Top Items:
Michael Bazeley / siliconvalley.com:
Yahoo's new online phone calls near — Yahoo is expanding its reach in the fast-growing Internet calling market, offering a service that will allow people to make and receive low-cost computer calls to and from regular phones. — The long-expected move could make the Sunnyvale company …
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Bruce Meyerson / Associated Press:
Yahoo adds Skype-like ability to IM service — NEW YORK — Yahoo Inc. is entering a suddenly crowded field, offering Skype-like capabilities through its instant-messaging service that will let people dial regular phone numbers using their computers or receive calls from conventional phones.
Davis D. Janowski / PC Magazine:
Yahoo! Messenger Phones Home — Yahoo! is rolling out two new fee-based services, under the overall name of Yahoo! Messenger with Voice, that deviate a bit in their structure from the unlimited calling plans of many voice over IP (VoIP) services such as AT&T Callvantage, VoicePulse, and Vonage.
Discussion:
VoIP Watch
Quinn Norton / Wired News:
Music Man Cracks DRM Schemes — The ongoing saga of Sony BMG's sneaky, lawsuit-inducing copy-protection software opened a new chapter Monday when the music company released an uninstaller program to allow customers to remove the offending code from their PCs.
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David / Signal vs. Noise:
Don't scale: 99.999% uptime is for Wal-Mart — David Dec 06 — Jeremy Wright purports a common misconception about new companies doing business online: That you need 99.999% uptime or you're toast. Not so. Basecamp doesn't have that. I think our uptime is more like 98% or 99%.
Discussion:
Ensight, Feh! v2, What's New, Labnotes, Business Logs, Smalltalk Tidbits …, IP Democracy, The Stalwart and Ross Mayfield's Weblog
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Danny / Danny Ayers, Raw Blog:
Web 2.0 and Scale — The point made by Jeremy Wright (currently 404ing), and supported by Om Malik on the need for Web 2.0 startups to consider scalability of their systems is valid, as far as it goes. But I believe the argument is, in part at least, misdirected and doesn't goes far enough.
Ben / Ben Metcalfe Blog:
Les Blogs: Me + Mena — (Health Warning: this is a rant) — Mena Trott (co-founder and president of Six Apart) gave, in my opinion, a badly toned and way-off-base speech at the Les Blogs conference in which she requested for more civility in the blogosphere.
Mike Antonucci / A+E Interactive:
Best Buy's new outreach over the Xbox 360 launch controversy — I'll also add this to the previous post about Best Buy, but this deserved a separate headline. Here's a new letter to consumers from Best Buy's President of Retail in North America, Brian Dunn: — TO: Open Letter to Customers
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Tim / O'Reilly Radar:
Ruby Book Sales Surpass Python — I was just looking at our BookScan data mart to update a reporter on Java vs. C# adoption. (The answer to his query: in the last twelve weeks, Java book sales are off 4% vs. the same period last year, while C# book sales are up 16%.)
Discussion:
Loud Thinking …
Dan Goodin / Wired News:
The Digital Audiophile's Toolbox — So you want to be an audiophile? Great, but you need to realize this is an elite designation and that joining the ranks will take work. The key is having the right tools, and not all of those listed here are easy to figure out, at least not the first time you use them.
signal15.com:
How to stop filesharers from stealing hotel bandwidth — Starts out with some geeky stuff, keep reading, the funny part is later on. — So, I'm in Milwaukee at ye olde Holiday Inn Express. They have a wireless internet connection here and it's been suckin' all night, like I couldn't even do anything on it.
CNET News.com:
CBS goes mad: free college hoops online — CBS Sports will offer out-of-market basketball games for free online during NCAA March Madness. — It's the fourth year that CBS Sports will offer the mostly regional games—ones that wouldn't appear across the whole network.
Loren Baker / Search Engine Journal:
Search Engine Journal's 2005 Search Engine Blogs Awards — Search Engine Journal's 2005 Search Engine Blogs Awards — The Search Engine Journal is proud to announce that we are now taking nominations for the First Annual Best of Search Engine Blogs Competition.
Joris Evers / CNET News.com:
New IM worm chats with intended victims — You can now instant message with a worm. — A new worm that targets users of America Online's AOL Instant Messenger is believed to be the first that actually chats with the intended victim to dupe the target into activating a malicious payload, IM security vendor IMlogic warned Tuesday.
Thomas Hawk / Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection:
Starbucks: Using Confrontational Marketing to Build Brand Awareness in a Saturated Market — Today as I was crossing the Embarcadero I noticed that this gentleman had left his coffee on the roof of his car. Midway through the cross walk I turned and pointed at him and he just waved at me.
Discussion:
Creating Passionate Users
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