Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment, Peripherals

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I never thought of Mashable as being an elite blog, but I’ll gladly take the recognition from ElitChoice.org, which has lined up 125 of its favorite blogs of 2007. The site has named Mashable an elite blog for social networking news. Among the posts on $1000 hand bags, flying in a gyrocopyter and gold-plated Dom Perignon, EliteChoice managed to find a place for Mashable, and we think it’s a great way to start of the new year.

Just take a look at Mashable in numbers for the past year–you guys have proven Mashable as the place to go for social networking news. We’re not really an elitist bunch, but for those of you that like to be in the constant know, you’ll find that Mashable helps you stay in the elite group of people that know far too much about social networking.

So with Mashable being named a favorite blog of Fast Company Magazine and Pete being named a top Web Celeb, we’ll have to make sure that no actual elitist attitudes creep in around here! By the way, if anyone feels that their 2008 resolutions should involve sending some of that gold-plated bubbly along for this first day of 2008, I’ll say cheers to that.

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Filed under: Announcements

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Tel Aviv, Israel based MeeMix, which we first covered in August, is kicking-off the New Year by moving their taste-predicting Internet radio service from closed to open Beta.

Internet radio is already a very crowded space dominated by entrenched startups like Last.fm and Pandora. Smaller players and recent entrants such as SpiralFrog, Jango and Slacker are not increasing the breathing room. MeeMix wants its share of the pie, too, and is keeping its crosshairs focused on the U.S. market and its dominant revenue potential.

MeeMix’s public beta launch is marked by the addition of new features:

• Meeps: Comment-based conversations users can have regarding a song, album or artist.
• Station Home: Every MeeMix station now has a dedicated page allowing users to interact in its context and shape its playlist.
• Mee Feeds: This is basically MeeMix’s version of Facebook’s News Feed. The feed indicates songs favorited, stations rated, friends added, etc.
• Mee Journey: Users can see other members’ public log or “journey” of actions in MeeMix.
• Station Gift: Users can now send other members a station as a gift. The station is then the “property” of the recipient who can customize it without affecting the original station.
• Twitter Integration: Users can update their Twitter accounts with songs they’ve listened to, their favorite stations, etc.

MeeMix claims to have doubled its music catalog, but a search for my personal favorites ‘John Coltrane’ and ‘Miles Davis’ came-up empty. The same searches on Jango and Slacker both came-up positive.

I would like to have seen the addition of “genre” to the channel creation wizard which is still limited to artist and song. A widgetized player also would have been a welcome addition, especially the desktop kind.

In my original post, I hypothesized that licensing its engine could become MeeMix’s core business. Looks like this might not be far fetched as the company says they have been approached by a mobile operator for the purpose of powering a taste-based cellular music streaming service. The company has also shared with me some interesting offline deals on the horizon that should keep MeeMix’s potential on a positive note for 2008. We’ll post another update soon. In the meantime, let us know how you think MeeMix compares to the competition.

Meemix

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Filed under: Laptops

While anything is obviously possible, it sure seems like the safe bet is that Apple will unveil some form of ultraportable laptop at MacWorld in a couple of weeks, and it now looks like the rumor mill is starting to pick up again with even more purported details. This latest round comes to us from the folks at Mac Rumors, who say they've heard "reliable confirmation" about a couple of the new features, including an external optical drive on the aforementioned ultraportable. What's more, they say that Apple will also be introducing "more than one notebook revision," including at least one that will incorporate a multi-touch trackpad. Again, a reasonable bet, but we'll just have to wait until the man himself takes the stage on the 15th to finally put this rumor to rest and gear up for the next.

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Filed under: Tablet PCs

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Chinese search giant Baidu has lost its CFO under mysterious circumstances, but has won a major piracy case.

In a statement, Baidu said that CFO Shawn Wang had died in “an accident” whilst on holidays in China. No further details on the death were provided. Baidu shares dropped $9.07 following the news.

On a more positive note a Beijing appeals court ruled that Baidu was not guilty of copyright infringement for posting links to websites that offer illegal music downloads. Baidu offers music search on its front page and the service is often cited as being one of the core reasons behind its success in China over Google, who does not offer a similar music search facility. Yahoo China lost a similar case December 21.

(via AFP/ NY Times)

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