Piazza, the social network that lets college students and instructors discuss material online, has closed on $6 million in a new Series A funding round. Piazza’s service is meant to counteract study group snobbery and eliminate students’ fear of asking “dumb” questions. Read more »
Mobile ad network Millennial Media has filed to go public as it looks to capitalize on the big shift in advertising toward mobile devices, a market that is expected to grow rapidly in the coming years as smartphones and tablets proliferate. Read more »
Sony is going to start selling Google TV devices around the world, Google revealed in a blog post today. Google also confirmed we are going to see new Google TV gear from LG, Vizio, Samsung and Sony at CES in Las Vegas next week. Read more »
Writer-turned-venture-capitalist MG Siegler recently reignited a long-standing debate over whether blogs should have comments or not. Critics argue that comments are mostly noise and are a waste of time, but blogs that don’t have them risk being seen as just a soap-box for their authors. Read more »
I’m saying goodbye to Android, and it appears I’m not alone. Here is why the platform’s fragmentation and lack of interoperability have driven me away — and why Google should do everything it can to address those ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Android Market has topped the 400,000 app mark, doubling the software available for the smartphone platform in just eight months, according to app analytics firm Distimo. Android Market is still shy of the 500,000-app milestone the App Store hit recently, but it’s catching up. Read more »
Amazon is hiring techies for a new digital media services push. The company seeks senior development managers and developers for a “brand new team,” although their work will grow out of an existing AWS digital media offering, according to a job post. Read more »
The momentum behind mobile payments is picking up but many of the newest challengers in the space are going to have to get over one nagging reality: consumers still trust their banks and credit card companies to drive the mobile payments market. Read more »
Everyone likes to share their predictions for what the future will bring in technology as a new year dawns. But some things seem to manage to stay the same, despite anticipation to the contrary. Here’s where I think the boat won’t rock in 2012. Read more »
PayPal isn’t just building out a point-of-sale transaction network. It’s looking to engage consumers well before they set foot in a store. The company says its WHERE location-based ad network will be key in helping merchants attract consumers into their stores with deals and offers. Read more »
On New Year’s Day, Ginny Rometty took the reins at IBM. Big Blue is on a roll: its stock outperformed Google and Apple this year, and Warren Buffett is a fan. But the IT giant faces perils as well as opportunities going into 2012. Read more »
Don’t expect the pace of change in web technologies to slow down in 2012. The web is far from dead. Social media may have anointed one huge player in Facebook, but even if there is little room for a start-from-scratch general-purpose social network, there are several companies creating useful alternative social graphs. Companies can leverage key technologies and trends in 2012 to earn revenue and gain share, whether that’s by leveraging HTML5 for rich cross-platform experiences, doing heavy data analysis or integrating collaboration tools across businesses.Companies mentioned in this report include Dropbox, Groupon, Twitter and Zynga. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Previously, we told you how you can use your iPad as a telephone. Using a Bluetooth headset with your iPad makes that idea even more practical. The Jawbone ERA is the one I happen to use, but others should work just as well. Read more »
Mobile users love their apps and that love affair has outstripped our interest in browsers. That’s according to comScore’s latest mobile subscriber data, which found that the percentage of users who use apps has finally surpassed the percent of subscribers who turn to a mobile browser. Read more »
New antipiracy legislation recently proposed in Congress and known as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) could force YouTube and other “user-generated content” sites to take content down, even if that content has not been proven to be infringing. Experts in freedom of speech and creators ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Just in time for the northern hemisphere’s winter season: An alarm clock application that automatically wakes you earlier in case of frost or snow. Winter Wake-Up is freely available for both Apple iOS and Google Android devices and smartly adjusts your alarm based on weather. Read more »
Oil giant BP has invested in biofuel startup CoolPlanet BioFuels, according to an announcement on Thursday. CoolPlanet BioFuels is the biofuel startup you have never heard of but that has unusually famous investors like GE, Google, NRG Energy and ConocoPhillips. Read more »
The past year in mobile has been even more eventful than most of us would have predicted. Our appetite for mobile data grew dramatically; Google’s Android continued its march to worldwide dominance; Amazon joined the tablet bandwagon; and AT&T tried and failed to acquire T-Mobile USA, among many other things. All of that activity lays the groundwork for a very promising — and very challenging — 2012. This research note serves both as a review of the major trends and events of 2011 as well as a forecast for the coming year. Companies mentioned in this report include Millennial Media, Quattro Wireless and Samsung. For a full list of companies, and to read the full research note, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Since I use multiple mobile devices on various platforms, it sometimes gets to be a chore trying to read saved web pages when offline. I’ve been bouncing back and forth between two great solutions: Instapaper and Read It Later. But both might be trumped by Evernote. Read more »
