weekly-wrap-ups - ReadWrite

Tablets & PCs: One Industry or Two?

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Weekly Wrap-Up: Social Olympics, The Underground Twitterverse, and Why Apple is Suing Android Manufacturers

Adam Popescu — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 11:00:00 -0700

Who does the gold medal go to in social media Olympics coverage? Why is Apple suing every Android maker in sight? What is the underground Twitterverse? After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web - Location, App Stores and Real-Time Web - plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

Social Olympics: Does The Gold Medal Go To Facebook, Twitter or Google+

Yesterday we looked at how online media is covering the London 2012 Olympics. We gave our virtual gold medal to the New York Times, for its sleek design and muscular content. Today we review the major social media sites: Facebook, Twitter and Google+. To continue the Olympics theme, we award each of the three a different colored medal. Which one gets the gold? More

The Number That Shows Why Apple is Suing Every Android Manufacturers

The eyes of the technology world are focused on the epic patent struggle between Apple and Samsung - the latest iteration of Apple’s frantic legal battle against everything Android. More

Charting the Underground Twitterverse [Infographic]

How bad is the underground Twitter economy? According to security vendor Barracuda Labs, pretty bad. More

Defusing the Corporate Social Media Timebomb.

According to survey results from the Altimeter Group, nearly “two-thirds of companies surveyed say that social media is a significant or critical risk to their brand reputation.” More

Burn After Calling: Disposable Phone Numbers

There's always a pause after someone asks, "Can I have your number?" Someone's silently wondering if complying will mean trouble. What if you didn't have to worry about about that? More

Social Revolution: Crowdsourcing For Change

In the world of technology, we’re used to upheaval. In fact, we rely on it to drive innovation and improvements. So why can’t we use technology to solve some of the underlying problems we all agree need to change? More

Why Lenovo Believes in Windows 8 Tablets - Even if Acer Doesn’t

Just hours after Acer’s CEO complained that Microsoft’s Surface tablet would generate a “negative impact” on the tablet market, Lenovo announced its own entrant to the Surface market, the ThinkPad Tablet 2. Clearly, Lenovo sees a market for a Windows 8 tablet that Acer does not. More

Amber Case's Illustrated Dictionary of Cyborg Anthropology

Humans, dogs, bees and even the computers themselves all use information technology to extend themselves. We’re all cyborgs. We may not realize it, but we are. More

Google Shows Off Its Latest "Baby Steps" Toward Becoming the Star Trek Computer

On Wednesday, Google announced new natural-language voice search on iOS, new, touch-friendly Web interfaces for its answers, and an ambitious, voluntary experiment to bring your Gmail messages into search results. Google wants to be like the Star Trek computer when it grows up, letting us ask questions naturally about anything and get a compelling answer right back. More

Microgrids and Solar Power, the Answer to India's Power Crisis

As India experienced its worst power failure ever last week, leaving 600 million people without electricity, disrupting the operation of hospitals and public services and shutting down transportation in key regions vital to the country’s economy, New Delhi will have to face up to some critical power realities. More

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Tablets & PCs: One Industry or Two?

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Weekly Wrap-up: Let's Hear It for Great Web Apps

Robyn Tippins — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 08:05:00 -0700

If you're running a startup, you need to see these essential apps for startups and entrepreneurs. People aren't willing to try a slow app more than a few times. Girls Who Code is educating young ladies in the fine art of programming. After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web - plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

7 Essential Apps for Entrepreneurs

These days everyone has their favorite mobile apps, ones that make both their personal and business lives run smoother. But are there any apps that are must haves for entrepreneurs and startup founders? For startup entrepreneurs, it’s crucial to find the apps that actually make a difference to you and your business. Plenty of startup founders are already experts in this area. Heck, apps are the business of many startups these days. But startups in other fields may not be so savvy. More

[Infographic] What is Slowing Down Your Mobile Apps?

