When it comes to competition, CNN president Jon Klein fears Facebook. The man at the top of the news network believes that the social network is more of a threat to his business than other broadcast media organizations. In a recent question-and-answer session with BusinessWeek, Klein specifically states, “We want to be the most trusted source,” and, “I’m more worried about the 500 million or so people on Facebook versus the 2 million on Fox.” The intriguing statements come just weeks after..   show all text

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

Foursquare, a location-based social network, is rolling out new tools that will give businesses more information about their customers and allow them to target special offers.

I feel for Google – Steve Jobs threatened to sue me, too. In 2003, after I unveiled a prototype Linux desktop called Project Looking Glass*, Steve called my office to let me know the graphical effects were “stepping all over Apple’s IP.” (IP = Intellectual Property = patents, trademarks and copyrights.) If we moved forward to commercialize it, “I’ll just sue you.” My response was simple. “Steve, I was just watching your last presentation, and Keynote looks identical to Concurrence – do you own..   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.

The entire family of devices built on the iPhone OS (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) have been designed to run only software that is approved by Apple—a major shift from the norms of the personal computer market. Software developers who want Apple's approval must first agree to the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement. So today we're posting the "iPhone Developer Program License Agreement"—the contract that every developer who writes software for the iTunes App Store must "sign." Though more t..   show all text

As I write this, I am traveling at 30,000 feet on Virgin America's excellent IAD->SFO nonstop, following an intense few days of conversations in Washington, DC about the Startup Visa. This trip was designed to build momentum following last week's announcement that Senators Kerry and Lugar have introduced a Senate bill to make the Startup Visa a reality: the Startup Visa Act of 2010. This follows Congressman Jared Polis, who has introduced a similar bill as part of comprehensive immigration ref..   show all text

Live blogging the Iraq elections

Gabe Rivera / Techmeme News: Techmeme now has a share button.  Read this post if you can't find it.  —  Frequent Techmeme readers may have heard of both “Facebook” and “Twitter”, up and coming social networking services where, among other activities, users tend to share links.  Sharing is in fact a core activity on these sites …

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

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

We've been dying to know more about Microsoft's Courier tablet / e-book device ever since we first caught wind of it last September, and while our entreaties to Mr. Ballmer went unanswered, we just learned some very interesting information from an extremely trusted source. We're told Courier will function as a "digital journal," and it's designed to be seriously portable: it's under an inch thick, weighs a little over a pound, and isn't much bigger than a 5x7 photo when closed. That's a lot ..   show all text

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.

Editor’s note: Richard Wong is a venture capitalist with Accel Partners, an investor in AdMob, GetJar, and SunRun, and a former mobile industry executive. In this guest post he argues that the fragmentation of mobile devices and platforms is here to stay, and offers some advice to entrepreneurs on how to deal with it. Mobile data is on fire. Despite a few false starts, we are now in the midst of a transformative “Open Mobile 3rd Wave” (remember WAP, and J2ME?). We are just in the early swell..   show all text

Google is developing a system that will enable web publishers of any size to automatically submit new content to Google for indexing within seconds of that content being published. Search industry analyst Danny Sullivan told us today that this could be "the next chapter" for Google. Last Fall we were told by Google's Brett Slatkin, lead developer on the PubSubHubbub (PuSH) real time syndication protocol, that he hoped Google would some day use PuSH for indexing the web instead of the crawling..   show all text

About one year ago Twitter reached a huge milestone: one billion tweets. Four months ago, 5 billion tweets were served. And now, in about one day, Twitter should reach another very important milestone: 10 billion tweets. Notice the trend? Although Twitter has been somewhat struggling with traffic (compared to its earlier immense growth) in the last couple of months, it still managed to go from five to ten billion tweets in four months; quite a remarkable achievement. Counting tweets is act..   show all text