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2:50 PM ET, January 24, 2012

Techmeme

 Top Items: 
Jennifer Van Grove / VentureBeat:
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales: MPAA chairman Christopher Dodd should be fired  —  Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales had fighting words for Motion Picture Association of America chairman Christopher Dodd, calling the former Senator and current lobbyist out on his recent threats and pronouncing that the MPAA should fire its chief.
RELATED:
Jay A. Fernandez / Hollywood Reporter:
Sundance 2012: MPAA's Chris Dodd Calls Piracy Defeat a ‘Watershed Event’  —  Speaking at the festival's daily Cinema Cafe series, Dodd said the tech community's ability to mobilize the public was a game-changing phenomenon that he hadn't seen in more than three decades in public office.
Discussion: PC World and WebProNews
Mike Thompson / The Escapist:
Petition Demands White House Investigate SOPA Supporter  —  Chris Dodd was a big supporter of SOPA.  After an angry comment last week, a petition wants him investigated for bribery charges.  —  Former senator Chris Dodd left office in January, 2011.  A month later, he was hired …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Facebook Timeline Now Pushed To Everyone, Users Get A Week To Clean Up Profiles  —  You can run, but you can't hide.  Facebook's biggest user interface overhaul since the Wall, the Facebook Timeline, is now becoming mandatory for all users.  According to the company, over the next few weeks, everyone will get the new Timeline.
RELATED:
Dan Graziano / BGR:   Facebook forcing Timeline on users ‘over the next few weeks’
Frederic Lardinois / SiliconFilter:
Ubuntu Wants to Replace Menus with a HUD  —  Ubuntu, the popular Linux distribution, has been experimenting with a number of interface designs lately.  Today, the project's founder Mark Shuttleworth announced that the next major version of Ubuntu, 12.04 LTS, will feature a replacement for the menu bar.
Gartner:
Gartner Says Apple Became the Top Semiconductor Customer in 2011  —  Top 10 Original Equipment Manufacturers Represented $105.6 Billion of Semiconductor Demand, Accounting for 35 Percent of Total Semiconductor Chip Revenue in 2011  —  Leading electronic equipment manufacturers remained …
Chris Foresman / Ars Technica:
iBooks Author EULA restrictions invite antitrust concerns  —  Apple's end user license agreement for the iBooks Author app has generated extensive controversy among authors and publishers.  Namely, the agreement restricts paid distribution of “works” created with the software to the iBookstore only.
RELATED:
John Gruber / Daring Fireball:   I'ma Set It Straight, This Watergate
Ed Bott / The Ed Bott Report Blog:   How Apple is sabotaging an open standard for digital books
Mark Gurman / 9to5Mac:
Steve Jobs looked to reinvent Apple's iPhone photography with instant capture system, advanced light-field sensors  —  “He had three things that he wanted to reinvent: the television, textbooks and photography,” said biographer Walter Isaacson in an interview following the release of his biography on Steve Jobs.
Jennifer Van Grove / VentureBeat:
Facebook added $15.3B and 230k jobs to European economy in 2011  —  Facebook added $15.3 billion in value to the European economy in the past year, COO Sheryl Sandberg said at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich Tuesday.  —  Sandberg, in her closing keynote on how social media …
RELATED:
Benny Evangelista / San Francisco Chronicle:
Sheryl Sandberg - Facebook's grown-up face
Discussion: ReadWriteWeb
Jason Fried / Inc.com:
When It's Time to Start Over  —  Sometimes, the best way to improve something is to begin again from scratch.  Even if it's your top-selling product.  —  In 2004, 37signals, the software company I co-founded, released a Web-based project-management and collaboration tool called Basecamp.
Kathleen De Vere / Inside Mobile Apps:
Exclusive: Microsoft to discontinue its virtual currency system Microsoft Points  —  Microsoft's proprietary virtual currency system, Microsoft Points, will be phased out by the end of the year, according to a source with knowledge of the company's decision.
Ray Walters / ExtremeTech:
The Pirate Bay declares 3D printed “physibles” as the next frontier of piracy  —  While the subject of online piracy is certainly nothing new, the recent protests against SOPA and the federal raid on Megaupload have thrust the issue into mainstream media.  More than ever, people are discussing …
Florian Mueller / FOSS Patents:
Dutch appeals court says Galaxy Tab 10.1 doesn't infringe Apple's design right  —  Apple's enforcement of design-related rights against Samsung's Galaxy Tab range of tablet computers has suffered yet another setback, with the Gerechthof 's-Gravenhage (an appeals court in The Hague, Netherlands) …
Neil Daswani / Dasient Blog:
Dasient Has Been Acquired by Twitter  —  The Dasient team is excited to announce that we have been acquired by Twitter!  Effective immediately, we will be bringing our technology, tools, and team to the revenue engineering team at Twitter.  —  Since its inception, Dasient has been focused …
