On the tail end of a very difficult year for electric car company Fisker, the company reveals that its insurance claim for 338 Karmas, worth $33 million, was denied by the insurance company, and Fisker is now suing XL Insurance America in court. Read more »
My pick for Android app of the year? AirDroid, which provides wireless management of your Android phone or tablet from any browser on the same Wi-Fi network. You can manage files, videos, music, ringtones and more on any computer, making for a great free companion application. Read more »
An image of someone wearing Google’s Project Glass prototype in New York City was snapped yesterday, just in time for the big New Year’s Eve bash on Times Square this evening. Even more exciting: this prototype supports lenses that could be used for prescription eyewear. Read more »
Google is excelling on Apple’s own platform with popular iOS apps, but it’s not alone among its fellow consumer internet companies. Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo also had some success on their rival’s platform in 2012. Here’s a look at who did better. Read more »
It’s time once again to watch the ball drop on Times Square. Don’t want to actually wait in person on Times Square? No worries, there are plenty of opportunities to watch all the action on the web, on your iPhone and on your Android handset. Read more »
Goodbye Eee PC and all other netbooks from Asus; the company is no longer producing the small laptops. Acer followed Asus into the netbook market and is following it out as well. What happened to this once quickly growing market? Tablets disrupted the space. Read more »
The Tribune Co. officially emerged from bankruptcy Monday with a new board including former Yahoo exec Ross Levinsohn and former Disney exec Peter Murphy. The company plans to sell off its 23 television stations, eight daily newspapers and stakes in websites like CareerBuilder.com. Read more at paidContent »
Fab is just 18 months into its existence as an online design store, but it’s been an eventful ride. Here’s a look at far the company has come based on some figures and slides provided by CEO Jason Goldberg. Read more »
2012 wraps with a year-end mobile tech podcast that looks both forward and back. With hardware cycles advancing rapidly, neither host is expecting blockbuster news out of the Consumer Electronics Show. Matt is looking deeper into uses for NFC, while Kevin is addicted to TuneIn Radio. Read more »
Runkeeper is updating to 3.0 for iOS just in time for the New Year. The improvements include a cleaner UI, better photo sharing and tracking abilities and refactored code base that should enable faster and better improvements in the future. Read more »
Startups and enterprises alike face barriers when it comes to cloud adoption. This includes security, speed of access to cloud resources, and runaway network costs. However, multiple solutions for direct access are being provided to address this issue for companies big and small. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Last year, AWS saw big success and big snafus; Superstorm Sandy prompted worry about data center location; legacy IT giants bought their way into SaaS; VMware regroups; the OpenStack crowd got their clouds off the ground; and Europe starts to buy into cloud. Read more »
Chicago app developer MiGym is giving health clubs an app store presence, but it has bigger plans. It hopes to make the gym a critical element in the quantified self, tracking members’ workout data and sharing that information with fitness and health platforms. Read more »
Two of the funniest women in comedy today. A channel that brought together cop show parodies and sci-fi drama. A series that created a community. And a brand that pushed the boundaries of serialized content. For those who like web video, 2012 was a great year. Read more »
An ode to the Delhi gang-rape victim, iTunes as a discovery service, what science stories to watch for in 2013, the rise of Snapchat, robots everywhere, manly origins of cheerleading, history of the GIF in video and web-UX trends of 2012. Read more »
The growth of apps like Snapchat, which allow users to set a time limit after which photos self-destruct, is seen by many as driven by “sexting.” But some users may simply be attracted by the idea of sharing content in a way that isn’t completely permanent. Read more »
A string of offensive hashtag memes in France has spurred the government to announce a consultation on hate speech with Twitter. It could mark a watershed for the country’s approach to social media — but it’s not just Paris that has a problem. We all do. Read more »
Placed Analytics has published a blog post showing which retailers had the most in-store visits during the holiday season. Placed can’t track sales, but its mobile-phone-derived location data can give a glimpse into who’s attracting the most physical shoppers, and when. Read more »
By creating a bevy of new iOS apps, what Google has been up to is becoming more obvious. It’s made it its mission to not just compete with Apple with the Android platform and Nexus mobile devices, but battle Apple on its own platform. Read more »
