Morning News Update, October 27 2010

  • Google donates $5 million to promote journalism
    Google has donated $5 million to non-profit organizations promoting new forms of journalism, including $2 million to the Knight Foundation, which will but $1 million of that toward the the Knight News Challenge.
  • PayPal Announces Micropayment System and Facebook Partnership
    The company calls PayPal for Digital Goods the online equivalent of dropping a quarter in the slot to buy a newspaper or play a video game. With a few lines of code, developers can integrate PayPal micropayments into their websites.
  • Google Docs’ New Charts Editor Adds Timelines, Org Charts, and Better Data Visualization
    Google Docs just rolled out a new Charts Editor that brings some impressive new tools to Google-Docs-built charts. Those new features include organizational charts, annotated timelines, and a motion chart for visualizing data over time. They’ve also given an all-around facelift to their regular old charts.
  • 10,000 Websites Integrate with Facebook Every Day
    COO Sheryl Sandberg revealed on stage was that 10,000 websites integrate with Facebook every day. That’s 3.65 million new websites per year, and you can’t forget that tens of millions of websites are already utilizing?Facebook Connect or the?Facebook Open Graph.
  • Appcelerator and PayPal Team Up for Mobile Commerce
    At the?PayPal X Conference today,?Appcelerator?makers of the cross-platform mobile development tool?Titanium?announced that it has just entered into a partnership with PayPal to bring a mobile commerce solution to both PayPal merchants and Titanium developers.
  • Macworld posts MacBook Air benchmark results
    The folks at?Macworld ran some formal benchmark tests on both the 11.6-inch and the 13-inch Airs, comparing them to their predecessors and even a 13-inch MacBook Pro. The results may surprise you. To begin, the?Speedmark 6.5 score doubled when comparing the 13-inch 1.86GHz MacBook Air and the 2009 13-inch 1.86GHz MacBook Air (Speedmark is Macworld’s benchmark test suite). Most of the gains were made over drive-based tests, as the new Air’s flash storage was able to show off a bit. Duplicating a 1GB file on the new Air took 13 seconds; compare that to 69 seconds on the model from 2009. Likewise, compressing a 2GB folder was 21% faster on the new Air.
  • Twitter Hits 300 Employees As The Search For A New Office Continues
    This past June, we?noted that Twitter had zoomed past 200 employees basically doubling in just six months. The rapid hiring pace continues at the startup, though not quite as quickly. The company has just hired their 300th employee a?tweet confirms today.
  • After Ten Years, LimeWire Capitulates To The Music Industry
    The music industry lawyers just put another notch on their wall. After ten years of existence, peer-to-peer music sharing serviceLimeWire is joining Napster, Kazaa, and all the rest. It will abide by a court-ordered injunction today and begin to disable the file-sharing and music-searching features of its P2P software. Years of?legal battles and the prospects of paying?astronomical fines finally did the service in.
  • Top 5 TED Talks On Tech
    Everyone needs a little inspiration now and again, and there is usually no better place to go than to TED to catch up on what the world’s real visionaries are working on. TED regularly hosts brilliant people from around the globe to talk about their ideas for the future.
  • Google is giving away 10,000 Google TVs to lucky developers
    Want a Google TV filled with all that Android goodness, but don’t want to pay for it? You may be in luck, that is you might be if you went to the right conferences or have some serious programming chops.If you attended the Adobe MAX conference, you should have been a part of Google’s 3,000 unit giveaway. If you missed it, circle back and raise Cain, free stuff is too important to miss. Secondly, if you are a member of the Google Code community, Google is going to be calling your digits to ship you a device.
    What if none of that applies to you? You can always submit an entry to the Google TV Web Developer Promotion, to be considered for a free Google TV. Really, if you want to develop for the new platform do yourself a favor and get started without paying hard cash.
  • Facebook rolls out a new design and features for Pages management
    Manage a Facebook page? Chances are that you’ve been frustrated at one time or another with trying to change things on it, even as simple as editing a name of a page. In answer to that frustration, Facebook has (it seems)?just rolled out new page management tools.
  • How To: Avoid Getting Fleeced By Firesheep
    Over the last 24 hours the world has been abuzz with talk about a small Firefox extension. Usually Firefox extensions don’ make headlines, but in this case one did. Why? This extension is called?Firesheep, and it’s scary.

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