Quora, a Q&A service has raised a whopping $50 million in funding from co-founder Adam D’Angelo along with Facebook funder Peter Thiel, Northbridge Ventures and Matrix Ventures. One of the most over-hyped startups, the question is why is it valued so highly despite mediocre … Read More »
There’s nothing quite like a hypothetical about someone setting a whole block on fire after cutting off the fire department’s electric supply in order to slow its response. Is it comforting to know that smart people and smart analytics could help stop it from happening? Read More »
T-Mobile, Sprint, rural operatorsPublic Knowledge have teamed up to create a mobile version of the Super Friends, their sole mission to battle the Verizon-cable Legion of Doom, but they can’t seem to agree on exactly how they would plan to oppose their new sworn enemies. Read More »
To address the fragmentation exploding across the digital advertising market, Luma Partners founder and CEO Terence Kawaja floated the possibility of an operating system for digital ad companies to use as a common building block for their products, just how mobile apps use iOS and Android. Read More »
Brian Sugar and his wife, Lisa, have built a women’s media and e-commerce empire that grew out of the company’s flagship celebrity site, Pop Sugar. We caught up with Brian to learn more about how he made it in media. Here’s some highlights from the chat: Read More »
How many apps on your phone do you use on a daily basis? Moving your product from a novelty to a habit is tricky, but Localmind CEO, Lenny Rachitsky thinks he’s found a way to make it happen and open up in this video interview. Read More »
Ikea’s Uppleva TV solution, which combines a Smart TV with living room furniture, will launch in select retail locations in Europe next month. Some of the apps available on the device at launch will offer access to services like YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion and TuneIn radio. Read More »
Twitter describes itself as an information network rather than a media entity, but it is making some interesting moves into the content business, including hiring a sports producer to curate content and sending out a weekly email of highlighted content. How far will it go? Read More »
MarketWatch founder Larry Kramer, a print vet and digital entrepreneur, is the new president and publisher of USA Today. It’s a sign that Gannett is serious about moving ahead in digital while making the most of its print roots. Read More »
LightSquared’s bankruptcy is the conclusion of a process that is rigged against broadband competition. Maybe it would have failed for economic reasons, but before it got the chance it fell victim to politics, spectrum warfare, and interests that don’t want more wireless competition. Read More »
As the pace of advances in mobile technology accelerates, waves of new smartphones are appearing every few months. That can mean some savings in the form of a price drop on recently launched phones by the carriers. But how long should you wait? Read More »
American Express has been using social channels such as Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter to deliver offers that can be synced to a user’s card account. But up until now, there wasn’t one place to find and get recommendations on all those offers. Read More »
More Must Reads
Hours away from defaulting on debt, LightSquared filed for bankruptcy protection. The company has said it would use the shelter of Chapter 11 to buy time in its fight to build its nationwide LTE network, but this could just be a prelude to a liquidation … Read More »
Facebook users on Android, iOS and mobile browsers aren’t stuck with postage-sized pictures and posts any more. Facebook announced on Monday that it now supports full-sized pictures on all three platforms as well as posts that will automatically scale from edge-to-edge of a handheld device. Read More »
After bootstrapping itself for more than five years, New York City-based Behance, an online destination for creative galleries and portfolios, has finally turned to outside funding, securing a $6.5 million investment from Union Square Ventures and a host of investors including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Read More »
The digital world changes constantly and often head-spinningly fast. With so much happening at once, how can you grasp the big picture behind all the headlines? Find out how on May 23 at paidContent 2012 in NYC. Read More »
In the mid-1990s, DoubleClick co-founder and CEO Kevin O’Connor developed a platform for data-driven advertising. With his latest startup, FindTheBest, he’s aiming to do the same thing for content. Read More »
Today, we’re excited to launch a great new addition to GigaOM. GigaOM Jobs offers up a selection of job listings from some of the best and brightest companies in tech — companies like Akamai, Intuit and Makani Power. We’ll focus … Read More »
Looking for a basic Android battery optimizer, trash cleaner and a very informative security function that monitors third-party application permissions? Check out Cosmos, a free app that officially launches next week but is available now in a stable beta for Android 2.2 and up. Read More »
The WSJ says iCloud will get new photo and video syncing capabilities, which will be announced at WWDC in June. It’s remarkable how quickly Apple has moved to build up iCloud, particularly for a company that previously hasn’t had much success with networked services. Read More »
A new RootMetrics report finds that AT&T’s industry-leading LTE speeds take a big dip in Chicago. The report highlights a problem AT&T has with several of its markets: it doesn’t enough spectrum to offer the big fat pipe it has in the rest of the country. Read More »
Labels used to spend big bucks to promote their music on radio stations and in record stores. They should embrace file sharing instead, argues Counting Crows singer Adam Duritz. The band just released four tracks of its new album as a free BitTorrent download. Read More »