Bastion is an adventure-based role-playing game in which the main character, known as The Kid, unravels what has happened to his world following the Calamity. In this world you travel from place to place collecting artifacts in an effort to rebuild the Bastion. Read more »
Big data might not be able to predict when a mass murderer is about to strike, but perhaps it can shed some light on why certain countries have such high murder rates. Are there factors not related to gun control that inspire a willingness to kill? Read more »
Car keys may soon be a thing of the past. Hyundai is testing out a concept in which it allows users to access their car using NFC-enabled smartphones. The tap-and-go interaction can also trigger individual user preferences and initiate streaming between the phone and car. Read more »
A year ago RIM bought NewBay, presumably to join Apple and Google in the cloud storage and synch arena. Now it’s selling NewBay at a steep discount to Synchronoss. Maybe a consumer-focused BlackBerry cloud services platform isn’t in RIM’s future after all. Read more »
The city of New York counted 108,432 “major crimes” that occurred during 2012, which is 3,484, or 3.3 percent, more than recorded last year. Meanwhile, Apple product thefts rose by 3,890 during the year. Read more »
Think you can send content on your smartphone that won’t appear elsewhere? Evidence that your Snapchat videos can be retrieved without notifying the sender comes as further proof what people in the digital age are realizing — true online privacy can be hard to come by. Read more »
Signaling traffic growth is outstripping mobile data traffic by 30 percent to 50 percent and threatening the stability of mobile networks. However, the growth in signaling traffic is not only an indicator of success but also shows that mobile data has come of age. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Ouya, an open $99 gaming console built off of Android, raised $8.6 million on Kickstarter. And now it’s shipping 1,200 consoles to developers, who can begin to create games for the system using Ouya’s SDK. Read more »
Barnes & Noble and Microsoft welcome Pearson to the Nook Media table as the education publisher lays down $89.5 to help secure distribution. But Nook is already set to miss targets set during its recent spin-out. Read more at paidContent »
Cloud computing’s increased performance cannot be sustained if the corresponding cost to the service provider (SP) for delivering this performance also increases. What service providers need is a way of delivering low latency, fast response, and increasing performance while minimizing the cost of the network. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Mail.ru is quitting its ambition of building a Russian Twitter, having failed to build sufficient scale. Instead, it’s aiming to consolidate its ownership of a leading social network. Read more at paidContent »
Show me — that’s the common thread in the top 10 most-trafficked GigaOM cleantech stories of 2012. Exclusive photos and videos of emerging clean power and electric car technologies lead the year. (OK, we’re not so surprised by that.) Read more »
What better way to end our first year of podcasts than with a show about the best podcasts of the year? The A.V. Club’s Kyle Ryan stops by our show to discuss his picks for podcasts of the year and where podcasting is going. Read more »
A New York newspaper has come under fire for publishing a map with the addresses of registered gun owners — data that is legally public, but not often published. The incident raises a number of thorny questions about what personal information should be made public and when. Read more »
Early indications show a big hike in ebook sales, a glut of new iPad owners and a transformative effect for one game studio — it’s another Christmas in which new device gifts give an uplift to content sales. Read more at paidContent »
Time to find a new name for all those folks on Twitter. “Twitterverse” joined “whatever” and “just sayin” on a list of terms that people find most annoying in conversation. Read more »
Moovit is trying to be the Waze of public transit by offering a crowd-sourced transportation app for bus and train commuters. The system hopes to provide more accurate estimated time of arrivals and better updates on upcoming travel conditions. Read more »
Congress is supposed to write our laws, but it’s looking inadequate at doing so in the face of a rapidly evolving technology industry. The near-term passage of a bill allowing Netflix to share user data is too little, too late — and altogether too common. Read more »
The USPS could be considering a proposal to sell magazine subscriptions to consumers direct through its website and stores, in an attempt to keep consumers checking their mailboxes for the latest print content, which remain highlights of people’s mail moments. Read more »
Netflix has been lobbying to change a law that prevents it from using Facebook to reveal what movies people are watching. It has finally won in Congress but, by this point, doubts about the value of frictionless sharing mean the victory may not be worth much. Read more »
Solar panels that can be integrated right into roofs and walls could provide a bright spot in a difficult solar market over the next five years, according to a new report from Pike Research. Read more »
