Opera demands Steve Jobs' attention with airport publicity stunt

Opera Software has never been one to shy away from publicity. And now that the company has to somehow convince Apple to approve its new Opera Mini iPhone application, we’ll likely see many more stunts like this one: Opera hired these two ladies to greet attendees after they arrived at the airport for the Mobile World Congress.

It’s another clever ploy to grab Apple’s attention — the first being that Opera knowingly developed an iPhone … Continue Reading

Looking for farmers: Zynga opens office in India for social game development

Zynga is announcing today that it will open an office in India to develop social games.

The office in Bangalore will be the company’s first outside of the U.S. The office is expected to hire about 100 people, mostly for game development and infrastructure to support Zynga’s games, which include the popular FarmVille.

Zynga has about 800 people now in offices in San Francisco, Baltimore, and Los Angeles. The new office says a lot about … Continue Reading

Twitter's hiring binge brings it to 140 employees

Twitter has been on a hiring spree as of late, grabbing up employees left and right for its engineering and business development teams.

The company just crossed the symbolic 140-employee mark, mirroring its famous character limit for tweets, according to co-founder Biz Stone. On Twitter’s job page, there are at least 27 openings, primarily on the technical side. Fresh off a funding round last fall that valued the company at $1 billion, Twitter now has … Continue Reading

Minority Report computer interface designer demos the real thing (video)

At the big-think, big-demo TED conference in Long Beach last week, MIT Media Lab alumnus John Underkoffler demonstrated a real working version of the memorable grab-it-and-throw-it computer interface he designed for Tom Cruise in the hit science fiction movie Minority Report.

One reason Cruise’s gesture-based interface was so striking was that it was based on Underkoffler’s serious deep-end work in user interfaces. The g-speak Spatial Operating Environment requires gloves much like the ones Cruise wore … Continue Reading

Alcatel-Lucent offers carrier-based app support, in competition with app stores

Paris-based Alcatel-Lucent made an announcement at today’s Mobile World Congress cellphone conference in Barcelona, Spain, that could open the door for mobile application developers to build apps that can be instantly available on multiple wireless carriers, rather than having to build a separate app for each operator.

Moreover, Alcatel’s new service — it’s basically a single API that removes the need for  separate APIs to tie an app to SMS, messaging and location services — … Continue Reading

TidalTV raises $16M for 'zero waste' video ads

Online video ad network TidalTV has raised $16 million in a second round of funding.

The New York based startup offers what it calls “zero waste advertising.” In other words, it optimizes the distribution of in-stream ads (basically commercials that run before, after, or during the video) and interactive ads so that companies maximize their reach to the audience that they’re looking for. In fact, TidalTV says that if its network doesn’t allow your ad … Continue Reading

Tumblr finds a savvy solution to trolls with new commenting feature

Blogging startup Tumblr has spent years cultivating an artsy, young base of nearly 3.5 million users from its Brooklyn headquarters and held off from enabling comments until this month. Two weeks ago, it experimented with photo-replies for 48 hours and received such a positive response that the site turned them on permanently.

It’s adding in generic text comments today, but with a twist that only its social networking model can provide. The beta feature lets … Continue Reading

Look for more blue splotches as AT&T improves its network

AT&T is budgeting up to $19 billion this year to improve its nationwide phone network, a 5 percent to 10 percent increase over its $17.3 billion investment last year, the company said today.

Although AT&T didn’t break out how much of the budget it plans to spend in California, it said it will add 200 new cell sites and upgrade 500 existing sites to 3G capability in the Golden State this year on top of … Continue Reading

iSuppli: Google will transform telcos from calling plans to mobile advertising

By working with the mobile gadget value chain rather than against it, Google will probably rewrite the rules in the $1 trillion wireless industry.

That’s what electronics market research firm iSuppli — the company known for guesstimating Apple’s hardware costs — wrote in a short report e-mailed to reporters on Tuesday afternoon.

iSuppli thinks Google has a strong chance of success in changing the basic business model for wireless carriers away from selling voice call … Continue Reading

Facebook Mobile guns for more than 100 million users with Zero

Although Facebook has reached 100 million users through its mobile apps and sites, the social network has even bigger ambitions. The company gave a quick glimpse at Zero, a spare mobile version of the site that cuts out bandwidth intensive applications like Photos, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today.

