It’s 10pm, do you know where your data is?

There is an interesting article from Andy Baio over at Wired that looks at how easy it has become to give total strangers a window into our lives. With the advent of OAuth, people can easily sign up for new services and apps by relying on their Facebook and Google profiles. Instead of filling out a lot of forms and trying to remember a new password, you can just rely on these companies to handle … Continue Reading

Apples to oranges: Google and Amazon are too timid to copy Apple’s retail success

There is a strange duality in the world of brick and mortar tech stores today. In the last four years CompUSA, Borders, and Circuit City all went out of business. Many expect Best Buy to follow in the near future. At the same time, Apple has opened over 300 retail outlets worldwide. And recent reports indicate that Microsoft, Amazon, and Google plan to follow Apple’s lead.

The new Google store, which Bloomberg reported on yesterday, … Continue Reading

Google-branded streaming music device in development, report says

Google is allegedly working on creating a company-branded entertainment device capable of streaming music in multiple locations throughout a person’s home.

The information about the Google-branded device comes from a Wall Street Journal report that cites unnamed people briefed on the project. If true, it would mark the Google’s first attempt at creating a hardware product without the aid of an electronics manufacturing partner. The search giant has historically concentrated its resources on developing web-based … Continue Reading

Google Wallet flaw takes the lock off your mobile money (updated)

Updated with comment from Google at 5:14pm PT.

A new vulnerability in Google Wallet gives thieves access to your funds, even if the application data has been erased.

Google Wallet lets you digitize your credit cards and pay for things using near-field communication (NFC). That is, all you have to do is touch your phone to an NFC device and the item you’re buying is automatically charged to your account. Google has touted that its … Continue Reading

How Google plans to avoid Facebook’s “games ghetto” with Google+

“We’ve seen communities ruined by games,” said Google+ engineering director David Glazer to a room full of app developers.

“How do we find that balance between people who are interested in games… without having the problem of more spam?”

Glazer said these words onstage today at the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco, and it was quite clear which community he was talking about: Facebook, which itself sees gaming as a sort of double-edged … Continue Reading

When the Google+ Platform is opening for developers and why it’s taking so long

The Google+ Platform is still a relatively small collection of read-only APIs, but Google is definitely preparing for a wide and varied set of features for developers.

At the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco Thursday, Google+ engineering director David Glazer (pictured) revealed that Google will roll out more enhancements to the social networking platform “when we’re delighted with how it’s working.”

It’s a vague answer to an important question, and it has a … Continue Reading

Google likely to launch Dropbox-like cloud storage service soon

Search king Google is close to launching its own cloud storage service similar to Dropbox and Amazon CloudDrive, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

If the report holds true, Google will be entering an extremely crowded market with a product simply called Drive. (No relation to the awesome Ryan Gosling movie.) On top of Dropbox and Amazon, the market consists of strong players like Microsoft SkyDrive, Box, SugerSync, and many others.

Drive’s … Continue Reading

Google’s Motorola bid set for approval, but it won’t be the end of patent wars

Google’s $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility will likely be approved by the U.S. Department of Justice next week, sources tell Bloomberg, but don’t expect Google to backtrack on Motorola’s contentious patent litigation tactics.

Purchasing Motorola will grant Google over 17,000 mobile patents in addition to the phone maker’s handset assets. Many had expected Google, which has historically argued against the trend of patent litigation from the likes of Apple and Microsoft, to use its … Continue Reading

Facebook woos photographers with new lightbox viewer, launching end of week

Facebook is rolling out its new lightbox photo viewer feature to all 840 million users by the end of this week, a spokesperson for the company has confirmed to VentureBeat. The new display helps make photos more attractive by showing them larger, moving comments off to the side, and graying out the background to minimize distraction.

“The new photo viewer is rolling out to everyone on Facebook and should be available to people worldwide by … Continue Reading

How Google is collecting user data — and paying users for it, too

As part of a project called Screenwise, Google is paying normal people to install a Chrome extension and browse the web as usual.

“Panelists,” as these average-Joe-and-Jane users are called, will be paid in Amazon gift cards — one $5 gift card every three months, to be exact. (Google notes that Amazon is not part of the program.)

The Chrome extension will track what these people do around the web, the sites they use, and … Continue Reading

A change we don’t hate: Facebook updates photo viewer

It seems Facebook has rolled out its new lightbox photo viewer to more people today, and some are saying it’s a ripoff of Google+.

