link

EarthLink said late Wednesday that it is bailing out of a contract to build San Francisco's free Wi-Fi service.

EarthLink backed out of the deal a day after the company announced it was laying off 900 employees--nearly half of its staff. EarthLink, which is trying to get its finances in order, announced earlier this summer that it would not invest in any new citywide Wi-Fi deployments until it came up with a better business model.

But it was assumed the company would fulfill obligations with cities where it had already signed contracts. Now it looks like EarthLink is … Read more

A day after EarthLink said it would lay off nearly half its workforce, the company has agreed to pay the city of Houston a $5 million penalty fee for missing its first deadline in building the city's municipal Wi-Fi network.

Houston Mayor Bill White announced the settlement with EarthLink at a Houston City Council meeting on Wednesday. EarthLink, which had agreed to blanket nearly 640 square miles of Houston with Wi-Fi service, failed to meet its first deadline by not signing an agreement with CenterPoint Energy to lease its utility poles for the Wi-Fi project.

"EarthLink appeared to … Read more

Internet service provider EarthLink said Tuesday that it would lay off approximately 900 employees as the company restructures in an attempt to boost its sagging stock price.

EarthLink will lose about half its staff in the restructuring as it shuts down operations in Orlando, Fla.; Knoxville, Tenn.; Harrisburg, Pa., and San Francisco. It will also substantially reduce its presence in Pasadena, Calif., and Atlanta, the company said in a press release Tuesday.

The reductions are expected to cost the company $60 million to $70 million. But it will save EarthLink $25 million to $35 million through the remainder of 2007, … Read more

AuditoriumA is a thoroughly ancient idea wrapped in a modern interface. The site is a collection of links (with commentary), hand-chosen by the site's editors and with the occasional help of the audience. It's the fanciest link-blog I've seen, and the stories are of high quality. At least it appears so to me--and it also appears that founder Tony Mars and I have similar tastes in content.

There will be a paid version of AuditoriumA when it is released later this year.

But as much as I like the content on the site, I question the business … Read more

At some point in life, you've likely been introduced to, or taken part in six degrees of Kevin Bacon, the movie trivia game that puts your film knowledge to the test to figure out who has worked with whom. The result is often impossibly obscure chains of actors and films, and the realization that you've absorbed an unnecessary amount of Kevin Bacon knowledge without realizing it.

Tileplex is a new service that can most easily be explained as a mix between the famous film trivia game, a genealogy-style mapping service like Geni (review), and Amazon.com. Everything is … Read more

This is the seventh in a series of posts from the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University. The previous installments looked at technology and software, process technology, multicore designs, IBM's Power6 efforts, Vernor Vinge's keynote address, and Nvidia. Other CNET coverage may be found here. This is sort of an experiment for me; I usually prefer to have time to review my work before I publish it. If you see anything wrong, please leave a comment!

This session has two presentations--one from SiBeam describing wireless HDTV transmission for home use, the other from Broadcom on new 802.11n Wi-Fi technology.

The SiBeam presentation is easily summarized: It describes a chipset that sends uncompressed HDTV video over… Read more

If it takes you longer to locate a particular browser bookmark than it does to search for that same Web page, it may be time to rev up AM-DeadLink. This nifty freeware utility for managing browser bookmarks becomes increasingly useful as your favorites list grows more congested.

With one button, AM-DeadLink produces a list of bookmarks on the browser you select, pointing out broken or unlisted links. Another button bumps problem bookmarks to the top of the list, saving you from hunting and pecking among the thickets of text. A button identified by an image of cloned human figures reveals any duplicate bookmarks that may have been tucked away in multiple subfolders. Unwanted links are easily disposed of with a click on the recycle bin. For a quick reminder of what leads to what, users can preview bookmark destinations within the app. Backing up the bookmark list serves as a more long-term reminder.… Read more

Toy makers have made good progress in robots and pretty much anything with a remote, but they've never quite been able to figure out computers for tots. Usually they're just toy laptops with lame black-and-white screens that are barely legible, making them kind of like fancy Etch A Sketches with some flashing lights and a mouse.

The latest offering from Fisher-Price, the "Easy Link Internet Launch Pad," takes a different approach. Rather than just try to look like a notebook for kids, it's a plug-and-play navigation device that works with any regular computer with a … Read more

If two months' worth of perpetual hype and hearsay about Facebook have given you social-networking fatigue, it might be time to chug an energy drink--looks like we will see another serious entry into the field on Monday.

Launched by contact and schedule management service Plaxo, this will apparently be a sort of midpoint between the strictly business LinkedIn and the still-full-of-frat-party-photos Facebook.

The rumors started, as they often do, with a single blog post from a well-read blogger. After attending the "Lunch 2.0" event at Facebook's offices last week, Robert Scoble started up a minifirestorm of … Read more