Sources have confirmed that work on an iPad app specially designed for British Prime Minister David Cameron has been underway for several months — and that, once completed, officials plan to make it available to the public. Read more »
In half a dozen years, I’ve tried more task manager apps than smartphones — and I’ve tried dozens of phones. But Any.DO, a free app for Android, offers an elegant iOS-like interface and syncs with Google Tasks. If you do one last thing this year, try Any.DO. Read more »
In its fight with Android hardware-makers, Apple almost seems to see itself as a noble hero fighting a nefarious villain bent on stealing its identity and reputation. But just or not, is the fight one that makes sense to Apple from a practical and business standpoint? Read more »
Out of all of Google’s close to $1 billion in clean power projects, turning biomass into energy seems like the least relevant technology to Google’s core business. But Google has made a few small investments into biomass projects, including a hog waste to energy project. Read more »
As 2011 comes to a close, I’m thinking ahead to what mobile technology trends I expect to see in 2012. While I formulate those thoughts for a post later this week, now is a good time to see how I did with my 2011 predictions. Read more »
Samsung is reportedly in discussions to offer Android 4.0 software upgrades to its Galaxy S smartphones and Galaxy Tab slates. Perhaps Samsung’s TouchWiz software is slimmed down or eliminated, which may not be a problem. Getting carriers to support such an upgrade, however, may be. Read more »
Apple’s iOS devices were popular gifts during the holiday weekend, as you might expect. According to a new study, there were 12.5 times more devices accessing games and apps using one major analytics platform than during previous weekends, in fact. Android fared almost as well, too. Read more »
As the year winds down, here’s a look back at the biggest, most significant things that happened in the apps we use on our smartphones and tablets this year, as well as the most important themes to watch out for come 2012. Read more »
American Express has worked up an infographic charting the rise of mobile payments, highlighting a lot of the milestones over time. All this work in the past is now coming together to make mobile payments a mainstream technology. Read more »
The Samsung Galaxy S smartphone and Tab slate won’t see an upgrade to Android 4.0, leaving owners to decide between buying a newer device, sticking with Android 2.3 or installing a custom build of Google’s latest mobile operating system. Here’s a suggestion to make everyone happy. Read more »
If Amazon opens an office in the Boston-Cambridge area as reported, it would boost a high-tech community that often feels overlooked and undervalued compared to Silicon Valley and Seattle. Amazon is recruiting engineers for an as-yet-unannounced Boston area venue slated to open in 2012. Read more »
The Sony Ericsson Xperia Play smartphone, aimed at mobile gamers, has a new twist that could add more appeal: OnLive’s cloud gaming service now supports the slide-out gaming controls on the Android smartphone. Touchscreens certainly work for games, but button-mashing is best done on…. buttons. Read more »
Which stories dominated the green GigaOM clicks in 2011? This year was filled with smart thermostats, a dream of Apple getting into solar, the bankruptcy of Solyndra, the efficiency of cloud computing, Google’s green data centers and Tesla’s Model S. Read more »
Google announced that it’s ending its Academic Cloud Computing Initiative, a joint program with IBM and the National Science Foundation that gave researchers access to a massive Hadoop cluster on which to run their data-intensive projects. The company says access to such resources is now common. Read more »
Samsung introduced its first dual-SIM smartphones on Thursday, the Galaxy Y Duos and Galaxy Y Pro Duos. The Android 2.3 smartphones are aimed at emerging markets, but if they’re successful, Samsung could migrate the solution up the Galaxy line for the bring your own device crowd. Read more »
Apple’s iPhone 4S has propelled Cupertino’s smartphone share back to growth in many markets, including Britain, according to new data from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech released Thursday. But Apple’s latest smartphone isn’t leading to runaway success everywhere, owing in part to economic concerns. Read more »
One of the biggest draws of the Galaxy Nexus is the 4.65-inch high-definition screen; literally a pocketable 720p HDTV display. But some video services still stream standard definition video. Here’s how to get HD video from Netflix on the Nexus and what it looks like. Read more »
Santa is about to bring us our presents, and kids big and small will once again be able to track him with their iOS and Android mobile phones. QR gift tags, personalized videos from Santa and Elf Yourself also help to geekify your holidays. Read more »
Earlier this week, I grilled Amazon for attempting to control web browsing activities on its Kindle Fire as the device was blocked from browsing Google’s Android Market website. With the new Kindle Fire software update, Amazon no longer blocks access, which is the right move. Read more »
On Monday, Apple won an ITC ruling resulting in an import ban on some HTC smartphones running Android. The patent found to have been violated has to do with a feature for detecting and using data, but HTC says it has already addressed the issue. Read more »
Every day, it seems like there’s another bland press release about startup seed funding. So when Buffer closed on $400,000, it wanted to announce it differently — by explaining exactly how the process happened. It’s a fun read, and a good lesson for other startup founders. Read more »
