Despite a knee-deep recession, the idea of giving away something for free and charging for something else later is bigger than ever. But is “free” selling? Or does “paid” have an online future?
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Millions of people logged onto the web when the news of Michael Jackson’s sudden death broke last week, and they’re continuing to flock to eBay to get their hands on the pop king’s memorabilia. The online auction site said it’s since seen the percentages of daily searches, listings and sales of Michael Jackson […]
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As MySpace struggles to regain ground it’s lost to Facebook and sort out its revenue woes, executive departures from MySpace Latino, a combination Spanish-English site targeted at U.S.-based Latinos that launched a little over a year ago, indicate it may be on the chopping block. MySpace Latino’s VP of Hispanic sales and strategy, Manny Miravete, […]
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Today we’ve received an email and seen multiple tweets alerting us to the fact that Google’s App Engine software development platform is down. We’ve emailed the company for details, but in the meantime, a check of the App Engine status page won’t even load at 11:30 a.m. PDT, and updates on the site indicate that […]
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Several marketing associations supported by Google have banded together and released seven principles that they believe should govern online privacy. Are you ready for a journey to the Emerald City? Because the principles are the online advertisers’ attempts to stave off government regulation around protecting consumers’ online privacy by diverting attention to the Great and […]
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Facebook is testing a set of changes to its privacy settings that will make it easier for folks to control what they share and with whom. Essentially the Palo Alto, Calif.-based social network is betting that if its users have more control over privacy, they’ll share more. To be sure, the current privacy settings are […]
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If you use self-described “web site traffic and promotion company” uSocial.net to buy votes on Digg and StumbleUpon, you’ll be thrilled to know it’s expanded its service to Twitter. For just $87, uSocial will generate an additional 1,000 Twitter followers to the account of your choosing. Sweet! Ratchet up your order to more than 5,000 […]
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Joost, a much-vaunted online video startup, today announced that it will offer a white-label video hosting platform, thus entering a crowded market littered with the carcasses of other failed video hosts. The company is also losing its famous chief executive, Mike Volpi, whom it’s replacing with Matt Zelesko, the current vice president of engineering. And […]
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When Heyzap, the San Francisco-based startup that offers up casual, Flash-based games for publishers to embed to their sites, launched back in January, revenue was being generated by the short ads shown before its games. But as the economic downturn tightened its grip and the online advertising market continued to flounder, Heyzap founders Immad […]
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Cisco today outlined its plans for delivering IT services over the web (aka cloud services), and as part of a conference call, showed off a great slide that illustrates exactly how many companies this former networking gear maker wants to take on. If I were to boil it all down, I’d say the company’s cloud […]
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Mozilla has just released the final version of Firefox 3.5. The JavaScript performance — critical for many web apps — is massively improved thanks to the new TraceMonkey engine, making 3.5 feel very fast indeed. In addition to improved performance and standards compliance, Firefox 3.5 features new privacy controls, location-aware browsing, and the ability to play […]
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As a longtime Kayak user, I was shocked when I first saw Microsoft’s new Bing travel site. The pages of search results for airline flights on Bing are so eerily similar to Kayak’s, I thought Microsoft had partnered with the startup. Of course, there is no partnership — and Kayak is not pleased by the […]
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Facebook said today that former Genentech executive vice president and CFO David Ebersman will join the social network site as its new CFO in September, succeeding Gordon Yiu, whose departure was announced at the end of March. Ebersman will direct Facebook’s strategy, planning and operations and report to founder Mark Zuckerberg, who was […]
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Research In Motion bought Dash Navigation in May for an undisclosed price, but yesterday an investment adviser did the math and stated on his blog that the BlackBerry maker paid $8.3 million for the navigation company. Davis Freeberg combed through Research In Motion’s SEC filings and its first-quarter fiscal 2010 conference call in June, and […]
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Netvibes, a Paris-based web startup that lets users create personalized start pages, is rolling out a new feature called Talk to Me that recommends widgets to users based on their personal preferences, the latest example of the company’s goal of hyper-personalizing web content.
“People want to consume information the way they want, when they […]
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I couldn’t help but notice the irony in yesterday’s events. At our Structure 09 Conference, just as panelists started discussing the challenges of managing web infrastructure, we heard that TMZ.com and Twitter had buckled under the massive traffic load that resulted from the news of pop star Michael Jackson’s cardiac arrest and eventual death. (Related: […]
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Web operation strategists at high-traffic sites such as MySpace, Yahoo and Google have to make hard-and-fast decisions on a daily basis to ensure their sites run at high speed and user data is stored securely. As the representatives of those companies, along with executives from Microsoft and LinkedIn, can attest, no single solution exists […]
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It can be difficult to find all of a company’s financial data in one place on the web. Sites such as Google Finance and Yahoo! Finance are good in a pinch, but can take awhile to sift through. San Francisco, Calif.-based Wikinvest is introducing a series of new features to its site today aimed […]
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FriendFeed rolled out a new file-sharing feature on its site this afternoon in hopes of encouraging more organizations to use FriendFeed as a collaboration tool.
On its blog, FriendFeed explained:
This has been an especially popular request from organizations and companies that collaborate using FriendFeed groups. We’ve certainly been using this feature internally and have found it […]
