Twitter on Wednesday switched on enhanced brand pages for accounts owned by National Public Radio, NBC News, Volkswagen, and others. This is the first batch of premium Twitter pages from companies other than the handful of launch partners who unveiled enhanced brand pages in December. Read more »
Apple has failed to secure a preliminary injunction against the Galaxy Tab 10.1N tablet and Galaxy Nexus smartphone in Germany, thanks to a ruling by the Munich Regional Court Wednesday. That should help take the sting out of the appeal it lost on Tuesday. Read more »
IOS development is not for the faint of heart, and a new blog post by developer Kent Nguyen does a good job of pointing out exactly why. Nguyen targets those who would be footing the bill for app development, in the hopes of lessening sticker shock. Read more »
If you bought a Mac last year, you probably have a Thunderbolt port on your computer doing nothing right now. As of Wednesday, however, Seagate’s GoFlex Thunderbolt adapter is available to order, which means you could soon be transferring data to GoFlex drives at lightning speeds. Read more »
A dedicated Apple TV set was a hot topic at the end of 2011. So far in 2012, news on that front has been relatively quiet, but a new note by longtime Apple TV set booster and Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster is reigniting the discussion. Read more »
Palo Alto, Calif.–based video encoding startup eyeIO came out of stealth mode Wednesday and immediately announced an impressive first customer: Netflix is using eyeIO’s encoding technology to lower the bitrate of its HD video streams, which should help the company both in mobile and emerging markets. Read more »
Boxee is following through with its announcement to remove the Mac, Windows and Linux versions of its client from its website. PC users have until the end of Tuesday to download the latest version, but many might opt to check out a competitor instead. 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 »
SeaMicro, the startup that built out a business in the low-power, microserver market, is taking its server architecture mainstream by adding Intel’s Xeon chips inside its boxes. This is a fundamental rethinking of how servers are built to respond to the needs of webscale operators. 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 »
While Hulu was formed primarily as a way for content owners to distribute and monetize content online that would otherwise be pirated, CEO Jason Kilar said Tuesday that there’s more reason for the company to exist now than there was four-and-a-half years ago. Read more »
China Telecom is getting very near to launching Apple’s iPhone 4S on its network, according to a new report. China Telecom subsidiary Beijing Telecom said it will likely offer a CDMA version of the iPhone 4S by the end of February or the beginning of March. Read more »
SocialFolders, a freemium application that launched last month to let you store and manage any file created on the social web, rolled out an integration with Evernote on Tuesday that lets users drag-and-drop content such as Tweets, Facebook updates, Instagram photos into their Evernote accounts. Read more »
Apple released a fairly big update for its Final Cut Pro X video editing app on Tuesday. It only tips the version number slightly up to 10.0.3, but it brings a couple of major additions pro users have been clamoring for, including multi-camera editing. Read more »
Apple won a small victory in Germany on Tuesday as the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court upheld its injunction against Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1. In the meantime, the European Union is putting Samsung’s recent patent claims under a regulatory microscope with a full-scale investigation. Read more »
Codecademy, the startup that makes an interactive and social web application aimed at teaching people how to write computer code, has gone the platform route. On Monday, the company debuted Course Creator, a platform that allows anyone to make educational courses to teach programming techniques. Read more »
Apple is the king of the PC heap, so long as you consider the iPad among those devices. Research firm Canalys does, and its most recent look at PC sales, focusing on the fourth quarter of 2011, shows the PC market growing with the iPad included. Read more »
Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node.js, says he is taking a break. Dahl said he is stepping back from day-to-day Node.js gatekeeping duties, which will now be handled by Joyent’s Isaac Schlueter. Will this leadership change dampen momentum? Read more »
Microsoft announced a partnership with TechStars today that will allow it access to more than 400 startups around the world so it can sell its Azure cloud platform. But as Microsoft tries to sell startups on its services, can it compete against Amazon? Read more »
Macworld | iWorld had some fantastic products. Ignoring anything that wasn’t actually shipping, since so many products never actually make it to market , here are my top picks from the show. They include most iDevice companions, but also one product any Mac user wil love. Read more »
