How CISPA would affect you (faq)
CISPA may have cleared the U.S. House of Representatives, but the fight isn't over. It's shifted to the U.S. Senate. Here's CNET's FAQ on what you need to know about this particularly controversial ...
Tablet Competition Heats Up: Kindle Fire Captures more than Half of Android Tablet Market
10" Tablets Have 39 Percent Higher Content Consumption Rate than 7" Tablets — comScore Device Essentials™ Introduces Unique Device and Local Market Reporting to Cross-Device Digital Traffic Measurem...
Samsung Ends Nokia's 14-Year Run as World's Biggest Phone Maker
Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) overtook Nokia Oyj (NOK1V) as the world's biggest vendor of mobile-phones last quarter, ending the Finnish company's 14-year run as the global industry leader, accordi...
Exclusive: Apple courts Hollywood for upcoming TV: sources
(Reuters) - Apple Inc began talks earlier this year to stream films owned by EPIX, which is backed by three major movie studios, on devices including a long-anticipated TV, according to two people wit...
Apple kills Chomp for Android
Apple acquired app discovery service Chomp earlier this year, betting that it would help make app discovery easier and better on its iTunes Appstore. The casualty of that acquisition is the Chomp for...
Apple sued over iPad cover
A Colorado man says Apple's smart cover for the new iPad and the iPad 2 violate his 2005 patent for a “Portable Computer Case.” — Aspen resident Jerald Bovino filed a lawsuit in federal court asking...
Intuit To Acquire Demandforce For $424MM
This morning, Intuit announced its agreement to acquire one of Benchmark's portfolio companies, Demandforce, for $424mm. As with Instagram, Benchmark Capital is the largest institutional investor in ...
Lead Android developer thinks a five-month wait for an update is ‘very reasonable’
Jean-Baptiste Queru, technical lead on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), has revealed his opinion on the current state of the project and the lengthy waits users face for updates.
Google Street View Investigation by U.S. Declared Closed
Google Inc. (GOOG) said the U.S. Justice Department closed an investigation last May into the company's use of specially equipped autos that collected wireless data for its Street View project. — Go...
Yahoo's Five Counter-Counterclaims Against Facebook. #1: Throw Out Retaliatory Patents
Today Yahoo hit Facebook with five big counter-counterclaims designed to invalidate the patents cited in the social network's infringement countersuit. If the court concurs, Facebook could be left wi...
Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing
YouTube didn't need ads to spread itself - instead it used embeds. Ad via Laughing Squid — The rise of the Growth Hacker — The new job title of “Growth Hacker” is integrating itself into Silicon ...
Google Says It's Being Investigated in Argentina, Korea
Google Inc. (GOOG)'s business practices are the subject of investigations by regulators in Argentina and South Korea, according to a regulatory filing. — Argentina's main antitrust agency and the Ko...
Yahoo hits Facebook with two more patent claims
Now it's Yahoo's turn. — Yahoo today replied in court to Facebook's countersuit, and it's now asserting that Facebook is infringing on two more patents — up from the 10 patents it initially claimed ...
The Winklevoss Twins Are Now VCs: “We Think The Cloud Is Going To Be Huge”
It's a Friday afternoon (in some parts of the world, at least), so go ahead — take a nice long drink of your favorite alcoholic beverage. If you're like me, you'll need it to make it through the CNBC...
Latest Firefox Beta Turns On the ‘SPDY’
With Firefox 12 out the door, Mozilla is turning its efforts to polishing up Firefox 13, due out six weeks from now. — If you don't want to wait that long, you can download Firefox 13 from the beta ...
T.G.I. Fridays lets diners pay with smartphones using Tabbedout
Casual food restaurant chain T.G.I. Fridays has become the first national chain to incorporate a mobile payment option called Tabbedout, which will allow diners to open a tab and pay their bill right ...
All-Star Cast Invests 750K In Ben Huh And Matt Galligan's Mobile News Startup Circa
SimpleGeo's Matt Galligan and Icanhascheezburger's Ben Huh have teamed up to change the way people consume news via mobile. Their startup Circa, which boasts a newsworthy list of advisors …
Evernote approaching 30 million users, funding reports are ‘premature’: CEO Phil Libin
Evernote CEO Phil Libin took the stage at The Next Web Conference earlier today. — We took notes and will have a longer post for you later on, but here are some interesting tidbits about Evernote th...
Apple's Texas move ‘in peril’ after attorney calls contract ‘rigged’
The company initially had plans to invest $304 million in Austin, Texas, but now the county isn't sure it wants to offer Apple incentives to come to the city. — Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Cali...
HP is working on x86 Windows 8 tablet, rough render exposed
Windows 8 news comes from a variety of sources. Sometimes it comes from the Windows 8 fountain and other times it comes from sources familiar with company's plans. — This time around we have some i...
“Instagram for Video”
Ok, I usually don't write about video other than commenting on YouTube because (a) I'm inherently biased and (b) I don't want my opinions to be taken as representing the view of my company. But.... ...
Are You a Klouchebag?
Klouchebag.com, a new parody of Klout, is the most entertaining expression we've seen of a growing backlash against the clout-measuring service's recent spate of media attention. Klout is a service t...
“Gangbang Interviews” and “Bikini Shots”: Silicon Valley's Brogrammer Problem
For startups like Path, recasting geek identity with a frathouse swagger is a dangerous game. — Quora (left and right); Geeklist (center) — At the South by Southwest Interactive festival in March ...
