As more businesses switch on to the possibilities of social media, a battle is brewing between the tools that help them do it best. Faced with stiff competition, Chicago-based Sprout Social has a simple strategy: fight back by building great products. Read more »
Twenty years after it started out in radio production, British digital agency Somethin’ Else is making waves with its innovative iPhone games — and representing a new generation of creative technology firms that are ready to step up and make it big. Read more »
Buoyed by the success of Y Combinator and TechStars, a new breed of startup accelerator programs are springing up everywhere. The latest? The U.K.’s Oxygen, which founder Mark Hales says can bring some much-needed tech innovation to Britain’s second-largest city. Read more »
British researchers have built a cheap, fully-functioning computer the size of a USB stick. But while efforts to bring low-cost computing to the masses are laudable, do they misunderstand the reality of the way the world uses computers in the 21st century? Read more »
Russia’s biggest search engine, Yandex, plans to cash in by going public on the Nasdaq — but its bid for the big time is being hit by concerns of political interference and revelations that it has handed private user data over to the Russian security services. Read more »
Hot music startup Spotify may have won over millions of users in Europe, but it still hasn’t launched in America. That hasn’t stopped it trying to take on Apple, however, by making a surprise move to try and replace the increasingly-bloated iTunes. Read more »
To mark World Press Freedom Day, campaigners have examined the different tactics used by governments around the world to silence dissent and shut down free speech. And it seems the range of tools at their disposal is growing as fast as the Internet itself. Read more »
Spanish shopkeeper Alejandro Fernandez is on trial amid accusations that he is aiding piracy by selling jailbreak cartridges for Nintendo devices. But he’s trying to fight back by leading a legal action against the Japanese games giant that accuses it of breaking European law. Read more »
Later this month France is hosting a summit of political leaders and Internet thinkers. But now it seems that senior industry leaders are being asked to pay up for their chance to dictate the conversation and swap numbers with powerful governments. Read more »
Hot on the heels of the furor over Apple’s location databases, personal navigation device giant TomTom is in trouble for selling speed data to police. But both companies have shown how technology firms are too quick to dismiss the worries of their customers. Read more »
Online social networks have been around for years, but most of them still make the same basic — and utterly incorrect — assumptions about the way we interact with each other. Whose fault is that, and how exactly do we fix it? Read more »
Zynga has been on a tear recently, buying 12 smaller games studios in the past year. But its latest purchase, British mobile development outfit Wonderland, gives a strong indication of what the red-hot company intends all of its spending to achieve. Read more »
Russia’s biggest Internet company, Mail.ru, has made its financial results public for the first time — and in doing so has revealed that despite relatively slim profits, it holds as much as $2 billion of hot technology companies such as Facebook and Groupon Read more »
MIT’s Media Lab is a hothouse of talent that helped usher in the digital revolution of the 1990s — but as the Internet has become dominated by large companies, its influence has waned. Now incoming director Joi Ito must help it regain its momentum. Read more »
In the four years since CBS bought online radio service Last.fm, the site hasn’t changed radically. Now, however, the London-based music service is looking for its second act — and product chief Matthew Hawn tells GigaOM what that might mean. Read more »
The news that Apple devices keep a record of your movements has generated plenty of coverage. Now, however, one researcher says not only has the knowledge been public for some time, but it’s already being used by security researchers and law enforcement agents. Read more »
New laws to track and disconnect Britons accused of illegally downloading copyrighted files has been controversial, but after an attempt to get it overturned by the U.K.’s two largest Internet providers failed, it looks certain to be put into action. Read more »
Europe’s long-awaited position on net neutrality is finally here — and it looks like business as usual, with telecom companies retaining the right to block or throttle traffic in return for making the life of consumers a little bit easier. Read more »
Sweden and Finland have long been among the world’s most wired nations — but yet Europe’s substantial lead in networking has never quite translated over into a world-leading startup economy. Perhaps now, however, the circumstances are right to see it happen. Read more »
The possibility of Europe-wide restrictions on the tracking cookies used by online advertisers had some up in arms. But the threat has been dispelled — at least in Britain, where the government suggests that browsers rather than websites should offer users better ways to stay private. Read more »
