Megaupload CEO asks bail, loses US lawyer, sees more arrests
Megaupload saw its troubles expand on Sunday in multiple directions. The file upload service's founder Kim Dotcom pressed for bail in a New Zealand court. In a Reuters account, his attorney argued b...
“Don't Be Evil” Tool — Backed By Facebook & Twitter — Gets Them Into Google's “Search Plus Your World”
Backed By Facebook & Twitter — Gets Them Into Google's “Search Plus Your World” — I've written that Google has plenty of public data to allow parts its new Search Plus Your World feature to be inclus...
Toward a more inclusive naming policy for Google+
With Google+, we aspire to make online sharing more like sharing in the real world. And during the Google+ signup process, we've asked users to select the name they commonly use in real life. — Sin...
Exclusive: Microsoft to discontinue its virtual currency system Microsoft Points
Microsoft's proprietary virtual currency system, Microsoft Points, will be phased out by the end of the year, according to a source with knowledge of the company's decision.
Virgin America Names Jet After Steve Jobs
Virgin America has named one of its fleet after Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, emblazoning a popular Jobs quote “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” on the side of this Airbus A320. — Steve mentioned the phras...
Judge: Americans can be forced to decrypt their laptops
American citizens can be ordered to decrypt their PGP-scrambled hard drives for police to peruse for incriminating files, a federal judge in Colorado ruled today in what could become a precedent-setti...
Vodafone Australia first carrier to get Galaxy Tab post-ban
Vodafone picks up Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Australia — Vodafone became the first Australian carrier to begin offering the Galaxy Tab 10.1 following the reversed preliminary ban. The Android tablet's 3G v...
350,000 Textbooks Downloaded From Apple's iBooks in Three Days
Though nascent and unproven, Apple's new textbook initiative appears to be gaining lots of momentum — and quickly, too. Within days of its debut, Apple's iBooks textbook store had already racked up a...
Google Search, Punctuation Marks and Other Symbols
Google usually ignores punctuation and mathematical symbols from a query because it doesn't index them. They rarely change the meaning of a query and Google's index would have to grow a lot bigger, w...
Dasient Has Been Acquired by Twitter
The Dasient team is excited to announce that we have been acquired by Twitter! Effective immediately, we will be bringing our technology, tools, and team to the revenue engineering team at Twitter. ...
Average Silicon Valley Tech Salary Passes $100,000
Average annual salaries for Silicon Valley technology workers surpassed the $100,000 mark last year, according to a new survey, pushed higher by the strength of the region's latest boom. — Tech-jobs...
Nokia Lumia Sales Seen Topping 1 Million
Nokia Oyj (NOK1V)'s first phones running Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) software may have sold enough units last year to help rebuild investor confidence in the Finnish company, which lost $19 billion in mark...
T-Mobile, AT&T File For FCC Approval Of Spectrum Transfer
T-Mobile USA and AT&T filed a request with the Federal Communications Commission for approval of the transfer of $1 billion in wireless airwaves AT&T promised as a result of the failure of its $39 bil...
Cyberlocker Ecosystem Shocked As Big Players Take Drastic Action
While the shutdown last week of Megaupload and the arrest of its founder and management team was certainly dramatic, a situation of perhaps even greater gravity is beginning to emerge. — Over the pa...
Rumor: Apple spent $100 million in its first case against HTC — and got almost nothing
and got almost nothing — As I reported in this week's Newsweek, Apple's “thermonuclear war” on Android smartphone makers has been fizzling out lately. Most of Apple's legal claims have been tossed o...
Tablet and E-book reader Ownership Nearly Double Over the Holiday Gift-Giving Period
The share of adults in the United States who own tablet computers nearly doubled from 10% to 19% between mid-December and early January and the same surge in growth also applied to e-book readers …
Gilt Groupe Cuts Include 10 Percent of Employees and Two Executives
Gilt Groupe, a luxury e-commerce and flash sales site, has trimmed roughly 10 percent — as many as 90 — of its employees, including some of its management team. — Earlier this month, Gilt Groupe CEO...