Ever try to launch a mobile application and get nothing but a spinning wheel? You're not alone. 74% of users will leave a mobile website if it does not load after five seconds, according to a survey conducted by Compuware, a software company. People are more patient with apps, as 50% of users will tolerate load times longer than five seconds. What is slowing down your apps? More

Girls Who Code: Crashing the “Brogram”

The high-tech industry is largely a guy’s world made up of "brogrammers" and job ads that ask, “Want to bro down and crush code?” Small wonder that women made up just 21% of all programmers in 2010, off from 24% in 2000. Or that less than 10% of venture-backed companies have women founders. An organization called Girls Who Code is trying to reboot the system starting from the beginning. More

Online Video Ads Hit a Record: 11 Billion Spots Streamed in June

It's official: Online video advertising is a force to be reckoned with. More than 11 billion ads streamed over the Web in June, amounting to 25% of all video content viewed. That online video ad traffic, as reported by comScore, translated to 4.6 billion minutes watched by 180 million Internet users in the United States. The average duration of an online ad was four seconds. The top five ad networks streamed at least one billion ads each. Google took the lead with 1.41 billion ads streamed. Google's domination isn't surprising; YouTube serves more than 99% of video on Google-related properties and is the third most popular website in the world, with 72 hours of video content uploaded every minute. More

Mark Zuckerberg Wins Approval For His First-Ever Patent Application - From 6 Years Ago

In the last few months, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took his company public, got married and scored a nearly $6 million home loan at just over 1%. What could possibly top all that? How about approval of his very first patent request from way back in 2006 - covering privacy issues no less? Turns out the US Patent Trademark and Office (USPTO), though it originally rejected it, just granted Zuckerberg a patent that can only be described as the ultimate geek vanity trophy. More

How Microsoft Plans to Use the Business Market to End Apple’s Tablet Dominance

In 2010, Apple blindsided Microsoft - and most everyone else - with the phenomenal success of the iPad. That success is now eating away at Windows PC sales. While Apple’s innovation took Microsoft down for the count, the software giant has regrouped and is trying to come back by shifting the battlefield from consumers to businesses. To turn the tide, Microsoft is counting on business users, a market where Apple remains relatively weak and CEO Steve Ballmer’s crew retains several critical advantages. Microsoft’s counterpunches will include Windows 8 and Office 13, a combination Apple can’t match in the business world. More

Instagram Growth Far Outpaces Facebook or Twitter

Instagram is exploding. Sure, the mobile photo-sharing service has been the object of buzz and adoration since day one, but few could have predicted a growth rate quite this phenomenal. Instagram boasts an amazing 80 million users, the company announced today. When Facebook announced its acquisition of Instagram in April, the photo-sharing app's user base approached 30 million. In just under four months since, its user base has grown by more than 166%, fueled in large part by the release of an Android version and tightening integration with Facebook. Instagram acquired 15 million users in the six months between Sept 2011 to March 2012. It ballooned by another 20 million between April and May. Another 30 million users in the last two months? No problem. More

Diagnosis Promising For mHealth

mHealth is an emerging trend in technology. It stands for 'mobile healthcare' and means utilizing smartphones and medical mobile devices to help diagnose and monitor health conditions. According to a new research paper from the Economist Intelligence Unit (commissioned by PwC), the adoption of mHealth will be slow in the healthcare industry. That's due to complexities and technology incompatibilities. However, there is more immediate hope with the thousands of consumer mHealth apps available on smartphones. More

Google Search Shapes Memory, New Research Shows

What’s the first thing you think of when faced with a difficult (or even a not-so-difficult) question? According to four recent studies, your mind is primed to think about computers. In the past decade, we have retrained our minds to google just about everything we want to know, according to new research by Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu and Daniel M. Wegner. “The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves,” the researchers, who are based at Columbia University, University of Wisconsin, and Harvard respectively, write in the July issue of Science. More

Facebook Shares Slip After Disappointing Zynga Earnings Report

Zynga's share price plummeted almost 40% in after-hours trading Wednesday after the company reported a $22.8 million loss for the second quarter. The social gaming developer also revealed that it was lowering its outlook for the rest of the year, due in part to "a more challenging environment on the Facebook web platform." Zynga is hugely dependent on Facebook; it reported earlier this year that 92% of its revenue was generated through the social media giant. More

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Weekly Wrap-Up: There's a New Evening Edition, the Mac Retina Display Disagreement and Twitter's Credibility Problem

