Clint Boulton

Google has purchased TalkBin, which makes a software platform that lets consumers send feedback, suggestions and questions to local businesses via Android smartphones and the iPhone. Businesses can then read and respond to their customers on the fly. See this brief screenshot of the mobile apps on TalkBin’s homepage. TechCrunch first noted the acquisition April […]

Facebook April 25 flipped the switch on its Deals on Facebook service, pitching local deals to its users living in Atlanta; Austin, Texas; Dallas; San Diego; and San Francisco to grab some of the success Groupon and LivingSocial are enjoying. Groupon and LivingSocial ignited the local deals market by offering consumers deals of 50 percent […]

Sales of any tablet are going to look bleak, compared with Apple’s iPad, which sold 4.7 million units in the recent quarter. The outlook for Motorola Mobility’s Xoom tablet is particularly bleak, according to Global Equities analyst Trip Chowdry. Chowdry said the first Android 3.0 “Honeycomb” tablet sold somewhere from 5 percent to 15 percent […]

Google’s Android operating system rose to 37 percent U.S. market share compared with 27 percent for Apple’s iPhone through March, according to the latest Nielsen data. That’s up 8 percent from Nielsen’s March 3 accounting for January, when the researcher said Android notched 29 percent, breaking a statistical tie with Apple’s iOS and Research In […]

Facebook updated its Facebook Groups feature with a Send button that lets users share content with a few people instead of an entire group, adding missing granularity to the Web service. Facebook launched Groups last October to help the social network’s users partition groups of connections into friends, family and professional groups, among other segments. […]

Yahoo April 25 said it has acquired IntoNow, which built a software platform and iPhone application that learns what users are watching on TV and recommends the show to their friends via Facebook and Twitter. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, though tech blogs are reporting the purchase price was in the vicinity […]

Verizon Wireless and HTC are bringing their first successful Droid-branded phone back for an encore in the form of the Droid Incredible 2 by HTC, which the carrier will launch April 28 for $199.99. Verizon launched the first Droid Incredible, a thin device powered by a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and the Android 2.1 operating […]

Amazon.com’s Android activities continue to attract the attention of us media types, as the company quietly offered customers who buy an Android smartphone or tablet from Verizon Wireless a $25 credit to buy Android apps. On Friday I reported that Amazon was offering the HTC ThunderBolt for $129.99 through Monday, ideally to help Verizon make […]

Google acknowledged it uses location data gathered from smartphones based on its Android mobile operating system to bolster its mobile search and Google Maps services. However, Google only collects this data and uses it once users explicitly opt in to allow Google to use location-oriented information collected via Android handsets, the company said. Moreover, Google […]

Introduction Microsoft stated on its Website that “People expect existing documents from their desktop to look exactly the same when they share them in the cloud. In this demo, you will see completely different results when viewing the same document using Word Web App and using Google Documents.” The circles call out file integrity differences […]

Google tweaked its end game procedure for closing Google Videos, removing the deadline and providing instruction for how users may migrate video to YouTube. Google last week emailed users of Google Video — the service users chiefly used to upload videos on Google’s infrastructure before the company’s $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube — that it […]

Google April 22 touted the security of its data center operations, offering the computing world a rare glimpse of the physical security and data-protection schemes employed in its data center operations. The search engine produced this video, shot at its Moncks Corner, S.C., facility, one of dozens of data centers Google had built around the […]