The Hindu
HP says cost for 3Par deal worth it
Financial Times
Hewlett-Packard's victory over Dell this week in a rapid-fire bidding war for storage technology company 3Par, should secure its lead over its long-term rival in the increasingly important data storage segment, ...
Owners of a Third of 3PAR Back HP BidABC News
Dell's 3PAR Termination Fee Could Fuel Storage AcquisitionInformationWeek
HP Wins 3PAR, What's Next for Dell?PC World
Washington Post -Wall Street Journal -Reuters India
all 2,063 news articles »

Telegraph.co.uk
Social brings native Facebook experience to iPad
Macworld
Since Facebook has yet to release a native iPad app—or give any real indication that one is in the works—third parties have capitalized on the opportunity to various degrees. Facebook's desktop Website has a number of quirks and features that do not ...
Twitter Counts 145M Users, 62% Hike in MobileeWeek
Mobile Apps Helps Boost Twitter Membership to 145MPC Magazine
Faster Forward: Twitter shares some numbersWashington Post
CNET -PC World -Digital Media Wire
all 499 news articles »

Gamasutra
Duke Nukem Forever to see light of day after all
CNET
After well over a decade of "development," 2K Games announced today that Duke Nukem Forever will actually see the light of day. The publisher went on to say that Gearbox Software has taken the reigns on the project, rescuing it from ...
'Borderlands' studio Gearbox resurrecting Duke NukemUSA Today
Duke Nukem Forever development 'complete'Computerandvideogames.com
Gearbox Software Unveils Duke Nukem ForeverGamespy.com
GameSpot -bit-tech.net -Exophase
all 85 news articles »

CBC.ca
Toshiba Recall Signals Larger Trend for Hot Laptops
PC World
Toshiba is the latest laptop vendor to fall victim to overheating technology. The recall of approximately 41000 laptops resulting from more than 100 reports of melting laptop cases and minor injuries follows similar issues and ...
Toshiba recalling 41000 notebooks - AfterDawnAfterdawn.com
Toshiba Recalls 41K Satellite Laptops Due to OverheatingPC Magazine
Fire hazard forces Toshiba laptop recallAFP
DailyTech -Slippery Brick -CNET
all 145 news articles »

Phandroid.com
Motorola Takes Another Shot At Apple
InformationWeek
Motorola has published another full-page ad for one of its Android devices, and takes a poke at the iPhone's inability to access Flash. By Eric Zeman The latest ad published by Motorola and Verizon Wireless reads, "Flash Websites? ...
Motorola mocks Apple for not having FlashIntoMobile (blog)
Motorola Takes Out Another Full Page Ad in the NYT Complete with Not So Subtle ...Phandroid.com
Motorola takes another shot at Apple with a new AdAllNewsMac (press release)
Droid Life (blog) -MobileCrunch (blog)
all 8 news articles »

USA Today
GM hatches Chevrolet Cruze hatchback for Europe
USA Today
General Motors is already getting some favorable press with the new Chevrolet Cruze, the automakers' attempt to go toe-to-toe against Honda Civic and Toyota Corolla. Now Europeans will get an extra that Americans won't: a Cruze hatchback. ...
'Toy Story' star Tim Allen becomes Chevy pitchmanThe Associated Press
News Tool Man Tim Allen Is The Voice Of Chevrolet 2011 CruzeThe Car Connection (blog)
2011 Chevrolet Cruze VideoCars.com (blog)
Ward's Auto (subscription) -Detroit Free Press -The Detroit News
all 103 news articles »

Six Apart is shutting down its free blogging service, Vox, and as Mike points out this announcement is really about cleaning up for an upcoming merger with VideoEgg. With 250 million uniques worldwide spread across thousands of blogs and a growing ad business, Six Apart isn’t a failure. But, like Slide and like Digg, it hasn’t lived up to its promise either. And products like Vox are a big reason why: As blogging was getting more open and commenters more mean spirited, Vox was intended as a clean, well-lit place in the blogosphere. It had a great UI and some nice features like a “Question of the Day” to get reluctant new bloggers up-and-writing. But then it just sort of withered.