Robyn Tippins — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 11:00:00 -0700

A Web design firm, not a newsroom, has built a stellar Evening Edition of the top stories from across the Web. Our writers are at odds on the MacBook Pro's Retina Display. Twitter has a credibility problem. After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web - plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

These Designers Did for Fun What News Sites Can't Do to Save Their Business

A Web design studio built the first news site I’ve ever read from top to bottom two days in a row, and it did so as a side project. Mule Design is not in the journalism business. It builds sites to solve all manner of client communication problems. But it did in a week’s work what news organizations can’t seem to do at all: deliver their output in a form that's comfortable and convenient for the audience. I couldn't help myself. I had to figure out how and why. More

Yes, MacBook Pro's Retina Display Is Brilliant, But Not For the Average User

First, I'd like to thank all the readers who commented on our post. Some of the criticisms made me cringe, such as being called a "link-baiting whore," while other remarks were more insightful and worth taking seriously. But whether the comments were for or against the post, I'm humbled that so many people took the time to participate in such a lively discussion. Because of that, we want to explain our reasoning further. More

Twitter's Credibility Problem

Where you read something may impact credibility as much as what you read - especially if where you read something is on Twitter, according to a new study. Published last month in Communication Quarterly, the research by Mike Schmierbach and Anne Oeldorf-Hirsch used two experiments to show that a New York Times story posted on the website was seen by respondents as more credible than when the same story was posted on the newspaper’s Twitter feed. Additionally, stories posted on Twitter were seen as less important than stories in a newspaper or linked by a blog. More

What Google Lost When Marissa Mayer Left to Run Yahoo

On Monday, The New York Times broke the story that Marissa Mayer, employee No. 20 at Google, had suddenly resigned by phone to become the CEO of Yahoo. Yahoo’s gain is Google’s loss, as Mayer was personally responsible for some of Google’s most iconic products. Here are just some of Mayer’s accomplishments over her years at Google. More

[Infographic] Survey: Consumers Are Concerned About Privacy, Tracking, Advertising

How much do social and mobile service providers know about you? What are they doing with your personal information? If you're worried, you're not alone. A Harris Interactive survey commmissioned by TRUSTe, which helps its clients manage customer privacy, shows that 60% of adults surveyed are more concerned about their online privacy now than they were a year ago. More

From Inmates to Entrepreneurs: The San Quentin Startup Accelerator

Prison inmates have all day, every day, to sit around and think. It could be the world’s largest pool of untapped brain time. Chris Redlitz decided to put it to productive use. He founded the Last Mile startup accelerator program at San Quentin State Prison in California. “I’ve driven by San Quentin every day for the last 14 years, but never bothered to understand the prison system,” says Redlitz, who lives in Marin County north of San Francisco (where the prison sits on San Francisco Bay) and runs the KickLabs tech accelerator in San Francisco. More

How to Get Bloggers to Write About Your Startup: Insider Advice

It’s every startup’s dream - to get the attention of the people who matter. You might think that refers to customers or clients, or even venture capitalists or angel investors. Nope. We’re talking about bloggers. Sure, investors and customers are vital to the success of a startup business, but few things can turn your tech startup into the “it” company on everyone’s lips (and tweets) as quickly as getting mentioned by a prominent blog or blogger. More

5 Surprising Facts About Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer

New Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer confirmed on Monday that she and husband Zachary Bogue are expecting a son in October. Her pregnancy makes all the more notable Mayer’s landmark appointment to the helm of a tech titan - only 19 Fortune 500 companies are headed by women, and not long ago a pregnant chief executive was unthinkable. But beyond her pregnancy, she is a multifaceted, dynamic leader who might prove to be the smartest choice for Yahoo since it fell from grace. Here are some lesser-known facts about Mayer that hold clues to her ability to save Yahoo. More

Age Bias: Young Startup Founders Get More Investor Cash

Blame Mark Zuckerberg. Since he invented Facebook in the third grade (or so it seems) high-tech investors have been throwing more and more money at younger and younger whiz kids. Older entrepreneurs may not like the trend - but it shows no sign of slowing anytime soon. More

