A pair of slices from a massive scrape of Twitter’s API could be of great use to programmers and researchers alike — as long as users don’t mind. The company behind the mining effort, Infochimps, is trying to demonstrate and promote its data aggregation service while offering up some useful information to interested parties.

At the end of last year, Infochimps posted a heftier version of its scrape of Twitter, which was taken down at the behest of the micro-messaging site over user privacy concerns. By releasing curated, anonymized chunks of data, the company may avoid most of the user privacy concerns that arose last time around. Then again, it may not. Continue »

Much of Facebook’s success on the iPhone has come courtesy of Joe Hewitt, an ace programmer who joined the world’s largest social networking site when it acquired Parakey, a company he co-founded with Firefox kid Blake Ross. Hewitt has now decided to shift his focus away from the iPhone. In a tweet sent out earlier today he said, “Time for me to try something new. I’ve handed the Facebook iPhone app off to another engineer, and I’m onto a new project.”

Joe was named to GigaOM’s Top 15 Mobile Influencers list earlier this year for his contributions to the iPhone app ecosystem — in particular, for single-handedly turning Facebook into a major force on the iconic Apple device. I recently gave him a hard time over the delays in launching Facebook 3.0, which prompted Joe to stop by our office and take part in an impromptu video chat. Here are the excerpts from that conversation. Continue »

The Crunchies, after two successful years, are back to celebrate the entrepreneurs and startups that make technology such an exciting industry. As always, we will be co-hosting the awards — for which nominations are now being accepted — with VentureBeat and TechCrunch. (Check out the photos from last year.)

Details of the event can be found here. The awards ceremony will be held Friday, Jan. 8 at 7:30 pm at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco and will be followed by an after-party across the street in City Hall’s Grand Rotunda. The nominations for the third annual awards ceremony honoring the best technology achievements of 2009 will remain open through midnight PST on Friday, Dec. 4th. The Crunchies Committee will select five finalists for each of the 18 award categories; final votes will be cast between Dec. 12th and midnight PST on Jan. 6th.

Updated: HP said today that it plans to buy router and switching gear maker 3Com for $2.7 billion — a deal that seeks to put HP on better competitive footing against Cisco and its server efforts. HP and the rest of the computing industry have struggled to come up with an answer to what Cisco calls unified computing systems, which combine servers and networking into one box, and in doing so have tended to lean on partnerships with networking providers such as Brocade and Juniper.

With its No. 2 line of Pro Curve networking gear, HP  was seen by the industry as being in the best position to compete, so this deal looks like an admission from HP that it has some holes in its networking portfolio that Cisco could exploit.  The boards of both companies have approved the deal. HP will pay $7.90 per share in cash for 3Com. My question is: Why didn’t it buy Brocade?

Update: Cisco has posted a comment in response to the deal, basically saying that HP is welcome to follow its industry leadership in unified computing.

Update2: Dan Primack over at peHUB has raised some legitimate questions about the price HP paid, and noted how 3Com’s stock has been steadily rising in the last couple of weeks. He pulled some Bloomberg data that shows how trading volume shot up today before the deal was announced, leading him and other blogs to suspect insider trading may be at work.

The mobile space has long buzzed with rumors of a Verizon Wireless version of the iPhone, and according to Northeast Securities, the device may finally arrive next year. Citing its supply-chain checks, the financial services firm said in a research note issued today that Apple will launch a WCDMA/CDMA2000-enabled version of the device — not an LTE version — through Verizon by the summer of 2010.

Northeast Securities’ note jibes with a new report from OTR Global via AppleInsider, which claims that Apple plans to roll out a hybrid iPhone — enabling the Cupertino company to sell a single global handset “to all carriers” — by the third quarter of next year. Continue »

It’s been an exciting week here at GigaOM HQ. We’ve been busy putting the final touches on the third edition of NewTeeVee Live, our annual online video industry conference that we’re holding in San Francisco tomorrow, Nov. 12th. I’ve been preparing for my conversations with Quincy Smith, the outgoing CEO of CBS Interactive, and Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix. Adobe Systems’ CTO Kevin Lynch is going to chat with Sebastian Rupley, our editor in chief. Expect some fireworks during our conversations about the future of video and video delivery. Continue »

“When Nokia announced that it was launching the Symbian Foundation to great fanfare,” writes John Mark Walker on OStatic, “it had within its grasp that rarest of opportunities to move swiftly and become the dominant open-source mobile platform. Alas, just one and a half years later, Nokia and the foundation have seemingly ceded that position to Android. Instead of recognizing the threat from Android and making strategic changes to counter, they instead criticized Google’s closed-door development of the OS before releasing a line of code themselves.” Can the Symbian Foundation and Nokia recover quickly and deliver on their important open-source promises and goals?  OStatic tackles that question today, here.

Today, at the GigaOM HQ here in San Francisco, key players of the web video industry will gather to talk about the approaches they’re taking when it comes to monitoring, regulating, spreading and monetizing content online — and what form they expect such activities to take over the long term. We will be live streaming the event, starting at 9:30 am PT, for two hours. We hope you can join us — please leave your thoughts as to what’s being discussed in the comments section. And for those who want to talk about it online, the Twitter hash tag is #NTVL.



To follow along via liveblog and get access to post-game analysis and video interviews with attendees, head over to GigaOM Pro. Sign up today with the discount code “BUNKERNTVL″ to get an additional $20 off our $79 annual subscription price.