My takeaway from the shuttering wasn’t so much “Six Apart is cleaning up for a sale” (which they are and Six Apart Japan is next) but “Good God, Six Apart! What took you so long?”

Back in 2007 when Six Apart sold off LiveJournal and named Chris Alden CEO, the mantra was the company was finally going to focus. There’s a fine line between healthy diversification and doing too much to do anything well. Six Apart has always had an Intuit problem—they had several valuable properties but they didn’t necessarily add up to one big consumer Internet brand in the golden age of huge consumer Internet brands. They were essentially a software-as-a-service company for media with MovableType, a Web publishing tool with TypePad and a consumer Web 2.0 play for teens with LiveJournal and for adults with Vox. Six Apart had essentially made itself a company no one could acquire outright because it was doing so many different things.

Here’s a hint: If no one wants to buy you as is, maybe you shouldn’t have so many disparate, under-developed products as a stand alone company. Every senior manager at Six Apart I’ve talked to for the last three years has said this was the company’s biggest problem. And yet, we’re only now seeing a move to shut down flailing properties. It’s hard to say from the outside who is to blame, but Six Apart has clearly suffered from a lack of leadership and decisiveness.

I like Alden. He knows media, he’s a nice guy and he came into that job with a lot of goodwill and fanfare. But perhaps that’s too much of the problem—he focused more on publishers than readers and was too nice to make hard decisions faster. From what I hear things are turning ugly inside the company, with Alden blaming some of his senior team and much of that team turning on Alden. When (and I should say “if,” but it’s likely “when”) this deal with Video Egg is announced, they’ll be all smiles, there will be a great narrative about why the two make sense together and maybe they do. But none of that is what I hear is going on at Six Apart HQ right now.

It didn’t have to be this way. Six Apart was one of the earliest blogging tools and one of the first to have the cojones to charge for simplicity and ease of use. A lot of the look and feel of blogs was shaped by Six Apart founders Ben and Mena Trott. And Six Apart had one of the more powerful and intriguing boards with the uber angel Reid Hoffman, superstar and Creative Commons founder Joi Ito and August Capital’s scrappy David Hornik. Some of the smartest people around the Web clearly saw something great in Six Apart. And it had plenty of money—it raised more than $20 million from investors and millions more when it unloaded LiveJournal.

Welcome to the sadly wistful phase of Web 2.0. The big winners – Facebook, Twitter, Zynga and LinkedIn—have already been separated from the obvious losers—Friendster, Plurk, Friendfeed and a host of names we’ve already forgotten. Only now are we starting to get judgments on the companies in the middle. Ventures that succeeded in building real companies with sizable reach and significant revenues and outlasted a raft of competitors, but that nevertheless didn’t live up to their promise. The best will go the way of Slide, a nice exit that no one loses money on, and some make money on. Then there’s the situation Six Apart is in now– poised on an uncomfortable merger with another private company that’s not an “exit” for anybody and just means another four years of slogging to build something big.
CrunchBase InformationSix ApartInformation provided by CrunchBase

With the launch of Ping this week in the latest update for iTunes, Apple is finally adding social elements to its software. Ping is essentially a social music discovery feature in iTunes. You can friend, follow, or lurk to see what music other people on iTunes—people you know, people you don’t—like, review, or buy.

Ping is very promising if only because of Apple’s reach through iTunes to 160 million music consumers. And it will no doubt get better over time. But at launch, it is riddled with problems which stem from the fact that Apple does not know how to create social software. It is completely out of its element, and it shows.

The biggest problem I have with Ping is that it lives in iTunes. Not only does it live in iTunes, it is isolated there. iTunes is not social. It is not even on the Web. And Ping doesn’t communicate with any other social networks. I can’t see people’s iTunes Pings in Twitter, Facebook, or anywhere else. While Ping does make iTunes itself more social, the problem is that I don’t live in iTunes. It is a store. I go in to buy stuff and get out as fast as I can. I am not sure Ping is going to make me want to hang out there more.

