Clint Boulton

Smartphone use grew 21 percent from December 2009 through February 2010, with some 45.4 million people using handsets with full HTML Web browsers in the United States, according to new statistics from comScore. Google’s Android operating system was the chief beneficiary of this growth spurt, rising to 9 percent market share from 3.8 percent from […]

Updated: Google went about privacy in a backward way with its Google Buzz social service, and the company is still backpedaling to make improvements to protect users’ privacy. The company April 5 began displaying its belated confirmation page to Buzz users who began using the service before Google changed its setup process. First mover Buzz […]

Updated: Earlier today I detailed Google’s rendering of its confirmation page for existing users of the Google Buzz social service. I also alluded to a nifty change that should cut down on the confusion and clutter in Buzz, where threads present as mountains of data piled atop valleys of data. Google actually calls the posts […]

Facebook confirmed April 5 that it has purchased Divvyshot, which lets groups of people upload photos to the Web, share them and edit them, for an undisclosed sum. Divvyshot’s technology groups its 40,000 users’ photos into collections called “events,” allowing multiple people to contribute to one so that users don’t have to publish pictures as […]

Apple iPad Gets Low-Key Reception at Connecticut Best Buy By Clint Boulton Arriving at Best Buy This was the scene outside the Best Buy at 9:30 a.m. EDT, 30 minutes before the store opened and the iPad went on sale. Quite the contrast from these scenesin New York City and San Francisco. Pre-sale Voucher A […]

Data Apple collects about users from its vaunted iPhone is so valuable that the company must build a special search engine just to keep Google from gleaning insight from that data, analysts say. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said there is a 70 percent chance Apple will roll out a mobile search engine tailored for […]

Apple may be mulling a swap of Google for Microsoft Bing on its iPhone, but Google April 2 said it is the default search engine for Apple’s iPad, which will also run YouTube, Google Maps and a Gmail application tailored for the iPad. Just as with Mac computers and the iPhone, Google will sit in […]

TRUMBULL, Conn.-While people in New York City and California camped out in front of Apple stores for a chance to buy the Apple iPad, the best place to pick up one of the hallowed devices may have been at the Best Buy in Trumbull, a small town in Connecticut’s Fairfield County. By 9 a.m. on […]

More than 20,000 Apple iPad applications are in the process of being created, according to data released April 1 from application research firm Flurry. Flurry, which monitors new project starts by developers within its system, said it calculated a significant spike in developer support for the iPad since it was introduced in January. That bodes […]

This is a fun story. Andrew McLaughlin, formerly Google’s top lobbyist and currently the deputy CTO in the White House, where he advises President Barack Obama on Internet policy, apparently was aghast to find his contacts exposed by Google Buzz. Buzz is the social Web services that leverage Gmail users’ contacts. By default, Buzz was […]

Google April 2 confirmed it has acquired Episodic, which makes a platform for broadcasting live and on-demand video over the Web. Website publishers, marketers and businesses use Episodic’s platform to stream, analyze and serve video content to their audiences through computers, mobile devices and IPTV devices. The startup also offers content management and sells an […]

Earlier today, eWEEK published this slide show of Google’s April Fools’ Day gags. Most are, as they say, corny or trite. My personal favorite is the Google Translate for Animals. This video, where a farmer walks around catching his livestock’s noises on a smartphone, is great. Of course, Google would roll out more gags after […]