We’ve already talked about some key highlights from the Macworld | iWorld 2012 show, particularly from the prosumer and developer angles. But my focus here is on those products average Apple users might be interested in, for both Mac and iOS devices. Read more »
I often wear an iPod nano as a watch, but with Android wrist-top devices appearing with much more to offer, it’s feeling a little behind the times these days. Something like Antonio De Rosa’s new iWatch2 is closer to what I’d like to see from Apple. Read more »
Apple’s iPhone was a hot seller in the company’s first fiscal quarter of 2012, but that’s nothing compared to what one analyst predicts we could see in just a couple of years’ time. Morgan Stanley thinks Apple’s efforts in China could pay big dividends by 2013. Read more »
Surprise: The Internet hasn’t destroyed the entertainment industry. The business of making money with music, movies, video games and books has grown by 50 percent in the last decade, according to a new study. Check out some highlights of the study in this infographic. 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 »
The Wi-Fi Alliance, the keepers of the Wi-Fi brand, have come out swinging against the characterization of white spaces broadband as Super Wi-Fi. The Alliance issued a press release Friday saying it likes the tech, but the name will lead to “substantial user confusion.” Read more »
One of the trends I saw on the floor at Macworld | iWorld 2012 is an increasing number of companies producing high-end audio and home theater equipment to use with your Mac and/or iOS devices. Here are some standouts from the show floor. Read more »
Thanks to Google trumpeting its new privacy policy and inviting users to explore their profiles with the search giant, there have been a few giggles as my female friends check their Google ad preference manager to discover that Google thinks they are male. Read more »
Tank Riders is a good cross between a maze, puzzle and third-person shooter game. Thanks to well-thought-out maps, Polarbit has done an amazing job at keeping the gameplay interesting enough in single-player mode, while also making multiplayer competitive and fun. Read more »
Could Apple spend its $100 billion in cash to create a virtual cable operator to compete with Comcast and the like? Sure. But it would have a really hard time offering a competitively priced service and building a profitable business out of it. Read more »
Recent studies show that Apple’s iPad is doing very well in the enterprise, with new activations soaring. One company just deployed 1,300 of the Apple tablets across its sales force, because combined with the right software, it believes there’s no better tool a salesperson can carry. Read more »
The sky is falling again in cellular land, and this time Siri is to blame. At least that’s the assessment form this opinion article in the Washington Post this morning claiming Siri’s piggy ways will destroy our cellular networks. But this assessment is wrong. Read more »
While the target audience for Macworld | iWorld is your typical consumer, there are a few vendors in attendance that are focused on reaching developers. If you’re a developer yourself, or work with developers, you might want to stop by the following vendors during the show. Read more »
Samsung suffered another reversal in its patent battle with Apple on Friday morning, as the Mannheim Regional Court in Germany dismissed the Korean company’s second patent complaint related to 3G/UMTS technology. Last week, the same court rejected another similar Samsung complaint about 3G tech. Read more »
Personalized algorithms and social recommendations are great for a lot of things. But when it comes to getting news, these technologies can create an echo chamber, where our existing beliefs are reflected back to us. Uberpaper, a new site from Dmitry Shapiro, wants to combat that. Read more »
One of the main reasons to embrace HTML5 for media playback is to make things work on the iPad. But for SoundCloud, HTML5 has also shown much more user engagement than Flash. That’s why the company switched its default widget to HTML5. Read more »
Apple’s iBooks Author impressed Diesel Sweeties creator and artist R Stevens so much that he created an e-book with it during the course of a weekend and distributed it free to readers. On Thursday, Stevens shared some interesting details about that experiment. Read more »
One of the year’s largest smart grid conferences — DistribuTECH — closes today in San Antonio, Texas. It’s like the CES for utilities, power companies and the vendors that are trying to sell them stuff. Here are the top 10 trends I took away. Read more »
Browsing recent App Store releases, I came across Minecraft – Pocket Edition, with a version 1.0 update. Thinking it might be a major update to Mojang’s smash hit, I clicked through — only to find a completely different app trying to lure customers who aren’t paying attention. Read more »
From 1990s through 2011, DSL, a broadband technology, had a strong run at large phone companies in America. Now it is falling behind cable broadband and fiber. The latest data from Verizon, AT&T and Time Warner Cable points to its declining fortunes. Read more »
