Top Stories

Facebook’s New Action Verbs Help You Socialize and Brands Categorize

facebook

Facebook enriched its revamped news feed this week with action verbs for developers that enable users to instantly post about their activities. The verbs provide Facebook users an easy way to socialize their run schedule or what they’ve been reading, for example, while providing Facebook as well as brands with critical, concrete data that can … [Read more...]

Google Vaguely Discloses FBI Spy Requests on Your Web Activity

google

Yes, FBI spies are watching us, or at least some of us, Google admitted in its Transparency Report. The web giant released some vague details about government requests on the private information of its users, providing ranges of figures “to address concerns raised by the FBI, Justice Department and other agencies that releasing exact numbers … [Read more...]

Groupon’s CEO Fired After Stock Price Drops 25% Following Dismal Earnings

groupon

Groupon’s CEO Andrew Mason may be out of a job after his firing following a dismal earnings report that saw the stock drop 25 percent, but at least he has a sense of humor about it. “After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I’ve decided that I’d like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding – I was … [Read more...]

TransLattice Becomes First Database System to Mix/Match Multiple Clouds

CloudComputing

By MATT GALLAGHER, Red Herring journalist When Amazon goes down, so does everyone else. Outages last October and June caused the disruption of Flipboard, Foursquare, Netflix, Pinterest, Instagram and others. So why put all your cloud data in one basket? With the release of version 3.0 of the TransLattice Elastic Database (TED), you no … [Read more...]

Google to Launch Glass by End of Year for Less than $1,500

glass

Google has made it official. The company announced plans to launch a “fully polished” version of Google Glass, a wearable headset combining Internet exploration with fashion, to the consumer market by the end of the year, the Internet giant told the Verge. The glasses will be priced less than $1,500. That’s in line with a date the New York … [Read more...]

Pinterest Raises $200M at $2.5B Valuation, Buys Time to Monetize

Money Sign

Pinterest has raised a $200 million round that values the company at $2.5 billion. The cash essentially buys the social sharing site more time to figure out how to actually make money to justify that valuation. The round included participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners and FirstMark Capital, along … [Read more...]

China Takes #1 Spot as World’s Largest Smartphone Market

China Cell Phone Tower

Step aside USA. China has become the world’s largest smartphone market, surpassing the US for the first time for actively used smartphones and tablets, according to recent data released by Flurry, the mobile analytics firm. Flurry tracked more than 2.4 billion application sessions across more than 275,000 applications around the world. The … [Read more...]

ComScore Report: 5.3 Trillion Ads in 2012, Social Media Taking Lead

trillions

ComScore released its Digital Future in Focus report for 2013, revealing that nearly 6 trillion ad impressions were served up the US. What’s more, social media is steadily taking the lead, accounting for 16.6 and will soon surpass portals as the most engaging online activity. Facebook naturally leads this surge, contributing to the largest share … [Read more...]

US District Judge Tosses out 4 Facebook IPO Lawsuits

Facebook IPO

A US District court dismissed four shareholder lawsuits related to Facebook’s botched IPO, on the grounds that the individual investors behind the cases purchased the company’s stock after the company had already amended IPO filings, including warnings about an unproven ability to monetize its mobile efforts, Reuters reported. The lawsuit, … [Read more...]

Liberty Global to Buy Virgin Media for $23.3B

Money Sign

Liberty Global, the US cable heavy weight, has agreed to purchase Virgin Media, a large cable and broadband provider in the UK, for $23.3 billion, both companies recently announced in a press release. If approved by regulators, the deal would make Liberty Global the largest cable and broadband company in the world outside of China. The company … [Read more...]