Enterprises of every size are moving applications and infrastructure to the cloud. Maintaining operational awareness is difficult enough within a single cloud…
Read MoreFormer Google CIO Douglas Merrill has set out to provide an alternative to payday loans that uses data analysis to determine whether borrowers are likely to pay him back. Called ZestCash, Merrill's Hollywood-based startup is launching tomorrow in the Utah market.…
Read More"Laughable," "absurd," "ludicrous" and "pointless" were words Twitter founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone used Monday night to describe a recent Malcolm Gladwell story in the New Yorker about the futility of social media to create real social change.…
Read MoreThe average Malaysian Internet user has 233 friends on social networks, which is the most in the world, according to interviews with nearly 50,000 online users in 46 countries. By contrast, the least social web users appear to be the Japanese, who count only 29 friends.…
Read MoreCrowdsourcing is often used for fairly menial tasks: correcting databases, screening offensive images, transcribing audio. But what if you could make those little bits of human labor even more menial, discrete and interchangeable? That's what the Finnish company Microtask does.…
Read MoreGoogle today announced it is shutting down its free U.S. and Canada directory assistance service, 1-800-GOOG-411, to put its focus on its other speech recognition services and extending them to new languages. As of Nov. 12, the number will go dead.…
Read MorePivotal Labs is a name that comes up often in regards to web startups like Diaspora, Twitter, Groupon and Gowalla, but it's sort of an enigma. We paid a visit to Pivotal's San Francisco office to see what it looks like and find out more.…
Read MoreAfter Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg debuted a new Groups tool to encourage more private and directed interactions between subsets of his more than 500 million users on Wednesday, he sat down with me and Groups product manager Justin Shaffer.…
Read MoreMobilize 2010 was not what you might call a focused conference. So here's some good news: the entire conference is already online, available for your viewing pleasure at your leisure.…
Read MoreFacebook launched a new approach to understanding groups of friends today. CEO Mark Zuckerberg called groups "a fundamental building block" and "the biggest problem in social networking," and said Facebook has determined the best solution is a social one: to enable users to tag each other.…
Read MoreWant to apply cool filters to your iPhone photos without paying for an app like Hipstamatic? Try out Instagram, which is launching today. Om already reported on how it comes from the makers of Burbn, a demo HTML5 app that was neat enough to win $500,000.…
Read MoreEventbrite has closed $20 million in Series D funding led by DAG Ventures, and including Tenaya Capital as well as previous investor Sequoia Capital. The four-year-old, San Francisco-based company has now raised a total of $29.5 million.…
Read MoreAppNexus has stepped up its fundraising, bringing in $50 million for its real-time display advertising platform from existing investors as well as Microsoft. The company has now raised $65.5 million over the last three years from investors including Venrock, Kodiak Venture Partners and First Round Capital.…
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