In Oren Etzioni’s world, telling you where to buy a product is so 20 years ago. Today, Etzioni wants to tell you when to buy. Tomorrow, well, maybe he can let you know when you’re in the vicinity of a great deal. Read more »
Cloud computing, mobile computing and the consumerization of IT are changing the game for IT departments. Section one of our three-part report describes and quantifies each of these trends, demonstrating that they are real now, growing rapidly and perilous to ignore. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Om has called 6wunderkinder “one of his favorite new companies”, and there’s good reason. The startup is one of the leading lights in the burgeoning Berlin scene, and impressive take-up claims for its first app could spell good news for its second, more fully-featured offering. Despite […] Read more »
French startup Pearltrees just scored another $6 million to help scale up its social curation service that helps people save, sort and share what they find on the web. But with dozens of services in play, is this a bubble waiting to pop? Read more »
More news from the Google-data-scientists-conduct-the-coolest-research desk: YouTube has created an algorithm for determining what videos are funniest based on the intensity of viewer comments. It sounds fairly unimportant, but YouTube’s work actually speaks volumes about the potential of social-media sentiment analysis. Read more »
Glam Media on Thursday is launching a new website called Foodie.com, its first foray into the culinary space. It also serves as the first Glam site that fully incorporates the social networking features Glam acquired when it bought Ning in late 2011. Read more »
The BBC has issued a new directive to its journalists telling them they must post updates to editors first rather than breaking news on Twitter, another example of how traditional media entities are struggling with their relationship to Twitter in an era of real-time, distributed news. Read more »
Twitter is fast becoming the focus group of the 21st century, a status solidified yet again during Sunday night’s Super Bowl. The platform saw 453 times the maximum tweets per second it saw during 2008′s game, and sentiment analysis of tweets might have predicted the upset. Read more »
Enterprise social networking may be a hot buzzword but it’s still in its infancy when it comes to adoption, which adds up to a frenzy of rushed roll outs by the inexperienced. What usually goes wrong? David Lavenda of harmon.ie has a few ideas. Read more »
Facebook’s S-1 filing shows the company is all about infrastructure. The ad revenue and user experience it relies on to exist mean Facebook can’t afford to take it easy on IT, which means shareholders and users will both find plenty of reasons to get upset. Read more »
According to Edward Aten, founder of Swift.fm, Facebook is recreating and competing with nearly every significant Internet product of the last few years. It’s an unprecedented pivot that threatens Facebook’s core products and may eventually benefit the very same startups Facebook is trying to crush. Read more »
The most highly anticipated initial public offering in today’s tech world is officially happening. Facebook filed S-1 documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission Wednesday afternoon to raise a maximum of $5 billion. According to the filing, Facebook made $3.7 billion in revenue in 2011. Read more »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Rightly or wrongly, Facebook catches a lot of flak for impeding on privacy by selling user information to advertisers and generally enabling too much sharing. But would users care so much if Facebook gave them a cut of the profits it generates by selling their data? 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 »
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 »
In the fight to determine who dictates web privacy, web users are like a a chew toy at risk of being torn asunder by two competing dogs — played this week by Google and the European Union. But the best option is empower consumers themselves. Read more »
San Francisco startup 1000memories has integrated its ShoeBox app for scanning and sharing old physical photos online with Facebook’s Timeline user interface. This means that people will be able to easily fill in the gaps on their Timeline between their birthdates and when they joined Facebook. Read more »
iTunes may be great for syncing your iOS devices, or buying songs, movies, apps and books, but it’s not exactly the most nimble music player anymore. Here are five great Mac-compatible alternatives that focus on the music, without the bloat that iTunes brings. Read more »
According to Facebook, reporters have been especially receptive to the Subscribe button feature launched in Sept. 2011. The number of journalists who have enabled the subscribe button is now in the thousands, and the average journalist has seen a 320-percent boost in subscribers since November. Read more »
Ad-targeting company 33Across is acquiring link-tracking specialist Tynt Multimedia, resulting in a combined user graph spanning 1.25 billion users. Both are storing and analyzing billions of transactions daily, and they will use that data to help publishers compete on ad sales against mega sites like Google. Read more »
Google announced a new privacy policy and new terms of service that eliminate some 60-odd disparate policies across its myriad services. But fewer separate policies also means less privacy for some as Google finally delivers on its vision of a unified platform. Read more »
Facebook said Tuesday it will convert all users’ profiles to the new Timeline interface over the next few weeks. Soon Timeline, which shows each user’s life over an expandable Timeline that dates all the way back to his or her birth, will be the only design available to all Facebook users. Read more »
Summify’s sale to Twitter this week was good news for the startup, but bad news for many of its users, who expressed frustration that the news aggregation service would be mothballed post-deal. But startups News.me and Percolate are now vying to take on Summify’s users. Read more »
Following Apple’s unveiling of e-book publishing platform iBooks Author Thursday, I reached out to Vook, the startup founded in 2009 by Brad Inman that provides a top-to-bottom publishing experience using a Software-as-a-Service model. Vook sees both flattery and opportunity in Apple’s e-book software. Read more »
Social gaming company 6waves Lolapps (which is now going by the shortened moniker “6L”) is continuing its stated quest to take on industry leader Zynga. The company is announcing Wednesday the acquisition of Escalation Studios, a Dallas, Texas-based mobile game company. Read more »
Apple has apparently re-introduced code references to Facebook integration to the most recent iOS 5.1 beta that were once present in pre-release software but later removed. It doesn’t mean we’ll necessarily see Apple include Facebook sign-in at the system level, like it’s done with Twitter, but it definitely makes it more likely than before. Read more »
The proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) has drawn the ire of many tech industry leaders for its potential to squash innovation. GigaOM talked to O’Reilly Media founder Tim O’Reilly about why SOPA is wrong and what the tech industry can do to stop it. Read more »
Hulu made $420 million in 2011, and is expected to pay $500 million to rights holders this year alone. The service now has 1.5 million paying subscribers, and Hulu CEO Jason Kilar projects that Plus will account for more than half of Hulu’s revenue this year. Read more »
UPDATED. Posterous encountered “server connectivity issues” that made the blogging site inaccessible to a number of users Wednesday. The apparent outage occurred after at least one Posterous user received a series of email posts from random Posterous groups, some of which were meant to be private. Read more »
Group chat startup Convore had pretty good traction after launching out of Y Combinator last year. But in the competitive world of consumer social apps, “pretty good” isn’t enough. So Convore’s founder Leah Culver built a new, business-focused iteration of the group chat service, called Grove.io. Read more »
Instagram’s website is currently receiving 10 million page views each day, adding up to some 300 million page views per month, GigaOM has learned. This is especially interesting given that the Instagram experience is tailored to users of the app, not viewers on the web. Read more »
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 »
London-based startup Pusher began life in unusual fashion — but now, thanks to its tools to let developers build real-time services quickly and easily — it is hoping to become the foundation for a new generation of online apps. Read more »
Pinterest is one of the hottest startups around these days and represents the latest buzzword in the Valley: curation. Here are some of my thoughts on why Pinterest and other such companies are getting attention and gaining traction with younger Internet users. Read more »
It may have been simple error that saw Twitter mark a fake account as “verified,” but the fact that the company won’t even say how its verification process works means it still has a lot of work left to do in the trust department. Read more »