Let’s start with when you sign up. There is no easy way to find people you already know on Ping. Facebook Connect was supposed to solve that, but that feature is disabled until Apple and Facebook work out their differences. So what you are left with now is having to type in people’s names and hope they’ve signed up for Ping, or invite them one at a time through email. Hopefully nobody else has claimed their name. (The fight with name squatters and spammers is already beginning. Earlier today I found a dozen “Steve Jobs” accounts, which have since been cleaned up). There is no mechanism for importing your contacts from Gmail or any other email, or bringing in the people you already follow on Twitter or other social networks.

That leaves you with the option of finding one or two early-adopter friends and clicking through their profiles to see who they follow and add the interesting people. The only people I can find right now are bloggers and tech folks I follow elsewhere for different reasons. I have no idea whether they have any taste in music, but I guess I’ll find out soon. Getting up and running should be easier than this But that is not the deal breaker.

Once you start following a few people, you can see all the songs they “like,” rate, review, or buy. It creates a realtime activity stream which gives you social entry points into the iTunes music store. It also works on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

But don’t be confused about Apple’s social ambitions. Ping is all about driving more sales in iTunes. It is completely separate from your existing iTunes library of songs. You can’t like a song while you are listening to your existing collection. If you’ve bought a song or album, Ping assumes you like it (bad assumption), but none of your actual listening activity appears in your stream.

You can only like songs in the iTunes store. And even doing that isn’t easy. There is a big like button for each album, but if you want to like a song, you need to click the drop-down arrow next to the buy button. Be careful not to hit buy, unless you really like the song.

Once you do like a song, that shows up in your stream with a nice big buy button for all your friends to follow suit. Of course, they can’t listen to the whole song before deciding to buy, only a sample. You can’t share playlists. You can’t really do much other than peddle music to your friends.

Ping is just too commercial. It is not fun. There isn’t even a leaderboard or any visible game mechanics. There is no way to see which of the people you follow are the best music recommenders as measured by subsequent purchases from people who follow them, likes or any other measure.

Ping is a promotional vehicle for iTunes and bands. If you follow a band like U2, it seems like they get a special account which allows them to upload videos (and who knows what else). Why can’t I upload photos or videos to my stream? I can’t even add a random comment or status update without first liking, rating, or buying a song or album.

While I am sure Ping will help drive more sales, and is probably something I will check out whenever I am in iTunes to do something else, it is not as compelling as it could be. The most interesting information in iTunes is what your friends are actually listening to and what they think about the songs they know by heart—the ones in their music library. Simply allowing people to like or promote the songs in their existing collections while they are listening to them in iTunes or on their iPods would make Ping a lot better. Sharing playlists is another no-brainer.

Ping could be so much more than it is: isolated, controlling, and a bit boring.

CrunchBase InformationiTunesAppleInformation provided by CrunchBase

Plex, taking over the world. Only a few days after releasing Plex/Nine and Plex for iOS, the media center announced a partnership with LG to include a version of the software on its Internet-enabled TVs and Blu-ray players. But you knew that already. Wouldn’t you know it, I have here a brief video demo. Who loves ya?

Oh my, how I love some good ol’ fashion mudslinging.

“Flash Websites? There’s A Phone For That.”

To any ne’er-do-blog-read layman, the full page ad that Motorola just put in the New York Times might just seem oddly worded. To anyone who has even considered considering themselves a gadget geek — or has, at least, turned on their TV anytime in the past year and a half and seen Apple’s “There’s An App For That” campaign — there’s no question who this one’s aimed at.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

Without Sony‘s support ESPN “probably would not have launched” ESPN 3D. So said Bryan Burns, Vice-President of ESPN, at IFA earlier today. Burns, talking before a reasonably crowded auditorium, reiterated ESPN’s commitment to 3D sports broadcasting while fully recognizing what we’ve all been going on about for months now: nobody’s going to buy an expensive 3D TV—have you seen the unemployment numbers of late?—when there’s nearly zero 3D content to be found.