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Google is expanding its AdSense web advertising service to mobile today with the beta launch of AdSense for Mobile Applications, which allows iPhone and Android developers to display text and image ads on their mobile applications and earn revenue. Google has been testing out the new mobile product with developers such as Urbanspoon, […]
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MySpace said today it’s cutting two-thirds of its non-U.S. workforce, bringing the total number of international employees to 150. The move comes a week after the social networking site said it would slash 30 percent of its U.S. workforce. MySpace said today that it will ”restructure its international operations and refocus personnel around a smaller […]
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If the growing number of games being played on it are any indication, then San Francisco-based micro-messaging service
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Kevin Marks, one of the leading voices on Google-backed OpenSocial and Friend Connect, has left the Mountain View, Calif.-based search engine, he announced on his blog. With his exit, Google might have lost one of its most visible evangelists. Kevin, who in the past worked at Technorati, is one of the smartest guys I have […]
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For iPhone users, wading through a sea of fitness and weight-loss applications can be confusing and time-consuming — and, much like adhering to the latest diet craze, it’s often hard to stick with using the application once you download it. Los Angeles-based startup Global Fitness Media on Monday is launching FitOrbit — the […]
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Ever since Netscape started storing cookies in its browsers, there has been a Jekyll-and-Hyde nature to the web. The Jekyll web promised a more personalized experience, with sites serving ads for products and services that you would actually be interested in — ads that are more like useful information and less like glaring interruptions. The […]
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A lot of things make Twitter special. The 140-character restriction makes the writing more potent, because people are forced to get to the point instead of rambling on. Anyone can search for things that are happening “right now,” as opposed to waiting hours (if not days) for Google to update its links. And unlike Facebook, […]
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Jason Shellen, founder of Thing Labs, the startup formerly known as Plinky, is keeping details about its new social media product tightly under wraps — except to say that initially it will only work in conjunction with Twitter. While other application developers focus their attention on multiple social network sites, Thing Labs decided […]
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Last summer, when I got my first iPhone, I found myself spending an equal amount of time downloading and installing various applications — some paid, some free — and using the excellent Safari browser to surf the web. Over the past few months, I realized that I was barely using my browser anymore, […]
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Could Facebook and Twitter, two of the hottest web-centric companies around, go public? I posed that question to legendary investment bank co-founder Bill Hambrecht during an interview at this morning’s GigaOM Bunker Series session. We’ve recently started hosting the monthly events in order to provide an intimate forum at which some of the most pressing […]
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The European Commission, which has been a staunch protector of privacy, may consider tighter regulations about sharing a user’s data with third-party sites, The Financial Times is reporting. It also wants to subject marketers that use social media sites like Twitter to tougher regulations. Under such regulations, a company like Facebook, which opens up […]
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The protests in Iran that have come in the wake of the country’s June 13 election results, which returned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power, have showcased the rise of social media like Twitter, Facebook and even cell phone video taken in the streets and uploaded onto YouTube. Arbor Networks, a company that provides security and […]
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As eBay tinkers with its e-commerce site, CEO John Donahoe has been making the case that the company is turning around. But as we’ve noted, while some of the changes look encouraging, it’s not clear whether enough buyers are returning to the site. Today, Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney expressed similar concerns, noting that while he’s […]
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YouTube is much closer to breaking even than widely thought, says a firm with intimate knowledge of global infrastructure costs. A widely publicized Credit Suisse report that said Google would lose $470 million on the site this year neglected to account for factors such as peering traffic, wholesale bandwidth deals and cheap data […]
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Twitter got an interesting tech support call from a highly unique customer today: The Obama Administration, via the U.S. State department, which reportedly asked the microblogging service to delay a system upgrade in order to maintain the tsunami of history-making tweets about and emanating from Iran via Twitter’s #iranelection topic in the wake of the […]
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Opera Software today is trumpeting its new technology offering called Opera Unite that uses the Opera browser to turn your PC into a server that can host photos, files, music, and even act as a Facebook-style wall for exchanging notes and chats. The idea is similar to services such as FolderShare that allow you to […]
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MySpace is cutting nearly 30 percent of its U.S. workforce, or roughly 420 people, the social networking site said today, bringing its total number of U.S. employees to around 1,000. The announcement comes just two months after MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe and President Tom Anderson left the struggling social network site, and a day after […]
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The German parliament is slated to vote on a bill this week aimed at cracking down on child pornography via the establishment of a mandated DNS block list. Representatives of the two parties that compose the country’s coalition government agreed on a final version of the bill late Monday night despite massive opposition from […]
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It might not be a Google-killer (yet), but Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, is certainly raising hackles at the Googleplex. The New York Post reports that Google co-founder Sergey Brin is personally leading a team inside the company to analyze Bing’s search engine and make changes to Google’s search results as necessary. An unnamed source […]

