LinkedIn reaches 100 million users, but how many are coming back?

LinkedIn, the social network centered around professional networking, has announced this morning that it has crossed 100 million registered users, making it the fourth American social network to do so after MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter.

In a blog post about the announcement, CEO Jeff Weiner highlighted that the site is growing by a million new users every week, with its fastest markets being Brazil, Mexico, India, and France. To date, the service has 44 million … Continue Reading

Jim Cramer talks AT&T, T-Mobile and the spectrum crunch with top wireless execs (video)

Jim Cramer, host of CNBC’s Mad Money, moderated a panel consisting of top wireless executives from AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Sprint that discussed topics ranging from the possibility of a spectrum crunch to AT&T’s just-announced deal to purchase T-Mobile.

The spectrum crunch — a shorthand term for fears that the amount of spectrum commercially licensed to carriers will be inadequate to consumers’ fast-growing demands for mobile bandwidth — has become an increasingly divisive issue amongst … Continue Reading

Amazon launches Android Appstore with 3,800 apps

Amazon has officially launched its own app store with 3,800 Android apps in what will be a fierce battle with Apple.

The new store is considered a potent competitor in the mobile apps space, with Amazon bidding to create the equivalent of Apple’s iTunes for Google’s Android mobile operating system.

One sign that Amazon is coming out swinging: it is making Angry Birds Rio, the new version of the hot mobile game that got its … Continue Reading

Opinionaided declares Instagram and Foodspotting the best-loved apps of SXSW

Plenty of writers have weighed in on who was the true winner at the South by Southwest Interactive conference, which wrapped up in Austin last week. Now the team behind a mobile question-and-answer app called Opinionaided is joining the debate.

How did Opinionaided choose the most popular apps at SXSW? It asked its users about their impressions of each service. Now, this methodology may seem a little weird to you (it does to me), because … Continue Reading

Can the FCC stop the coming spectrum crunch?

For all the talk of a pending spectrum crunch that is worrying regulators and wireless companies, Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski doesn’t seem to be doing a whole lot about it.

Genachowski reasserted his stance that the government needs to open up the “white space” of the wireless spectrum between television stations for auction to wireless companies in order to alleviate an upcoming spectrum crunch — which refers to a large number of companies … Continue Reading

Apple will launch iPad 2 in 25 more countries on Friday

Apple said today it is launching its iPad 2 tablet computer in 25 additional countries on Friday.

That’s an early launch for international markets and it suggests that Apple’s shortage of units isn’t as dire as some observers have feared. Apple continues to be in a mad rush to sell as many tablets as it can in order to head off competition from increasingly competitive rival Android tablets.

The various Apple stores will open at … Continue Reading

CrowdFlower raises $7M to crowd-source freelance work

Crowdflower, a firm that specializes in crowd-sourcing freelance workers and making it easy for companies to quickly find freelance programmers and other types of professionals, announced today that it has raised $7 million in its second round of funding led by Harmony Partners.

The company lets other companies quickly hire and outsource tasks to freelance workers across the world. CrowdFlower also announced today that it is launching a new niche version of the service that … Continue Reading

Viewfinder app lets you see video from your own head cam

Contour makes cool video cameras that you can wrap around your head so that you can take video while you’re skiing or otherwise engaged in an extreme sport. But the problem with these “head cams” is that you can’t see what is really within the frame of your camera’s viewfinder.

Contour is launching its Viewfinder app and a Connect View Card today that you can use to view your camera’s picture on the screen of … Continue Reading

Q&A: Crysis 2 pushes the extreme edge of graphics in video games

Somebody has to push the leading edge of graphics technology in video games. And on a regular cadence, the game developers at CryTek in Frankfurt, Germany, are the ones who do it. Crysis 2, one of the most ambitious and expensive video games ever made is debuting today on the PC, Xbox 360, and the PlayStation 3.

Games like Crysis 2 are important because they inspire hardcore gamers to buy the biggest and baddest computers … Continue Reading

Endomondo raises $800K to make cardio training virtually social

Mobile fitness tracking application Endomondo launched additional features geared toward making a social network for cardio training today and announced that it has raised $800,000 in a seed funding round at the CTIA Wireless 2011 conference in Orlando, Fla.

It’s one of a new series of applications that are trying to turn fitness into a game by giving users the chance to compete with friends and earn points for their fitness achievements, such as Runmeter … Continue Reading

Deals & More: Basis raises $9M to monitor your heart rate

Today’s funding announcements include companies that measure vital signs, print stationary and treat rare diseases:

Basis brings in $9M for health and wellness tech: The San Francisco-based company, formally known as Pulse Tracer, has raised a first round of funding co-led by Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) and Doll Capital Management (DCM). The company’s first consumer product, Basis Band, is a watch-like device that measures heart rate and other vital signs of the wearer. The product, … Continue Reading

MasterImage 3D raises $15M from Samsung for 3D displays

MasterImage 3D, a maker of stereoscopic 3D display technology for mobile devices, said today it has raised $15 million in venture funding from Samsung Ventures.

The two companies haven’t announce a business deal yet, but you can probably guess that Samsung will eventually use MasterImage 3D’s glasses-free 3D viewing displays in its smartphones and mobile devices at some point.

MasterImage 3D makes technology for screens that can be viewed in 3D, without the need for … Continue Reading

T-Mobile's latest super phone has Nvidia's Tegra Zone app for games

T-Mobile just unveiled its LG G2x super phone, a smartphone with good computing performance and an Nvidia Tegra Zone app that connects users to high-quality games.

South Korea’s LG makes the phone, which is built for 4G speeds and has a 4-inch capacitive touchscreen display. With an Nvidia Tegra 2 chip as its brain, the phone is another example of a new class of devices that have the capabilities of a phone and the brawny … Continue Reading

Nokia releasing yet another cheap Symbian smartphone

Nokia announced today that it is launching the Nokia Astound in the United States, a low-end smartphone geared toward first-time smartphone owners running the company’s Symbian mobile operating system.

The device is purposely built with slightly weaker technical specifications — including a 620 megahertz processor (compared to 1 gigahertz dual-core processors in most phones today) and around 300 megabytes of memory (compared to 512 megabytes in most phones), according to Nokia representatives. It keeps the … Continue Reading

Google calls out Beijing for messing with Gmail

Google today officially accused the Chinese government of intentionally messing with its Gmail email, perhaps in an effort to head off any attempts by its citizens to ride a recent global wave of dissent and jumpstart their own revolution, the company confirmed today.

“Relating to Google there is no issue on our side. We have checked extensively. This is a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail,” said a Google … Continue Reading

Justin.tv’s social video bet pays off with 150K downloads

Justin.tv, one of the best-known startups offering live-streaming video services, launched a mobile video application called Socialcam two weeks ago that moved the company in a new direction. The app seems to be attracting users — it has been downloaded more than 150,000 times.

When I talked to Justin.tv spokesman Matthew DiPietro right before the Socialcam launch, he told me the company was applying some of the lessons it had learned from adding livestreaming to … Continue Reading

Rebecca Black's awful "Friday" song could be unstoppable on YouTube — 30M views and counting

Rebecca Black’s “Friday” single has been uniformly panned as the worst song ever on the internet. And that has helped turn the 13-year-old girl’s song into an instant hit, with more than 30 million views of her official video on YouTube.

Update: [Black's video has now surpassed 42 million views, adding 5 million views a day in the last couple of days. She is spoke and sang (really lip-synced) last night Jay Leno's Tonight Show.]… Continue Reading