Facebook restates its zero tolerance for scam offers and ads
Faced with media scrutiny, Facebook reiterated in a blog post that it is taking action to improve the quality of third-party ads in its apps. The post was inspired by the controversy that began last Friday when Techcrunch editor Michael Arrington confronted Offerpal chief executive… Continue Reading
Graphics chip maker Nvidia rides on industry recovery
Graphics chip maker Nvidia reported good third fiscal quarter results thanks to the continuing recovery of the personal computer market. The company reported today that revenues came in at $903.2 million for its third fiscal quarter, compared to analysts’ expectations of $838.1 million. Earnings per… Continue Reading
Twitter cleans up trending topics to make search results more relevant
Twitter is cleaning up trending topics by returning more relevant results when you look up popular keywords people are tweeting about.
One of the neatest little features that grew out of the Twitter phenomenon last year were these trending topics. The company adopted them after acquiring… Continue Reading
New retweet feature on Twitter begins limited roll-out
Retweets, a way of sharing content on Twitter, are coming into their own.
Twitter’s testing a new official retweet feature after announcing they were going to incorporate the informal practice earlier this year.
As you can see in mock-ups above, there will be a link to retweet… Continue Reading
Google Dashboard: All Your Data That Are Belong To Us
OK, so all that personal data doesn’t really belong to Google, but it would be nice to know how much the search giant has on us — embarrassing e-mails, search histories and all.
The company released a dashboard today that shows all the data it has from… Continue Reading
Roundup: Les Moonves rocks it for CBS, Google’s privacy dashboard gets hated on
CBS beats analysts with $207 million profit for Q3 — Bloomberg reports that CEO Les Moonves “is leading the industry” in getting satellite and cable TV systems to pay retransmission fees that may bring CBS $200 million by 2012 or 2013. Audience members heckled Moonves… Continue Reading
iTunes turned the music market on its head. Could iTunes TV do the same for TV?
Rumors surfaced this week that Apple is in the process of putting together a $30-a-month iTunes TV offering. This rumored iTunes TV is supposedly something altogether different from the currently available Apple TV.
Apple TV is a piece of hardware that makes it easy to watch… Continue Reading
Activision Blizzard’s video game sales exceed estimates despite recession fears
Activision Blizzard, the largest independent maker of video games, announced that it had better-than-expected quarterly earnings for the third quarter. That’s a bit of a surprise since recession fears have dogged the company, as well as rumors that some of its games were not selling… Continue Reading
Senate Dems lay Climate Bill smackdown on boycotting Republicans
The Climate Bill has emerged victorious out of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, with Democratic members exploiting a loophole that negated their Rebublican peers’ three-day boycott.
Led by Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who sponsored the bill with Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) 10 Democrats gave… Continue Reading
Lawsuit alleges Offerpal co-founder was cheated out of ownership
Offerpal Media founder Anu Shukla was hit with a lawsuit this summer over alleged shenanigans over the company’s founding, VentureBeat has learned.
In August, Kevin Halpern filed a breach of contract lawsuit against Shukla. He alleges that he helped start the company in 2006 with Shukla… Continue Reading
Pixorial uses home movies to liven up your Christmas e-cards
Christmas e-cards are probably among the five most boring things ever, but Pixorial is offering a nice improvement, by embedding your movies within them. After all, if you’re going to get all warm-and-fuzzy, isn’t it better to do so on-camera? And I’m sure you get… Continue Reading
Tendril to release “eco-warrior” game, connecting conservation to virtual rewards
Tendril CEO Adrian Tuck sent ripples through the audience at GreenTech Media’s “Networked Grid” conference yesterday, letting slip that the home energy monitoring company is partnering with a well-known game maker to produce a new title that connects real-life conservation to in-game rewards.
While he wouldn’t… Continue Reading
Jon Stewart wants his ‘Super Grid’ to fly and shoot lasers
The Smart Grid got a shout out on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart last night, with guest Al Gore touting it as one of the vital developments that will make renewable energy generation possible.
Calling it the “Super Grid,” Gore explained that new, more efficient… Continue Reading
Spore Islands launches on Facebook as EA tries social games expansion
Rumors persist that Electronic Arts plans to buy social gaming startup PlayFish to break into the fast-growing market of Facebook games.
In the meantime, EA continues to expand into social games on its own. Today, it launched Spore Islands, a spin-off from the create-a-creature Spore game… Continue Reading
Third quarter global game sales decline 6 percent
Global console video game unit sales declined about 6 percent compared to a year ago according to a measure of three key regional markets, a new report says.
Unit sales collectively fell in the U.S. and United Kingdom markets, while Japan saw an increase in the… Continue Reading
Chip industry forecast not as dire as expected — down 11.6 percent for 2009
The chip industry has a brighter forecast than during the summer, but 2009 will still go down as a dismal year with a 11.6 percent decline in revenues, according to the semiconductor industry’s trade group.
Worldwide chip sales are expected to be $219.7 billion this year,… Continue Reading
Hell returns as id Software’s John Carmack builds Doom Classic for the iPhone
John Carmack is the programming wiz at id Software, the Mesquite, Texas-based company that pioneered the first-person shooter game genre that has generated billions of dollars in the game industry since 1993. Now Carmack has returned to the game that started it all: Doom. He… Continue Reading
Isabella Products and AT&T launch two-way sharing digital photo frames
Isabella Products is announcing Vizit, a two-way interactive digital photo frame that will share photos via AT&T’s wireless network.
Most web-connected digital photo frames can display pictures via flash memory cards or receive them over the Internet. Concord, Mass.-based Isabella has made one that uses AT&T’s… Continue Reading
Ngmoco scores with iPhone games that charge per time played
With a new game, a new business model, and a new developer platform, iPhone game publisher Ngmoco has been able to land itself on the top of the AppStore charts.
Ngmoco’s Eliminate Pro shooting game moved to the No. 1 spot on Apple’s app download store… Continue Reading
Google offers search tools for the Amazon.coms of the world
Google is taking the next step in offering its search technology to businesses with a new product called Google Commerce Search. It’s basically Google search for web retailers.
In the same way that Google is taking on traditional enterprise search companies with the Google Search Appliance… Continue Reading