Sears (SHLD) is doing some very interesting things online that while in their infancy, have the potential to turn them into a "social shopping hub".

From Bnet:

On Wednesday I spoke with antitrust attorney Gary Reback, the man who spearheaded the push to break up Microsoft (MSFT) in the nineties. The event was hosted by HBSTech at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.

By Jon "DRJ" Najarian

Akamai Technologies (AKAM) has fallen sharply in recent weeks but popped more than 5.5 percent yesterday as options traders rushed into upside calls.

From the “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic file”: The new MySpace exec team has promised changes (”we have…laid the groundwork for an exciting new chapter of innovation for MySpace”). And they’re delivering. A couple of hours ago they changed the MySpace logo. No longer does it say “MySpace.com - A Place For Friends.” Now it simply says MySpace. The old logo is below.

We’ve confirmed that the change just occurred this evening, although MySpace PR is as usual not responding. They refuse to confirm that the logo is new, or say why they changed it. It sure is absurd to have a conversation that goes something like “So it looks like you’ve changed your logo this evening? No Comment. Uh huh. Ok, so any official reason why you changed it? No comment.” Trade secrets, I guess. And heck, I’m just happy someone still works there to pick up the phone.

By Robin Wauters

It’s one thing when Internet companies like Facebook adopt OpenID, it’s another when a giant retailer like Sears Holdings Corporation (SHLD) embraces it. Sears has just announced that it will enable over 1 million monthly MySears and MyKmart visitors to use their Google (GOOG), Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or other accounts to log into the community websites, enabling them to write product reviews and share information about products and services without the need to create a separate account.

Facebook’s privacy conference call just ended, and it’s clear some major changes are going to be coming to the social network soon. Some of these, like a totally revamped privacy control page, are both long overdue and very welcome. But others, like the Transition Tool, seem ripe for disaster.

Facebook clearly wants its users to become more comfortable sharing their content across the web, because that’s what needs to happen if the site is going to take Twitter head-on with real-time search capabilities. Unfortunately that’s far easier said than done for the social network, which has for years trumpeted its granular privacy settings as one of its greatest assets. Now, those settings are turning into problematic obstacles.

谷歌的工具栏现在包括自动语言翻译. Did you understand that? Well, if you had installed the new Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer, you would have been able to automatically translate it to: “Google’s Toolbar Now Includes Automatic Language Translation.”

Here's the question the publishing industry is trying to figure out: Does it make sense for Google (GOOG) to have the rights to exploit "orphan" books, those whose copyright holders can't be found? Is it bad if Google has the exclusive rights to those books through its book search initiative?

Now the president of the U.S. arm of Oxford University Press is asking Congress to prevent Google from having the "exclusive" rights to orphan books. Tim Barton is proposing that Congress give others the same rights over these works as Google. The issue at hand is the settlement Google made last fall with publishers, which has been endorsed by the major U.S. publishing associations, though it's being investigated by the Department of Justice and has been criticized by libraries and law professors.

Apple was the top computer hardware manufacturer site in May 2009, likely because of consumer interest in its new iPhone model, which also sent blog posts soaring after it was announced, according to (pdf) a report from Nielsen Online.

I said in What Would Google Do? – and argued the point in a talk at Google (GOOG) in Washington – that Google and other technology companies have more influence than they know – and should use it – in protecting free speech and pressuring censorious governments. I see evidence of the strategy working – or hope I see it – in China’s decision Tuesday to delay its noxious Green Dam requirement for all PCs sold there. Government and companies put pressure on; China blinked.

Yahoo’s (YHOO) new CEO, Carol Bartz, said in July that it’s not her job to fix governments. But neither is it a company’s job to enable tyrannical governments in their tyranny. Technology companies from Cisco (CSCO) to Nokia (NOK) to Siemens that have provided technology to enable censorship and tracking, and companies from Yahoo to Google that have handed over information about users to governments that use it to oppress citizens should be ashamed. And we need to shame them. We need to give them cover by demanding behavior that is not and does not support evil.

To that end, I recently got a chance to shmooze with Divya Narenda, founder of SumZero, an interesting expert investment community servicing professional investors. Divya’s got an impressive pedigree which reads Sowood, CSFB and Harvard. He was also a co-founder of ConnectU.com. Google that one.

