Firefox has taken the number one spot in browser market share in Europe, pushing past Internet Explorer for the first time, according to StatCounter. But the real battle for Firefox is with Chrome, the Google browser that continues to gain market share at a rapid pace. Read more »
Steve Case, the founder of AOL and architect of the disastrous merger with media giant Time Warner in 2000, has been using the question-and-answer site Quora to respond to critics of that deal, and also to share his thoughts about the new AOL. Read more »
Goldman Sachs is reportedly investing $450 million in Facebook, giving the social networking company a theoretical market valuation of $50 billion and positioning it for what seems like an inevitable IPO. That may be good for Facebook and Goldman, but will it be good for investors? Read more »
The enthusiasm iPad users had for magazine apps seems to be waning, according to some recent numbers that show sales of many apps slipping. Hopefully some publishers are starting to realize that simply having an iPad app doesn’t qualify as a digital content strategy. Read more »
Here are some of the best and worst iPad apps from media companies and publishers, including some of the familiar names — Wired, The New Yorker, Esquire — as well as some less familiar ones, with what they are doing right and what still needs work. Read more »
The fact that even journalists and media professors can’t seem to agree on whether what WikiLeaks does is journalism emphasizes just how deeply the media and journalism have been disrupted by the web, to the point where we aren’t even sure what they are any more. Read more »
Stock traders and hedge funds can’t predict the future yet, but they are doing their best to come as close as possible, and that involves crunching every bit of data they can get their hands on — up to and including that tweet you just posted. Read more »
According to a new survey of the online video market from Brightcove and TubeMogul, newspapers as a group overtook broadcasters in terms of the total number of video minutes streamed in the third quarter. Newspapers also led in terms of total number of videos uploaded. Read more »
When it comes to real-time responses from your social graph, Twitter has a lot going for it that even Facebook can’t duplicate. And it looks like the company plans to do more to support that kind of feature, since it just bought Q&A startup Fluther. Read more »
After being rebuffed by Groupon, Google is reportedly looking at acquiring another player in the group-buying space — and there are good reasons why it should do so. A marriage of local advertising and social shopping could fill a big hole in the web giant’s portfolio. Read more »
Fans of Groupon note that it has more than 100 writers, editors and fact-checkers on staff — more than a lot of medium-sized newspapers — and is continuing to hire and train writers, many of whom are (or were) journalists. But is that really something worth celebrating? Read more »
After ignoring the phenomenon for some time, companies and agencies alike seem to be jumping into social-media marketing with both feet, whether it’s Facebook or Twitter or Foursquare. But many are suffering from “bright shiny object” syndrome, says Adam Kmiec, and their campaigns will fail. Read more »
A comparison of demographic data about Facebook’s users vs. Twitter’s users shows that there are a lot of similarities between the two platforms, but also some key differences in how people use the two networks — including how often they visit and update their status. Read more »
Some see Yahoo as a slow-motion train wreck, heading inevitably for disaster. But the company is arguably doing exactly what it has to: triage to stanch the bleeding, shutting down or selling off assets, and so on. It may not be pretty, but it is necessary. Read more »
The European Union is broadening an investigation into Google that was originally launched following complaints the web giant was giving its own assets preferential treatment in search results. Google has also been coming under increasing pressure in the U.S. as a result of similar allegations. Read more »
According to a leaked photo from an all-hands meeting at the web giant, Yahoo is planning to shut down several of its services, including the Delicious bookmarking site, as well as a Digg clone called Yahoo Buzz, and an early blog-based social network called MyBlogLog. Read more »
When Flipboard first arrived on the scene, it was essentially just a browser for Twitter and Facebook. But now the company has introduced support for Google Reader feeds, Flickr photos and other real-time media streams, as it tries to become a one-stop iPad portal for content. Read more »
After Twitter CEO Dick Costolo wrote on the company’s blog about its funding round from Kleiner Perkins — which values the company at $3.7 billion — the blog post was edited to take some of Costolo’s witticisms out. Is Twitter too rich to have fun? Read more »
Terms like “cyber-war” have been used to describe the denial-of-service attacks waged by anonymous hackers against the companies that cut off support for WikiLeaks. But the attacks were nothing like a real cyber-war, security experts say, and calling them that could have unintended consequences. Read more »
A Washington Post columnist argues that Google has grown so large and dominant it should be prevented from buying new companies, even those in completely new markets it doesn’t have a presence in. But is that really what we want antitrust laws to do? Read more »
