘Tweets’ Because Of ‘Extremely Low Usage’  —  LinkedIn is planning to shut down its Tweets application as of January 31, 2012.  As you may remember, the Tweets application allowed users find and keep track of their LinkedIn connections on Twitter …
Kara Swisher / AllThingsD:
As Weak Q4 Earnings Loom, Yahoo Freezes Hiring and Also Contemplates Layoffs  —  According to sources close to the situation, Yahoo has instituted a hiring freeze across the company and is contemplating a reduction-in-force in support units of the company.  —  While the details of any layoffs …
Discussion: CNET
Michael Hastings / Rolling Stone:
Julian Assange: The Rolling Stone Interview  —  Under house arrest in England, the WikiLeaks founder opens up about his battle with the ‘Times,’ his stint in solitary and the future of journalism  —  It's a few days before Christmas, and Julian Assange has just finished moving to a new hide-out deep in the English countryside.
Leena Rao / TechCrunch:
Former Google CIO Raises $73 Million To Reform Payday Loans With Data-Driven Startup ZestCash  —  ZestCash, a company founded by former Google CIO and VP of engineering Douglas Merrill to legitimize the payday loan industry, has raised $73 million round of funding.
Discussion: VentureBeat, WebProNews and PC World
 
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 More Items: 
Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch:
Appstores.com Launches An ‘AdSense For Mobile Apps’
Discussion: Business Insider and GigaOM
Tim Stevens / Engadget:
Apple iTunes U hands-on (video)
Discussion: The Verge
Ryan Paul / Ars Technica:
Mozilla demos MediaStream Processing, audio mixing in Firefox
WantChinaTimes-News:
Foxconn chairman likens his workforce to animals
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
No More Swiping: Card.io Launches New Consumer App, Developer Tools Which “See” Your Credit Card
Discussion: ReadWriteWeb and GigaOM
 Earlier Items: 
Reuters:
News Corp pays out over hacking claims, said to admit coverup
Juan Carlos Perez / PC World:
Google Adds WebRTC to Chrome for In-browser Voice, Video Chat
Discussion: SlashGear and Softpedia News
Tricia Duryee / AllThingsD:
eBay's John Donahoe Literally Starts Hammering Out the Plan for Mobile Payments
Electronista:
New fast Fourier math could give image compression 10X boost
Discussion: PhysOrg.com
Ina Fried / AllThingsD:
Not a Kodak Moment: Legendary Camera Maker Files for Bankruptcy Protection
 

 
From Mediagazer:

Athena Stavrou / The Independent:
More than 230 media industry professionals, including anonymous BBC staff, sign a letter accusing the BBC of bias favoring Israel in coverage of Gaza

Dominick Mastrangelo / The Hill:
Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt quits as a contributing columnist at WaPo, after abruptly leaving a Post live video event hosted by Jonathan Capehart

Devin Gordon / New York Times:
AI in Hollywood is a tech leap with a vast impact but remains a tool, not a replacement, for creatives; its speed, quality, and cost allow for VFX breakthroughs

 
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