Wednesday, YouTube is going to release a very important addition to its suite of advertising products, and it has the potential to have a huge impact for politicians, brands, and charities alike. The funny thing is, you probably thought it was already out there.

The product’s official name is the Call-To-Action Overlay, and it’s about as straightforward as ads come: it’s a semi-transparent pop-up that links viewers to any website you choose. For example, I could place an overlay on a TechCrunch video inviting users to visit the corresponding post we wrote about it. Yes, it’s that simple.

It’s now clear that the bane of my next year will be questions about the future of the newspaper industry from journalists. I don’t blame them—newspapers are indeed one of the industries most affected by Free (although that’s just one manifestation of their larger problem: having lost their monopoly on consumer attention). And neither I nor anybody else has any good answers, other than the newspaper business is probably going to shrink but not go away, and that the business model will have to change.

But since journalist Malcolm Gladwell has somewhat parochially decided to make the Future of Paid Journalism the focus of his review of Free (which is, ironically, free on the New Yorker’s website; perhaps this is something Gladwell should take up with David Remnick?), I’ll try to respond in a bit more detail.

By Robin Wauters

At the beginning of last year, Yahoo (YHOO) made a fairly large acquisition with the purchase of online video distribution and advertising platform provider Maven Networks. Under the terms of the agreement, which we reported as a rumor the same day the papers were signed, the company acquired the startup for approximately $160 million. At the time, the press release touted the acquisition to lead to an expansion of the “state-of-the-art consumer video and advertising experiences on Yahoo.com and Yahoo’s network of leading premium video publishers across the web”.

Not only does Google (GOOG) want to organize all the world’s information, it also wants to make all that information available to everyone in the world. For the majority of the world’s population, that means making it available on a cell phone, and not a fancy iPhone or Android with a Web browser either. I’m talking about $10 cell phones with not much more than voice and SMS capabilities. If Google can reach people, especially in developing nations, with SMS, it can reach everyone with a cell phone.

By Robin Wauters

Over the weekend, YouTube launched a new channel dubbed Reporters’ Center, which it hopes will prove to be a good way to educate existing and aspiring citizen journalists on how to report news in ‘the digital age’. The new resource will feature a host of top journalists and media experts sharing instructional videos with tips and advice for better reporting.

The double-digit sales of smartphones and notebooks during the worst economic downturn in half a century are more evidence that connectivity has reached utility status with a force that is profoundly shaping content and advertising.

Too bad there is a major disconnect between consumers' engagement with their nondiscretionary devices and the digital content and commerce they crave. While a torrent of apps help bridge the gap, too many content and service providers are not fully embracing connectivity to reinvent themselves -- and connected consumers are taking off without them.

Respondents recently surveyed by Pew Internet & American Life Project said they were twice as likely to cancel their cable TV service or cell phone plan before dropping their Internet service. Even as service prices increase, U.S. home broadband adoption approaches 65% -- cutting across all age and income demographics, and appearing to be "largely immune to the effects of the current recession," Pew concluded. Even in this downturn, consumers will pay for content and services they deem most relevant and valuable.

click to enlarge

Interestingly enough, CNN was once considered to be the provider of the most instantaneous, real-time news. If something was happening in the world, you could tune into CNN to get the latest details.

Today, that comes from Twitter.

There is little the media companies can do to stop the havoc that the Internet is wreaking on their traditional business. They can slow the drain of profits for a while. But eventually, the companies will have to come up with new business models a little more adventurous than what was unveiled on Wednesday. - Wall Street Journal, Heard on The Street.

That to me was the most insightful section of the Wall Street Journal article discussing the Time Warner (TWX) / Comcast (CMCSA) TV Anywhere proposal announced on Wednesday. However, it was insightful not for only what it said but for what it left out. That is, the havoc the Internet is having on business models of what I refer to as the "traditional Internet companies" - Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO), eBay (EBAY), Amazon (AMZN), MSN (MSFT), AOL, and IAC. Of the group of seven, Amazon's business model is the most exposed to massive disruption. That's a tease to an upcoming write up on what I foresee as a head-to-head competition by the Internet's two most stable companies with one coming up on the losing end.