Yahoo is looking to leverage its big data prowess with a new tool for marketers called Genome. It looks like an acknowledgement that while Yahoo might not rule the the web anymore, it knows a heck of a lot about analytics. Read More »
Welcome to the concept of the superstack — which acts to circumvent the openness that the Internet and the digitization of content has enabled and once again lock consumers into a single platform for their content determined in part by the hardware they choose. Read More »
The appointment of Ross Levinsohn as CEO is a sign Yahoo wants to focus on media as the core of its rebirth, but does the company have what it takes to succeed as a new-media entity? There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical. Read More »
Buffalo Technology has wasted no time using the newly approved 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard: The company is now shipping its AirStation router that is capable of pushing wireless bits and bytes at 1.3 Gbps. The $179.99 device is also backwards compatible with older Wi-Fi standards. Read More »
More than nine million apps and services use Facebook Connect, the Open Graph developer platform, which gives company powers to predict the future. It can turn on the traffic spigot for some apps such as Socialcam. But it can turn off the spigot, equally fast. Read More »
How many of us have gone through numerous batteries for our laptops, because aging batteries start to lose their ability to charge? Yep, me too. Stanford’s materials scientist Yi Cui is working on a lithium ion battery that could last six times longer. Read More »
Microsoft has balanced social search integration without compromising core results far better than Google has demonstrated. Bing represents social done well, and it could lead to minor market share ... Read More »
The UK’s current best-selling single is nowhere to be seen in the first ever dedicated streaming music chart – but, elsewhere, anomalies are harder to spot. Read More »
GigaOM Pro and New Relic present “Hitting a home run in the cloud,” a free analyst roundtable webinar on May 16. This webinar explores the challenges of Web application performance management and how BleacherReport.com is meeting its self-imposed goal of 99 percent uptime to its fanbase. Read More »
Amazon says its updated Cloudfront content delivery network will better handle dynamic, interactive web content. To date, Cloudfront handled static web pages while Amazon left a lot of the heavy lifting of dynamic content to partners like CDN market leader Akamai. Read More »
Apple may not be buying a high-design German home entertainment device maker, but that doesn’t mean investors in the rumoured target company won’t make a killing – and it doesn’t mean it won’t still have a part to play in Apple’s iTV. Read More »
Under pressure because the new iPad’s 4G connectivity does not work outside North America, the company has started dropping its claims in some international markets — like the UK and Australia — but not in others. Read More »
Ross Levinsohn has a lot of new responsibilities as interim CEO of Yahoo but one of the most important roles is as salesman-in-chief. He not only has to pitch the media company to advertisers — he has to sell the image of what Yahoo does right. Read More »
Unlimited-access digital music services are racing to beat iTunes – and each other – in new countries each week. Our map breaks down the world’s digital music market, country by country. Read More »
What Billy Beane is to baseball, Dave McClure wants to be technology startups. And like Beane, he is willing to go anywhere in the world to find a slight edge to beat his richer, bigger and fancier rivals on Sand Hill Road. Read More »
it’s challenging enough for startups to manage the traditional bottom line of profits, let alone the “triple bottom line” of social and environmental impacts. But, increasingly, they’re supporting business models that benefit not just their shareholders, but customers, workforce, environment and greater community. Read More »
Amazon cloud services may be cheap, but even those small charges can add up. Following a raft of third-party companies that offer AWS monitoring services, Amazon has stepped up to offer its own proactive billing alerts for Cloudwatch customers that enable it. Read More »
LightSquared is preparing for a potential bankruptcy filing on Monday as it has made little progress in its negotiations with debtholders. If LightSquared does enter into bankruptcy it might find Dish Network waiting, eager to relieve it of its spectrum. Read More »
As the world once again starts analyzing Yahoo’s myriad woes after Sunday morning’s ouster of embattled CEO Scott Thompson, I’m left wondering if its investment in Hadoop didn’t aid in the company’s demise, even if it’s a way down the long list of Yahoo’s mistakes. Read More »
The IT hype machine has everyone jumping on the big data bandwagon. But before we start saving every scrap of data in the enterprise for fear that we will miss a nugget of insight, shouldn’t we focus on what we already have? Read More »
If Facebook really is overvalued leading up to its IPO, privacy might be the underlying cause of the company’s missed expectations. As it turns out, pleasing both investors and users isn’t easy for a company that relies heavily on advertising and personal data. Read More »
Yahoo chief executive officer Scott Thompson who has been caught in a resume gate is leaving the company, reports AllThingsD. He is going to be replaced by Ross Levinsohn. A settlement with activist investor Dan Loeb of ThirdPoint Capital is also in the works. Read More »
This is second edition of our weekly What we are listening to series.This week, I asked Matt Brezina, co-founder and CEO of online-to-offline photo service, Sincerely. In his past life he was co-founder of Xobni, and is an avid music listening. Read More »
Most Commented
Popular Now
