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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

Newspaper, Magazine and Book Publishers Organizations to Address Search Engine Practices — Español Français Deutsch — The newspaper, magazine and book publishing industries have come together to explore ways to challenge the exploitation of content by search engines without fair compensation to copyright owners.
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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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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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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 …

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.

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

Craigslist's laid-back approach to success — NEW YORK—Online classified-ad site Craigslist isn't your typical Internet company, and CEO Jim Buckmaster isn't your average media mogul. — While other CEOs in the fast-paced technology market are driven by growing revenue and guard their turf …
Discussion:
Silicon Valley Sleuth

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 …