Occupy protester's tweets fair game for prosecutors: judge
An Occupy Wall Street protester has lost his bid to quash a subpoena seeking his Twitter records from last fall, when he was arrested during a mass protest on the Brooklyn Bridge. — Criminal Court J...
Rumor: First BlackBerry 10 Phone To Launch in October
According to reports from multiple sources, RIM may announce the first BlackBerry 10 smartphone by mid-August, and launch it by October-with just enough lead time for the dwindling smartphone platform...
Viddy Is Raising $30M At A $370M Valuation
Someone wise once said “If Instagram for video were to happen it would look nothing like Instagram” but, because it was on Twitter, I briefly saw that tweet before it got lost in the ether and now I c...
Amazon settles $269M Texas tax bill with jobs, investment and ‘immaterial payment’
Amazon.com has reached a settlement in one of its largest and longest-running state tax disputes, reaching a deal with the Texas comptroller to resolve the state's claims that the company owed some $2...
Mac App Store Hits 10,000 Available Apps
As pointed out by MacGeneration [Google translation], Apple's Mac App Store has reached a new milestone with 10,000 apps available for purchase or free download through the marketplace. — Our own si...
Nintendo to begin simultaneous digital and retail releases
The veteran video game giant has just suffered its first ever annual loss, prompting a new focus on digital downloads — In an investor meeting following the news of Nintendo's £330m annual loss, pre...
AT&T stockholders vote down net neutrality measure by overwhelming margin
It looks like AT&T didn't have anything to worry about when Beastie Boys member Mike D and other stockholders proposed that the company commit to operating its wireless division under the principles o...
‘Pivoting’ Pays Off for Tech Entrepreneurs
Technology entrepreneurs of past eras took two years to build a product, hire a staff and figure out whether there was any real market for their service. But today all that typically takes only a few...
Oracle Releases Java Development Kits for OS X as Work on Java SE 7 for Mac Continues
Back in late 2010, Apple announced that it would cease supporting Java for OS X, with Steve Jobs noting that Apple was always a version behind that being distributed by Sun/Oracle, which handled Java ...
YouTube co-founders raise Series A funding for AVOS from Google Ventures, NEA and others
Internet company AVOS Systems has raised a Series A round of funding, co-founder Chad Hurley announced on stage during a fireside chat at The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam today.
Say Hello to Windows Azure, The World's Most Misunderstood Cloud
Jeremy Howard sees Silicon Valley as an echo chamber. He recently moved to Northern California from Australia, looking to improve the fortunes of his startup, an ingenious operation known as Kaggle, ...
Microsoft forges ahead with new home-automation OS
More than a decade ago, Microsoft execs, led by Chairman Bill Gates, were touting a future where .Net coffee pots, bulletin boards, and refrigerator magnets would be part of homes where smart devices ...
Most of the Internet's Top 200,000 HTTPS Websites Are Insecure, Trustworthy Internet Movement Says
Ninety percent of the Internet's top 200,000 HTTPS-enabled websites are vulnerable to known types of SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) attack, according to a report released Thursday …
After four years as President of Tumblr, John Maloney steps down
In a post appropriately shared on Tumblr, John Maloney has announced that he's stepping down as President of the content-sharing site. Maloney has filled this role at Tumblr for the past four years, ...
Aware Sells Patents To Intel For $75 Million
Aware Inc. (AWRE) has agreed to sell a portfolio of patents and applications to Intel Corp. (INTC) for about $75 million, in the latest example of the industry-wide battle for technology patents. — ...
Facebook's next patent push: The top suspect
When Yahoo filed its sweeping patent lawsuit against Facebook, claiming that Facebook essentially built its social network on the back of Yahoo's intellectual property, Mark Zuckerberg took little tim...
Google Drive Arrives In ChromeOS Developer Channel
Ever since Google released its cloud storage service Google Drive earlier this week, there has been some speculation as to what its integration with ChromeOS, Google's cloud-centric operating system, ...
Under the hood: Data diving with Scuba
At Facebook, we often find ourselves seeking very specific answers to complicated questions. Whether we're diagnosing a performance regression or measuring the impact of an infrastructure change, we ...
Google Details Chrome Browser Security-testing Technology
Since late last year, Google has been using an industrial-strength testing system to identify, analyze and fix security holes in its Chrome browser, helping it significantly cut down on the number of ...
Social Networking Ends Games 40 Month Mobile Reign
The app revolution has changed the way software is distributed and used among consumers. With a perfect storm of digital distribution, free content and powerful touch screen devices, the success of m...
Two Angry Birds leaders leave the nest to start Boomlagoon (exclusive)
Angry Birds has become a worldwide phenomenon with more than 700 million downloads. So it's no small event that two of the leaders who created the mobile game are leaving the nest at Rovio to form th...
LivingSocial picks up online ordering software firm ONOSYS for at least $6.5m
Groupon rival LivingSocial has acquired online and mobile ordering software company ONOSYS. Bloomberg has the scoop, but the financial details of the agreement were seemingly kept under wraps.
Users Shun Prepaid Carriers
Customer Growth Plunges at Pay-as-You-Go Carriers MetroPCS, Leap Wireless — MetroPCS Communications Inc. and Leap Wireless International Inc. reported an abrupt slowdown in customer growth during wh...
Misfit Wearables, The Startup From Agamatrix's Founders, Former Apple CEO John Sculley, Raises $7.6M
Google Glass isn't the only game in town. — Misfit Wearables, a wearable computing startup from the founding team of mobile health company Agamatrix and former Apple chief executive John Sculley …