GigaOM

Last few weeks the buzz around Second Life has been increasing. The metaverse has over a million members; companies are feeding off the Second Life economy, and others are taking the concept of a virtual company to the very extreme - by doing business in the virtual confines of Second Life . Tax man wants [...]

Last week when Skype announced that it had seen five million downloads for the Pocket PC platform, I was suitably impressed. Why? Because it showed that there is clearly a demand for a Skype-type solution on the mobile phones. Of course, we all know that the delta between downloads and actual usage is huge.

We stopped by the so-called FON Freedom Friday event in Union Square this afternoon, and watched the WiFi-sharing company give away 500 FON routers to those milling around, mostly workers on their lunch break. By the time we left, around one P.M., they had given away about half of the routers. It’s not too [...]

While startups and investors are clamoring over flashy mobile consumer applications, there’s a lot more mobile money found in the silicon — a fact that chip giants like Qualcomm and Broadcom know better than anyone. Quellan, a four-year-old Santa Clara-based startup knows this too. The company, which has raised over $20 million in two rounds [...]

Six Apart celebrated the launch of its blogging/social networking product Vox last night with a big party at Bimbo’s. The club wasn’t quite as crowded as last time I went, for an ’80s cover band show, but it’s an impressively large and nice place for a startup to throw a party. The food was good, [...]

When Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated his new invention, the telephone, for the first time publicly in 1876, he didn’t announce the birth of a new age of ubiquitous electronic person-to-person communications. Nope. Instead, to the oohs and aahs of those gathered around him at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Bell proclaimed the advent [...]