Tim Conneally

Joshua Schachter, founder of social bookmarking site Delicious, said in a forum posting yesterday that he regrets selling Delicious to Yahoo.

The discussion centered around Apache Hadoop creator Doug Cutting, who announced this week that he's leaving Yahoo to join Cloudera, an enterprise support service for Hadoop users.

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SlingPlayer Mobile is an application for mobile devices that lets Slingbox users stream content from their television to their phone regardless of their location. Sling Media created apps for Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Symbian, PalmOS, and most recently, iPhone OS. The app for iPhone and iPod Touch was released in May, costs $30, and works with Slingbox Solo, Pro, and Pro-HD set-top boxes.

Unfortunately, there have been a couple of major complaints about the app by users. Firstly, it doesn't work with older Slingboxes and secondly, it can only stream content to the iPhone or iPod over Wi-Fi.

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After Facebook announced that it would be acquiring social sharing service Friendfeed, Facebook engineering manager Akhil Wable announced that Facebook was in the midst of improving its in-site Search features as well.

Users can enter the term they want to find in the search field, then results can be filtered to include posts by friends, fan groups, or pages viewable to all users, as well as events, applications, and the Web as a whole.

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Until today, there were only a couple of important bits of information about Microsoft's new multi-touch Zune that were left unknown: the price and the date of availability. Now, thanks to a Best Buy Leak, even those mysteries have been exposed.

On September 8th, the 16GB Zune HD will be available at $220, while the 32GB model will cost $290 (versus $299 and $399 for the 16GB and 32GB iPod Touch.)

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Popular social networking site Facebook has bought FriendFeed.com, and will be taking its entire staff aboard, the companies announced this afternoon.

"Since I first tried FriendFeed, I've admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information," said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO.

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Today, bankrupt-but-bailed-out automobile company General Motors announced it will be attempting to sell cars on eBay in a move to reach out to new customers and possibly reclaim some market share.

Beginning tomorrow, approximately 225 California Chevrolet, Buick, Pontiac, and GMC dealerships will put some 20,000 cars up on a new dedicated portal (gm.ebay.com) with "buy it now" prices which are negotiable.

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Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski is stepping down from his position today as the nearly bankrupt Canadian telecommunications company continues its liquidation and reconstruction.

After losing almost $7 billion in two years, Nortel filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in January of this year.

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There's an old business saying: If you want to make money in a gold rush, don't prospect, sell shovels. This is the same sort of idea that happened with Twitter and URL shorteners.

URL shortening services are the shovels of the Twitter gold rush, except nobody's making any money selling them.

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Toshiba this morning announced that it has applied for membership in the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA), the body in charge of standardizing and evangelizing the high definition disc format, and that it intends to launch Blu-ray notebooks and standalone players this year.

"In light of recent growth in digital devices supporting the Blu-ray format, combined with market demand from consumers and retailers alike, Toshiba has decided to join the BDA," read the company's statement this morning.

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The U.S.' second most popular retailer, Target announced that it will be ending its 8-year relationship with Amazon.com and launching its own new platform for Target.com, which does not rely on Amazon's services.

Steve Eastman, president of Target.com said, "The strength of Amazon's technology and fulfillment services has been a contributing factor in Target.com's success. However, to deliver a customized multi-channel experience for Target's guests, we believe it is in Target's best interest going forward to assume full control over the design and management of Target's e-commerce technology platform, fulfillment and guest services operations."

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Earlier this summer, Digg's Chief Revenue and Strategy officer Mike Maser announced the beta of Digg Ads, a novel advertising platform where readers rate ads and determine how much the advertisers has to pay. For example, an ad which has lots of Diggs will cost an advertiser much less than if an add is buried. Ads can be buried so much that they are priced out of the system.

This week, the site has begun the rollout of an early beta version of Digg Ads. For a select group of users, paid entries will begin to appear on the site. The only difference between these advertisements and traditional Digg entries is that the advertisements are marked as "sponsored", similar to sponsored results on search sites.

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In June, cable operator Comcast and media company Time Warner announced that they would begin working on the new distribution model known as "TV Everywhere," a Web-based streaming service akin to Hulu that would give Comcast subscribers on-demand access to cable content at a premium. Ideally, the service will help cable companies make more money off of streaming content than syndication sites currently do.

Now, satellite television network DirecTV has reportedly entered into discussions with Comcast and Time Warner about joining TV Everywhere.

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It takes a lot to get Apple to make a statement to the public, but the ongoing controversy related to the company's App Store review policy has come to such an agitated peak that Apple has repeatedly been forced to explain itself.

Yesterday, Senior Vice President Phil Schiller had to make a stand against allegations of downright censorship by the blogosphere.

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Though the news actually leaked out a bit early in the "AppPack" at the end of July, Geodelic's location-based Android app called Sherpa was officially launched yesterday for all Android users.

Sherpa combines "Web 2.0"-style profiling with location-based and contextual data to suggest nearby attractions, restaurants and retailers. Using a learning engine called GENIE (Geodelic ENgine for Interest Evaluation), Sherpa automatically learns a user's favorite locations and lifestyle behavior.  If a user eats out more than shops, it modifies itself and tailors the experience to begin showing more restaurants and less retail stores. Sherpa will also only give suggestions that are pertinent to the time of day, so if you run a search at 2:00 am looking for government offices, you're not likely get anything without searching specifically.

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Twitter, the popular and ubiquitous (as long as you're over 25) microblogging service was down for several hours on Thursday.

"Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote in the site's official blog today.

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