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 … Read More »
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Jordan Golson
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Internet service providers may become legally responsible for scam web sites and spam that passes over their lines if a new piece of legislation, the Investor Protection Act, gets turned into law. The act, which passed through the House Financial Services Committee today, requires … Read More »
Apple purchased digital mapmaker Placebase in July for an undisclosed sum, according to Seth Weintraub at Computerworld. Placebase, which we wrote about last year, is a Google Maps competitor that focuses on adding layers of public and private data to existing maps with … Read More »
Alcatel-Lucent CEO Ben Verwaayen gave a keynote speech this morning at the EmTech conference, running today and tomorrow at MIT. He spoke of tech innovations and — perhaps most importantly — the need to turn them into sustainable, profitable businesses. During the question-and-answer … Read More »
Adobe said today it’s agreed to buy analytics and metrics firm Omniture for $1.8 billion in cash, or $21.50 a share. Customers want to integrate Adobe’s online products like Flash with services like those offered by Omniture, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said during the … Read More »
Intuit said today it’s spending $170 million to acquire Mint.com, a site that helps people manage their personal finances through budgeting and spending trackers, among other features. Mint has around a million users and has amassed a treasure trove of data on their historical … Read More »
Is Apple building a monthly television subscription service, like Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster claims? Maybe! Munster also thinks the Mac maker is going to launch a television that wirelessly syncs with your other Apple devices, and predicts an Apple set-top box with TV input … Read More »
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The iPod Touch might be hiding in the shadow of its big brother, the iPhone — both in volume, and revenue — but is it possible that the Touch is more disruptive than its cellular sibling? The iPod Touch has seen huge growth within Apple’s iPod … Read More »
Sacre bleu! Amazon and Google’s digital book efforts could force publishers to slash prices and put them out of business, says Arnaud Nourry, head of French book publisher Hachette. He is concerned that unilateral pricing by e-book resellers like Sony, Amazon and Barnes & Noble … Read More »
Many companies are slashing budgets to improve the bottom line — or at least postponing purchases until later — but not all. Thirty-nine percent of small and medium businesses reported budget cuts this year, averaging a 22 percent reduction in IT funding, according to Spiceworks’
By Jordan Golson
Aug. 26, 2009, 1:15pm PT
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African cell phone penetration rates are at an impressive 37 percent, according to a recent study by Ernst & Young. Impressive because a year and a half ago, at the beginning of 2008, the penetration rate was only 28 percent. That’s a huge increase, and … Read More »
Earlier this month, I slammed Sony for offering “affordable” e-book readers but not including a wireless option — something I consider to be the e-reader killer app (GigaOM Pro subscription required). At the time, the electronics giant promised to tell us more about its … Read More »
Delaware, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts have some of the fastest Internet access speeds in the country, according to a new survey by the Communications Workers of America, while Hawaii, Alaska, Montana and Wyoming have the slowest. In other words, there appears to be a direct … Read More »
Amazon.com is pushing small, inexpensive digital camcorders like the Flip and Kodak’s new Zi8, naming them “shoot-and-share” and introducing a whole category focused on the devices. Earlier today, Amazon sent me an email touting the cams because I had “shopped for camcorders” on the site … Read More »
Southwest Airlines said today that it will begin a fleetwide rollout of its in-flight Wi-Fi service in the first quarter of 2010, putting it on track to be the first major airline to offer broadband access in all of its planes. The service, in partnership with … Read More »
An influential Ruby programmer, writer and cartoonist working under the pseudonym “_why” has disappeared from the Internet. He — or someone with access to his accounts — has deleted his Twitter account, blog, and all of his programming work. Some folks think … Read More »
Today’s news that Apple sells almost 70 percent of songs online had us wondering about other industry giants. Some companies, whether because they make a great product, or were first to a particular industry, or some other reason entirely, make goods that manage to secure … Read More »
Nine out of 10 Americans don’t listen to music on their cell phones, according to a Forrester Research note released today on “The Future Of Music On Cell Phones.” The report gives a bunch of reasons for this, but all the conclusions are bad news … Read More »
Google actually lost U.S. search share in July from the prior month for the first time since January, according to the latest data from comScore. The drop, which worked out to 0.3 percent from June to July, largely benefited Microsoft and Yahoo, which announced a partnership … Read More »
The Internet has changed a lot of things over the last decade or two — including how we search for jobs. Sure, the basics are the same: Find an opening and apply for it. But the web has permanently altered the employment process. And with more … Read More »
Self-proclaimed “web promotions company” uSocial issued a press release last night claiming that Twitter had accused it of spamming and wanted it shut down. uSocial, of course, denies the accusation. Spamming, as it is generally understood, is the sending of unsolicited messages, something that uSocial … Read More »
Twitter might be revolutionizing social communication, but it’s also providing a handy way for hackers and virus makers to issue commands once their creations are out in the wild. Symantec has determined that a trojan horse called “Downloader.Sninfs” was using the @upd4te Twitter … Read More »
