Clint Boulton

Silicon Alley Insider broke the news that Google CEO Eric Schmidt granted all of its 23,000-plus employees a 10 percent pay hike for 2011 and $1,000 in holiday bonus cash. Schmidt said in a memo sent to employees: “We want to make sure that you feel rewarded for your hard work, and we want to […]

Googles Long-Running Feud with Facebook: The Rancor Escalates by Clint Boulton OpenSocial In November 2007, Google unveiled its OpenSocial effort with the expectation that Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook and other socially inclined Web service providers would use the application programming interfaces to allow programmers to write social applications that would work on LinkedIn, Friendster and other […]

Twitter said Nov. 11 that it is now connecting with Ping, the Apple iTunes music social network that failed to get in sync with Facebook earlier this year. Based on the technology Apple acquired from Lala, Ping is packaged as part of the new iTunes 10. The social software lets users follow iTunes’ 160 million […]

Google TV hasn’t been on Logitech Revue boxes or Sony Internet TVs and Blu-ray players for a month, but are sales lagging? Google won’t say, but the company promoted Dish Network’s amazingly reduced sale of the Logitech Revue for $179, or 40 percent off of the $299 retail price from last month. The offer, which […]

Fuze Box Nov. 11 launched Fuze Meeting for Android, a free Web conferencing application that could appeal to corporate road warriors who need to conduct virtual meetings on the go from mobile phones and tablets. The app works on phones and tablets based on Google’s Android 2.2 operating system or later. This means it will […]

Thanks to the seepage of Facebook and Twitter in enterprises, social network services could replace e-mail for 20 percent of business users by 2014, Gartner said Nov. 11. The researcher noted that e-mail giants Microsoft and IBM are connecting with their e-mail apps with social networks to make contacts, calendars and tasks shareable. Microsoft is […]

It sure has gotten ugly between Google and Facebook with regard to data portability, an industry catch-phrase used to describe the ability for users to import and export data from Web services such as social networks. Breaking its code of silence regarding Google’s allegations that it is a closed network, a Facebook engineer Nov. 9 […]

The Federal Communications Commission is mulling whether Google broke the law when its Street View cars captured users’ e-mail and passwords in more than 30 countries. Google revealed in May that cars that patrol the earth to take images for the Street View Google Maps feature had collected 600 gigabytes of user data from unencrypted […]

Verizon Wireless said it is launching the Motorola Citrus Android smartphone Nov. 11 for a wallet-pleasing $49.99 after a $100 mail-in rebate. Selling a smartphone for $50 is certainly aggressive for the holidays, but the Citrus is not in the league of high-end Android handsets such as the Samsung Galaxy S line or Motorola Droid […]

Blekko said Nov. 9 that users made more than 1 million queries per day and created more than 30,000 slashtags in the curated search engine’s first week in public beta. Launched Nov. 1, Blekko tries a crowd-sourced approach to search results to help users better pinpoint answers. The idea is to provide an alternative to […]

Evernote revamped its application for Google Android smartphones, adding a new home screen and using Google Search, among other usability perks. Evernote, which has 5 million users and banked $20 million from Sequoia Capital last month, lets users make notes out of text, a full Web page or Web page excerpt, a photograph, a voice […]

Google Instant Previews Homes In on Users Search Targets by Clint Boulton Hiking in Yosemite Google Instant shows these results for “hiking in Yosemite.” But what if you want to drill down further into the results without actually clicking on them? Instant Previews Instant Previews captures the essence of gleaning more information before you commit […]