This morning Google announced a new Blue Dot feature on the mobile version of Google Product Search that shows whether a product is in-stock at nearby stores. This seems to pose a threat to startup Milo, which highlights local inventory in product se...

Most people in the world hear Hewlett-Packard and think "printers." And who can blame them? Since the relatively recent emphasis on the "HP" instead of "Hewlett-Packard," and the general consumer move away from printers, HP hasn't really done anythin...

Apple has set the standard that once every year they will release a new version of the iPhone. It stands to reason that this year will be no different, with a new model likely coming sometime this summer. But arguably just as important as Apple's har...

As I've made abundantly clear over the past several days, just about every service that has anything to do with location is launching something at the SXSW festival which starts tomorrow in Austin, Texas. Don't believe me, here's a small sampling (Fo...

Last November, MSNBC acquired the Twitter account @breakingnews, which was started as a basic newswire by Michael van Poppel and gradually grew to 1.4 million followers (it's now up to over 1.6 million). A month later, MSNBC announced that it had ac...

Aol launched Lifestream, a social aggregator and publisher, as part of their AIM platform at TechCrunch50 Last Fall. Since then it has gained nearly 2 million users, say Aol. Based on that success Aol is now launching Lifestream as a standalone produ...

Google just launched a new feature on the mobile version of Google Product Search which could take local shopping search startup Milo out at the knees. Whenever you do a Google product search from a mobile phone, blue dots will appear next to items...

In January, private company stock marketplace SecondMarket published data on private company stock sales that they helped complete in 2009. And February's report showed the transactions that took place in January, which showed a strong demand for con...

We were somewhat sad when Barnes & Noble sent their PR firm to accept their award for the Nook for Best Gadget of 2009 at the Crunchies in January. Traditionally only Apple blows off the awards, and we've always been able to work around that. B...

Betaworks, the New York City-based holding company investing in the realtime Web, just raised a $20 million Series B. The round was led by RRE Ventures and Intel Capital, DFJ Growth, AOL Ventures, The New York Times, Softbank Japan and Softbank NY,...

Consumer Reports has a new report on which computer company has the best tech support. Apple wins! That's what happens when the same company controls the hardware as well as the operating system (and several of the most prominent pieces of software)....

After shopping itself around to all the major search engines, Radar Networks finally found a buyer in another semantic search startup. Today, Evri is announcing that it will be acquiring Radar Networks, along with its core technical team and its mai...

Fits.me, a virtual fitting room for internet clothing retailers based on robots (yes really) has won the European startup competition in Brussels, Plugg. It's actually even cooler than it sounds. By creating robotic shape-shifting manakins and test...

FlyScreen, the mobile phone lock-screen replacement from Israeli startup Cellogic, has added Foursquare integration to its Android app ahead of this year's South by Southwest festival. The new Foursquare widget lets users of the location-based socia...

Google has Google Trends, Twitter has trending topics, and now so does Wikipedia. Pete Skomoroch, a Senior Research Scientist at LinkedIn and blogger at Data Wrangling, built a trending topics page for Wikipedia. The homepage ranks the top-25 Wikip...

With Microsoft becoming increasingly marginalized in areas like mobile media, DirectX is becoming less of a must-use toolset and more of a gaming-specific one. The other side of the coin is, of course, the increasing relevance of standards like OpenG...

As mobile gaming takes off, developers will need in-depth analysis to determine consumer behavior with their games and adjust their games accordingly. Motally, which provides user-action tracking services for the mobile web and apps, is expanding its...

I handle a lot of mice in this job (right now I'm using the Mionix Naos 5000) and I have to say that if a mouse were, like the Magic Mouse, shaped completely wrong for human hands, I would throw it away and never speak of it again. Others, while perh...

If I were a spit takin' man, I'd do a spit take right now. Motorola, stalwart of freedom, will work with Chinese carriers to add Bing to Chinese Android-based phones, ousting Google Search and Maps from the scene. Now this isn't meanness on Motorola'...

Do you remember to the days of college, when you were required to sort through your curriculum and career goals with your designated college advisor? Education startup MyEdu aims to replace this by helping students virtually access their academic in...

Lucid Imagination, the startup that commercially distributes the open source Apache Lucene and Apache Solr search technology, has raised $10 million in Series B funding from Shasta Ventures with Granite Ventures and Walden International participatin...

Sure, Opera Mini may (or may not) already be the most popular mobile browser in the world -- but why stop there? Following up on the Android release of Opera Mobile 4 just over a year ago, Opera has just launched Opera Mini 5 for Android into public...

Pelago knows that just about every location-based app in the world is seeking coverage right now just prior to SXSW where they will all battle Highlander-style. So they approached me with a pretty smart pitch: curing the "social rut." What they mean...

Over the last six months, doubleTwist, the iTunes alternative that lets you manage your music, videos, and photos, has really been stepping up its game. In October the company integrated an Amazon-powered MP3 store, allowing users to download and syn...

Earlier this year, Google landed a "landmark" deal with Global Cricket Ventures, the licensing partner to the Indian Premier League (IPL), which would give them the so rights to live stream cricket matches from the IPL on YouTube. This is a huge deal...