It took video blogging pioneer Ze Frank less than eight hours to achieve his funding goal of $50,000 on Kickstarter yesterday. Now he’s already working on planing the relaunch of his show, which is currently scheduled to debut at the end of March. Read more »
Cloud storage player Box is beefing up its Android clients with collaboration and batch upload support. It also seems to be favoring Android devices even over popular IPhones and iPads and is definitely backing them at the expense of Windows Phone. Read more »
Systems integrator Dimension Data bought OpSource for its cloud services in June, and is now unveiling the updated cloud offering under its brand. The updated services include a public compute-as-a-service cloud, a private version of same, as well as managed hosting and managed services. Read more »
Mobile privacy will still be a murky issue despite a new agreement between the state of California and six leading mobile companies over how best to help app developers comply with a California law requiring them to post a privacy policy. Read more »
Cloud service providers are all rushing to claim compliance with the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002. The only problem is that FedRAMP, the federal effort to ensure a safe move to the cloud, won’t sign off on certifications for three or four more months. Read more »
Analytics firm Distimo said that, of the top 110 apps that appear in both Android Market and Amazon Appstore, 42 of them make more money on Amazon than on Android Market. That’s a strong showing for Amazon’s Appstore, which got a boost from the Kindle Fire. Read more »
Constant connectedness means an increased risk of communication addiction, with knowledge workers checking their devices at all hours and burning themselves out in the process. But whose problem is this? Should companies, individuals or even countries be responsible for setting boundaries? Wharton School experts debate. Read more »
Mobile operators might as well give in and work with web companies. But if they are smart they will adapt their pricing before consumers start dumping texting and voice services, so they can still maintain the same wallet share (and maybe higher margins). Read more »
Search engine Yandex is looking to extend its dominance in Russia through a deal to access Twitter’s firehose — allowing users to search millions of incoming tweets in real time. Read more »
The excellent Swype keyboard found its way to Android 4.0 devices this week while questionable rumors of Android 5.0 surfaced. Android tablets made a dent in the overall tablet market share, but its the small and low-priced slates that are selling well. Read more »
Yelp announced pricing of its planned IPO, with plans to sell 7.15 million shares at $12 to $14 a share. But the important thing is that Yelp has shown there is a real business to be made out of building and growing a community of users. Read more »
A Wall Street Journal investigation finds that Google was tricking Apple’s Safari browsers into dropping their ad-tracking protections in order to promote Google+. What does this say about Google’s attempts to promote its services? And about Apple’s proprietorship over its users? Read more »
A new platform has emerged to create converged applications between the TV, PCs and mobile devices. Clik, which released a mobile app that can connect to any screen with a browser, is also releasing smart TV platform for developers. Read more »
NBCUniversal will once again use its Olympics coverage to search for what it calls the “holy grail” of audience measurement. This time, however, the company is approaching the development of this metric with a little more urgency. Read more »
Have the patent wars — that have dominated mobile in recent years — finally come to cleantech? And what does that mean for startups? Read more »
A lawsuit filed by the Associated Press against news aggregator Meltwater, accusing it of copyright infringement and “free riding” on its content, is just another sign that the newswire is trying to fight the democratization of distribution that the web provides instead of trying to adapt to it. Read more »
Microsoft’s ambitious Windows Azure cloud is many things — it’s a full-fledged PaaS for developers. But beneath that, it is also a huge pool of foundational storage infrastructure for rent. And in that arena, it could be the only real competitor to Amazon. Read more »
Today happens to be the 8th birthday of Flickr, a groundbreaking photo-sharing service that introduced to the world the founding principles of the social web: community, sharing, openness and social connections. Flickr today languishes in the shadow of newer photo-sharing services. Sad, really! Read more »
Two industry luminaries — Google Fellow Amit Singhal and Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Henrique “Rico” Malvar — were elected to the The National Academy of Engineering this week. Singhal oversees Google’s search algorithms and Malvar specializes in signal processing and compression. Read more »
Google’s mystery device has been unveiled by The Wall Street Journal as a Sonos-like platform for wirelessly streaming music around the home. But the most important thing is that Google is moving beyond software to making a branded hardware device of its own. Read more »
