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Amazon To Acquire AbeBooks, And With It A Stake In Library Thing - 08/01/2008 05:49 PM

Amazon has acquired twelve year old Canadian company Abebooks (formerly the Advanced Book Exchange), the companies just announced. AbeBooks is an online marketplace for books focusing on used, rare and out of print titles for sale by independent booksellers - it currently has 110 million books for sale from 13,500 sellers. The company has been around [...]

The Reports of Usenet’s Death are Greatly Exaggerated - 08/01/2008 05:18 PM

Sascha at PCMag writes a charming little piece on the death of Usenet as a method of discourse and its eventual rebirth as a repository for porn, spam, and pirated warez. He recalls the days of “serious conversations” on 8-bit Atari architecture and the rise and fall of net.manners as more and more n00bs came [...]

Skyfire Brings Full Browser Experience To Nokia S60 Phones (200 Private Beta Invites) - 08/01/2008 04:39 PM

Throw out that WAP browser on your cell phone. We are quickly approaching a point where a full browser experience is available on our mobile devices. And it is not just the iPhone. A startup called Skyfire is in some respect even further along than Apple in bringing the entire Web to [...]

Yahoo Turns Yelp, Yahoo Local and LinkedIn SearchMonkey Apps On In Search - 08/01/2008 06:31 AM

Yahoo is making a number of changes to its default search experience tonight to add more structured data to results. Yelp, Yahoo Local and LinkedIn SearchMonkey widgets are being added to search results automatically, eliminating the need for users to go into the search gallery and add them manually. SearchMonkey is a key part of Yahoo’s [...]

Tethering Briefly Comes To The iPhone, Tempers Flare - 08/01/2008 05:13 AM

Macrumors reports that Apple’s App Store was selling a tethering app compatible with the iPhone (both 3G and EDGE) for a brief period earlier this evening. The $10 application, called NetShare, was developed by Nullriver software, and would be a godsend for many iPhone owners. After going up around 8PM EST to the [...]

Tap Tap Revenge Approaches 1 Million Users, Music Industry Takes Notice - 08/01/2008 02:50 AM

Tapulous, the company behind Tap Tap Revenge, has announced that the popular iPhone app will hit 1 million installs some time this weekend. The app is the second we’ve heard from to hit the milestone (Facebook reached it last week), and is another testament to the extremely rapid growth some applications have seen on [...]

NBC Launches On-Demand Olympic Coverage In HD - 08/01/2008 01:39 AM

NBC has launched its online video hub for the 2008 Olympics, which features free on-demand video for over 20 sports. In order to maximize quality, the videos are available as downloads (you can start watching before the download finishes) and will be in “up to HD” quality. Unfortunately, the video downloads will only [...]

Philip Rosedale Doesn’t See Browser-Based Virtual Worlds As A Threat to Second Life. Is He In Denial? - 08/01/2008 12:38 AM

Recently, there’s been a growing wave of startups and products appearing that are bringing 3-D virtual worlds to the browser. These include Vivaty, Google’s Lively project, and the Electric Sheep Co.’s WebFlock. And I’ve seen a few stealth companies working the same vein. None of these are as fully featured or immersive as [...]

GumGum Rethinks Its Approach. Drops Flash - 07/31/2008 11:13 PM

Music and movies may grab the most headlines when it comes to piracy, but many content providers on the web are also having trouble managing their images, which are easy to crop, resize, and copy. Some services, like Attributor, try to monitor and track offending images, but the ultimate solution may well lie in removing [...]

New Recommendation System = 40 Percent More Diggs - 07/31/2008 10:28 PM

One month after launching its new recommendation system, Digg is already reporting positive results. Digg recommends stories based on other members with similar voting patterns and interests. Chief scientist Anton Kast writes on the Digg Blog: - Digging activity is up significantly: the total number of Diggs increased 40% after launch. - The Recommendation Engine [...]

Wikinvest Gives the World Embeddable, Interactive Stock Charts - 07/31/2008 09:30 PM

Embedable stock charts are nothing new, and neither are interactive charts that give you price information as you mouse over different dates. Both Yahoo Finance and Google Finance offer interactive charts on their respective sites, and Yahoo offers embeddable static charts. Neither one brings that interactivity to chart widgets that can be embedded [...]

Having Won his Board Seats, Icahn Decides To Skip Yahoo Shareholder Meeting - 07/31/2008 09:24 PM

Secure in knowing that he will get minority seats on Yahoo’s board, Carl Icahn has decided to skip tomorrow’s shareholder meeting. He doesn’t want to cause a “media event,” he says. (Because he’s so shy, you know). Seriously, it’s probably a good idea for him not to show up. On his blog he [...]

