Philip Elmer-DeWitt / Apple 2.0:
Apple starts 2009 with strong Net gains  —  Apple (AAPL) consolidated its 2008 holiday Internet market-share gains with strong performances from the Mac, iPhone and iPod touch in January, according to preliminary data issued overnight Sunday by Net Applications.

Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Hulu’s Super Bowl Ad Comes With An Ad  —  The Super Bowl is perhaps the one television event where people actually look forward to the ads because so much effort is put into each one.  And every year, there are a handful of standouts.  You can watch the ads plenty of […]

Telegraph:
Networking site cashes in on friends  —  Facebook founder finally finds a way to profit from its 150m members’ private data  —  Facebook is planning to exploit the vast amount of personal information it holds on its 150m members by creating one of the world’s largest market research databases.

Enigmax / TorrentFreak:
One-Click iPhone App Cracker Released to the Public  —  Recently we have reported on what can happen when iPhone software from the Apple store is cracked and made available to the public.  In our articles we briefly touched on how these applications were cracked, via a piece of code known as Crackulous.

MG Siegler / VentureBeat:
Credit problem takes down the iTunes store  —  I just opened the iTunes store to attempt to buy last night’s episode of Battlestar Galactica and was greeted with a message telling me that my store credit balance is currently unavailable.  I found that odd because I don’t currently have any credits […]

Fred / A VC:
When Talking About Business Models, Remember That Profits Equal Revenues Minus Costs  —  There is no shortage of discussion about Internet business models these days.  And they almost always focus on revenues.  But revenues are only half of the value creation equation.  The other half is costs.

Dom Sagolla / 140 Characters:
How Twitter Was Born  —  Twitter was born about three years ago, when @Jack, @Biz, @Noah, @Crystal, @Jeremy, @Adam, @TonyStubblebine, @Ev, me (@Dom), @Rabble, @RayReadyRay, @Florian, @TimRoberts, and @Blaine worked at a podcasting company called Odeo, Inc. in South Park, San Francisco.

Matt Hickey / Crave: The gadget blog:
Dell’s rumored smartphone: Look out RIM  —  OK, so Dell and Apple have been locked in a marketing war for years.  Dell has long been considered the default PC for enterprise, while Apple has positioned itself as the most influential consumer computer brand in the world.