Comcast has filed its appeal of an FCC decision issued last August that censured the cable company for blocking P2P files, arguing that the commission doesn’t have the authority to impose the broadband principles that define network neutrality in the U.S. absent a … Read More »
While second-quarter mobile phone sales fell 6 percent from the same period last year, sales of smartphones surged 27 percent, according to new a Gartner report, making it the fastest-growing mobile devices category. On a sequential basis, Nokia, Samsung and LG — the top three … Read More »
Production at Corning’s LCD glass manufacturing facility in Shizuoka, Japan, has come to a halt following a 6.4 magnitude earthquake off the Japanese coast yesterday. Corning said in a statement that “glass-making operations at the facility are currently suspended and we believe they will … Read More »
Nearly two years ago, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told a group of European advertising executives that he saw online ads generating one-quarter of Microsoft’s revenue within a few years. Yet in the quarter ended June 30, Microsoft’s Online Services Business turned in sales of … Read More »
The mobile advertising business is the place to be these days. AdMob, a mobile ads specialist, is about to serve its 100 billionth impression — you can watch the numbers tick up on the firm’s home page. To be sure, the number on its own … Read More »
Rupert Murdoch is picking up his toys from the playground and going home, and kicking sand at the “free” model touted by Wired’s Chris Anderson on the way out. The News Corp. chairman has announced that, due to poor advertising revenue on the company’s numerous … Read More »
The United States Postal Service is in dire straights. The second-largest employer in the country (behind only Wal-Mart) is facing a massive fiscal crunch amid falling mail volumes and rising expenses. The GAO estimates total mail volume will fall to 175 billion pieces in … Read More »
Updated with comment from Sony: Everyone talks about how great “choice” is, as if having an alternative to the existing status quo is automatically good. But what if the alternative is lame? Then there really isn’t much of a choice, is there? Sony today introduced
Apple has taken on a seemingly impossible task with the iPhone App Store: policing it for potentially objectionable applications. There are many, many apps that have been forbidden from the store. Some apps go against Apple or AT&T’s terms of service, contain “questionable” content, or … Read More »
So, you launch a brand new product with a lot of publicity into a very crowded market. How do you promote that product? If you’re Palm, by running what some folks have dubbed “creepy,” “annoying” ads that don’t explain — at all — what … Read More »
Google is integrating its Bookmarks service with its Chrome web browser. The service will allow users to link their local bookmarks and browser data with the Google cloud, letting bookmarks be automatically backed up and shared with the cloud. The search giant used to … Read More »
Amazon will need to start selling the Kindle through venues other than just the Amazon.com web site if it wants to maintain its lead in the U.S. e-reader market, according to a new study from Forrester Research. For while the vast majority of current e-reader owners … Read More »
The FCC’s probe of cell phone contracts and exclusivity deals will reportedly focus on markets where the iPhone and the Palm Pre aren’t available — that is, where AT&T and Sprint don’t have service. FCC chairman Julius Genachowski told Bloomberg, “There are markets in the … Read More »
Consumers are still looking to hold onto their memories with hard-copy photographs. At a time when many tech-savvy users are uploading their entire photographic lives to Facebook or Flickr, many others — especially those with kids looking to send pictures to grandparents or other … Read More »
Southern Comfort is taking its $8 million marketing spend online to reach its target market of 21- to 29-year-olds. Last year, the brand spent $6 million on late-night cable TV and another $1.5 million on magazines. All of that is going away. Now, SoCo plans … Read More »
The vast majority of technology purchasers don’t care how their stuff works. They just care that it works. This is especially true with digital content delivery services like iTunes or the Kindle. Kindle and iPod buyers want to be able to enter a credit card number, …
Microsoft and Yahoo have reached an agreement on a search deal that will allow both companies to focus on their core strengths: Microsoft’s Bing will become the default search engine on Yahoo.com, and Yahoo will eventually take over the ad inventory on all Bing search results, … Read More »
The Apple rumor mill never stops. This week, the Financial Times is claiming that Apple is working hand-in-hand with record labels to redesign how it sells music albums on its iTunes store. According to the FT’s sources, Apple is working with EMI, Sony, Warner and … Read More »
AT&T has finally issued a statement about the company’s unannounced blocking of certain parts of forum site 4Chan. A number of parties blamed AT&T for “censoring” the Internet, presuming that the company had blocked access because of the content on 4Chan, which can … Read More »
Yahoo and Microsoft are very close — a year and a half after Microsoft went public with its buyout offer for the beleaguered web giant — to inking a search deal. AdAge’s Michael Learmonth reports that an agreement is likely to be announced this week, … Read More »
Voicemail transcription startup SpinVox is in a bit of a fix, after a BBC investigation found that the majority of messages the company claimed were converted to text by an advanced speech-to-text algorithm, were in fact “heard and transcribed by call center staff in … Read More »
Apple, at the iPhone SDK launch last May, began a big push towards getting the iPhone into the enterprise — the traditional stronghold of the BlackBerry. It rolled out enterprise-targeted features like push email/contacts/calendar, a global address list, VPN support and remote wipe. Now, more than … Read More »
Some 700 million more people are going to go online in the next five years, according to a report released today by Forrester Research, hitting 2.2 billion by 2013. Much of the growth is seen taking place in emerging markets in Asia like China, India … Read More »
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