Delicious 2.0 Launches. Really. It Totally Launched. - 07/31/2008 08:12 PM

YAY! The long awaited, much promised, never delivered Delicious 2.0 will launch in the next few minutes, just like they promised again last week. The new Delicious is just like the old Delicious, except for the way it looks. They’re also promising that it will be “faster, easier to learn,” and “hopefully more desirable.” Speed: We’ve [...]

SEC To Recognize Corporate Blogs as Public Disclosure. Can We Now Kill the Press Release? - 07/31/2008 07:53 PM

For several years, Sun CEO, Jonathan Schwartz has lobbied the SEC to allow disclosure of financial information through corporate blogs. In a landmark announcement, it seems that Mr. Schwartz may indeed get his wish, and with it, a historical decision that could break the age-old shackles that bound businesses to traditional media and distribution channels [...]

Apple Releases Push Notification Services Developer Kit, Background Apps FTW - 07/31/2008 06:17 PM

I think it’s safe to say that iPhone OS 2.0 is far from perfect and anyone saying otherwise must be on Apple’s payroll. Other than the horrendous battery life (on the iP3G), what else do we all hate about the OS? The inability to run background apps! Sure, Apple’s argument against a Windows Mobile-like task [...]

Kleiner Perkins’ iFund Invests In Stealth Gaming Startup ngmoco - 07/31/2008 05:01 PM

Kleiner Perkins is adding to its iFund portfolio of iPhone-focused startups. It’s latest investment is a series A round in stealth gaming company ngmoco. Kleiner partner Bing Gordon, formerly chief creative officer of Electronic Arts, will join the board (he is also on the board of Zynga, which KP also recently invested in [...]

Wordscraper Hurts My Eyes - 07/31/2008 04:17 PM

Yesterday, one day after taking down Scrabuluos in the U.S. and Canada in response to a lawsuit from Hasbro, the Indian brothers behind Scrabulous, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, released a brand new crossword-like game on Facebook called Wordscraper. The brothers have obviously been preparing this countermove for a long time. Wordscraper is designed [...]

LG Releases Blu-ray Player with Netflix Streaming - 07/31/2008 02:51 PM

CG’s Doug writes: Remember the great Blu-ray versus HD DVD debate of 2008? When Blu-ray finally won, some claimed that it didn’t really matter, as streaming and/or downloadable online video would soon be the reining champion of the HD movie marketplace. Whatever your opinion, it appears that LG is attempting to head things off at the pass [...]

Dr. Horrible Not So Horrible, And It’s Now On Hulu (Update: And International) - 07/31/2008 10:45 AM

Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog is a 40 minute musical that stars Neil Patrick Harris as Dr. Horrible, a bumbling, video blogging super villain who’s trying to get into the Evil League of Evil. The project is available on iTunes for $4 - this week Hulu also put it on its site for [...]

Flickr Co-Founder Caterina Fake Joins New Startup, Hunch - 07/31/2008 08:11 AM

Caterina Fake, who co-founded Flickr along with her husband Stewart Butterfield in 2004, has announced her plans to join a fledgling new startup called Hunch. Flickr is one of the web’s most popular photo-sharing sites, and was acquired by Yahoo in 2005 for $35 million. Since then, Flickr has been one of Yahoo’s [...]

Google To Launch Venture Fund - 07/31/2008 08:02 AM

The WSJ is reporting that Google is set to launch a venture fund to give it the option of investing in startups instead of just flat out buying them. The fund will be led by Google’s SVP Corporate Development David Drummond and Bill Maris, a long time business friend of Anne Wojcicki, Sergey Brin’s wife. [...]

Socialmedian Brings A New Take On News Filtering - 07/31/2008 08:01 AM

There is no shortage of social news aggregators looking to help users cut through the noise on the web. Digg is by far the most popular, with similar offerings from Reddit, Newsvine, and a host of others. Today, Socialmedian (not to be confused with SocialMedia, the ad network) is launching its own take [...]

Nokia Plunks Another $150 Million Into Venture Fund - 07/31/2008 06:27 AM

Nokia doesn’t want to miss the next wave of mobile technologies so it is doubling down on its venture investment activities. The cell phone giant is putting another $150 million to work in Nokia Growth Partners, a fund in which it is the only limited partner. This brings the total capital in [...]

Yahoo Exec Makes Yuil: Looks Like Cuil, With Better Results - 07/31/2008 12:24 AM

It was only a matter of time. Cuil, the “massive” new search engine that was supposed to be able to keep up with Google, has just gotten its first knockoff. It’s Yuil, a Yahoo-powered mashup that looks almost exactly like Cuil. And, oddly enough, Yuil might actually work better than its much-hyped [...]

Call your Twitter pals with Phweet - 07/31/2008 12:05 AM

Would you like to talk to your Twitter friends or set up a spontaneous conference call? Normally you’d have to agree to hook up over Skype or something else. But soon you could be making calls via Twitter. Phweet is a new service which does just this (thanks to Pat Phelan of MaxRoam and Twitterfone for [...]