Roundup: CNET cofounder in tax trouble, Energy Star cracks down, and more

Here’s the latest action:

ZAP licenses government charger for EVs — The less well-known Bay Area builder of low-speed electric vehicles is borrowing car-charging technology from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The system is supposedly able to toggle how much energy is being delivered, and how fast. Earth2Tech has the details.

CNET cofounder in deep tax trouble — Halsey Minor and his wife Shannon apparently owe more than $13 million in income tax, according to … Continue Reading

Why platforms like iPhone and Twitter are becoming control freaks

Small app developer shops have had a great couple of years. Facebook, Apple, Twitter, and a host of other platforms opened up and let these third-party developers build games and other apps to entertain their users, and in the process allowed developers to build multiple monetization channels as well.

It was a great move for the platforms — all those cool apps brought in more users and kept those users coming back. And it was … Continue Reading

DebtGoal raises $2M to help users pay off their debt

DebtGoal, a site that helps users manage their debt and hopefully pay it off more quickly, just announced that it has raised $2 million in its first round of institutional funding.

The San Francisco company launched an early version of its site at the end of 2008, which was pretty apt timing given the economic meltdown and all the attention on the fact that so many Americans are struggling with debt. It wasn’t the only … Continue Reading

Live Q&A with Twitter's top brass

I’m at Twitter’s developer conference, Chirp, in San Francisco. Twitter’s co-founders Biz Stone and Ev Williams, director of platform Ryan Sarver, chief operating officer Dick Costolo and director of product management Jason Goldman are on stage taking live questions from the audience. (These notes were taken live, so don’t rely on them as verbatim text.)

Q: Will there be an Android app?

Williams: Yes, and it will be awesome.

Q: Will it be acquired … Continue Reading

Datameer lands $2.5M, launches big-data spreadsheet tools

Imagine if you could use Excel to examine 10 million gigabytes of data as if it were a spreadsheet parked on your desktop. Datameer Analytics Solution lets you do exactly that. The San Mateo-based company announced a beta program for DAS, which builds on top of the open-source Apache Hadoop system for extra-large scale data handling.

DAS, based on a familiar interactive spreadsheet, also includes a wizard for incorporating data from both old and new … Continue Reading

The details: How Twitter's newfangled revenue model will work

Twitter’s chief operating officer Dick Costolo has said that although the company’s new promoted tweets allow brands and businesses to buy special placement atop search results and hashtag streams, they are fundamentally different from advertising. The new feature launched yesterday.

“Promoted tweets are a way of enhancing the communications that companies are already having with users. It’s a combination of earned media and paid media in one place,” Costolo said, speaking at Twitter’s developer conference, … Continue Reading

Google going Twitter crazy, adds Follow Finder

For the second time today, Google unveiled a new feature for navigating Twitter.

The Google Follow Finder feature seems pretty straightforward: You enter your Twitter username, then Google shares a list of people you don’t follow who you might be interested in, and of similar users. In both cases, Google says it’s analyzing the public social data in Twitter. Using popular Twitter slang, Google calls them “tweeps,” short for “Twitter peeps.”

“Tweeps you might like” … Continue Reading

Twitter COO: @anywhere will spread Twitter across the Web

Twitter chief operating officer Dick Costolo gave more detail on the company’s new @anywhere service, which will make it easier to post tweets and follow Twitter accounts across the Web, rather than visit Twitter’s website.

The goal of @anywhere is to “remove friction” and “make it easier for people to tweet in the context of what they’re doing on the Web,” Costolo explained. Twitter cofounder Ev Williams first unveiled the concept last month at the … Continue Reading

Want a free ticket to next week's lean startup conference?

Update: I’ve chosen a winner. Congrats to Gofeedit, and thanks to everyone else for their thoughtful comments!

Eric Ries, who cofounded virtual worlds startup IMVU, is devoting a conference next week to his idea of the lean startup. It sounds like there will be lots of valuable content, but if you’re a hungry entrepreneur who isn’t sure about paying full price ($750 for an individual ticket), read on.