Facebook’s mobile team has been posting impressive numbers; one out of every four users of the site accesses it through a mobile device. But … Continue Reading

Biometrics firm confirms: User counts for websites are 2-4 times too high

For years, comScore Web analytics experts have said that cookie-based user counts are wrong, often by a factor of two or more. That’s because most Americans use more than one computer to access the Internet, but cookie technology can’t tell that it’s the same person hitting a site from both home and work computers or, increasingly, from a cellphone.

Now, a tool meant to better identify, track and measure Web users through clever biometrics has … Continue Reading

Take that, Apple: Wired AIR app looks good on a tablet (video)

VentureBeat’s Matthaus Krzykowski was raving yesterday about a demonstration he saw of Wired magazine running on an Android tablet device. At the time we didn’t have any images to share, only Matthaus’ slightly-creepy exclamations like, “You want to touch it constantly!” Now, thanks to a video released by Adobe and Wired (embedded below), the rest of us can see the app in action.

To be clear, Adobe won’t confirm that it’s an Android device. But … Continue Reading

Electro Power unveils hydrogen fuel cells to power mobile networks

Hydrogen fuel cells may be suited to more than powering next-gen cars. Italian electronics company Electro Power Systems just debuted a new fuel cell that could provide backup power for mobile networks run by wireless carriers. Where better to demonstrate the new technology than at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona?

Electro Power’s new device, dubbed the ElectroSelf hydrogen fuel system, has several features making it apt for mobile applications. Not only can it operate … Continue Reading

Yoono social dashboard blows past Seesmic, TweetDeck in Facebook monthly users

Social networking application Yoono released new versions of both its desktop app — Windows, Mac, Linux — and its Firefox add-on this morning.

The company likes to point out that the add-on is downloaded more than the toolbars for social networks StumbleUpon, Facebook and Digg combined, according to the live stats at the Firefox add-ons directory.

More interesting to me is that on Facebook, active monthly users of the Yoomo Facebook app now number 89,277. … Continue Reading

Jambool teams up with Miniclip on Social Gold virtual goods system

Virtual currency enabler Jambool announced today that its Social Gold virtual currency and payment system will be used in online games on the big casual games portal Miniclip.

The partnership will enable virtual goods purchases across Miniclip’s catalog of 550 games. It will also allow seamless in-game payments for Miniclip’s 57 million unique users per month. That means the players can purchase virtual goods — decorations or vehicles — without leaving the game itself.

The … Continue Reading

EnerVault lands $3.5M to make cheap, grid-scale batteries a reality

With bigger name battery companies like A123Systems and Johnson Controls-Saft getting most of the attention, Enervault, a maker of flow battery technology, has been flying under the radar. Now the young company, which may have one of the most practical solutions for grid-scale storage, has raised $3.5 million in new venture funding to make a name for itself.

According to a detailed description on Earth2Tech, Flow batteries are different than the other big storage concepts … Continue Reading

Parisian love? Google's Super Bowl ad was really about Bing

My apologies to all the Google fanboys, but the Super Bowl ad was really about Bing. Google’s now infamous ad spot during the Super Bowl — ostensibly about an American student who studies abroad in Paris only to fall in love with a French woman and eventually marry and raise a child with her — has garnered quite a bit of attention and speculation from the tech community. Explanations have ranged from “it’s a social … Continue Reading

Fashion fans push Stardoll past 50 million users

Girls who love fashion are pushing Stardoll to new membership heights. Today, the Swedish company announced that its membership base has surpassed 50 million registered users.

Stockholm-based Stardoll created a site where members can create their own MeDoll avatars, design their own fashions, and furnish their own virtual suites. They can engage in social play and purchase virtual items for their avatars to wear. Since its launch four years ago, the user base has grown … Continue Reading