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Microsoft Announces Windows Live Academic Search — New research tool delivers enhanced search capabilities to the academic community. — REDMOND, Wash. — April 11, 2006 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the beta release of its Windows Live™ Academic Search service in seven countries.
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AT&T asks judge to order documents alleging wiretaps returned — Attorneys for AT&T have asked a federal judge to order a San Francisco civil liberties group to return ``highly confidential'' documents that allegedly show that the telecommunications giant provided detailed records of millions …
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dailywireless.org
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Tangled up in spying controversy — NARUS SAYS IT WAS UNAWARE ITS TRACKING SOFTWARE AIDED THE NSA — The engineers at Narus weren't intending to create Big Brother's dream machine when they began writing software a decade ago to help phone companies send out more detailed bills.


Podcasting, MP3 Players Stealing Radio's Audience — Podcasting and MP3 players are stealing radio's audience, according to the latest figures from Bridge Ratings. According to Dave Van Dyke, President of Bridge Ratings, "By 2010, today's 94% penetration for terrestrial radio will have sunk to 85%."
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Newsome.Org
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Google patent points to voice search — A recently published patent provides further evidence that Google is developing a voice-activated search engine. — Patent No. 7027987, of which Google is the assignee, concerns "a voice interface for search engines.
Discussion:
InfoWorld Tech Watch
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Coming soon: Google Voice Search — The master of text-based search is looking to lend a lend a voice to Internet users everywhere, or so it appears based on Google's latest patent. Patent #7,027,987 issued today by the US Patent and Trademark Office covers a "Voice interface for a search engine," which is described as:


Travel Searching Made Easier — It seems pretty obvious that, especially at this time of year, when the weather is changing and you've got summer vacation on the brain, travel is a big part of what people search for on the web. You want to figure out where to go and what to do - and there's so much out there.
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Sketchy New Mobile Firm Does Sketchy Reverse Merger — from the not-building-up-much-confidence-here- are-we? dept — Last month, the details started coming out on the latest in an incredibly overcrowded MVNO market, Xero, and they didn't look pretty. The company appeared …

Learning To Love The Dreaded TiVo — How agencies are using it to make ads that viewers actually want to watch — If TV ads are the media equivalent of mosquitoes, then the digital video recorder (DVR) is a bug zapper on steroids. Rather than merely wringing their hands, however …
Discussion:
Engadget
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Local Coupons at Zixxo — Silicon Valley based Zixxo has launched a great service that I asked for last year (#4 on this list) - local coupons via RSS. This is a very big market. Last year, 323 billion coupons were distributed in the U.S., and of those 4.5 billion were actually used (Zixxo has more coupon stats here).

The Skinny on April's Batch of Microsoft Patches — Microsoft on Tuesday released five updates to remedy security flaws in its software products, including a huge — and potentially disruptive — patch bundle that fixes eight "critical" flaws in Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser.
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ABC experiment faces infrastructure problems — Internet not designed for mass-market streaming video, analysts say — SAN FRANCISCO - The design of the Internet is unsuited to the sort of "live" online television services announced this week by Walt Disney, according to analysts and Internet executives.
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The Silent Penguin, SeattlePI.com Buzzworthy, Venture Chronicles and Lost Remote TV Blog

Google spreads tentacles to Russia — Google has announced that it is going to open a research and development centre in Moscow this year. — Sergei Burkov, a former CEO of Dulance, an Internet search company, will run the centre. According to sources, Google has acquired Dulance.

Apple's iBook successor may sport fashionable hues — When Apple Computer introduces its new line of Intel-based consumer notebooks this spring, the company may once again offer buyers a fashionable option it phased out of its iMac product line nearly half a decade ago: colored enclosures.
Discussion:
Infinite Loop, Gizmodo, The Tao of Mac, Good Morning Silicon Valley and O'Grady's PowerPage

A Little Funding — The best thing that can ever happen to a web service is to have passionate users. Users that notice and email you the second there's a database problem, users that really push the limits of what you can provide, and users that are phenomally successful and bring thousands of others to your doors.


The limitless Xbox 360 hard disk — XSATA links your 360's paltry drive to your computer's - so it need never fill up! — Great as the Xbox 360 is, the capacity of its hard drive is verging on embarrassing. Although marked up as a 20GB, you only really get around 12GB of space to play around with - unless you add the XSATA.

TiVo and DIRECTV Agree to Extend Relationship for Three Years — Agreement Guarantees Quality Service for Existing DIRECTV TiVo Subscribers; Also Addresses Intellectual Property — ALVISO, Calif., April 12 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — TiVo Inc. (Nasdaq: TIVO - News), the creator of and a leader …

Blogosphere suffers spam explosion — Boing Boing would allow its readers to leave comments and engage in a discussion on the wildly popular blog, if it weren't for spam. — The editors of the technology and pop culture blog took down the comment option about two years ago.
Discussion:
Bloggers Blog, Donna's SecurityFlash, scot hacker's foobar blog and Datamation IT News Blog