For the past two years, thousands of taxi drivers overcharged passengers a total of more than $8 million by switching the meter to double the rate.

Later this week, thousands of ironic t-shirts will be arriving in Austin for the 16th annual South By Southwest Interactive festival. At about this time, it’s traditional for tech publications to publish handy guides to “surviving SXSWi” – packed with useful advice that’s basically interchangeable with that for any other festival since the beginning of time. “Drink plenty of water!” “Prepare for some late nights!” “Plan ahead to make sure you don’t miss anything!” “Pack sturdy shoes!” “Alwa..   show all text

The social networking site plans to roll out features next month that will give its 400 million users the option of sharing their location with friends as part of their news feeds.

Did you know that blocking ads truly hurts the websites you visit? We recently learned that many of our readers did not know this, so I'm going to explain why. There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won't hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis. If you have an ad blocker running, and you load 10 pages on the site, you consume resources from us (bandwidth being only o..   show all text

A decade after the dot-com bust, the Internet economy in New York is springing back to life.

In its wide, wide world, Facebook has the advantage of “network effects” — making its value grow in tandem with the number of people who use it.

The origins of Facebook have been in dispute since the very week a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg launched the site as a Harvard sophomore on February 4, 2004.  Then called "thefacebook.com," the site was an instant hit.  Now, six years later, the site has become one of the biggest web sites in the world, visited by 400 million people a month. Read the rest of this story »

Books in the Age of the iPad Print is dead. Digital is surging. Everyone is confused. A collections of thoughts on the future of books in the context of the iPad.

Even the most prolific users say Twitter has become more useful as a way to tap in to the discussions of the day than to broadcast their own thoughts.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—"Whether you're Michael Paulson who lives at 3425 Longview Terrace and makes $86,400 a year, or Jessica Goldblatt from Lynnwood, WA, who already has well-established trust issues, we at Google would just like to say how very, truly sorry we are," said CEO Eric Schmidt.

While many people were yawning their way through the news networks’ coverage of the White House’s Health Care Summit, a government transparency advocacy group turned the event on its head and used social media and streaming technology to possibly become the next C-SPAN, PolitiFact or Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com. Relying on “data jamming” (a kissing cousin of “culture jamming”), the D.C.-based  Sunlight Foundation gave readers and viewers an endless supply of information–from donor data ..   show all text

E-books are cheaper to produce than print volumes, but consumers may not realize that expenses like overhead and royalties are still in effect, publishers say.

At 3:34 am local time, today, February 27th, a devastating magnitude 8.8 earthquake struck Chile, one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded. According to Chilean President-elect Sebastian Pinera, at least 120 people are known to have been killed so far. The earthquake also triggered a Tsunami which is right now propagating across the Pacific Ocean, due to arrive in Hawaii in hours (around 11:00 am local time). The severity of the Tsunami is still not known, but alerts are being issued acr..   show all text

A massive quake struck Chile early Saturday, shaking the capital of Santiago, bringing down buildings and setting off a tsunami. At least 78 were killed with the toll rising.

On Tuesday, Facebook was awarded a major patent for “Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network”. This is a huge deal for a number of reasons, most significantly that it grants Facebook the opportunity to pursue other social networks which are infringing on their patent. Included in the patent are additional claims including feed filters, feed advertising, searching the feed, and more. (update We’ve been told that this is about the implicit feed stories. Will update wh..   show all text

By Matthew Holt Last week in London I met with two of the brightest lights in the UK's community of physicians looking at Health 2.0. Annabel Bentley is the medical director and head of informatics at Bupa, the UK-based non-profit...