Did ya miss us? We’ve been out of town since last Thursday, and since then there were some pretty big announcements that we wanted to be sure to cover. It appears as though the last few days before last weekend was the prime time for acquisitions. 
–Firefox 3 RC1–
Mozilla released Firefox 3.0 RC1, which indicates that they are on the home stretch before releasing the final version. The Release Candidate doesn’t have many changes over the previous Beta, but as expected it’s a bit more polished:
- Improvements to the user interface based on user feedback, including changes to the look and feel on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux.
- Changes and fixes for new features such as the location bar autocomplete, bookmark backup and restore, full page zoom, and others, based on feedback from our community.
- Fixes and improvements to platform features to improve security, web compatibility and stability.
- Continued performance improvements: changes to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimization continues to improve performance over previous releases as measured by the popular SunSpider test from Apple, and in the speed of web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office.
Thanks to “C” and “Cory” for the tips!
–Condé Nast/Wired Acquires Ars Technica–
Ars Technica has joined the likes of Wired and Reddit! That’s right, Condé Nast has acquired the news site that most geeks have come to love. They won’t disclose what was paid for the site, but TechCrunch says is in the $25 million range.
What I’m interested to see is whether the Digg button on Ars Technica will remain considering that their parent company are also the proud owners of Reddit. Ars Technica’s articles are constantly plastered all over the front page of Digg, and removing the button could cause them to drop in traffic. Maybe they’ll just add a Reddit button alongside it?
–Ask.com Acquires Dictionary.com–
When you need to lookup a meaning of a word there is a very good chance that you head straight to Dictionary.com. I know I do. That site has now been acquired by Ask.com, and they also get Thesaurus.com and Reference.com as part of the deal. By purchasing the rights to these sites Ask.com is looking to return to its roots a bit by being able to quickly answer basic questions.
Thanks for the tip Omar!
–CBS Acquires CNET–
CNET has got to be one of the top technology sites on the web, and they sure showed it with their price tag. CBS acquired them last Thursday for $1.8 billion, which includes all of the properties owned by CNET. Here’s a quick list of CNET’s more popular assets: ZDNet, GameSpot.com, TV.com, MP3.com, UrbanBaby, CHOW, Search.com, BNET, MySimon, Download.com, and TechRepublic.
–Digg Launches New Comment System–
Digg has finally decided to revise their comment system, and I think it’s much better than before. There’s just one problem… they didn’t test it in Opera. A formatting glitch would be one thing, but the new Digg comment system crashes the Opera browser anytime you try to visit an article. They admitted that they didn’t test the system in Opera, and tried to justify the glitch by saying that Opera users account for less than 1% of the visits to Digg. *sigh*
–Windows will be Available on the OLPC–
Looks like Windows is coming to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) after all. These budget machines will run a $3 version of Windows XP and Office called the Student Innovation Suite. I have a feeling that these laptops will now be even more appealing to developing countries.
Good to see you guys back, hope you had a good time!
I didn’t know the CBS-CNET deal was officially completed already. Not sure if I like to see all these media giants grow bigger and bigger, leaving less and less space to real competition (not status quo).
I definitely like the changes to the Digg comment system! Great to see they keep improving, in a good way. I do hope they will get rid of the comment digging though, and go for average instead. I suppose they won’t because it sort of copies the article digging, which makes the site be “digg.com”
I _used_ to use Dictionary.com until I found WordWeb. Now checking definitions or spelling is one-click easy.
[wordweb.info]
We definitely had a good time, but it did end up being a rather hectic trip. Lots of running around to do in a short amount of time.
CBS actually has a press release on it themselves, so it is pretty much official:
[cbscorporation.com]
From what I gather they’ve agreed upon a price and the details, and so all that’s left is for them to sign on the dotted line.
Personally I don’t like to see the “big guys” making all of these acquisitions. It makes it that much harder for the little guys to succeed since they don’t have the funding that these large corporations do.
Very cool program! Almost reminds me of Mac’s built-in dictionary/Wikipedia lookup. I’ll have to give that a spin and see if it’s worth writing about. Thanks!
I have been using WordWeb for more than a year with fantabulous results. It’s use is so intuitive that my fingers automatically go for the icon on the Task Bar to look for a word meaning or for a synonym.
I would encourage Ryan to write a review about this very useful application.
It’s good to see your back. Glad to hear you had a good time.
The CBS deal seems big on the outside, but it’s kind of like two giant old media outlets merging, but into what? I read an interesting article talking about Cnet being the king of the Web 1.0 world that just has not made the transition to web 2.0 or beyond. CBS is such a big company I don’t see it really helping Cnet to grow it’s audience. It will be interesting to see how that plays out.
No Dictionary.com for me; for me it’s OneLook [onelook.com]
You know, there are so many good dictionary services out there, but my problem is I can never remember them so I automatically turn to dictionary.com because that is at least easy to remember.
The first thing that popped into my head though was CBS’s ability to market and advertise CNET to mainstream audiences. They could probably give the site quite a boost if they through in TV commercials here and there targeting things that people would be looking for, such as cameras.