Social App Foursquare Takes in $1.35 Million in Funding From Unionsquare
Foursquare, the hot iPhone social app that allows you to broadcast your location to your friends, is raising its seed round of $1.35 million., and has raised almost all of it, according to a new SEC d...
Verizon Wireless Touch Pro2 to land September 11th, $199.99
As if an Android handset and a couple of Blackberry handsets weren't enough, Verizon Wireless customers may have yet another handset coming quickly down the pike. A trusted ninja let us know that VZW...
Network Woes? Hate the iPhone, Not AT&T
Now that AT&T has finally greenlit MMS for the iPhone, maybe it's time we gave the company a break. — For years, AT&T's iPhone customers have endured dropped calls, slow connections, and crippled se...
23andMe Co-Founder Linda Avey Leaves Personal Genetics Start-Up to Focus on Alzheimer's Research
BoomTown just got the following email from Anne Wojcicki, co-founder of 23andMe, the personal genetics start-up, about the departure of her co-founder, Linda Avey (pictured here).
Dish Told to Pay TiVo Almost $200 Million Over Patent
Sept. 4 (Bloomberg) — Dish Network Corp. and EchoStar Corp. were told to pay almost $200 million to TiVo Inc. for contempt of an order that it stop providing its DVR service after losing a patent-infr...
Fox's Twitter TV Experiment Tweets Its Way to Epic Failure
When Fox revealed its plan to broadcast reruns of Fringe and Glee with a live Twitter feed overlay, I said they had to be really really careful. But Fox didn't listen. From user comments online it l...
Loopt Location To Update In The Background On iPhone
Loopt, a location-based social networking service, will be the first third-party iPhone service to work in the background while the app is not running. — Via a deal with AT&T, and with your permissi...
China's Potential Crackdown on Music Piracy
China's Ministry of Culture has issued a new online music policy that will regulate online music content and potentially reduce the level of music piracy. — Pali Research has already warned that thi...
Samsung: OLED notebooks by late 2010
Global computing boss targets release a year from now — Samsung says we could get the first commercial OLED laptops a year from now. — Speaking at the official IFA launch of the X-Series and N-Ser...
Old WordPress Versions Under Attack
Otto42 of OttoDestruct, a key WordPress developer and supporter, reports that there is an “attack” on older versions of WordPress right now. The number of sites hit by this is growing every hour. Pr...
How Old Is This Internet Thing, Again?
Poor Al Gore has been teased mercilessly for supposedly claiming he invented the Internet. … But that's not the only portion of cyber-history that's in dispute. — Media outlets are celebrating Sept....
Regarding the Brouhaha Over the Version of Flash in Snow Leopard
There've been a bunch of stories this week (see: here, here, here, etc.) making hay over the fact that the version of Flash that ships with Snow Leopard is not the very latest, because the very latest...
WebOS 1.2 Accidentally Leaked!
go4craig in our Palm Pre Forums has just posted that he applied the webOS Doctor (the ‘last resort’ method for getting your Pre back to factory standard) and, wonder of wonders, it installed webOS 1.2...
Cast Set for David Fincher's Social Network?
Rumor has it David Fincher has found his cast for The Social Network, a story focusing on the early days of Facebook written by Aaron Sorkin. The screenplay was based on the novel “The Accidental Bil...
TomTom Car Kit Release Pushed Back to October
TomTom's FAQ for its iPhone navigation app now notes that the anxiously-awaited Car Kit will not be released until October: … This update to the FAQ comes surprisingly close to the kit's run through t...
Microsoft: Cyber-crooks exploiting unpatched IIS bug
IDG News Service - Microsoft says that cyber-criminals are starting to exploit an unpatched bug in its IIS server software that was made public earlier this week. — The flaw can be exploited to let ...
Verizon: We're Not Setting Broadband Definition Bar Low - We're just, well, setting the broadband definition bar low
As noted earlier this week, a number of carriers have responded to the FCC's request for a concrete definition of broadband with the suggestion that the FCC stick …
LinkedIn profiles give clues of Windows Mobile 7 features
Stephen Chapman, aka the UX Evangelist, has scoured the LinkedIn profiles of tech-industry workers for clues of what features Microsoft is building into its upcoming Windows Mobile 7 phone operating s...
Four new themes
Posted by Jake Knapp, UI Designer and Manu Cornet, Software Engineer — Manu: Hey Jake, you still using that same old theme? — Jake: Well, yeah. I mean, I like it — but I don't know... I guess it ...
