Preview: Reddit strikes back with its official iPhone app

Last month, I wrote about two different Reddit applications for the iPhone, neither one actually made by the social voting site. While both were pretty good, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian clearly thought an official one could do a bit better — so they made one.

Due to hit the App Store shortly, iReddit has all the features you’d expect from a Reddit iPhone app: voting, commenting and the ability to switch to different sub-Reddits. It … Continue Reading

Another day, another 100 million credit cards compromised

Heartland Payment Systems said today that hackers may have compromised more than 100 million credit card accounts last year in what could be the biggest ever data breach.

The New Jersey company is one of the largest credit and debit card processing services in the country. It said that unknown cyberthieves planted malicious software on its computers last year and stole credit card data stored on the company’s networks. The company says it only learned … Continue Reading

Don't despair, Google Notebook users: Import to Zoho

When Google announced it has stopped active development on Notebook, the tool for saving ideas and web pages, there were cries of dismay from a corner of the web. A small corner, but still — users created an online petition to save Notebook (as pointed out by Mashable), which has 881 total signatures. Notebook isn’t officially disappearing, at least not yet, and Google already offers ways to export your information into Google Docs or HTML … Continue Reading

Second Life moves into the virtual goods market business

Diving into one of the hot business models for virtual labs, Linden Lab said today it has acquired two virtual goods markets that sell items for the denizens of its Second Life virtual world.

Linden Lab has bought Xstreet SL and OnRez, two burgeoning online markets that sell hundreds of thousands of virtual goods to Second Life players, including clothes and accessories for their virtual characters, property and surroundings.

Tom Hale, a spokesman for Linden … Continue Reading

Web too busy for business during Obama inauguration?

People flooded to the Internet this morning to watch President Barack Obama get sworn in. Social networking site Facebook saw 4,000 status updates per minute during the inauguration, while Twitter users made five times the normal amount of “tweets” per second. GigaOm wondered if the web was breaking under the inaugural strain and reported on the high traffic seen by content delivery networks Limelight and Akamai. Despite all of that, some websites sat forlorn and … Continue Reading

With Twitter friend imports, FriendFeed again devalues Twitter's actual website

There’s much ado about Twitter’s site traffic today — is it bigger than Digg’s or isn’t it? But the reality remains that Twitter.com’s traffic doesn’t matter that much because there are so many services out there that can (and do) pipe in and use Twitter’s data. FriendFeed, a social data aggregator, continues to be one of the best at doing that. Today, it unveiled a Twitter friend importer — another feature that makes visiting twitter.com … Continue Reading

Pictures: President Obama's inauguration, as seen from space

The other day I wrote about how the GeoEye-1 satellite would be taking images of President Obama’s inauguration from 423 miles up — in space. This could only have worked on a clear day so clouds didn’t block the view. Good news: It was a clear day, and the pictures (above and below) look great.

The images show the view from the Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument and surrounding areas. See those things … Continue Reading

Social network Friendster refocuses business on Asian users

Friendster, one of the earliest social networks to grow big, is trying to capitalize on its Asian growth by expanding its business operations in the region. Singapore and Sydney, Australia will now host two key business offices, with former Googler and current chief executive Richard Kimber working from the latter city. Formerly based in San Francisco, Friendster has also moved its global headquarters to Mountain View, Calif.

It’s a symbolic move for the company, which … Continue Reading

On the mainstream: Twitter's U.S. web market share passes Digg

Twitter, as we all know by now, is growing fast. And for the first time last week, its website’s market share of visits in the U.S. surpassed that of another hot Internet startup, Digg, according to numbers from the analytics firm Hitwise.

Twitter.com’s growth since December seems to be exploding, and it went even higher this past week, no doubt thanks to the tweets (Twitter messages) and incredible picture taken of the US Airways plane … Continue Reading

Synaptics' Francis Lee on the magic of touch

Francis Lee loves to gesture when he talks. That’s fitting, since he’s the chief executive of Synaptics, the company that’s brought gesture-based computing to the mainstream with its abundant touch sensors in everything from laptop touch pads to smart phone touch screens. Santa Clara, Calif.-based Synaptics was founded in 1986 by Federico Faggin, the co-inventor of the microprocessor, and Carver Mead, a pioneering Caltech professor and founder of many chip startups. Lee took over as … Continue Reading

