Clint Boulton

Google officials confirmed what many folks expected: The company’s bidding in the FCC’s 700 MHz wireless auction was a ploy to drive up the purchase price of the spectrum to ensure that the provisions for open devices and applications would be applied to the winner. Worked like a charm as we all now know: Verizon […]

Google officials confirmed what many folks expected: The company’s bidding in the FCC’s 700 MHz wireless auction was a ploy to drive up the purchase price of the spectrum to ensure that the provisions for open devices and applications would be applied to the winner. Worked like a charm as we all now know: Verizon […]

Facebook plays host to roughly 17,000 applications already, but this week it’s become the playground for new virtual worlds thanks to Vivaty. The startup March 31 began testing Vivaty Scenes, a browser-based widget users can download to construct their own three-dimensional virtual environment on their Facebook profile pages and invite friends to participate. Users can […]

Two interesting rumors about possible Google acquisitions have me rooting for one to happen and the other to vanish like an unwanted stepchild. First, TechCrunch is talking to people who claim Google is huddling with Skype over a possible acquisition or partnership. This makes perfect sense. The second is that Google is considering buying travel […]

Like a lot of Web 2.0 technologies, virtual reality has been slow to take off among enterprise customers, largely because of concerns that merry pranksters hacking the three-dimensional worlds for fun will disrupt online meetings, or wreak worse havoc. IBM and “Second Life” creator Linden Lab are looking to change that with a joint effort […]

The race for the socialized inbox is on. Xoopit went into private beta March 31 with its with a new personal media browser application that combs through the files, photos and videos floating in users’ Gmail cloud and lets users post content on other social networks and blogs. But the San Francisco startup is hardly […]

In a move that has search experts giddy over the preservation of objectivity, Google said it will sell the Performics search marketing business it secured when it bought DoubleClick. The company is also laying off 300 people, or one-quarter of the 1,200 DoubleClick staffers based in the United States, a source familiar with the company’s […]

The new voice search and search assistance features in its new OneSearch mobile service indicate that Yahoo will continue to enhance its Web services despite the looming presence of rival Microsoft, which offered to buy the company Feb. 1. The new features are also the latest steps on a mobile Web ladder race the embattled […]

The recent subpoena of TXTmob programmer Tad Hirsch by the New York City Law Department illustrates the risks text-messaging services face from legal discovery. The New York City Law Department subpoenaed Hirsch, who wrote the code for the TXTmob text messaging service, ordering him to cough up records of the content of the messages exchanged […]

Be careful of how and what you tweet on Twitter. It may come back to haunt you in a court of law. In the wake of the arrest of hundreds of people in July 2004 during the Republican National Convention assembly in New York, the city’s attorneys are prying for access to text messages used […]

The merry pranksters are out in earnest for April 1, with some of the more silly jokes whipped up by or on behalf of Google, poking at the search vendor’s Big Brother aura. In the United States, Google crafted a press release and blog post detailing Virgle, a fictitious joint venture between Google and intrepid […]

Yahoo opened a lot of eyes with Inbox 2.0, a socialized version of Yahoo Mail that integrates multiple social networks into the Web mail application used by more than 250 million people. San Francisco’s Xoopit is looking to take the social inbox schema up a notch with a new personal media browser application that lets […]