Every day, the Fortune staff spends hours poring over tech stories, posts, and reviews from all over the Web to keep tabs on the companies that matter. We’ve assembled the day’s most newsworthy bits below.
- At All Things Digital’s D: Dive Into Mobile last night, Android creator Andy Rubin revealed he and Nokia have discussed the idea of adopting Android as one of many alternatives for the handset-maker. Rubin also whipped out a prototype Motorola tablet with a landscape front-side camera, new version of Google Maps, and Android 3.0 Honeycomb. (Fortune)
- Google launched its cloud-based ebookstore yesterday. Users will be able to read their purchases in-browser or via dedicated mobile apps for many mobile devices, the one glaring omission being Amazon’s Kindle ereader. (Fortune)
- Not one to be shown up, Amazon plans to show off a comparable new Kindle experience of its own today. According to a spokeswoman, the new version will enable users to read full books in the browser and enable web sites to become Kindle bookstores. (More on how exactly that will work once the company makes a full announcement.) (Computerworld)
- WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested in London on suspicion of committing sexual crimes. (Mashable)
- Despite WikiLeaks getting nixed by Amazon, PayPal, MasterCard, its DNS server and its Swiss bank account, Facebook says it has no current plans to shut down the controversial web site’s account. “The Wikileaks Facebook Page does not violate our content standards nor have we encountered any material posted on the page that violates our policies,” said Andrew Noyes, Facebook’s Manager of Public Policy Communications. (ReadWriteWeb and cnet)
- The Foxconn Electronics plants in Shenzhen, China will reportedly ship 400,000 – 600,000 units of Apple’s iPad 2 within the next 100 days. (Digitimes)
- Tim O’ Shaughnessy, CEO of Living Social, says the daily deals web site plans to use Amazon’s recent $183 million investment to beat Groupon. To that end, the company will more than triple its 1,800-strong staff next year. (Bloomberg)
- Online help desk ticketing provider Zendesk raised $19 million in what could be the startup’s last round of funding. (VentureBeat)
- Zynga’s latest social gaming moneymaker, CityVille, seems off to a good start. The company reports some 290,000 people played it on day one, more than double the number that took in FrontierVille during on launch day. (TechCrunch)
- DecorMyEyes founder Vitaly Borker (aka Tony Russo or Stanley Bolds), the subject of a controversial New York Times story, was arrested for defrauding his customers and threatening customers who tried returning defective items. (CBS money watch)
- Surprise, surprise: Consumer Reports ranked AT&T worst mobile carrier in the country, scoring the publication’s dreaded “Worse” rating in every survey category except texting. (Houston Chronicle)
- According to Tumblr, the site’s recent 24-hour downtime wasn’t due to a rumored 4chan attack, but an unspecified issue that took down a critical database cluster, which in turn brought the whole network down. (The Next Web)
