On a PC, having to fill out a form and type in a credit card number to buy something is only mildly annoying. On a cellphone, it could make you want to skip the purchase entirely.
This is why investors, start-ups and major corporations are pouring money into services that make it easier to use cellphones to buy goods and transfer money.
The aim is to turn phones into virtual credit cards or checkbooks, enabling the kind of click-and-buy commerce and online banking that people have come to expect on their PCs. But shrinking down those...
» Read the rest of the post
Posted by
Kevom 15 days 4 hours ago
Wikipedia has big plans for video; both in the sense of having more videos on the site, and letting contributors edit and annotate the actual videos.
The organization behind Wikipedia is close to launching an editable online video encyclopedia to enhance the current textual one. The hope is to revolutionize the popular reference site and goad content providers--from public broadcasters to the music industry--into allowing more video to enter the public domain.
Within two to three months, a person editing a Wikipedia article will find a...
» Read the rest of the post
New News Corp (NWS) digital media boss Jonathan Miller is about to fire MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe and replace him with an as-of-yet unnamed new CEO, reports TechCrunch's Michael Arrington.
We’ve confirmed that things are actually moving much faster than we first understood, and that a decision has already been made to terminate Chris DeWolfe’s employment with MySpace. We’ve also been told that the core MySpace executive team will follow.
MySpace has a dozen or so “execs,” but our guess is that it’s the very senior team that...
» Read the rest of the post
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his board met yesterday to discuss and eventually reject two funding offers for the company -- one at a $4 billion and one at $2 billion, according to reports from VentureBeat and TechCrunch.
A source close to Facebook tells us the company values itself closer to $5 billion.
Ever since a report surfaced at BusinessWeek that Facebook intended to engage in vendor-financing for new equipment, there's been speculation that the company is suddenly cash-strapped.
In addition, a source close to Facebook...
» Read the rest of the post
TechCrunch reported late last night that Twitter was in late stage talks to be acquired by Google. That sent what used to be called the “blogosphere” into a frenzy. Kara Swisher, of AllThingsD, striking back against what she believes was sloppy journalism (and TechCrunch more generally), said no:
In fact, Twitter and Google have simply been engaged in “some product-related discussions,” according to one source, around real-time search and the search giant better crawling the microblogging service.
Said a source close to...
» Read the rest of the post
When I first saw this, I had to do a double take. I made sure it wasn't April 1 at least three times before I conceded. While looking around Encarta's homepage today, I stumbled on a message that Microsoft was getting rid of MSN Encarta completely: "On October 31, 2009, MSN Encarta Web sites worldwide will be discontinued, with the exception of Encarta Japan, which will be discontinued on December 31, 2009. Additionally, Microsoft will cease to sell Microsoft Student and Encarta Premium software products worldwide by June 2009." Looks like...
» Read the rest of the post
Google will begin showing ads on Wednesday to people based on their previous online activities in a form of advertising known as behavioral targeting, which has been embraced by most of its competitors but has drawn criticism from privacy advocates and some members of Congress.
Perhaps to forestall objections to its approach, Google said it planned to offer new ways for users to protect their privacy. Most notably, Google will be the first major company to give users the ability to see and edit the information that it has compiled about...
» Read the rest of the post
According to a boxee blog entry, Hulu will no longer be supported. From the post: 'two weeks ago Hulu called and told us their content partners were asking them to remove Hulu from boxee. We tried (many times) to plead the case for keeping Hulu on Boxee, but on Friday of this week, in good faith, we will be removing it. you can see their blog post about the issues they are facing.' Reading the Hulu blog post, the only 'issue' I see facing Hulu is that content providers have (once again) shot themselves in the foot, switching off a media...
» Read the rest of the post
Google now wants to organize your home's energy information.
The search giant on Tuesday muscled into the burgeoning smart-grid software business, showing off a prototype Web application that displays home energy consumption broken down by appliance. The software uses so-called smart meters, which can communicate home energy consumption back to utilities every few minutes.
The driving idea behind the Google PowerMeter iGoogle gadget--and nearly all smart-grid companies--is that giving consumers access to more detailed home energy data...
» Read the rest of the post
Google developers have announced a new feature part of Gmail Labs that everybody was waiting to see realized. Offline Gmail will allow users to have a partial copy of its Gmail account on their PCs, and access their messages while being offline. The magic of Google Gears comes to the rescue, but the process will not be complete. The syncronization will update the online and offline copies, but Google will use an algorithm that will determine the messages downloaded on each sync (the first being the most important) based on several parameters...
» Read the rest of the post
« Previous
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
...
90
Next »
2 Votes