Google bails on print media, like everyone else

As the situation for the industry continues to get more dire, Google has announced today that it is pulling out of the print media advertising business. “While we hoped that Print Ads would create a new revenue stream for newspapers and produce more relevant advertising for consumers, the product has not created the impact that we — or our partners — wanted,” Spencer Spinnell, Google’s director of print ads wrote in a Google blog post … Continue Reading

WhiteHouse.gov takes a page from Twitter's playbook

One of the many cool things about President Barack Obama’s inauguration (and the resultant excitement on sites like social network Facebook and micro-blogging service Twitter) is the new WhiteHouse.gov web site, which was unveiled as Obama was sworn in. As an Obama fan, it’s exciting to see his agenda (yes, the same one that was already available on the transition team’s Change.gov website) up on the White House site, and I’m glad that Obama’s “Director … Continue Reading

Ex-Android engineer may get me coupons on my fridge

Stephen Horowitz is leaving his engineering director job at Google, where he helped build its Android mobile operating system. He’s moving on to become the chief technology officer at Coupons, Inc., a company that runs a wide range of print and online coupon services. So what does this tell us about where Android’s headed?

Android’s goal, as we’ve been covering for a number of months, is to become more than just a platform for cell … Continue Reading

Twitter sees massive usage and some delays, but stays up for Obama's inauguration

I stopped looking at Twitter sometime this morning when I realized that every tweet (Twitter message) for several hours seemed to contain the words, “Obama” or “historic.” Don’t get me wrong, I like our new President as much as the next guy, but the repetition was maddening. And the data coming in from Twitter now confirms the massive usage surrounding the inauguration.

Twitter saw five times its normal tweets-per-second and four times its normal tweets-per-minute … Continue Reading

Ubisoft snaps up a South American game developer

French video game giant Ubisoft has acquired Brazilian game developer Southlogic Studios.

Southlogic is the longest-standing game developer in Brazil, with a team of 20 developers and headquarters in Porto Alegre. It has created titles for the PC, handhelds, and home game consoles. It also provides art outsourcing and game adaptation services. Most recently, it worked on Ubisoft’s Imagine: Wedding Designer for the Nintendo DS.

It’ll be interesting to see if South America emerges as … Continue Reading

AMD sells cell phone graphics business to Qualcomm for $65 million

Advanced Micro Devices is doing what it can to keep from taking on water. Hurt by a bruising battle with Intel, AMD agreed to sell off its handheld graphics business and multimedia assets to Qualcomm for $65 million.

The move will give San Diego, Calif.-based Qualcomm a more complete arsenal of chip assets that it can integrate into a single chip for running a cell phone. AMD will get more cash as it makes progress … Continue Reading

CNN, Facebook win presidential inauguration live-streaming contest (kinda)

I woke up this morning without access to a TV — I didn’t have time to go find a place to watch Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration. So I decided to watch online. The problem was that just about every video-streaming service I’ve been trying hasn’t been able to stream without hiccups — not live-streaming sites Joost and Ustream (nor its iPhone application), not even the New York Times.

The best one that I’ve seen is … Continue Reading

Atheros Communications chief Craig Barratt foresees Wi-Fi spreading like wildfire

As chief executive of Atheros Communications, Craig Barratt has battled big rivals in the market for Wi-Fi wireless networking chips — rivals like Intel and Broadcom. It’s a battle that’s lasted the better part of a decade. But while there were once 40 Wi-Fi startups in the fray, now there’s only a handful of players left, and Barratt is finally sitting on top.

Having sold more than 200 million Wi-Fi chips since its founding in … Continue Reading

Twingly launches microblog search — Twitter search with a sprinkle of Jaiku and a dash of Identi.ca

Blog search tool Twingly’s new microblog search, as a concept, makes a lot of sense. You enter a keyword in one search box and get results from services like Twitter, Jaiku and Identi.ca. But in practice there’s a problem — and it’s not Twingly’s problem — it’s every service besides Twitter’s problem: Twitter overwhelms the results.

You see, Twitter is much more popular than any of the other services being indexed, so if I do … Continue Reading

Yammer ups bet on the "Twitter for business" market

This could be the year that micro-messaging makes it big with businesses, Yammer is betting. The company lets employees share 140-character messages about what they’re working on — a simple intranet to help communicate more quickly than through masses of emails and phone calls. It has raised $5 million from the Founders Fund and Charles River Ventures, founder David Sacks tells TechCrunch.

I’d be interested to hear specific ways that Yammer saves companies time and … Continue Reading