The New Microsoft Office: 20 Things to Like, Not Like and Worry About

For all the parental and media hand-wringing, sexting remains a poorly studied phenomenon. But according to new peer-reviewed research, that concern might not be unfounded. Teen texts are indeed ablaze with sexual content - but how does technology-based sexual activity intersect with actual behavior? More

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[Video] This Week's Top Stories: Yahoo's New CEO, Google's Big Bucks & MS Office 2013

Eliot Weisberg — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 06:00:00 -0700

Weekly Wrap-Up: Google's Big Fine, Twitter's Upcoming App Leaked and the Dangers of IPAA

Robyn Tippins — Sat, 14 Jul 2012 11:00:00 -0700

We explain why Google just received the largest privacy fine in history. Leaked screenshots of Twitter's upcoming iPhone app tell us a great deal about what to expect. The IPAA shares some disturbing privacy issues with SOPA.

Google Gets the Biggest FTC Privacy Fine in History - and Deserves It

Google is about to settle with the Federal Trade Commission for $22.5 million for violating the privacy settings of Apple’s Safari browser. Apple’s default setting prevented third-party sites from tracking users as they visited different sites, but Google (and several other, less reputable companies) exploited a loophole to do it anyway. More

Leaked Twitter iPhone App Update: Here's What to Expect

If you tweet from your iPhone, get ready for big changes. Twitter's official iOS app is about to get a meaty upgrade, judging by screen shots leaked from the App Store. Twitter 4.3 for iPhone is expected to deliver deeper interactivity, improvements to search and more granular push notification settings, among other things. More

SOPA Lives! New Bill Seeks to Resurrect Expansion of IP Enforcement Powers

A new bill is about to be officially introduced to the U.S. House of Representatives that would resurrect some unsavory aspects of the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that sparked widespread protests last winter. More

Get Your Startup Into a Top Accelerator: 4 Insider Tips

The top startup accelerators in the world - programs like TechStars and Y Combinator - receive a couple thousand applications for just a handful of spots each session. It’s harder to get into one than Harvard or Stanford. So how do you do it? More

Kippt Reinvents the Internet's Favorite Hobby: Sharing Links

With its update on Monday, the link listing tool Kippt adds social features that make it a one-stop shop for practicing the Internet’s favorite hobby: sharing interesting links. It helps you keep track of links you like, as well as find and follow people who share interesting things. You can easily share links with your friends on Facebook or wherever else, but your list belongs to you instead of disappearing into the Facebook ether. It's the kind of thing you probably won't know you need until you try it. More

Apple's App Store Secrecy Hurts Indie Developers

The timer in the built-in Clock app on the iPhone sucks, so David Barnard built a new one, Timer. But if you search for “timer” in the App Store, you won’t find it. Because of Apple’s obscure, ever-shifting search method, making the best timer in the store is not enough. Barnard invested $7,000 to build this app. It’s the best timer iOS could ask for. Instead of a fiddly, spinning wheel, it has giant buttons that represent preset periods of time. All you have to do to start a timer is tap the interval you want. To set a new one on the fly, you dial it in with the full-sized phone keypad. It’s fast, smooth, easy on the eyes, and it costs a buck. More

From Contest to Company: 6 Tips for Taking a Startup to the Next Level

From hackathons to programming contests to business plan competitions, competitive events are a great way to test the potential appeal and viability of a startup idea. But what happens after the contest? Win or lose, how can a new company make the most of the experience and the exposure? Let's say your team was good enough - and lucky enough - to make it to the finals of one of these events - or maybe you even won the grand prize. After you have had a chance to get some sleep and gather your thoughts, then what? More

What Is the Point of: Google+ Hangouts?