Advertisers and publishers have swarmed over QR codes as they try to add interactivity to analog media. Now the Swiss team behind retooled mobile app Shortcut hopes they can help make the black-and-white glyphs a thing of the past. Read more »
Path and Pinterest are getting some significant backlash because of recent decisions that appeared to put their interests ahead of their users and a lack of disclosure about that behavior. It’s a welcome reminder that the trust of users is not something to be taken lightly. Read more »
How do the heavy weights of the Internet and telecom stack up in terms of how green their technology, energy footprint and political advocacy are? On Tuesday night Greenpeace released its latest Cool IT leaderboard report, which ranks the world’s largest IT giants. Read more »
Consumer applications have driven the rapid take up of faster broadband services in the U.S. in the last decade. But as Google and others build gigabit networks to see what can be done with them, it’s time to bring businesses back into the innovation cycle. Read more »
More details have emerged about Google’s intriguing plan to open a co-working space in London’s trendy startup district — but businesses and the authorities should be careful of reading too much into the move. Read more »
The iPhone may have passed over Android in total U.S. smartphone sales, but Google’s platform still has one key advantage: it’s attracting more mobile data newbies. According to the NPD Group, 57 percent of first-time smartphone buyers last quarter chose Android handsets. Read more »
When Mobify CEO Igor Faletski participated in a Google event, he didn’t realize that the tech giant could teach him so much about running his startup more effectively. Here are the four lessons he learned and advice on how to put them into action. Read more »
Google’s Fiber organization is asking the FCC for the ability to test a residential gateway that has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It’s likely Google is asking the FCC for an experimental licence to test upcoming 802.11ac gigabit Wi-Fi technology inside residential gateways. Read more »
The U.S. government has settled on Google’s Android platform for secure phones, mainly because the software is open and can easily be modified. But what about the dreaded Android software updates? No worries; the government says it can provide them within 2 weeks of Google’s changes! Read more »
Google TV devices from Sony received an update based on Android Honeycomb 3.2 this week, and Logitech’s Revue will be updated in the near future. This is the last major update for the platform before Ice Cream sandwich, which is rumored to come before year’s end. Read more »
Will an idea to build a data center park powered by onsite clean energy and paired with a microgrid in Colorado, represent the future of data centers? Read more »
It’s clear that Pinterest is really hot, but a new study shows just how powerful the virtual pinboard company has become. Pinterest is now driving more referral traffic on the web than Google+, YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn combined, according to Shareaholic’s January 2012 Referral Traffic Report. Read more »
The era of the 100 MW data center is coming, as Internet companies build more and more server-packed data centers to support the growing number of web users and the increasing amount of time spent online. Read more »
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said Google has all the data it needs to present Twitter in its search results right alongside Google+. That’s the latest public word from Twitter after Google began pushing its own social network in search results while keeping out Facebook and Twitter. Read more »
Almost a year after it angered users with its ‘quick bar’ advertising, and several months into its new Promoted Tweet service, Twitter’s ad platform seems as shaky as ever. Is targeted advertising a myth, or can Dick Costolo and team turn it around? Read more »
Companies such as Google, PayPal, Facebook and Microsoft have teamed up to create a standard to help boost email security. They are part of a working group to create the DMARC standard, which will help cut down on the number of phishing attacks. Read more »
Los Angeles-based startup Causecast this week debuted its Employee Impact Platform, a web-based program that connects companies and their employees with non-profits and charitable causes. With Causecast, small businesses can compete with larger, more established companies when it comes to offering employees ways to give back. Read more »
I love watching high-definition movies on my Galaxy Nexus because the phone actually has a true high-definition display. There’s a problem though: after watching the rentals, the massive media files aren’t disappearing from my phone. Here’s the quick fix which requires a file manager application. Read more »
The news that Twitter will be censoring tweets has reinforced for many the fact that our freedoms exist at the mercy of the companies whose networks we are using — and being used by. How much trust should we have in these new information gatekeepers? Read more »
Startups often rail against copycat companies, arguing that they steal their business and their ideas. But maybe the secret to beating clones isn’t to waste time trying to shut them down — it’s to accept them and focus on being bigger, better and faster. Read more »
