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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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