The Guardian
Jobs slashes Apple TV price, unveils 'Ping' social network
Computerworld
Computerworld - Apple today introduced a dramatically smaller and less expensive Apple TV that streams rented movies and TV programs to high-definition television sets, making good on rumors that the company would push what CEO Steve ...
Apple vs. Facebook: What's Behind the Ping Controversy?PC World
Apple's Ping Inundated with Spam CommentsPC Magazine
Facebook questions, spam fears greet Ping's arrivalUSA Today
TechCrunch -CNET -Mediapost.com
all 1,759 news articles »

Business Daily Africa
Anti-Google Group's Creeptastic Video Campaign
PC World
Consumer Watchdog, an anti-Google group, invaded Times Square with a 540-square-foot video cartoon of Google CEO Eric Schmidt frightening children -- and me -- with threats of infiltrating their online lives. Watch it with the lights on. ...
Google updates privacy policyAFP
Consumer Watchdog's over the top cartoon goes too farFortune
Consumer Watchdog thinks Google's Eric Schmidt is a data pervInfoWorld
PC Magazine -San Francisco Chronicle -Times Square Chronicles
all 129 news articles »

WLFI.com
Prepaid Smartphone Plans Announced By Verizon
RedOrbit
Verizon Wireless customers who don't want to commit to long-term service contracts will now be able to prepay for smartphone service, the company announced on Thursday. In a September 1 press release, the company announced that the new 3G Prepaid data ...
Verizon Wireless Beefs Up Network for Penn State Football FansTMCnet
Verizon Announces Prepaid Data Plans For SmartphonesInformationWeek
Verizon's New Prepid Data Plans: How Beneficial Are TheyUSANewsWeek.com
Computerworld -Yahoo! Tech -PC World
all 535 news articles »

Sydney Morning Herald
iPod Touch is Not Quite an 'iPhone Without the Phone'
PC World
Sorry, geeks, but Apple's new iPod Touch is not quite ready to become your contract-free, data-only iPhone. The smartphone without a voice plan is a fantasy that a lot of people share, at least judging from blog and website comments that I've read over ...
Apple iOS 4.2 for iPad Teased on Company's Website: What To ExpectNotebooks.com
Jobs promises fixes for iPhone flaws next week with iOS 4.1Computerworld
First look: Taking HDR photos with Apple's iOS 4.1Apple Insider
FierceCIO -I4U -ITProPortal
all 2,871 news articles »

Mike Yang, Google’s Associate General Counsel, just published a post on the Google blog, informing users that the company is making its privacy policies shorter and easier to understand for non-lawyers. They are also making some other changes, but to be clear, the Mountain View company isn’t altering its privacy practices as such.

The updates will go into effect October 3, which is 30 days from now.

Until that time, all products and services will continue to be governed by the current version of the privacy policies and Google will update people on the changes via the Google Privacy Center and a notice the company will be putting up on the Google Account sign-in page, enabling people to learn about the changes when they sign into Gmail, Docs, Talk or Calendar.

There’s now also a dedicated page in the Privacy Center where users can find the most popular privacy tools, and some of Google’s product Help Centers will get more content over time.

So what else is changing?

Most Google products and services are governed by the main Google Privacy Policy, which was last updated in March 2009. However, Google writes, a number of its products also have individual privacy policies in addition.

The company will be getting rid of twelve of these product-specific policies to reduce unnecessary redundancies and/or to better reflect how the products work together. These twelve products will continue to be governed by the main Google Privacy Policy.

They are: 3D Warehouse, App Engine, Calendar, Docs, Firefox Extensions, G1, Gmail, Feedback, iGoogle, Maps, Talk and Tasks.

The main Google Privacy Policy will also be made more user-friendly.

Google says it is trimming redundancies and updating some of the legal language to make it more clear to users. For example, Google will be deleting a sentence that reads, “The affiliated sites through which our services are offered may have different privacy practices and we encourage you to read their privacy policies,” because they realized it’s kind of obvious that non-Google sites aren’t covered by Google’s privacy policies.