Jonathan S. Geller / BGR:
RIM's roadmap for 2012/Q1 2013: Two BlackBerry 10 phones, two Curves, HSPA+ PlayBook  —  We've been gathering info on what exactly Research In Motion is planning to release over the next year and even into early 2013, and we now have a solid picture to share with you.
Andrew Kippen / Boxee Blog:
Boxee Live TV now available for $49 - let the cord cutting begin!  —  Boxee 1.5 rolls out to Boxee Boxes today and Boxee Live TV tuners have begun shipping!  Order one now for your Boxee Box!  With the addition of Live TV, the Boxee Box holds the distinction of being the only mainstream set top box …
Thomas Houston / The Verge:
Vimeo redesign offers cleaner interface, bigger videos, Tumblr-like feed for browsing  —  Search is great when it comes to video, but how should a video service best show videos to users that they don't necessarily know they want to see?  YouTube's recent redesign opted for a visually busy route …
Mike Orcutt / Technology Review:
Twitter Bots Create Surprising New Social Connections  —  Researchers show how simple programs posing as real people can shape interactions on Twitter.  —  You might have encountered a “Twitter bot” before: an automated program that perhaps retweeted something you wrote because it had particular keywords.
Discussion: ReadWriteWeb
Harry McCracken / Technologizer:
Highlight, a Social Network for the Real World  —  For all that Facebook does to help you organize your online relationships, it doesn't do much to help you interact with folks in the physical world.  Every time you enter a restaurant, conference, or hotel lobby, you're surrounded by strangers …
Joseph Volpe / Engadget:
Droid RAZR Maxx hits Verizon on January 26th for $299 on contract  —  While good handsets do tend to come in small packages, longer lasting ones are undoubtedly a bit fatter.  And so, dear chubby phone chasing fans, Verizon's girthy revamp on its branding mash-up — the Droid Razr Maxx — is set for an official bow.
Mary Jo Foley / All about Microsoft Blog:
Microsoft to replace Mix with a new developer conference  —  Summary: Microsoft is doing away with its annual Mix designer/developer event.  This year, instead, the company is planning a developer conference likely to focus on Windows 8.  —  The rumors were true: Microsoft is doing away …
Surur / WMPoweruser:
Nokia already nearly 50% of Second Generation Windows Phone market share  —  Using data available from OccasionalGamer's game collection, who has more than 1 million game installs, it is possible to estimate the relative share of the various Windows Phone 7 OEMs, and as can be reasonably expected …
Jennifer Van Grove / VentureBeat:
Parse.ly launches predictive analytics dashboard for publishers  —  Online publishing is about to get a lot smoother for publishers.  Whether that's a good thing for readers is another question, however.  —  New York-based startup Parse.ly is releasing its flagship product, Dash, into general availability Tuesday.
Nathan Ingraham / The Verge:
Audiobooks.com launches unlimited book streaming service for $24.95 a month  —  If you're a voracious audiobook listener and want access to as many books as you could possibly listen to, the just-launched Audiobooks.com streaming service might be worth looking into.
Discussion: CNET, Macworld, IntoMobile and TUAW
Jason Del Rey / AdAge:
Social TV Startup Bluefin Labs Lands $12 Million Investment  —  A Bet That Social Data Will Become Essential for TV Marketers  —  If there's any doubt that social TV is poised to become big business, Bluefin Labs is trying to put that to rest.  The Cambridge, Massachusetts social-analytics startup …
Declan McCullagh / CNET:
Judge: Americans can be forced to decrypt their laptops  —  American citizens can be ordered to decrypt their PGP-scrambled hard drives for police to peruse for incriminating files, a federal judge in Colorado ruled today in what could become a precedent-setting case.
Amar Toor / Engadget:
Orange offers free Wikipedia access to mobile users in Africa and the Middle East  —  There are more than 70 million Orange customers across Africa and the Middle East, but only about 10 million are able to access the web from their handsets.  That gap may be narrowing, though …
 
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 More Items: 
Richard Allan / Facebook:
Measuring Facebook's economic impact in Europe
BBC:
Star Wars crowdsourced film reaches million YouTube views
Matt Burns / TechCrunch:
Was Megaupload Targeted Because Of Its Upcoming Megabox Digital Jukebox Service?
Discussion: ReadWriteWeb, Geekosystem and Reuters
 Earlier Items: 
Larry Dignan / Between the Lines Blog:
Verizon rides iPhone 4S, LTE in Q4 at expense of profit margins
John Markoff / New York Times:
Google's Autonomous Vehicles Draw Skepticism at Legal Symposium
Discussion: Mashable! and Gizmodo
Rebecca J. Rosen / The Atlantic Online:
Why the Jones Supreme Court Ruling on GPS Tracking Is Worse Than It Sounds
Discussion: ReadWriteWeb
Rich Miller / Data Center Knowledge:
Google Spent $951 Million on Data Centers in 4Q
Pui-Wing Tam / Wall Street Journal:
Average Silicon Valley Tech Salary Passes $100,000
Discussion: Business Insider