Clint Boulton

My how the rumor mill is churning around the alleged Google-Groupon acquisition. Just yesterday I noted how Vator News pegged Google’s offer for the local deals and social shopping Website was $2.5 billion. Now AllThings Digital and The New York Times say the deal has a stunning price tag of between $5 billion and $6 […]

With Research In Motion’s share of the U.S. smartphone market eroding and Apple poaching key sales employees, analysts look to the PlayBook tablet to save RIM from being slowly squeezed to death in the mobile market. RIM unveiled its PlayBook Sept. 27 at its annual DevCon conference as an enterprise-oriented alternative to Apple’s iPad and […]

Apple has lured at least five members of rival Research In Motion’s enterprise sales team to sell the iPhone and iPad to more corporate accounts. Until just a few years ago, RIM BlackBerry commanded over half of the U.S. smartphone market, challenged mainly by Microsoft Windows Mobile. Apple’s iPhone burst out of the gate on […]

The New York Times has a great exposé on how Vitaly Borker and his online DecorMyEyes eyeglass business uses negativity to bolster his PageRank and profits. Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan is consulted in the piece and blogged about it, summing it up thusly: “Any publicity, even negative publicity, means a win with Google’s ranking […]

Google has allegedly acquired local deals startup Groupon for $2.5 billion, which would mark the company’s second-largest acquisition, after its $3.1 billion DoubleClick deal. VatorNews cited an “unnamed insider” confirming the deal, though Google declined to comment “on rumor or speculation” for eWEEK. Groupon, with 20 million subscribers and a $1 billion valuation, did not […]

China’s government was indeed behind the hack on Google’s Gmail system earlier this year according to a cable captured by the controversial Wikileaks organization. Wikileaks, which butters its bread collecting secret documents and seeding them in media outlets, snagged 250,000 American diplomatic cables dating back three years and released some of them to the New […]

More than 62 percent of over 3,680 participants in a recent online poll said they wouldn’t use Facebook Messages as their primary e-mail service. Some 17 percent of respondents in the poll, conducted by the Wall Street Journal, said they would use Messages as their main e-mail, while 20 percent said they weren’t sure. Facebook […]

Media are lining up on the Web to sound the death knell for Google TV, the marriage between Web and channel surfing that spawned some pricey hardware products from Logitech and Sony. Google TV is the search engine’s bid to successfully wed television programming with Web surfing. Users may watch TV, surf the Internet and […]

One of the key differences between Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android mobile operating systems is the pace of iteration. Apple does one major upgrade to iOS and the hardware it runs each year, most recently the excellent iPhone 4 and iOS 4.2. Android, on the other hand, is open source so things flow a little […]

Google Nov. 24 said it will start showing content ratings for all applications on Android Market in the next few weeks. Applications will be categorized according to All, Pre-teen, Teen and Mature, with specific details on the rating levels located at the Android Market Help Center. For example, according to the ratings guide: “Apps that […]

When we watch movies on Netflix, the service serves up suggestions about movies related to those you liked. When we make purchases on Amazon.com, we get recommendations of related or similar items, from books to consumer electronics devices. These are passive versions of recommendation engines and this is happening now, but in the not-so-distant future, […]

Some 95 percent of people earning more than $75,000 access the Internet from computers and other devices at least occasionally, compared with 70 percent of people earning less money in the United States. That’s the latest finding from Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Projects, polled more than 8,000 people aged 18 and older […]