Whenever a new Web trend comes along, people ask, “What is the point of this?” If millions of people are using something, there has to be a reason. In our What Is the Point of… series, we’ll explain it to you. This week, we’re asking, What is the point of Google+ Hangouts? It hasn’t exactly taken over the world yet, but Google+ has become the social backbone of all Google’s services. If you “upgrade” your Google account to Google+, as more than 200 million people have, your profile becomes the way people find you in search and communicate with you across the Google-sphere. More

Russia's New Censorship Law Diminishes the Entire Internet

Russia's new Web blacklist is only the most recent of an alarming series of authoritarian moves to muzzle networked communications. National governments bent on censorship are eating away at the global, public Internet. On Wednesday, the Russian parliament's lower house approved legislation that would block Web pages selectively. The proposed law reportedly lets officials filter out specific domain names and IP addresses. Law enforcement agencies could add URLs to the blacklist without a court order. Hosting services would need to remove banned materials within 72 hours or risk being shut down. More

Teen Sexting Really Does Mean Teen Sex

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Weekly Wrap-Up: The Evolution of Google+, Mobile Dominates in 2012 and More

Robyn Tippins — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 11:00:00 -0700

Richard MacManus explains how Google+ has evolved over the past year and whether it delivered on its promise. Mobile continues to dominate in 2012. After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web - plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

How Google+ Has Morphed Over The Past Year & What We Can Expect in 2013

One year ago, Google+ launched to the world and was greeted with the collective cry, "Not another social network!" But over the past year Google+ has cemented its position as one of the Big Three social networks, alongside Facebook and Twitter. Or has it? Google+ boasts similar user numbers to Twitter, but if we look more closely we see that Google+ hasn't lived up to its initial promise as a new type of social network. In fact, it's morphed into something completely different for Google... More

Top Trends of 2012: The Continuing Rapid Growth of Mobile

In our half-yearly review of the top Internet trends of 2012, there's been a common theme: mobile is the main driver for all of them. The Visual Web (Instagram, Pinterest and similar image-focused apps), the Consumer Cloud (Evernote, Dropbox, iCloud and others), social video apps (Socialcam and Viddy) and video on tablets (BuzzFeed, Flipboard and others). Each of those trends are popular in 2012 because of smartphones and/or tablets. More

In Closing Its Platform, Twitter Risks Destroying Its Community

After attaining unlikely success as an open platform, Twitter is demanding that third-party apps show Twitter’s stream the way the company wants them to. “You need to be able to see expanded Tweets,” Product Manager Michael Sippey wrote in an announcement on Friday afternoon. He said those features make Twitter “more engaging and easier to use.” But if Twitter squeezes too hard on third-party developers, it risks damaging something more important to the company than any set of features: It risks destroying the culture that has grown up around it. More

Facebook Blames Email Problems On User "Confusion"

If you’re missing email messages, don’t blame Facebook: The social network says you are simply “confused.” Facebook spent a second straight weekend dealing with complaints from users about a switch in the default user email addresses, this time with users complaining that the change was resulting in lost messages and contacts. More

Where Google Is Going Next: 5 Things You Need to Know

On the last day of the Google I/O developers conference, we sat down with engineering director Peter Magnusson to digest the introduction of Compute Engine, which adds Google-scale processing power to the company's list of cloud offerings designed to take on Amazon Web Services. Here are the announcement's five key implications. More

How Open Source Hardware Is Driving the 3D-Printing Industry

The potential of 3D printing to transform the way we get things - the market is predicted to hit $3.1 billion in the next four years - gets a lot of press. But not much of that attention has focused on the unique role of open source hardware in enabling 3D printing to realize its promise. Open source software has been a key player in all kinds of disruptive technologies - from the Web to big data. Now the nascent and growing open source hardware movement is helping to power its own disruptive revolution. More

Top Trends of 2012: Social Video Apps (Warning: Seedy Content!)

Continuing our review of the first half of 2012, we look at an emerging product type that became popular this year: social video apps. The two leading contenders are Socialcam and Viddy, each vying to be the breakout app. But at least one of those apps is using dubious seeding tactics to get ahead... After image sharing network Instagram was acquired by Facebook in April, attention turned to the same type of app - but for video. Essentially social video apps have the following characteristics. More

What if RIM Supported Windows Phone 8?

