If you follow AllThingsD, and Weekend Update hopes you do, then one thing you’ve come to value is the special way the staff gets around the world to cover the important stuff and report it straight from the geek’s mouth. This week our bicoastal brigade brought the tech news as it happened, and in Boomtown’s case, from 30,000 feet.
BoomTown’s week began onstage in front of thousands of chanting women. No, Kara wasn’t filling in for Oprah; she was doing something much cooler.
Here’s official confirmation of the search partnership Microsoft has struck with Twitter, first reported by BoomTown earlier this morning. It’s being distributed as Qi Lu, president of Microsoft’s Online Services Division, presents at the annual Web 2.0 Summit.
AT&T has finally completed the very important “internal system upgrades” that prevented it from supporting multimedia messaging service on Apple’s iPhone. And at some point late tomorrow morning, the carrier will release an update enabling MMS.
Silicon Valley luminary and Golden Geek cover model Marc Andreessen is adding another gig to his CV: Hewlett-Packard director. Andreessen, who sold his software company, Opsware, to HP two years ago for $1.6 billion, will begin serving on the board immediately, bringing its total number of directors to 11.
In August 2008, Facebook claimed 100 million monthly active users worldwide. By April 2009, the social networking outfit doubled that number. In July, it reached 250 million monthly active users. And now, two months later, Facebook has passed 300 million. But more important: Facebook is cash-flow positive.
Motorola has finally announced its bet-the-company Android handset. At GigaOM’s Mobilize 09 event in San Francisco this morning, Sanjay Jha, Motorola’s co-CEO and CEO of the company’s handset division, uncrated the CLIQ, a device it describes unremarkably as the “first phone with social skills.”
Speaking at Apple’s music event, CEO Steve Jobs, in his first public appearance since his medical leave of absence, introduces iTunes 9. After noting that iTunes is the largest music store in the world, boasting some 100 million accounts, Jobs rattles off some of the software’s new features. Among them: Genius Mixes and improved synching. The latter enables more specific synching and supports a new way of managing applications for the iPhone and iPod touch with a nice drag-and-drop feature. Very easy to organize and reorganize applications. The crowd really likes this one.
A renewed advertising push for the Palm Pre and an increase in the number of applications available for it haven’t done much for the device’s sales. According to Pali Research analyst Walter Piecyk, weekly Pre sales are holding steady in the mid-20,000 range at which they stabilized a few weeks back. One way for Sprint to spur sales, says Piecyk: Cut the price of the Pre to $99, or even 99 cents
Yahoo’s search advertising partnership with Microsoft and its embrace of Bing don’t mean the company has given up on its search business. During a presentation at its headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., Monday, Yahoo unveiled a number of new features in its search product that show it’s intent on competing with its new partner in the only way it can–by mimicking the features of Microsoft’s new Bing search engine, and Google’s search engine as well.
Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal are back up after being felled earlier this morning by denial-of-service attacks that rendered them inaccessible. It’s not yet known if the attacks were related, although, as a LiveJournal spokesperson notes, “it would be a huge coincidence” if they weren’t.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
12:58 AM: Breakfast: Two schools of fish from Tokyo Bay. Calories: 782,000. How I was feeling when I ate this: confused, irradiated, hating my size.
11:37 AM: Exercise: “Taxi Stomp” (alternating legs, for 30 blocks). Calories burned: 148,900,183.
1983. The Beatles announce their first tour in thirteen years, but likewise announce that Michael Jackson will be going on tour with them as a one gigantic mega-concert event.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
D is unlike any other executive conference. Since its debut in 2003, D has brought to life the energy and excitement of the digital revolution in an unscripted, upfront and unparalleled way. Read more »
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