Media data specialist Gracenote wants to show you ads that matter to what you watch and who you are. To do so, the company is looking to embed video recognition and ad swapping technology right into the TV set. First trials are set to start 2013. Read more »
Snapchat, the mobile photo app popular with teens for taking self-pics, is adding video on Friday, expanding the app to a new dimension. Snapchat allows a user to take photo, share with a friend, and have the photo automatically delete only seconds later. Read more »
Next year, “the cloud” will finally be ready for enterprise workloads and big companies will finally start moving them there. Data centers will stop being enclosed by walls and those are just two of GigaOM’s 5 big cloud predictions. Read on for more. Read more »
Looking to cut down or measure the energy usage of an appliance? MeterPlug is one option. This small pass-through device watches electricity consumption in real-time to a Bluetooth-enabled smartphone. It also cuts power when an appliance isn’t in use, helping to save electricity. Read more »
News coverage showed Apple Store lines in China on Friday were small to non-existant on the first day of the device’s launch in the country. But let’s not forget the steps Apple has taken in improving crowd control after January’s iPhone 4S launch. Read more »
If you travel overseas and want to maintain your mobile data connection, you’re either going to pay criminal roaming rates or endure tremendous hassles avoiding them. But a new breed of virtual operators like Voiamo are looking to create the first truly international plans. Read more »
Amazon released its list of the bestselling books of 2012 on Friday morning. The list is a great summary of one of the key themes in book publishing in 2012: Self-published authors and traditional publishers need each other. Read more at paidContent »
The human body is a workable piece of networking equipment, as it turns out. Ericsson, which has managed to get data transfers running through people at up to 10Mbps, now says it’s talking to ‘partners in the mobile space’ about implementation. Read more »
There’s no lack of iPad mini covers for sale. BookBook just added their own, which makes your small Apple tablet look like a classic, old book. It still protects the iPad mini though and you can prop up the tablet for typing or video enjoyment. Read more »
Shopular, a location-aware mobile app, is officially launching Friday to serve up relevant in-store deals while consumers are shopping. To start, the app will only alert shoppers once it senses that they’re at a shopping mall, but the company plans to expand to more locations. Read more »
New AWS billing lets customers see their cloud services charges broken out into more detail — a key issue for many customers who want a better look at what’s going on in their AWS cloud. Read more »
The Huffington Post is moving into Asia. The company will publish a Japanese-language edition in partnership with Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun, and is also in discussions with publishers in South Korea and India. Read more at paidContent »
Just seven months after introducing Sail, a payment platform for small merchants that competed with Square, VeriFone is now saying it is retreating from that business and will look to banks and other channel partners to sell the service to merchants. Read more »
Folks already use the internet more than newspapers to get their national news. Now the internet is on the verge of toppling even TV, research sugests. Read more at paidContent »
For Dalton Caldwell, he’s seen all sides of Silicon Valley at this point, but it’s possibly his current startup that is his most audacious — App.net is an experiment in seeing if users will pay for a network instead of having their data sold to advertisers. Read more »
Orange has reportedly asked banks to find a US investor for Dailymotion, as the French video site embarks on a subscription video by embracing the growing paid kids’ content trend. Read more at paidContent »
A Colorado startup has come up a light-weight motor for wind turbine generators that borrows the design of a printed circuit board. Boulder Wind Power is lining up its first customer that plans to give its technology a try. Read more »
Somewhere tech companies didn’t get the memo that the holidays were a time of peace and love because spats are breaking out all over. Twitter, Instagram and Flickr ratchet up the mobile photo fight. And Apple fends off attacks on multiple fronts. Read more »
Aereo, which lets consumers in New York watch live TV on their phones and online, now has a cable channel. The deal shows viewers it can get more content — and also gives it a small PR boost in its legal fight with broadcasters. Read more »
It may seem small, but this tool is a good step. Apple realizes and is taking seriously how its web services and their status are crucial to their users’ experience — iCloud, Siri, Mail, iMessage have all had major service disruptions in the last few months. Read more »
