Gary Chan 2.0

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), today announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire Audible Inc. (NASDAQ:ADBL).

Audible.com is the leading online provider of premium digital spoken word audio content, specializing in digital audio editions of books, newspapers and magazines, television and radio programs and original programming. Through its web sites in the US and UK and alliances in Germany and France, Audible.com offers over 80,000 programs, including audiobooks from well-known authors such as Stephen King, Thomas Friedman, and Jane Austen, and spoken word audio content from sources including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Fresh Air and Charlie Rose.

amazon.com

Speculation is mounting that Google is plotting the launch of a mobile phone in partnership with computer giant Dell.

Senior industry sources claim the two companies will reveal their plans at next month’s 3GSM telecoms conference in Barcelona, al-though Google insiders deny an announcement is due in the near future.

marketingweek.co.uk

One of the more anticipated video cards of this year is finally here, AMD is launching the ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2. What will two 3870 GPUs on one board do for you in gaming? We are going to find out exactly that in Crysis, UT3, COD 4 and HL2.

enthusiast.hardocp.com

Microsoft is proud to announce the availability of Visual Studio 2008 in volume licensing, retail, and MSDN download.

The Features

Visual Studio 2008 hosts a variety of new and exciting features:

* Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) lets developers do native queries without the use of specialized languages.
ASP.NET AJAX, JSON, RSS, REST and JavaScript are all supported
* Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) is now included in Visual Studio 2008 Professional and Visual Studio Team System
* Developers now have the ability to bring corporate data and interactive applications within the familiar Office environment to ease deployment and adoption of the application
* Visual Studio 2008 builds applications that work with .NET versions 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5
* Cascading Style sheet and HTML editors have been greatly enhanced for productivity
* And more!

Trial Download

blogs.msdn.com/usisvde

As of today, you can play full-length tracks and entire albums for free on the Last.fm website.

Something we’ve wanted for years—for people who visit Last.fm to be able to play any track for free—is now possible. With the support of the folks behind EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner—and the artists they work with—plus thousands of independent artists and labels, we’ve made the biggest legal collection of music available to play online for free, the way we believe it should be.

Full-length tracks are now available in the US, UK, and Germany, and we’re hard at work broadening our coverage into other countries. During this initial public beta period, each track can be played up to 3 times for free before a notice appears telling you about our upcoming subscription service. The soon-to-be announced subscription service will give you unlimited plays and some other useful things. We’re also working on bringing full-length tracks to the desktop client and beyond.

blog.last.fm

“The feedback tool lists the “pillars” of Win 7. You can see that Microsoft is aiming to fine tune this release as the case in XP rather than technological advancement as in 2K. highlights include”network aware”, with improved connection tools and detections. It will have the ability to detect which network you’re in and switch your settings and devices accordingly; With Live account, you can carry your IE settings and favorites with you; Gadget data caching; New Calculator, Paint, and Wordpad using WPF; install to desktop in 10 mins with only 1 reboot; instant streaming; better battery mileage, etc. All descriptions are scenario-based, so what will actually turn up is still yet to know.”

liveside.net

It happens to everyone, and it’s annoying. Sometimes the wrong tab gets closed in Firefox, but it’s OK. There’s a solution to the problem, and it comes in the form of CTRL SHIFT T in Windows or COMMAND SHIFT T in Mac OS X.

And if you’d like to close the tab currently up, CTRL + W or COMMAND + W should do the trick. Now you have no excuse for your lady to catch you browsing the Apple Store late at night.

downloadsquad.com

We announced big news today - our preliminary results for our fiscal second quarter, and as importantly, that were acquiring MySQL AB.

But the biggest news of the day is… we’re putting a billion dollars behind the M in LAMP. If you’re an industry insider, you’ll know what that means - we’re acquiring MySQL AB, the company behind MySQL, the world’s most popular open source database.

blogs.sun.com/jonathan

UPDATE: I just installed the latest version of Vista SP1 and now ntoskrnl.exe is either corrupt or missing. Discussion here.

Microsoft may not have released any more information regarding the actual changes in the latest version of Windows Vista SP1, but the company has widened the release pool to… everybody. When Microsoft first made the update available earlier this week only about 15,000 beta testers were given official download links. Now you can grab the update as a direct download. You can also download the service pack through Windows Update if you jump through a few hoops.

downloadsquad.com

First, we’ve got new releases of our most popular applications: FeedDemon 2.6, NetNewsWire 3.1, Inbox 3.0 (beta), and NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile 2.0. Each of these is a pretty major release on its own - tons of new features in all of them.

But second, every one of those applications is now free! Free as in beer, that is. And add to the free list NewsGator Go! for BlackBerry as well. And not only are they free, but our online services (including synchronization) are now free as well! Not to mention our iPhone reader, HTML mobile reader, and all of the other applications that are part of our online platform.

rassoc.com