Facebook Coming Soon: Ability to Measure Stream Activity
If you look closely on the “learn more” blurb on the Facebook Insights there's a very interesting “coming soon” feature. It reads: — Stream CTR / ETR: This graph is a measure of the Click Through R...
Gov 2.0: It's All About The Platform
Editor's note: The following guest post is by Tim O'Reilly, the founder and CEO of computer book publisher O'Reilly Media and a conference organizer. O'Reilly coined the term Web 2.0 five years ago. ...
Snow Leopard, Marble, And Calamine Lotion
There are two types of people in the world: Those that hate change, and those that embrace it. I tend to fall into the latter category. And that's why OS X Snow Leopard is an odd product for me. — ...
How I cross-site scripted Twitter in 15 minutes, and why you shouldn't store important data on 37signals' applications
Today the Ruby on Rails security team released a patch for a cross-site scripting issue which affected multiple high-profile applications, including Twitter and Basecamp.
Amazon Offers Redelivery or $30 to People Who Lost '1984′
Amazon took a lot of heat in July when it wirelessly deleted copies of two George Orwell titles from the Kindle e-readers of some customers. CEO Jeff Bezos eventually apologized for the incident, cal...
Smule's new T-Pain app provides the Auto-Tuned voice you've always wanted
There are lots of music fans out there who aren't happy about the frequent use of Auto-Tune technology in songs — a viewpoint expressed in Jay-Z's song “Death to Auto-Tune.” But if Auto-Tune haters w...
An update on Google Books and privacy
We're excited about the wide range of support that the Google Books settlement has received. Some people have asked how Google's privacy practices apply to Books and the settlement, and, last month, ...
Four new themes
Posted by Jake Knapp, UI Designer and Manu Cornet, Software Engineer — Manu: Hey Jake, you still using that same old theme? — Jake: Well, yeah. I mean, I like it — but I don't know... I guess it ...
RSS Is Alive And Well
Somehow the comments on my “10 Characteristics of Great Companies” post yesterday drifted into the topic of the future of RSS. I was debating whether to wade into this silly debate about whether “RSS...
How Team of Geeks Cracked Spy Trade
PALO ALTO, Calif. — From a Silicon Valley office strewn with bean-bag chairs, a group of twenty-something software engineers is building an unlikely following of terrorist hunters at U.S. spy agencies...
Browser Speed Tests: Chrome 4.0 and Opera 10 Take On All Challengers
Opera 10 final is out, Chrome just turned one year old, and Firefox 3.5 has settled into stability. It's time once again to break out the timers and speed test today's web browsers. — Like all our ...
Diebold impeaches e-voting unit, sells it off for $5 million
Diebold announced on Thursday that it has sold its voting machine division to Election Systems & Software (ES&S), a former competitor. Diebold's unceremonious departure from the electronic voting mac...
Techie-Conference Smackdown
An upcoming New York arts and technology event, dubbed the Audience Conference, is scheduled for Nov. 5 and 6, but it's managed to ruffle some techie feathers well in advance. … Several of its speaker...
Nokia to develop Maemo platform-based handheld devices for high-end segment
Nokia will focus on the development of Maemo platform-based mobile Internet devices (MIDs) for the high-end mobile computing segment in addition to Symbian-based devices for the mass market, according...
Former MySpace Exec Allen Hurff to Launch SoCal-based Incubator
Allen Hurff, former SVP of Engineering at MySpace, will be launching a startup incubator based in Southern California. The news comes from his recently-updated LinkedIn page (image below). — Detail...
Why Europe Won't Stop Oracle from Taking Over Sun
Sun's open-source software is at the heart of an EU antitrust probe into Oracle's proposed deal, but it likely won't block the takeover — Oracle CEO Larry Ellison delivers a keynote address San Fran...
Google Search Volumes and Economic Activity
We are really excited to launch Google Domestic Trends on Google Finance. This launch was inspired by Hal Varian, our chief economist's research on using Google Trends data to predict economic indica...
How To Get People To Reply To Your Messages In Online Dating, Part I
Picture this online dating scenario: — You see someone you like. — You read their profile, and wow. — You send them a long message. — You hang tight and... - ...you never get a reply.
PS3's new 3D mode captured on video, coming in 2010 to all existing games
You know what's absolutely useless? A video of Wipeout HD being played in 3D, with some schmuck wearing 3D glasses and babbling on about how much fun he's having. Well, that schmuck is this Engadget...
Bit.ly Offering Even Shorter ‘J.mp’ URLs
Bit.ly, Twitter's official URL shortening service, is offering even shorter URLs, via a new ‘j.mp’ service. — We just popped open our bit.ly sidebar to send a tweet and got this new URL tool instead...