The Startup Lessons Learned conference (which shares … Continue Reading

Flash cookies get deleted, skew audience stats as much as 25 percent

One of the features app makers and online advertisers rely on is reliable measurement of their audiences and customers. But according to Scout Analytics, a Seattle-area firm that provides behavioral analytics tools for online publishers, audiences may be overcounted as much as 25 percent because of Web surfers who delete Flash-related cookies from their browsers and Flash players, either manually or via tools such as Flash Cookie Cleaner.

“Beyond the fact that unique user counts … Continue Reading

"Print" your own glass objects with Shapeways

Dutch startup Shapeways, which lets you design and print your own 3D objects, now lets you print in glass. Previously Shapeways offered printing in steel, plastic and a high performance composite (a powdery, sand-like substance) that hardens like a cement to produce full-color objects as we reported in January.

The glass material, called Milky White Matte glass, is produced from recycled plate and bottle glass. Jewelery made from glass costs $15-40 depending on the … Continue Reading

Library of Congress offers a new home to Twitter's full archive of tweets

Amidst much Twitter-related news today, thanks in large part to Twitter’s Chirp developer conference, came a surprising announcement courtesy of the Library of Congress’s Twitter account: The Library will soon be home to Twitter’s entire public archive of tweets.

That’s a lot of tweets, as the Library mentions in a blog post about the announcement. The microblogging service’s most recent numbers show that over 50 million tweets are made per day, with an average of … Continue Reading

Apple tells app developers they "haven't decided" on new rules

The waiting is the hardest part: iPhone and iPad app developers are still trying to find out exactly what Apple means by changes to the wording of its developer contract that appear to ban important software functions widely used by app developers.

The most important two are third-party ad targeting, and the collection of app usage data for analysis by the developer.

A developer who has been in touch with Apple told VentureBeat that, surprisingly, … Continue Reading

Join us for the next "Conversations on Innovation"

We’re about to launch the next series of posts for “Conversations on Innovation,” and we’re soliciting articles and ideas for columns from you, our readers.

We first launched Conversations last fall, with the goal of writing about the most cutting-edge technology developments of our day. We’re doing it again because of the success of the first series: We generated excellent feedback on the pieces, which ranged from the future of touch technology, to the latest … Continue Reading

Twitter launches "Annotations," lets developers add any metadata to tweets

Twitter is now allowing developers to add any kind of metadata they want to tweets authored in their apps, using a system called “Annotations.”

Metadata, loosely defined, is data about data — for example, information on where a tweet came from or what time it was sent.

Annotations will let developers make up what kind of data they want to add to a tweet.

This could be huge, or it could be a mess depending … Continue Reading

Twitter's 100,000 apps and annotations: Huge potential, or a huge mess?

Twitter showed off new social features and said it now has 100,000 registered apps, the company’s director of platform, Ryan Sarver, said at the Chirp conference in San Francisco today. Seventy-five percent of the company’s traffic now comes through external apps.

“Twitter is the way it is because of the ecosystem,” said Sarver. “There is no way we can be successful without you guys.”

His comments come as Twitter is hoping to reassure developers rattled … Continue Reading

Twitter to launch location feature, swears it's not a check-in service

Twitter will make it easier to see tweets and media around specific places through a new feature called Points of Interest.

“If you’re writing a tweet and tagging it with a place, we care about the content of that place and what’s happening in real-time there” said co-founder Ev Williams at the company’s Chirp conference in San Francisco.

Williams was adamant, however, that Points of Internet wouldn’t be a check-in. He said that services like … Continue Reading

Ev Williams: "Twitter is too hard to use"

If you’re a Twitter user, you’ve probably had a moment where someone you know has complained that they “don’t get” what the  microblogging service does. How does posting 140-character messages help them?

These users may have signed up. But then they couldn’t figure out how to find their friends, who to follow, or what to do. Add to that Twitter’s insidery language of retweets, shortened URLs, and compact slang, and you’ve got a real challenge. … Continue Reading

Google one-ups Twitter, adds search across entire tweet archive

Twitter take note: Today Google added a new feature to its search engine that allows you to search for topics at any point in time across Twitter’s public archive.

Of course, Twitter has its own search engine, which was made even more powerful with its acquisition of the Summize search tool. But while Twitter’s built-in search is great for current topics, it’s sort of clunky for dealing with tweets from the past — particularly since … Continue Reading