The new feature is similar to the old “theater view” in that it takes the user into a pop-up carousel of photos. What’s new is that Facebook has moved the comments to the right side of the photo and added advertising below the comments field. In order to like or tag … Continue Reading

LinkedIn reportedly buying contact manager Rapportive

Business social-media giant LinkedIn is acquiring Rapportive, a Gmail add-on that enhances contact information.

Sources close to the negotiation disclosed the news and said that LinkedIn is paying over $10 million to buy the company, All Things D reported. The final purchase price is undisclosed, no deal has been finalized, and both companies are keeping quiet about the details. VentureBeat reached out to Rapportive’s chief executive Rahul Vohra for comment and didn’t get a response.… Continue Reading

Chrome finally comes to Android, get the new beta now

If you’re running the Ice Cream Sandwich operating system, a.k.a. Android 4.0, on your smartphone or tablet, you can run along right now and download Chrome for Android.

The latest addition to the Chrome family is a mobile beta that brings a (purportedly) better and faster browsing experience to Android devices. Perhaps most exciting of all, it allows for the desktop-to-mobile syncing and sign-ins we have loved so much in competitor Firefox for Android.

“Like … Continue Reading

Razr-like Motorola Droid 4 lands on Verizon Feb. 10 for $200

Motorola’s fourth-generation Droid smartphone with 4G LTE data speeds will launch on Verizon Wireless Friday, Feb. 10 for $200 on a 2-year contract, the company announced today.

The first Motorola Droid smartphone was one of the earliest great Android devices when it was released in November 2009. The Droid 4 closely resembles the Droid RAZR, except the Droid 4 features a full QWERTY keyboard. The Droid RAZR was released to much hype in November, but … Continue Reading

BlackBerry App World more profitable than Android, says RIM

Showing that it’s not quite dead yet, Research in Motion aimed to “bust a few myths” about its BlackBerry app ecosystem at the company’s Europe BlackBerry DevCon today.

RIM VP of developer relations Alec Saunders pointed out that the company is now seeing over 6 million daily downloads from its App World store, reaching 174 million per month (and over two billion downloads in total). But most importantly, Saunders wanted to dispel the notion that … Continue Reading

Google+ issues a call to arms for would-be third-party developers

Google is making a bid for third-party developers’ interest with a new Google+ page for Google+ platform developers.

Google+ developer-relations team lead Chris Chabot writes on the G+ platform blog that the new page will be a source of office-hours-style hangouts and best practices for using the +Platform APIs.

“Our team will host regular hangouts to talk about the +Platform, your experiences with it, and share tips and tricks with the community,” Chabot writes, noting … Continue Reading

Google Fiber construction starting today in Kansas City

In addition to its world-renowned supply of crazy little women, Kansas City is now the proud owner of a new supply: the world-renowned Google Fiber cables.

The search giant’s project to bring super high-speed Internet access to Kansas City citizens is finally getting off the ground with construction starting today.

On the project’s official blog, Google Access general manager Kevin Lo writes “We’ve measured utility poles; we’ve studied maps and surveyed neighborhoods; we’ve come up … Continue Reading

From Google to Facebook, online privacy concerns aren’t going away (infographic)

Ever since Google announced its new, controversial privacy policy two weeks ago, interest in online privacy has spiked as more people question how Google and other companies are managing their data.

Google announced last week that it would change its privacy policy by combining 60 existing policies into one, with the changes going into effect March 1. While simplification of hard-to-read policies is nice, Google attracted criticism because it will now combine user data across … Continue Reading

iPhone tops US handset sales, Android attracts more newbies, says NPD

Corroborating what just about every other research firm has noted by this pointed, the NPD Group announced today in its latest report that the iPhone has become the best-selling handset in the U.S. during the fourth quarter.

No big surprises there, but the group also pointed out another interesting statistic: Despite the iPhone’s dominance, first-time smartphone buyers still overwhelmingly jump to Android.

In the fourth quarter, Apple overtook LG and Samsung with the iPhone 4S, … Continue Reading

The free ride is over: Facebook likely adding mobile ads “within weeks”

With Facebook’s financial situation firmly in the spotlight after its IPO filing, the company will finally address the problem of generating revenues from mobile users by introducing mobile ads in the next few weeks.

One of Facebook’s biggest risks Facebook listed in last week’s IPO filing was “mobile,” and the company said it generates no “meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products.” One solution would be to launch a Facebook-branded phone that would … Continue Reading