News on Technology

Barnes & Noble's e-reader entry was supposed to have one big advantage over the Kindle--you could buy one at the retailer's stores. But it has been a long time coming, and in the meantime, you may have heard about another compelling e-reader heading to market.

Customers suffering shipping and technical issues with the new Android phone now have more resources than online support forums.

Redpoint Ventures announced that it had closed a new $400 million fund to invest in early-stage start-ups in the "social and mobile Internet, cloud computing and clean technology spaces." Is the closing a sign that things are looking up for the venture business after one of the...

Location-based social net Foursquare is on a roll when it comes to netting high-profile media partnerships. The latest is restaurant reviews guide Zagat, the NYT reports. By hooking up with Foursquare, Zagat may be hoping to bid up its own cool cache. The reviews site’s...

A doctor examining a child with pneumonia, using a solar-powered lantern in a community health center in the Narok district of southwest Kenya.

Foursquare continues to sign interesting deals with major players in a wide range of fields. Following the service's Bravo deal a couple weeks ago, they've reached a deal with restaurant rating guide Zagat, according to The New York Times. And AdAge has some details about deals...

Google is working on an instantaneous translation software for phones, the Times Online reports. If you talk in English into the speaker of the phone it would translated it, and produce French, or Spanish, or whatever, in the receiver of another phone. Read the rest of this story...

TorrentFreak alerts us to an interesting case happening in Norway right now. Apparently, the most expensive movie ever produced in Norway was (shocking, I know) found on the internet soon after it was released. The filmmakers got very, very upset about this and "launched an...

The iPad's lower-than-expected price may go lower still if the device doesn't perform as well at market as Apple hopes. Recounting his recent meeting with some executives from the company in a research note issued last night, Credit Suisse analyst Bill Shope said Apple is quite...

With a new report coming out suggesting that Facebook sends more traffic to news sites than Google News, folks like Mathew Ingram are asking if Rupert Murdoch, the AP and others will be complaining about Facebook "stealing" their traffic and demanding to get paid. Given their...

Last summer, due to a DDOS attack emanating from IP addresses connected to 4chan, AT&T temporarily blocked access to 4chan... without giving a full explanation for why. If you know 4chan, you know why this is a bad idea. It took very little time for the 4chan community to...

Last year, there was no shortage of developers who were complaining about Apple's App Store. The situation got so heated that no less than Apple senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, Phil Schiller, got personally involved with a number of developers having issues....

It’s not exactly a great leap from publishing an iPhone app to offering one on the soon-to-be-released iPad - not only will the former will run on the latter; the skillset for developing the latter won’t be significantly different. So publishers who have already...

Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) still sees value in local newspapers, even if Guardian Media Group doesn’t. It’s buying GMG Regional Media - with its 32 newspapers and websites - for £44.8 million, in a deal that had been expected and shows the very different strategies of...

Rajiv Goel, formerly of Intel, said he had leaked inside information to Raj Rajaratnam.

Hark, the herald angels sing! Total UK ad spend will rise this autumn, after nine consecutive quarters of annual decline, according to an Advertising Association and WARC forecast. The rise is modest - Q3 2010 is predicted to be 2.8 percent up from the year before. But...

News Corp. (NYSE: NWS) received $12.5 million in Flixster stock when it sold its Rotten Tomatoes movie reviews site to the startup last month, according to an SEC filing. We first reported about it on Twitter this morning, though the filing wasn’t clear enough on the mix of...

When Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) announced its Nook e-reader in October, the ability to pursue a dual in-store and online sales strategy appeared to be one of the clear advantages it might have over Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN). But, as we first reported then, the chain didn’t...

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has lowered its “equipment recovery fee” to $150 from $350 when customers drop its Nexus One phone before their contract with T-Mobile USA officially expires. The change occurs just after the FCC formally sent letters to various operators and...

Even with all the focus on local online ads by newspapers and directories sites, large parts of the space remain untapped. One of those spots is quick serve restaurants, otherwise known as fast food. In his role as a moderator on a Borrell Associates’ Local Online Ad...

Electronic Arts (NSDQ: ERTS)—which continues to try to move its business “beyond the console”—is bringing Madden NFL to Facebook. It isn’t exactly clear what EA has in mind for the Facebook version of its blockbuster video game; EA Sports President...

Since the dawn of Facebook's Photos feature, users have been tasked with the not-so-terrible burden of having to manually click through every photo in an album. Sure, you can also hit the arrow key on your keyboard to jump to the next picture, but even that repetitive task could...

AOL has taken another step closer to selling off its ICQ instant messaging service, culling seven bids to four "serious" ones, said sources close to the situation. The price for the service is hovering just under $200 million, several sources said, with one bid 15 to 20 percent...

A decade ago most of us were using AltaVista or something similar for search. No one was really complaining very much about the huge amount of spam and other noise that cluttered the results because we didn't know there was a better way. Then Google came along with Page Rank, and...

AMEE, the US/UK-based startup that aims to build the largest engine for computing greenhouse gas emissions, has secured a $5.5m series B financing lead by Amadeus Capital Partners alongside existing investors, including O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Union Square Ventures. AMEE...

Last July, we reported that the new company by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield had received a name, and was looking to hire. Tonight, Tiny Speck's first project has revealed itself to the world: Glitch. So what is it? As we suspected, it's an online game in the vein of Game...

Last year, Yahoo still dominated display advertising on the Web in terms of sheer number of ad impressions on its properties, but social networking sites MySpace and Facebook came on strong. Some new data from comScore in its just-released 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review ranks...

With the continued success of Twitter and other social networking tools, any criticism (or praise) of products and companies is becoming increasingly public. Finding a way to manage these external communications in the internal decision-making process is an ongoing challenge for...

YouTube might be streaming more than 13 billion videos a month, or nearly 40 percent of total individual streams, but when you measure by time spent YouTube only accounted for 26 percent of all viewing minutes on the Web last year. It is not surprising that it commands a smaller...

Nowadays, buzz around brands on the news, blogs, tweets and other social media that spreads through product launches, PR campaigns, earnings reports are as valuable as traditional ad campaigns. But buzz and social dialogue on the web is tough to quantify. General Sentiment has...

Editor's note: Is Apple going too far with its restrictions on developers? Alistair Goodman thinks so and explains why in this guest post. He is the CEO of 1020 Placecast, a location-based mobile advertising startup. Apple's recent behavior bears an increasing resemblance to...

Underwhelmed with last night's Super Bowl ads? So are the people who paid for them. The majority of TV ad buyers say they think their are spots less useful than they used to be. That's good news for Google and the Web, but it will be a long time coming.

Google got a second ad for free last night: A Vizio ad that promoted YouTube, along with a slew of other Web services. But the ad did a lousy job of promoting the company's Internet-connected TVs. Pity, because it actually has something cool to pitch.

Last month SecondMarket published data on private company stock sales that they helped complete in 2009. They've now released last month's data as well. A total of a little more than $13 million in sales occurred, with the average transaction size of around $2 million. There...