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Era Ends: Western Union Stops Sending Telegrams — After 145 years, Western Union has quietly stopped sending telegrams. — On the company's web site, if you click on "Telegrams" in the left-side navigation bar, you're taken to a page that ends a technological era with about as little fanfare as possible:
Discussion:
saschameinrath.com, Engadget, Techdirt, SearchViews, Dvorak Uncensored, ldopa.net, TechBlog and MIT Advertising Lab
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Western Union abandons telegrams — The Internet strikes again. — First it mostly did away with brick-and-mortar auction houses. Then newspaper classifieds went the way of the Model-T Ford. — And now, thanks to the ubiquity of e-mail and instant messaging, Western Union is getting …
Discussion:
Engadget

Taking Internet Explorer 7 beta 2 preview through install and uninstall, step-by-step, with screenshots — Bittorrent and private beta testers aside, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but yesterday's release of the IE7 beta 2 for the general public is the very first opportunity to download …
Discussion:
Scobleizer, InsideGoogle, albert.tanutama.com, Todd Bishop's Microsoft … and InsideMicrosoft
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IE7 Beta 2 Available — Microsoft released a public preview of Windows Internet Explorer 7 (previous versions were only available to subscribers of MSDN, as far as I know). New features in version 7 include tabbed browsing, a direct search box, phishing protection capabilities, and more.

IE7 beta: Read the fine print — Now, we're all used to just clicking "next" when we install new software. — That's a bad idea in general. First, many software programs today have incredibly invasive default settings that give the software permission to do everything short of audit your tax returns.
Discussion:
Web 2.0 Explorer, SearchViews, Search Engine Journal, Mark Evans, InsideMicrosoft and BetaNews

Politicos attack tech firms over China … WASHINGTON—Politicians on Wednesday attacked Google, Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Yahoo for declining to appear at a briefing about China's Internet censorship and called for a new law to outlaw compliance with such requirements.
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New blog for high-fliers — Got your own blog yet? If not you'd better hurry up if you dont want to be beaten to it by a flock of pigeons, according to New Scientist. — Later this year 20 of the birds will take to the skies above San Jose, California, each carrying a GPS receiver …
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Newspapers take aim at Google in copyright dispute — DUBLIN (Reuters) - A group representing global newspaper publishers has launched a lobbying campaign to challenge search engines like Google that aggregate news content. — The move comes as the newspaper industry's traditional business model …
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Subscriber credit data distributed by mistake — Globe, Worcester paper affected — Credit and bank card numbers of as many as 240,000 subscribers of The Boston Globe and Worcester Telegram & Gazette were inadvertently distributed with bundles of T&G newspapers on Sunday, officials of the newspapers said yesterday.

Turning Limitations into Innovation — When "balanced with a healthy disregard for the impossible," constraints can shape and focus problems, leading to truly creative solutions — As vice-president for search products and user experience at Google (GOOG), I work with a team that defines the features …

Interview: Josh Robinson — Josh Robinson's review of PS3 development cost him his job at Sony. We caught up with him to talk about life after his few minutes of gaming fame. — FULL STORY: — We had a chance to chat with Josh Robinson, the former Sony 3D artist who shook up the gaming media …

Slip-up spills beans on Dell notebooks — update Apparent specifications for Dell's future notebooks were briefly exposed by Google's search engine Tuesday, before the spreadsheet was removed from a Dell FTP site and from Google's cache. — The basic configurations for the Dell Inspiron e1405 …
Discussion:
Search Engine Watch Blog

Imagining the Google Future — Top experts help us plot four scenarios that show where the company's geniuses may be leading it—and, perhaps, all of us. — (Business 2.0) - We all know that the company Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded a mere eight years ago is one of the new century's most cunning enterprises.

Pandora and Last.fm: Nature vs. Nurture in Music Recommenders — Over the past week, there has been some blog talk (Fred Wilson, TechCrunch, David Porter) comparing music-recommendation services Pandora and Last.fm. I've been using both for the past couple months, making notes along …

LEADING SPANISH PROVIDER, AWA, SELECTS MERU'S WLAN SYSTEM FOR FIXED MOBILE CONVERGENCE NETWORK IN EUROPE — Provider Will Offer Wireless Voice and Data Services to Business and Government Users in Spain — Meru Networks, the global leader in wireless VoIP infrastructure, today announced that AWA …
Discussion:
thevoipdigest.com

AT&T chief says that people are only paying for half the Internet — AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre has made a name for himself by making loud and repeated pronouncements about how people and companies are not paying enough for Internet access. First, there was the infamous "our pipes" comment, made last year as a warning to VoIP providers.
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Silicon Valley Shrugs Off Google Hiccup — Silicon Valley is leaving knee jerk reactions to Google's lukewarm quarter to the Wall Street crowd. That was the finding of my reporting yesterday after the search giant reported its earnings. I filed this report for CNN Money, that went live this morning.
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Pheedo, PRWeb Put the News in RSS Ads — Download this press release as an Adobe PDF document. — Pheedo and PRWeb are working together to deliver content in an innovative new advertising format, expanding reach and exposure for PRWeb customers. — Emeryville, CA (PRWEB) February 1 …