Research In Motion’s new BlackBerry 10 operating system has been delayed to, at the earliest, early 2013. That could prove to be a deathblow to the storied but struggling smartphone maker. RIM is going to miss out on the important holiday season with BlackBerry 10, and that could prove to be the weight that finally breaks the company’s back. In its dire straits, RIM has reportedly started to consider alternatives to BlackBerry 10 and its current strategy. Does that mean aligning itself with Microsoft and its Windows Phone platform? And how would such a move remake the smartphone landscape? More

Why We Still Need the Open Source VLC Media Player

The Monday Version 2.0.2 release of the free open source VLC media player points out a surprising hole in the age of the Internet video - there is still no universal standard for video formats and players. Fortunately, VLC is there to fill in the gaps among proprietary formats and competing ecosystems, playing just about every video in use. More

Why “Good Enough” Security Really Is Good Enough for Most Companies

When it comes to security, the human quest for perfection can end up muddying our thinking. We act as if we don't know that, on any given day, even the lowly Cubs can beat the mighty Yankees, and that a lucky hacker might be able to break into the most secure business system. We demand perfection, and we're continually disappointed. And that makes it harder to think clearly and objectively about actually reducing our company's security risks. More

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Weekly Wrap-Up: Social Media Guidelines for the Olympics Are Strict, the Web Is Getting Increasing Visual and Startups Need to Focus on Branding

Robyn Tippins — Sat, 30 Jun 2012 11:00:00 -0700

Do the social media guidelines from the Olympics muzzle athletes? Richard notes the rising trend of visual websites, like Instagram and Pinterest. Startup branding is more important than ever.

Olympic Social Media Guidelines Muzzle Athletes

Media outlets are billing the upcoming London Summer Olympic Games as "the first social media Olympics." That means athletes and coaches will be posting, tweeting, Facebooking and generally bringing fans closer to the action more than ever before. So why is the International Olympic Committee trying to censor participants? More

Top Trends of 2012: The Visual Web

Continuing our mid-year review of the top trends of 2012, in this post we look at the emergence of the Visual Web. Two of the hottest products in the first half of 2012 are the best examples of this phenomenon: Pinterest and Instagram. But one or two swallows don't make a summer. Beautiful design is a key part of online business in this era, which has resulted in more images and video all across the Web. More

Design Is Now Crucial to Startup Success

Remember the good old days? When a startup founder could draw up his own clunky logo, slap it on a Web page and call it a day? Now every startup needs to spend time, attention and money on slick branding and design sophistication - just to get in the game. More

How To Use Facebook’s Newest Stalking App

Facebook has quietly rolled out a new feature that allows you to easily find profiles of people who are close in physical proximity to you. Unlike previous Facebook apps, which have primarily been aimed at helping you strengthen connections with existing friends, Find Friend Nearby is aimed at helping you make more connections. More

Facebook Knows What You're Doing (Even If You Don't)

If you think a site that pulls your Facebook status updates and FourSquare check-ins to tell the world if you’re hungover, doing drugs or looking to get fired is unsettling, consider this: It’s fairly simplistic when compared to what social networks will one day be able to figure out based on what you choose to broadcast to the world. More

Firefox for Android Reveals the Future of the Mobile Web

In an era when tech companies are attempting to squeeze more data and more dollars out of users, it is refreshing to know that there are organizations that aim to make the Web a better, more functional place. Mozilla is one. On Tuesday it unveiled the latest version of Firefox for Android. While the browser is an excellent update, the most interesting thing about it is what it says about the future of the mobile Web. More

Google I/O: Web or Native Apps? Google Has it Both Ways

The two keynotes at the Google I/O developers' conference presented two divergent approaches to Google's future products - and users inevitably must choose between them. Wednesday's keynote emphasized native Android apps downloaded from Google Play. Thursday's focused on Google's browser, Chrome, with its own store for Web apps. Will the company's two-prong strategy pull it apart? More

RWW Recommends: The Best Mobile RSS Reader

RSS lives! Not everything is a real-time stream of status updates from Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Subscribing to an RSS feed is still the best way to closely monitor your favorite blogs and topics. So where to check your feeds? Google Reader is the undisputed king of RSS Readers for the desktop, mostly because it's the Last One Standing. However, there is much more competition among RSS Readers for smartphones and that means there are some great options out there. In this post we give you our recommendation for best mobile RSS Reader. More

