Clint Boulton

Bloomberg cited a state official and some other person who claimed that Ohio and Wisconsin are weighing whacking Google with antitrust investigations over its business practices: “Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine is “evaluating the facts to determine if it’s something we want to review,” Dan Tierney, his spokesman, said. In Wisconsin, Attorney General J.B. Van […]

Facebook began rolling out Facebook Questions out to its U.S. users March 24, showing that the service has evolved into more of a recommendation engine to help friends answer friends’ questions. Facebook last July began testing Questions as an expert question-and-answer service. Users asked questions and waited for answers. Users would click an “Ask Question” […]

Google March 24 said it will roll out in-application billing for the Android Market next week and has opened its app store to let developers submit and test apps with this method of billing. To this point, developers who submitted apps to the Android Market would take their 70 percent cut of the app sale […]

Research In Motion March 24 said its BlackBerry PlayBook tablet computer will support applications based on Google’s Android operating system as well as BlackBerry Java apps. RIM earlier this week pledged to sell the 7-inch PlayBook April 19 in Best Buy, Office Depot, RadioShack, Staples and carriers in the United States and Canada. Like Apple’s […]

Was Motorola Mobility too hasty to the market with its Xoom Android 3.0 “Honeycomb” tablet? It’s a fair question, particularly in light of moves made by Research in Motion this week and Samsung during a CTIA Wireless show week dominated by tablets. RIM answered one of the most pressing questions about its PlayBook when it […]

Google and Mozilla both launched new versions of their popular Web browsers March 22, and each had something important in common: HTML5 support, albeit for different use cases. Mozilla Firefox 4 was the bigger of the two launches, emerging from several months of beta builds stretching back to last summer. In addition to the obvious […]

Motorola is apparently not content to tether its lifeline on Google’s Android operating system alone. According to InformationWeek, and confirmed by industry analysts, Motorola has hired engineers from Apple and Adobe to forge a mobile operating system as an alternative Android. As in, Motorola is no longer willing to place all its chips in the […]

LinkedIn won’t be mistaken for Facebook anytime soon, but the professional social network crossed the 100 million member mark March 22 and is adding 1 million users per week. LinkedIn launched in May 2003, which means it took almost eight years to hit the century mark in users. Contrast that with Facebook, which hit the […]

Yahoo March 23 launched Search Direct, a feature that retrieves immediate search results to rival the Google Instant predictive-search technology. Like Google Instant, Search Direct brings users search results as they type characters, and before they complete a query, hit the search button, or go to a search results page. The idea is to shave […]

Google saw its Google Books settlement proposal struck down by a New York court March 22 for giving the search engine too much power in the nascent market for digital book sales. New York District Court Judge Denny Chin said the deal “would give Google a de facto monopoly over unclaimed works” and concluded the […]

Consumers are more than twice as likely to purchase a smartphone based on Google’s Android operating system than they would Apple’s iPhone, according to a new survey. Application store GetJar said that nearly 40 percent of 2,500 respondents said they will switch to Android when they purchase their next phone, compared to the 18 percent […]

Google’s WiSpy incident, in which its Street View cars inadvertently sniffed out and socked away 600 gigabytes of user data from unsecured WiFi networks in more than 30 countries, is costing the search engine dollars, not just bad publicity. While U.S. states are hashing out multimillion-dollar settlements, France has just settled with the search engine, […]