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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 consumer products and services startups. The majority of transactions in January were sales of Facebook sto […]

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. But apparently Barnes & Noble are at least aware that they won the award. They are using it to promote […]

If you’ve never been to Hong Kong, and you’ve heard legends about the busy streets of the city, you can now see how it looks for yourself without leaving your comfy chair, as Google has launched its Street View service for Hong Kong.The huge city has been covered extremely well; just zoom out of Street View, pull the little yellow Street View figure on the u […]

Opera Mini 5 Beta was first introduced about 5 months ago, but owners of Android-based smartphones had to wait until now to get their hands on Opera’s nifty mobile browser.This version is nearly identical to the Opera Mini 5 Beta for other handsets; biggest improvements are speed dial, tabbed browsing, password management and better optimization for touchscr […]

Tech-minded volunteers quickly pitched in with a variety of communication and data services in the days following the Haiti earthquake. One company -- crowdsourcing platform CrowdFlower -- repurposed its service as a text-message translation tool to aid Mission 4636. CrowdFlower founder and CEO Lukas Biewald shares his story in this guest post. […]

January 2010 US Mobile Subscriber Market Share (ComScore) -- Android just overtook Palm, and is growing faster than the other smartphone platforms. And for a reality check, 28% of mobile customers used a browser on their phone. This and more in today's Four Short Links. […]

Hardly a week goes by where we don’t receive a company pitch from a hopeful startup trying to crash the group deals scene. And for good reason, since venture capital firms seem happy to throw cash at well-executed takes on the business model. LivingSocial is the latest to score a large amount of funding. It raised $25 million in a round led by U.S. Venture P […]

Just after Sony debuted its new motion controller tonight, the Japanese company threw a big God of War III launch party. The game has been in the works for more than three years and it finally debuts on March 16. After a day full of GamesBeat@GDC panels, I made it to the party, which was bathed in neon light and featured a cool band. In the game, you play Kr […]

Think the semantic web is all hype with no bite? Paul Allen backed semantic startup Evri will announce tomorrow that it has been acquired, we've learned from a reliable source. The service specializes in extracting the names of people, places and things from raw streams of text in order to facilitate smart user navigation and related content recommend […]

The Internet has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for 2010--but should it be? The nomination was proposed by the Italian version of technology magazine Wired and has so far been endorsed by 11 people including 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi and Nicholas Negroponte, founder of One Laptop Per Child. […]

Despite the fact that Groupon dominates all of its smaller competitors in the daily-deals market, rival LivingSocial is trying to draw some blood by expanding with the help of a new infusion of venture funding. Originally posted at The Social […]

Twitter.  Digg.  Facebook.  37Signals.  These are companies known on every continent.  They are not publicly traded and don’t have huge offices or development… […]