Next month, French President Nicolas Sarkozy is convening a meeting of the world’s most powerful politicians and the leaders of the Internet’s most important companies. Together they’ll discuss the future of the online world. Should we be happy? Or is it cause for concern? Read more »
Europe’s hottest on-demand music service, Spotify, is narrowing its free offering as it tries to boost subscription numbers and prepare for an American launch. Will it finally end the ongoing delusion that advertising can ever make enough to support streaming music services? Read more »
The launch of the Playbook tablet is a big moment for Research In Motion boss Mike Lazaridis — his company’s attempt to take on the iPad. But the attention is all going the wrong way today, after the BBC revealed how he walked out of an interview. Read more »
Swedish entrepreneur Ernst Malmsten presided over the rise and fall of Boo.com, Europe’s most notorious dot-com failure. Now he’s ready to try his hand at online retail once again — but what has he learned from more than a decade in the wilderness? Read more »
At the London Book Fair, publishers are getting their heads around how digital content is changing their business, but it still feels like a clash of civilizations: publishers talking about what the next big thing is, while Amazon and Google simply make the next big thing. Read more »
It has been slammed in the past for being the Internet’s most powerful echo chamber, but now a team of researchers from the U.K. and Korea have found that active Twitter users are exposed to a wider diversity of political viewpoints. Read more »
Minecraft, a collaborative started off as the brainchild of a single developer in Sweden, but its combination of addictiveness and sociability has turned it into a massive underground hit — generating tens of millions of dollars of revenue along the way. Read more »
Most Internet analysts suggest Myspace fell from grace because it crumbled in the face of stiff competition from Facebook. But a Reuters report suggests it may have been Google that dealt the fatal blow by accident as long ago as 2006. Read more »
French officials have sent Internet companies into a frenzy with a new requirement that all web services must keep detailed files on all their users — including passwords, addresses and activity — for government purposes. Time to cancel that trip to Paris? Read more »
Senior venture capitalists have said they are planning to dump slow-burning investments in biotech in favor of the faster returns offered by dotcom companies. But while changing focus may seem like a practical investment strategy could be a depressing — and ultimately dangerous — shift. Read more »
After spending more than a decade battling European regulators over accusations that it was engaged in anti-competitive practices, Microsoft has turned around and made its own complaint over Google’s dominance of the search market. Is it a sign of things to come? Read more »
One of Arianna Huffington’s first decisions since selling up to AOL is to expand the website to the U.K — but she may discover that the rest of the world isn’t as hungry for her brand of news as the American market. Read more »
Italy’s famously fractious relationship with Internet companies doesn’t show any signs of improving, after a judge in Rome ruled Yahoo should do more to “inhibit” copyright infringement — a move that could open the door to lawsuits against YouTube and others. Read more »
Eleven years ago Britain’s auction of 3G wireless spectrum broke records by raising more than $36.7 billion. So today, when the news broke that the even faster 4G spectrum will be auctioned off next year, why were analysts so underwhelmed? Read more »
Two weeks after Twitter launched its controversial Quick Bar, the Internet is still seething with anger and resentment. But for once, it’s not just power users kvetching about changes — but Twitter demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of what users value about the service. Read more »
It’s no secret that the political machine in Washington can be slow. The Startup Visa Act was first discussed in 2009, and in the meantime, Britain has managed to pass their own version, despite a change of government, heated debate, and necessary changes to immigration laws. Read more »
The trend to add Foursquare-like features has turned into a bandwagon. But is HeyZap’s new Android app, which lets you check in to mobile games, one idea that’s more than just a copycat? The company thinks the app discovery system is shifting, just like gaming. Read more »
The culture clash between American and European privacy cultures has been bubbling away for some time, but now European lawmakers have given the clearest signal yet to America’s Internet companies that they will be forced to abide by new, stricter privacy regulations. Read more »
Since Russia’s Yuri Milner burst onto the scene with heavy investments in Facebook, Groupon and Zynga, many rivals have wondered whether he can see something they can’t. So what did he have to say for himself during a rare public appearance? Read more »
Need proof that smartphones are conquering the globe? Look no farther than the U.K., where the Office for National Statistics has begun factoring smartphones and the apps that run on them into its consumer spending data, as well as another high-tech addition. Read more »