You can see a preview of the updated policy that will take effect on October 3, 2010. But even better is going to this page, where all the changes are indicated more clearly.

CrunchBase InformationGoogleInformation provided by CrunchBase

Pocket-lint.com
iHome throws up teaser page for AirPlay wireless speaker system
ZDNet (blog)
Apple recently teased about AirPlay support on third-party products, and it looks like iHome might be answering the call first. Andrew J. Nusca is an associate editor for ZDNet and SmartPlanet. ...
iHome ready for some Apple AirPlayPocket-lint.com
iHome teases AirPlay-ready portable speakeripodnn
iHome Shows Off the First Speaker With Apple's AirPlay Built InGizmodo.com (blog)
CNET (blog) -Reg Hardware -Soft Sailor (blog)
all 28 news articles »

Music identification app Shazam has announced big feature updates to its iPhone and iPod touch music discovery apps. There are now customised settings for ‘tagging on start-up’ make the process of identifying a music track faster, a new UI, the ability to search for ringtones and videos on iTunes and better video. You can also share tunes you find via Facebook and Twitter. Shame it doesn't own its name on Twitter then.

The Guardian
Samsung Launches Galaxy Tab
PC World
Samsung has finally revealed the Galaxy Tab, a tablet computer running Android 2.2 that will begin shipping in October in Europe. A launch date for the US was not revealed. The tablet can be used to surf the Web, watch movies, read e-books, ...
Samsung Expects Profit Boost From Mobile PhonesWall Street Journal
Samsung Galaxy TabDailyTech
Galaxy Tablet May Herald Boon For VodafoneForbes
CNET (blog) -ABC News -The Guardian
all 1,287 news articles »

comScore has just released some telling stats about the massive growth of live streaming video over the web. According to the analytics company, over the past year, the amount of time American audiences spent watching video on the major live video publishers (Justin.tv, Ustream, Livestream, LiveVideo, and Stickam) has grown 648% to more than 1.4 billion minutes. Of course, video consumption on the web has grown generally—U.S. audiences watching YouTube and Hulu increased 68% and 75%, respectively, over the same time period. comScore says that even though live stream viewership still represents a fraction of the total time spent watching online video, it does indicate that viewers are increasingly looking for live streams on the web.

While live online video sites don’t have nearly as much of an audience as static video sites, the live video sites have been able to keep their audiences more engaged for a longer period of time. For example, the average live streamed video view is 7% longer than the average online video view.

Live video could also be good news for advertisers looking to target demographics via video advertising. Live video sites are 72% more likely to deliver the demographic, males age 18-34, than the average online video site. In fact, males age 18-34 comprise almost 30% of the total live video viewing audience on comScore’s sample sites.

In particular, comScore says that Justin.tv, Ustream, and Livestream have all grown significantly in terms of viewership over the past year. In July, Ustream reached more than 3.2 million unique viewers, with Justin.tv reaching 2.6 million and Livestream 2.4 million. Livestream, however, served more than 160 million videos, compared to roughly 130 million from Justin.tv and 20 million from Ustream. Vut those 20 million videos on Ustream were viewed eight minutes longer on average than videos on Justin.tv and 17 minutes more than those on Livestream. In terms of total minutes, viewers logged nearly 900 million minutes watching Justin.tv in July, outpacing the other two sites.

The growth in live streaming viewership isn’t particularly surprising. More and more viewers are looking to their computers and mobile devices for live video content as players like Ustream and Justin.tv provide a platform for these events. Justin.tv just released and Android app that allows you to broadcast video live, and an iPhone app is in the works. And Ustream has already released a similar Android app. Ustream has raised a whopping $90 million in venture funding, and CEO Jon Ham is confident that his company can remain a leader in the space when YouTube eventually starts its own live stream platform (YouTube has dabbled in the space but it is rumored that Google will be launching a live streaming feature).

CrunchBase InformationcomScoreUstreamJustin.TVLivestreamInformation provided by CrunchBase