At the close of the NASDAQ on Thursday evening, SolarCity ended its first day of trading up close to 50 percent, closing at $11.79. Read more »
After a year-long experiment that saw its Facebook “social reading” app gain more than six million monthly users — and then lose more than half of those after the network changed the way those apps work — the Guardian has decided to take back control of its content. Read more »
Chicago, Reno, and the LA burbs join Atlanta, Minneapolis and Seattle as the newest areas of the country where an iPhone will work on T-Mobile’s 3G network. T-Mo is now about one-third of the way from completing its nationwide HSPA+ overhaul. Read more »
Yahoo has added Max Levchin, a Silicon Valley star, to its board of directors giving it a much-needed entrepreneurial and engineering-savvy board member. The web portal will also see two of its existing directors leave, shrinking the board to 11 members. Read more »
The New York Times is launching an ebook publishing program with the e-singles startup Byliner, and will also publish curated article selections called “TimesFiles” with publishing platform Vook. The new partnerships mark the paper’s first real foray into ebook publishing. Read more at paidContent »
Verizon’s flagship Android phone, the Galaxy S III, will be getting a software upgrade starting later this week. It’s Android 4.1, not 4.2, but will add a number of key features to the handset including Google Now, ISIS mobile payment support and improved notifications. Read more »
VMware aggressively recruited partners to base platforms on its open-source Cloud Foundry stack. Now as it preps the Pivotal Initiative spinoff, those partners worry about more intense competition with the Cloud Foundry mothership. Read more »
Five years after its $280 million acquisition, the music service is still struggling to turn a profit for CBS, if latest efforts to tactically abandon and charge for royalty-incurring personalised radio are anything to go by. Read more at paidContent »
New York is getting on board with e-hailing services for taxi cabs though it’s doing so slowly. The Taxi and Limousine Commission approved a one-year pilot program that will allow companies like Uber, Hailo and others to offer taxi hailing from a smartphone. Read more »
T-Mobile will lean heavily on financing to execute its plan to end phone subsidies, but it’s not the only one. MetroPCS and Cricket are already largely subsidy free, but they’re using financing to get expensive high-end devices like the iPhone into their customers’ hands. Read more »
You can count GigaOM Pro cleantech analyst Adam Lesser in the category that believes that SolarCity pricing at $8 rather than the $13 to $15 the company wanted was a major blessing. A blessing for all of cleantech. Read more »
Twitter added some new features to its promoted tweets on Thursday, making updates that will help brands and marketers better target audiences with in-stream advertising. For Twitter, this year is all about monetization, so the more accurate it can be with its advertising, the better. Read more »
The selection of these apps as best of the year demonstrate the growing sophistication of what developers are making for iPhone and iPad. A glance at the top paid apps also shows that games are somewhat loosening their grip on their “most popular” status. Read more »
Airbnb announced in a blog post Thursday that it’s acquired Localmind, the Q&A startup that allows users to answer and receive information particular to their locations. Airbnb noted in the post that Localmind will allow them to add more social components to their popular travel product. Read more »
YouTube is going to have its first live telethon Thursday night, courtesy of What’s Trending, and with appearances of a bunch of YouTube stars. It’s for a good cause, but also one more step towards turning YouTube into something that resembles TV. Read more »
Seattle will join Chicago, Kansas City, Bruistol, Tenn. and other cities with its very own gigabit broadband network. The proposed plan would see a mix of fiber-to-the-home, mobile broadband and gigabit point-to-point wireless services. The city will partner with Gigabit Squared to make it happen. Read more »
Transcriptic is a startup that’s trying to let grad students and researchers conduct their experiments over the web. The company offers a lab-as-a-service product and hopes to take some of the economics from the cloud and apply them to scientific research. Read more »
Another year has come and gone with more mobile advances than ever before. What’s in store for the year ahead? Our mobile staff looks a five trends that are likely to affect hardware, software and services in the fast growing mobile space. Read more »
Google and Belgian news publishers announced a deal that will put an end to their copyright dispute. Google says it is not paying the papers for content — so then why is money changing hands? Read more at paidContent »
Media ratings giant Nielsen is backing Pereg Ventures, a new venture capital firm that plans to invest in U.S. and Tel Aviv startups that help advertisers measure and market to audiences across multiple platforms. Read more »