At least one senior technologist thinks that Amazon removing WikiLeaks from its servers could raise red flags about the utility of cloud computing, while programmer and open-web advocate Dave Winer believes the incident reinforces the need for an open cloud host to protect our content. Read more »
When you have almost 600 million users and a “social graph” of the connections between them, you can do a lot with that data — so a Facebook intern plotted the connections between millions of users and came up with a map of the socially connected world. Read more »
Ever been pressed into service by family members to help them adjust their PC clock, or cut and paste text from a document? Well, the geeks at Google have set up a special site just for you to help your parents do all this and more. Read more »
Media analyst Clay Shirky says that the list of things that the Internet has killed — or is in the process of killing — includes media syndication of the kind that the Associated Press is built on, which he says is next in line for widespread disruption. Read more »
The Atlantic magazine took a radical approach to surviving in the web era: It set out to deliberately disrupt its own business, rather than letting someone else do it. Traffic has climbed, revenues have almost doubled and it is profitable for the first time in years. Read more »
Although 2010 isn’t over yet, Twitter has come out with the top trending topics for the year, and surprisingly enough, Justin Bieber — the guy who is so popular that Twitter had to modify the way it calculates trending topics — didn’t take the top slot. Read more »
Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff says the company tracks activity on Chatter, its internal Twitter-style social network, and gives employees who provide valuable information via the network extra compensation, in the same way executives are given bonuses for hitting sales targets. But is that a good idea? Read more »
As WikiLeaks fights to remain online and solvent, the organization seems to be part of what could be a new form of media emerging: not a journalistic entity specifically, but a kind of investigative middleman or clearinghouse for the traditional media to use as a resource. Read more »
We often take smartphones for granted — the ability to instantly find information, get directions, take photos and share them, and so on. Doing without one even for a day is a good way to be reminded of just how much they have changed our lives. Read more »
Social tools such as Skype and instant messaging, along with social networks that help workers connect with each other, can make it much easier to manage remote teams than it used to be before the web came along — and doing so has become even more necessary. Read more »
Technology has changed dramatically in the past 10 years, but human beings and the way they work and manage each other has not evolved and adapted nearly as quickly. That is one of the major challenges for businesses today, according to Allen Delattre of Korn/Ferry International. Read more »
As the U.S. government and a series of corporations such as Visa, MasterCard and PayPal keep up the pressure on WikiLeaks, a rough alliance of hackers and supporters have taken it upon themselves to wage an ongoing cyber-war in defense of the document-leaking organization. Read more »
Since they are both giant web companies with a search engine at their core, the assumption is that Yahoo competes primarily with Google. But the truth is that Yahoo has more to fear from Facebook — and Yahoo’s CEO Carol Bartz admitted as much on Tuesday. Read more »
While Google moves onto Apple’s turf by launching a Chrome OS store for apps, many of which cost money and only work properly if they run in Google’s browser, some companies such as Twitter are instead spending their time and resources making their websites more app-like. Read more »
Visa, MasterCard and PayPal have all cut off support for payments to WikiLeaks, saying the organization has been involved in illegal acts — but is there any real justification for this? Not really. In fact, it’s not clear that what WikiLeaks is doing is even illegal. Read more »
The Tumblr blog-hosting platform has been down for more than 17 hours, in what appears to be the longest outage in its history. Twitter has shown even a problem-plagued service can continue to grow if it is popular enough, but does Tumblr fall into that category? Read more »
Google today launched its long-awaited electronic book store, called simply Google eBooks, with more than 3 million titles and 4,000 publishers participating as partners. The move is likely to ramp up competition in the e-book market, which until now has been dominated by Amazon and Apple. Read more »
We may not like its methods or its leader, but WikiLeaks is a publisher — a new kind of publisher, but a publisher nonetheless — and as such it deserves to be protected from government interference, just like any other member of the traditional or mainstream media. Read more »
According to multiple reports, Groupon has walked away from a rumored $6-billion acquisition offer from Google, and is choosing to go it alone, and possibly file for an initial public offering. The two-year-old company is said to have annual revenues of close to $2 billion. Read more »
Rebecca Jacoby, chief information officer at Cisco, says if it wasn’t for new collaboration tools such as video telepresence, blogs and wikis, the networking-equipment maker would never have been able to grow as large or move quickly into as many new markets as it has. Read more »
