Amazon: Google Books deal an ‘unprecedented’ copyright hack
Amazon came out swinging Tuesday against Google's proposed settlement with book authors and publishers. — Amazon's opposition was made public last week when it joined the Open Book Alliance, but the...
Oh, RSS Is Definitely Dead Now: Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo To Become Twitter COO
Former Google exec and the cofounder/CEO of RSS service Feedburner Dick Costolo is Twitter's new chief operating officer, we've heard from multiple sources. Costolo, who sold Feedburner to Google for...
Sony announces VAIO X ultraportable
Sony just announced the VAIO X at IFA 2009, a half-inch thin ultraportable with an 11.1-inch screen and a new all-day battery that “will set the new standard for stamina.” The machine's built of carb...
Google Patents World's Simplest Home Page
After a five-and-a-half-year fight, Google and its attorneys have managed to convince federal bureaucrats to bestow a patent on the company's iconic home page. We always thought the page was brain-de...
Sources confirm no Apple TV at Apple's September event
Piper Jaffray Senior Research Analyst, Gene Munster, on Tuesday said he feels an Apple TV may be introduced at next week's Apple event. However, that is not going to happen. — The Loop has learned ...
Want 5,000 More Facebook Friends? That'll Be $654.30
USocial Will Sell You Followers and Friends — NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — If you're a Gmail user who also happens to use Twitter, it's probably been about five minutes since you've seen an ad promising t...
YouTube in Talks to Stream Rental Movies
Google Inc.'s YouTube is in discussions with major movie studios about allowing users to stream movies on a rental basis, according to people familiar with the company's plans, marking one of the vide...
Bing Leads in Successful Canadian Searches
A couple of weeks ago we posted data on the success rate of Canadian searches, noting in particular that only 30% of Canadian Internet searches are “successful”. A couple of readers asked us to share...
Microsoft pushes for single global patent system
A senior lawyer at Microsoft is calling for the creation of a global patent system to make it easier and faster for corporations to enforce their intellectual property rights around the world. — In ...
Then and Now, Seven Years of Blogging as Business
When Nick Denton launched the proto gadget blog Gizmodo in August 2002, it arrived on scene to a milieu of early web confusion. Until then, blogs were low traffic outlets for personal thought-flingin...
After ‘Obama Joker’ debacle, Flickr changes takedown policy
Flickr came out looking like the bad guy when it removed an image of President Obama portrayed as the Jokerfrom “The Dark Knight.” Onlookers accused Flickr of having a “political agenda” and being a ...
OnLive Opens the Beta Program
Hey there... It's been a very busy and productive few months for OnLive. We've been focused on evolving the OnLive technology, installing lots of servers in our data centers and tuning the OnLive® G...
The bar for success in our industry is too low
This weekend the New York Times published a piece called Using ‘Free’ to Turn a Profit. The piece focused on Evernote, a web-based and smart-phone based application for taking notes, snapping picture...
Apple to offer ready-made ringtones
Apple has obtained the rights to offer ready-made ringtones for the iPhone and managers are trying to have them available in time for next week's press conference, music industry sources told CNET New...
Taking The Plunge: How Newspaper Sites That Charge Are Faring
As more newspapers kick around the idea of charging for content, much of the attention has been focused on the pay models employed by the bigger players like the WSJ and the Financial Times. But quie...
SFO boarding passes go paperless
San Francisco International Airport has become the first airport in the Bay Area to allow paperless boarding passes on a limited basis. — The experiment may go a long way to reducing the anxiety for...
Google's Most Profitable Business Gets New Leadership
Google (GOOG) exec David Fischer is moving on as the search leader's quiet sales shake-up continues. — David is an exec who, from 2002 on, helped build Google's self-service advertising business int...
Take-Two pays $20 million to settle litigation that sprang from game's hidden sex scenes
Take-Two Interactive Software said today that it reached an agreement to settle a securities class-action lawsuit that stemmed from its infamous “hot coffee” incident involving hidden sex scenes in a ...
Google Voice Alternative Line2 Is Now Live On The App Store
The Apple/Google Voice fiasco just got more interesting. Toktumi, a startup that lets small businesses build office-caliber phone systems with their mobile phones and computers, just had its applicat...
Google and Others Fish for Acquisitions: Here's What They Might Be Looking For
Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave what he just had to know would be a much quoted comment to the Nikkei today, explicitly saying that the company had “begun seriously looking into acquisitions again.”
Android Now Plays Foursquare Too
Foursquare has been all the rage in the early adopter mobile space the past several months. And it has been peeking outside of the early adopter crowd with things such as local bars offering promotio...