64GB iPhone 4S takes 21% of sales, 36% of iPhone buyers come from another platform
A new survey of recent iPhone customers found that 21 percent of iPhone 4S buyers chose Apple's highest capacity 64-gigabyte model, while 36 percent of users migrated from another platform like Androi...
Dear Rupert Murdoch: Let's Talk Piracy & “The Simpsons”
Rupert, my son had a simple request. “Daddy, can we watch last week's episode of The Simpsons?” No, son, we can't. You can blame Rupert Murdoch for that. — Rupert, I know you're all upset about a...
Our Apple whisper numbers
Averaging the Q1 2012 estimates of the six analysts with the best track records — Whisper numbers, according to Wikipedia, emerge from widening cracks in the spreadsheets maintained by Wall Street a...
Evi arrives in town to go toe-to-toe with Siri
When Siri arrived on the iPhone 4S I thought to myself, who else could do this? It would need to be a search engine with natural language processing, but also behave in the manner of artificial intel...
Denial Is Not A Turnaround Strategy: Why RIM's New CEO Needs To Get Real
If you took the statements of new Research in Motion (NSDQ: RIMM) CEO Thorsten Heins this morning at face value, you might walk away thinking the company's many problems stem from confused marketing a...
Exclusive: YouTube hits 4 billion daily video views
(Reuters) - YouTube, Google Inc's video website, is streaming 4 billion online videos every day, a 25 percent increase in the past eight months, according to the company. — The jump in video views c...
Welcome Garry and Aaron
Y Combinator is pleased to announce two new venture partners, Garry Tan and Aaron Iba. They're both YC alumni, both formidable hackers, and both really nice people. — Garry was one of the founders ...
Polyvore, the Fashion Site, Gets More Money and a New C.E.O.
On Polyvore, the do-it-yourself online fashion magazine, the trendiest clothing and accessories today are Givenchy bags, mini skirts and anything from H&M. — That information is helpful enough to ad...
Google nearly doubles lobbying spending in 2011, tops Microsoft
Google nearly doubled its federal lobbying expenditures last year, surpassing rival Microsoft in dollars doled out to persuade legislators to consider its policy positions. — The Web giant spent $9....
Facebook To Google: Don't Be Evil, Focus On The User
Last week I spent an afternoon down at Facebook, as I mentioned here. While at Facebook I met with Blake Ross, Direct of Product (and well known in web circles as one of the creators of Firefox). Ta...
Tablet and E-book reader Ownership Nearly Double Over the Holiday Gift-Giving Period
The share of adults in the United States who own tablet computers nearly doubled from 10% to 19% between mid-December and early January and the same surge in growth also applied to e-book readers …
Evil, Greed, And Antitrust Aren't Google's Real Problems, Relevancy Is
It seemed like this week could finally be the week when Google didn't make headlines for their decision to inject Google+ results right into Search. That hope lasted until Monday. Now the story is b...
The Hacker is Watching
Every online scam begins more or less the same—a random e-mail, a sketchy attachment. But every so often, a new type of hacker comes along. Someone who rewrites the rules, not just the code. He sec...
Breaking CAPTCHA with automated humans
We're all familiar with CAPTCHA right? That impenetrable fortress of crazy squiggly characters that only a real human can decipher. Whilst they tend to drive us a bit nuts, they do actually provide ...
DLD 2012 - Brian Chesky: “Average Airbnb Host In NYC Pockets $21,000 A Year”
Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, took the stage this afternoon at the DLD Conference in Germany for a keynote covering his views about the ‘sharing economy’. — In terms of news, there isn...
Startups Size Up Loan Candidates With Algorithms Rather Than FICO Scores
For more than 40 years, banks have counted on FICO scores to determine the credit worthiness of American consumers. Now a handful of entrepreneurs in California say it's time for a smarter way to siz...
Piracy is part of the digital ecosystem
In the summer of 2009, I found myself invited to a small party in an old bourgeois apartment with breathtaking views of the Champ-de-Mars and Eiffel Tower. The gathering was meant to be an informal d...
Anonymous Documentary We Are Legion Peels Back Hacktivist Group's History
PARK CITY, Utah — New documentary We Are Legion puts an actual human face on Anonymous, the hacktivist group whose members usually are seen wearing Guy Fawkes masks — if they are seen at all.