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  • 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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  • Apple announces Mac OS X Lion with some superb new features. OS X Lion will be available in Summer 2011.
  • In about 90 days Apple will open an App Store for OS X Apps, thereby bringing iOS closer to it’s desktop sibling.
  • FaceTime is now available for OS X so you can start video chats between iOS devices and OS X desktop computers.
  • Apple updates the iLife Software suite with some nice improvements.
  • There will be a new MacBook Air.
  • Boxee Box Starts Shipping November 10
    Amazon will start shipping the?Boxee Box to customers on November 10, with other retailers throughout the world offering the device beginning on November 17 both online and in stores.
  • If you read yesterdays?Morning News Update you know about the discussion between Apple iOS and Google Android about being “open”, my thoughts about it and what Joe Hewitt twittered. Now Joe Hewitt posted an article on his blog, clearing up a few of his statements.

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  • Today we’re somehow in between yesterdays geek fight between Apple and Google over the openess and/or integration of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android mobile operating system and tonights Apple event.
    Developer Joe Hewitt, who for example built the great Firefox Extension Firebug and the first few versions of the great Facebook iPhone App, has now joined in to the discussion via Twitter.

    How does Android get away with the “open” claim when the source isn’t public until major releases, and no one outside Google can check in?

    Until Android is read/write open, it’s no different than iOS to me. Open source means sharing control with the community, not show and tell.

    Check his Twitter stream for all of his statements. So why is this interesting? Well, firstly Joe Hewitt has given up on developing the Facebook iPhone client because of a lack of choice over the whole process, but he didn’t stop working for Facebook and rumors say he’s in charge of developing an official Android client for Facebook. So now he’s equally frustrated with the state of things over at iOS’s biggest rival. We’ll see if any more voices appear but for the time being it seems like the “open claims” of the Android folks didn’t hold for very long and in my personal opinion enduser satisfaction probably ranks higher than having an OS that can be compiled yourself and in this field Apple still holds the crown. I – as a geek – might enjoy hacking my devices and tweaking every little aspect of the platform, but for the average user it’s much more important to find the applications you want to use easily and without much set up effort which is still easier with a unified platform like iOS in contrast to the fragmented multi incarnations of Android on different carriers and handheld platforms.

  • The other big thing is of course Apple’s “Back to the Mac” event that will be held this evening which will probably announce a new version of OS X together with some Mac centric product announcements. I wont go into speculating what exactly will be announced though.
  • In other news: App Stores seem to be popping up all over the place:
  • HP offers a Video Walkthrough of webOS 2.0

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  • WiMAX 4G Coming to New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles in 2010
    The next-next generation U.S. wireless technology is preparing itself for primetime in major metropolitan areas. New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles will each have 4G WiMAX by the end of 2010.
  • Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie To Step Down As Chief Software Architect
    Microsoft has just?announced?that?Ray Ozzie, the company’s Chief Software Architect is stepping down from this position.
    Ozzie assumed the chief software architect’s role in June 2006. In his role, Ozzie was responsible for oversight of the company’s technical strategy and product architecture. Prior to this role, Ozzie was chief technical officer from April 2005 to June 2006. He assumed that position in April 2005 after Microsoft acquired Groove Networks, a next-generation collaboration software company he formed in 1997.
  • Driverless taxi gets called with an iPad
    This is just wild! A group of researchers in Berlin have been?working on “autonomous cars” for a while. The Berlin team has pushed the idea ahead by hooking the car up to an iPad. The iPad’s GPS location is sent out to the car, and then the user can even track the car’s movement and scanner information directly from the iPad.
  • Google Puts the Emphasis on Location in Search
    With a few tweaks and an interface change, Google has placed location and location-based search front-and-center in its search engine.
    The big change, announced earlier today?on Google Blogs, is thatGoogle has moved the user location setting to the left-hand panel of the search engine results page. This feature automatically detects your current location and tailors search results based on that.
    The change rolls out starting today and will be available to users in 40+ languages sometime soon.
  • Apple releases Q4 results: $20.34B revenue, $4.31B profits
    Apple reports earnings of $4.31 billion, or $4.64 a share, in the fiscal fourth quarter, versus $1.82 a share in the year-ago quarter.
    3.89 million Macs, 14.1m iPhones (almost 2x the previous year’s number), 4.19m iPads sold in Q4.
    ANdy Rubin's answer to Steve JobsDuring Apple’s earnings call yesterday, Jobs pointed out that open systems don’t always win.?
    But he also tried to reframe the debate. Open versus closed is a smokescreen,? he argues. Google likes to characterize Android as open and iOS as closed. We think this is disingenuous.? The real difference between the iPhone and Android is, he says, integrated versus fragmented.
    Android chief Andy Rubin responded with his first tweet. (See image)
  • IPv4 Space Shrinks To 5% Final Addresses To Be Issued In Early 2011
    The Number Resource Organization, the coordinating mechanism for the five?Regional Internet Registries or?RIRs, this morning?announced that less than 5% of the world?IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) addresses remain unallocated. The IPv4 pool first dipped below 10% in January 2010, and in the next nine months some 200 million addresses have subsequently been allocated from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) to the RIRs.
    Follow @IPv4Countdown to keep up to date and meanwhile prepare your systems for IPv6 (it’s about time anyway).

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This is the first post of what I plan to make a recurring feature on this blog. Each day I will try to assemble a post with interesting news that pop up in my newsfeed.
So here it goes…