Web Developers Brace For the MacBook Pro's Retina Display

The Web is about to get uglier - that is, if you're eager enough to plunk down $2,200 for the new MacBook Pro with its ultra high-resolution "retina" display. The new laptop, which Apple unveiled last week, already has Web designers and developers trying to figure out how they're going to create sites and Web apps that look good on the new machine without leaving the rest of the Web's population behind. More

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Weekly Wrap-Up: Microsoft Announces New Windows 8 Tablet, Surface

Robyn Tippins — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 11:00:00 -0700

This week Microsoft announced its upcoming tablet Surface. Eliot Weisberg compared the announcement of Surface with Steve Job's initial announcement of the iPad. After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web - Location, App Stores and Real-Time Web - plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

[Video] Surface vs. iPad: Microsoft's Getting Rusty At Stealing from Apple

Eliot Weisberg did a video mixup that compares Steve Job's initial presentation of the iPad to Steve Ballmer's presentation of the Surface. Played side by side, you can see the similarities. Take a close look at the clothing choices, similar phrases and even the touted features. It's a short video, but definitely worth a look. More

Survey: Tablet Owners Prefer Browsers to Native Apps

Browser or app: Which is a better way to reach readers on mobile platforms like iOS and Android? Publishers and developers haven't been shy about offering their opinions, but what about the people who actually use the devices? Among tablet owners, at least, reading on the mobile Web is preferable to using native apps, according to a recent survey from the Online Publishers Association. More

Startup Accelerator Fail: Most Graduates Go Nowhere

Startup accelerators continue to grow in popularity. There are now more than 200 around the world attracting twice as many applicants as they did just two years ago. But there’s a dirty little secret: A lot of accelerators are just spinning their wheels. Last year, Aziz Gilani, a director at Houston venture capital firm DFJ Mercury, ran a study of 29 North American accelerators for the Kauffman Fellows Program. He found that 45% of them produced not a single graduate who went on to raise venture funding. More

Top Trends of 2012: The Consumer Cloud

In 2012 we've seen amazing growth in the Consumer Cloud, meaning cloud computing for everyday users. There are three main categories in the Consumer Cloud: storage, sync and notes. Dropbox, Apple's iCloud and Evernote (respectively) have been the most impressive performers in each category so far this year. More

Nobody Is Using Facebook's Life Events - Not Even Mark Zuckerberg

When Facebook announced Timeline in September last year, a key new feature was the ability to define different types of "life events." Events such as starting a new job, entering a new relationship or getting married, making a home improvement, getting a tattoo. The idea behind Life Events was to better structure Timeline data. Unfortunately for Facebook, very few people are using Life Events. More

How To Track Topics On The Web

It's easy to get obsessed with the super-fast, real-time cycle of online news. But don't forget that the Web is a massive treasure trove of information about any topic. With just a bit of work, you can set up tracking and get regular updates about topics you're passionate about. In this how-to article, we share our tips on topic tracking. More

Why Security Could Be Apple’s Greatest Threat

Apple is sitting on top of the tech world. The company has set the standard for smartphones and tablets, tech’s biggest growth markets, and the company’s Mac sales in the U.S. are growing faster than the industry average. So what could derail the most valuable company in the world? Forget rivals like Microsoft and Google: Apple’s biggest threat may come from hackers. These cyber-criminals are upending Apple’s carefully cultivated perception that the Mac is more secure than Windows PCs. Hackers smashed that notion in April when 650,000 Macs were infected by the Flashback Trojan. More

Retailer's Tax on IE 7 Users Opens New Front in Browser Wars

When Australian retailer Kogan.com enacted a “tax” on customers using Internet Explorer 7 last week, it may not have been trying to become the poster child for worldwide Web-developer frustration with Microsoft browsers. But the stunt seems to have tapped into a seething undercurrent of animosity for Internet Explorer that could bring new combatants to the ongoing browser wars. More

Reimagining Books: How Citia's iPad App Compares to a Paper Book

Kevin Kelly's book "What Technology Wants" was one of our favorite nonfiction books of 2011. In Richard's April 2011 review, he gave it five out of five stars. It's fitting that Kelly's book is the first to be turned into an iPad app on a new iOS platform called Citia. The result isn't an e-book, though; it's more like a condensed summary of the book's main ideas. So is Citia just a modern-day CliffsNotes, or something more substantial? More