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As folks increasingly store and access information online, the data centers powering cloud services need to be managed more like a single computing entity rather than a bunch of servers, according to a Google white paper (Google calls it a mini-book) released today.
The paper lays out the concept of warehouse-scale computers (which we have previously […]

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Salesforce.com is trying to entice developers working inside the enterprise to its platform-as-a-service product by offering them a free first taste of Force.com. The platform is built on Salesforce.com’s own infrastructure that it cobbled together to deliver its CRM software as a service. It looks like Salesforce.com’s  goal with Force.com is to create an enterprise […]

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Adobe Systems is taking Acrobat.com out of beta on Monday and introducing two paid subscription offerings targeted toward businesses, which will put pressure on competing file storage and sharing products made by Google, Microsoft and Cisco. The San Jose, Calif.-based company believes tapping into the sphere of online collaboration tools is a $2 billion […]

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The marginal cost of delivering web-based content is approaching zero, so while some publishers continue to charge for it, they are the exception and not the rule. This has led to the reliance on advertising as a revenue model by most consumer web publishers. But if the marginal cost of a page of content is […]

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This past Friday, Facebook started issuing vanity URLs to its 200 million plus community. It was a big change for the social networking company that has so far used unique numerical identifications to identify its members.
Not any more — now you can go to Facebook.com/OmMalik and friend me. (I am It was such a […]

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Is any tech CEO more reviled by his or her own customers than eBay’s John Donahoe? In online forums, sellers seethe about the higher fees and site changes he’s implemented. They write and sign petitions calling for his ouster. Even eBay employees voted him onto Glassdoor.com’s “Naughty List” of CEOs with the highest disapproval ratings.
But […]

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AOL announced two locally focused platform acquisitions today: Patch, which is designed to bring news and other information to local communities, and Going, which helps people find stuff to do in their areas. In the press release announcing the acquisitions, new AOL CEO (and former Google exec) Tim Armstrong said local was “prime for innovation […]

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Bit.ly? SU.PR? Those are so yesterday. Today’s URL-shortening service is GCut.to. The service (launched anonymously) allows you to create a shortcut link that will go to the first result for a particular Google search — the same result that the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button on Google takes you to. Gcut.to/taxes takes you to the IRS. […]

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Yesterday we heard from Harvard Business School researchers that only 10 percent of Twitter users are generating almost 90 percent of the content. Today, HubSpot, a Cambridge, MA-based start-up has released a study that not only backs-up the findings of the HBS study, but also offers more granular information about the Twittersphere.
The company crunched the […]

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Google announced today a new Google Apps feature that enables syncing with Microsoft Outlook mail, calendar and contacts data, giving Outlook users a way to use Google Apps without changing their behavior. It will launch worldwide this afternoon (but only available in English; Google said other languages will come later) for Google Apps Premiere Edition […]

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StumbleUpon has launched a new URL-shortening service to compete with Bit.ly et al, called SU.PR. Om hypothesized earlier this year that services like Bit.ly could challenge Digg for social news supremacy, in part because Bit.ly tracks how many users click each particular link — allowing the company to rank (if they chose to) the most […]

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Cisco said today that the web will continue its breakneck rate of growth to hit 56 exabytes of data per month by 2013. In 2008, IP traffic accounted for 9 exabytes per month, according to the company’s second annual visual networking index.
Cisco, which stands to profit by selling its communications gear to ISPs and businesses […]

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