November 2010

The Kobayashi Lab [JP] at Tokyo-based Waseda University has been working for years on what are probably some of the most advanced conversational robots out there. The first of this…

The Guardian says that Call of Duty: Black Ops has “easily the most cogent and well-constructed story we’ve seen from the Call of Duty franchise in a number of years.”…

After ten months of a private pilot limited to only 50,000 users, Square has finally opened its doors to the public. The brainchild of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and Jim…

Chicago-based startup Sprout Social, the developer of a social relationship management platform for businesses, has raised $1 million in new funding from Lightbank. The startup had previously raised an undisclosed…

As you recall, the folks behind Arduino are offering a $2,000 bounty for an open source hack of the Microsoft Kinect. They’ve just upped their bounty to $3,000 after Microsoft…

If you’re a big company and you need a little software help managing online advertising campaigns, you go to Omniture or a competitor. But if you’re running a small store…

All of a sudden, visual search previews are the hot feature of the week. On Monday, RockMelt unveiled its new browser in private beta. One of its main features is…

We received almost 500 comments on our Fuze iPad contest last weekend and I just got through them all. I’ve picked a few excellent runners-up as well as one winner.…

Yesterday Facebook released a clever way to continue to download Google user data, despite Google banning Facebook from using their APIs. It looks to me like they aren’t going to…

The Biscuit and wooden cell phones Sharp yesterday announced for the Japanese market weren’t the only ones worth mentioning. Big S also unveiled [JP] the SH-05C, a handset featuring a…

I’ve written a lot about America’s flawed immigration policies: how the unavailability of permanent-resident visas and the growing xenophobia in the U.S., combined with expanding economic opportunities abroad, are causing…

Bon Jovi is getting into social gaming today by distributing the band’s digital music through games on Facebook. The band is partnering with CrowdStar to bundle its digital album, virtual…

Lighting is everything in photos. It will make a shoot, but not everyone wants to drop serious cash on several studio-quality lights. There’s a bunch of alternatives out there including…

Touch interfaces for content and social media are, thanks to applications like Pulse and Flipboard – the ‘new new thing’. They are presenting streams of information in a far easier…

This video shows how amagical things will get once you start toting your MiFi wi-fi hotspot around the house. You’ll be in a new place! You’ll surf the Internet! You’ll…

According to a report by SquareTrade (a company that sells extended warranties), the iPhone 4 is the phone least likely to fail in the first year but is the most…

When textbook tablet startup Kno raised $46 million in September from Andreessen Horowitz and Silicon Valley Bank, it was shooting to price its dual-screen tablet at under $1,000. On Tuesday,…

OnGreen— a professional networking and collaboration website that connects clean tech entrepreneurs with potential investors— today announced that it has raised a $1.4 million series A investment of its own from…

When I visited Dublin recently for the F.ounders event, I didn’t even get around to attending the bigger event that was happening alongside it, the Dublin Web Summit. I did,…

Video search engine blinkx has been plugging away at video search for years now. Finally, six years after being founded, and already publicly traded on the London stock exchange, it…

Backupify, a cloud computing service that backs up data on other cloud computing services, has launched a dedicated product to back up data on Facebook Pages. Founded in 2008 by…

Japan’s biggest business daily, The Nikkei, is reporting that NEC has developed a technology that makes it possible to quickly change low-res analog video to HD video. According to NEC,…

23andMe, the personal genetics company co-founded by Anne Wojcicki, Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s spouse, has raised $22 million+ in its third round of financing. The Series C round was led…

I can’t recall something we’ve gotten tipped about more than Google Instant Previews. Even after we wrote about it appearing in the wild a month ago, the tips kept flowing…

This holiday e-commerce shopping season is expected to produce stronger sales results than last year, but retailers and e-commerce giants aren’t taking any chances. Today, mobile payments company PayPal will…

Quest Software is to acquire BakBone Software, a San Diego, CA-based provider of data protection software. Quest in a statement says it expects to pay approximately $55 million, including the…

The Story Of Electronics debuts online today, the latest in a series of short films by Annie Leonard, whose original viral video The Story Of Stuff surpassed 12 million views.…

IBM today announced a plan to give away $50 million of its services and technology over the next three years to 100 municipalities through a program the company is calling…

A few months ago, Borders got into the textbook sales race with the launch of a marketplace to buy and sell used books. Today, the company is getting into textbook…

Zuora, a SaaS startup that offers online services to manage and automate customer subscriptions and payments, has raised $20 million in Series C funding led by Redpoint Ventures with the…