How to Keep Facebook from Recognizing Your Face

Now that Facebook has bought facial recognition vendor Face.com, many users are worried that the giant social network will use the technology to infringe on their privacy. While you can’t stop Facebook from grabbing the facial-recognition data, there are ways to limit the service’s use of that information. More

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Weekly Wrap-Up: Some IT Departments Resist Moving to Cloud-Based Systems and More

Robyn Tippins — Sat, 16 Jun 2012 11:00:00 -0700

Brian Proffitt wonders if the resistance to cloud-based systems by IT departments is more about protecting companies or actually about protecting IT workers' jobs. Fredric Paul explains how Windows 8 throws computer users under the bus. After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web - Location, App Stores and Real-Time Web - plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

Are IT Fears Holding Back Cloud Computing?

As corporate IT workers adapt to the shifts towards decentralized, cloud-computing services in place of in-house technology assets, they have to be asking themselves: “Am I working myself out of a job?” This fear, justified or not, is one way to explain the persistent efforts of many enterprise IT departments to forego public cloud-computing services in order to maintain their own private-cloud systems. It may also offer insight into the hype around datacenter tools such as Hadoop, Cassandra and Pig. More

How Windows 8 Throws Computer Users Under the Bus

Whatever you think of Windows 8’s Metro interface on smartphones and tablets, Microsoft’s decision to force computer users to deal with Metro will needlessly alienate and confuse many of the company's most loyal customers. It’s as if Apple suddenly required Mac users to rely on iOS instead of OS X. More

Facebook Advertising Report: It's the Fan Engagement, Stupid

The ComScore report released Tuesday that propped up Facebook as a worthwhile avenue for advertisers to consider underscores what most social media observers have known for quite some time: Not all customers - and not all fans - of a company or brand are created equal. More

Apple's Opportunity: Disrupt the Credit Card Business

Apple has never been shy about bringing change to complacent industries. Its products have reinvented music distribution, mobile phones and, with its new mapping app, GPS navigation devices in cars. It may be time for a new sector to sound the alarm: Apple appears to be maneuvering itself into position to challenge Visa and Mastercard like no company has before. More

Why Twitter May Have the Edge in Online Ads

For all their popularity, social networks have turned out to be barren soil for advertisers. Facebook famously has 901 million users, but it only saw $4.12 in revenue from each of them last year. Twitter has taken even longer to implement a business plan for monetizing its 140 million users. But as it reveals its strategy, it's starting to look like it may have an edge over Facebook in selling ads online. More

Top Trends of 2012: Video on Tablets

One in every ten tablet users views video content almost daily on their device, according to a new report by comScore. The study also found that tablet users are nearly three times more likely to watch video on their device compared to smartphone users. Nearly one in four smartphone owners now owns a tablet, according to comScore. That's an increase of 13.9 percentage points since a year ago. More

Apple's Love/Hate Relationship With iOS Jailbreaking

As developers converged on San Francisco to find out what's next for Apple's hardware and platforms, there was another discussion going on in the background: What does iOS 6 mean for the jailbreak community? Did Apple borrow any ideas this time? How soon will we see an untethered jailbreak for iOS 6? More

5+ Ways Entrepreneurs are Different from Everyone Else

Successful entrepreneurs are really smart. Just look at Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, guys who could get a lobotomy and still do your math homework. But intelligence is not the defining characteristic of successful entrepreneurship. Instead, the secret is a more prosaic quality: good old-fashioned stick-to-itiveness. More

Q: Why Does Microsoft Need Yammer? A: To Save SharePoint

Microsoft is reportedly set to acquire the Yammer business social network for an estimated $1 billion. The deal would give a much-needed social network injection to its SharePoint business collaboration platform. Yammer - with an estimated valuation of $500 million - makes business-oriented social network tools for internal company sharing and discussion centered on blog posts and automatically generated content (such as notifications that a document is ready to edit or a sale has been closed). More

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