Nokia Booklet 3G Hands-On and First Impressions
Nokia completed its announcement of the Booklet 3G today at Nokia World and I've got to play with it briefly. Take a look at some of the hands-on photos and my first impressions. I'll have access to...
COOLERBOOKS.com announces Google partnership
...More than a million titles now available from COOLERBOOKS.com, the first ebookstore outside the US to partner with Google Books... Reading, England, ISSUE DATE: GMT 10:00am, 2 September 2009: Briti...
Pandora One gets an upgrade: Desktop App 2.0
I'm pleased to announce that we've released version 2.0 of the Pandora One desktop app. You've been telling us that the desktop app is one of your favorite features of Pandora One and it's great to h...
More pressure to limit behavioral targeting threatens startup media companies
Last month I raised some concerns that the government could make monetization even harder for online ad networks and publishers through limiting their ability to do behavioral targeting. The pressure...
Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage
At Backblaze, we provide unlimited storage to our customers for only $5 per month, so we had to figure out how to store hundreds of petabytes of customer data in a reliable, scalable way—and keep our ...
The role of social and digital media in business consulting: Dachis acquires Headshift
Some of my industry peers are talking online this morning about the significance of the acquisition of Headshift, the social business consulting firm, by Dachis Group, the one year old US based acquis...
NetBase Debuts “Semantic Search Showcase” With HealthBase
Netbase is an enterprise-facing software and search company that appears to have one of the most advanced search platforms in the market. Earlier this week during a briefing Netbase marketing and pro...
About 24 percent of Xbox 360 games consoles fail within two years
It looks like the Xbox 360 is the most unreliable video game console in history. Most gamers already know that. Microsoft acknowledged the “red ring of death” failures in 2007 and took a $1.15 billi...
HTC Touch2 launching October 6th with Windows Mobile 6.5
Hey, HTC — pull up a chair. Listen, we admire your tenacity and all, but did you realize that both Nokia World and IFA kicked off today? Cool, just making sure. Now that we're past that, we'd like ...
Microsoft's fight against Apple ads seen as waste of money
With Apple's Mac home market share tripling in the past five years, Microsoft has fought back with its own advertising campaigns attacking Apple for the first time, a move one analyst sees as a mistak...
Web meeting startup Dimdim goes big with Dimdim Webinar
Dimdim, the startup taking on established web meeting providers with its low cost, open source meeting service, said today that it's adding a service for webinars, big online events which could end up...
Is Twitter Pimping Porn to Family Users?
The microblogging site makes it too easy to get spammed with off-color content, and too difficult to do something about it — Back in March, I wrote a column about how Twitter is a closer competitor ...
Lifecast with Ovi to share memorable moments with your friends on Facebook.
With Ovi, you can now keep your Facebook friends up to date where you are and what you are doing in a new way. — Right from the home screen of your Nokia N97, you can lifecast the street address you...
Google Chrome Turns One: A Few Questions and Answers
One year ago today, Google released Chrome, a day after the news-at once startling and inevitable-feeling-leaked that it had decided to get into the browser business. (Lest we forget, Chrome remains ...
The Race to Be an Early Adopter of Technologies Goes Mainstream, a Survey Finds
For decades, the adoption and use of the latest technologies was limited to a subculture: Whether called “tech enthusiasts” or “gadget geeks,” the implication was that most of the world got along fine...
Inside Mac OS X Snow Leopard: 64-bits
As jingle-pundits desperately try to denigrate Snow Leopard as a “Service Pack,” Apple's new operating system reference release actually expands the reach of the Mac platform in several important and ...
Google CEO keen on M&A to extend cloud computing lead
Nikkei quotes Eric Schmidt as saying company is seriously looking at acquisitions. — Google Inc. is ready to seize any opportunity to grow its cloud computing business, Chief Executive Officer Eric ...
Nokia finally comes clean with N97 mini: €450, ships in October
Nokia World 2009 just kicked off over in Stuttgart, and while the outfit's CEO didn't have much to say outside of a few nice teases, Mr. Anssi Vanjok did the honors of officially unveiling the N97 min...
Salesforce Launches Lightweight Contact Manager For Small Businesses
One of the advantages of using a CRM is the ability to easily manage and organize contacts to maximize leads. Salesforce.com and the many other companies that offer CRMs have well-established contact...
Official: XPERIA X2 launching Q4, Windows Mobile 6.5 onboard (video)
If you've been waiting with bated breath for some real news on the XPERIA X2, wait no longer. News has just broken that the re-styled, gutted refresh of Sony Ericsson's popular (and expensive) X1 is ...
Psystar Taking Orders for Apple's Snow Leopard OS
Need a copy of Snow Leopard? Psystar has your back—sort of. — The Mac clone maker, which is currently embroiled in several legal battles with Apple, announced on its blog Monday that it is now taki...