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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 by that is these days, despite the prevalence of social networks, people are actually less social th […]

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 sync their music directly with any of hundreds of compatible devices, much as they would with the iTunes/iPod com […]

Twitter has just flipped the switch on gelocation within Twitter.com. Now at least some users can pull up location-based information from individual tweets on the microblogging website.While attaching locations to tweets has been possible for several months now through third party apps, Twitter.com itself hasn’t done much geolocation until today. It was fi […]

Sony has named its forthcoming PlayStation 3 motion controller “PlayStation Move.” The controller is Sony’s answer to Nintendo’s Wii Remote and Microsoft’s Project Natal for Xbox 360 — a way to use motion to play video games instead of (or at least in addition to) buttons.The controller was originally announced at the E3 interactive entertainment conference […]

Last Saturday, several hundred folks gathered at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government to spend the day discussing Open Government. I attended, and Laurel Ruma (O'Reilly's Gov 2.0 Evangelist) was one of the organizers. […]

Folks in the web world are accustomed to granular information, yet brick-and-mortar businesses are still largely in the dark on the data front. But what if business owners could gather hard data? What if they could use that information to entice customers and adapt their offerings? Mobile location tools are poised to make this possible. […]

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 recently unveiled secret agreement that Apple makes iPhone developers sign supports what many have suspected all along: Apple is trying to control the universe. […]

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 […]

This is a guest post by Ben Huh. The toughest competition I’ve ever had to deal with was The Joneses. I had never… […]