General Motors plans to stop advertising on Facebook after determining its paid ads had little impact on consumers. The news comes just days ahead of Facebook's IPO.

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(Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife) Just days before Facebook's historic stock offering, General Motors said it plans to stop advertising on the social media site, concluding that its paid ads don't have a big impact on consumers. GM spends about $40 million a year on Facebook marketing, according to the Wall [...]

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Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of something brand new from nothing but an idea. More »

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Quora co-founders Charlie Cheever & Adam D’Angelo @ Crunchies 2010 Quora, a Palo Alto-based knowledge (read: Q&A) community has raised a whopping $50 million in Series B funding from co-founder Adam D’Angelo along with Facebook early funder Peter Thiel, Northbridge Ventures and Matrix Ventures. D’Angelo, who was chief technology officer of Facebook, has put $20 million of his own money (big props for that) in Quora while others chipped in the rest.  D’Angelo co-founded the company with Charlie ...  show all text

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An ode to the father of the electric age. View

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Starting today, you can discover the best of Twitter in a weekly email digest delivered to your inbox. This summary features the most relevant Tweets and stories shared by the people you’re connected to on Twitter. Stories feature a design similar to the recently updated Discover tab, emphasizing who shared each story beneath summaries to help you decide which ones matter most to you. Click any headline to finish reading the story, add your take by tweeting directly from the email, and see rel...  show all text

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More than nine million apps and services use Facebook Connect, the Open Graph developer platform, which gives company powers to predict the future. It can turn on the traffic spigot for some apps such as Socialcam. But it can turn off the spigot, equally fast.

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Dave McClure speaking at the US Embassy in Mexico City. Photo by George Kellerman It’s around 8:30 on a warm Friday night in Mexico City, and we’re all milling around a podium set up in the lobby of the private residence of the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, Earl Anthony Wayne. Dozens of Mexico’s tech entrepreneurs and investing elite are mingling with more than 40 members of Geeks on a Plane, a traveling tech-revue of sorts organized by the Silicon Valley investment group, 500 Startups. Just outsi...  show all text

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Facebook announced some intended changes to its data use policy to "enhance transparency", according to a Friday post on its Facebook and Privacy page. The updates include better explanations, examples, and "tips" denoted in the text with a lightbulb, as well as some revelations about how third parties deal with users' data. In the revised data use policy, Facebook makes explicit that any time one of your Facebook friends starts using an app, game, or partner website (that, is a site where you ...  show all text

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Facebook’s founder will soon face the unfamiliar landscape of running a public company, monitored by a merciless stock market.

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When Eduardo Saverin was 13, his family discovered that his name had turned up on a list of victims to be kidnapped by Brazilian gangs. Saverin’s father was a wealthy businessman in São Paulo, and it was inevitable that he’d attract this kind of unwanted attention. Now the family had to make a permanent decision. They hastily arranged a move out of the country. And of all the places in the world they could move to, the Saverin family saw only one option. They took their talents to Miami. Would ...  show all text

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All those minutes reading your news feed in bed, messaging friends over lunch, and browsing photos on the bus really add up. Time spent on Facebook’s mobile site and apps per month (441 minutes) has finally surpassed usage of its classic website (391 minutes) — for Americans who use both Facebook interfaces according to the latest report from comScore. And that’s actually a big problem for the social network. Facebook usually shows four to seven ads per page on its website, but only a few ads p...  show all text

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For Google Maps, winter is coming. Potentially. As you’ve undoubtedly seen by now, with the upcoming iOS 6 software, Apple intends to replace the Google Maps aspect of their default Maps application with their own, in-house version. Mark Gurman of 9to5 Mac was the first to report this news, and dives into more of the detail behind it, including the 3D aspect. John Paczkowski of AllThingsD confirmed the change. And after talking to my own source, I can beat the dead horse in confirming the switc...  show all text

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L’une des lacunes de l’interface de Twitter.com réside dans l’impossibilité de gérer plusieurs profils depuis un même compte. Il semble que Twitter déploie doucement cette fonctionnalité. Du moins, elle est présente sur certains comptes. Cette fonctionnalité se nomme Contributeurs. Elle vous permet d’ajouter un ou plusieurs utilisateurs auxquels vous déléguez la possibilité d’utiliser votre compte sans révéler votre mot de passe. Cette nouveauté m’apparaît être très pertinente pour les entrep...  show all text

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Gina Trapani says the technology companies that promote a culture of frat house fun will lose out in attracting the smartest people.

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So first things first: We're not being sold! Instead, we've just hired a bunch of brilliant writers and a new COO. Also, we have seen a resurgence of community support (with over a thousand people attending our NYC meetup last night, for example), are back at around 12% on the much-lauded Techmeme leaderboard and are gearing up for our NYC Disrupt conference.Our traffic is up with regards to unique visits year over year and we are working on getting our pageviews up to pre-awful redesign levels...

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We weren’t sure about this one at first, but now we have two independent sources confirming that AOL is exploring the sale of its cornerstone technology sites Engadget and TechCrunch. The two would likely be sold together as AOL Tech, possibly including smaller assets like TUAW and Joystiq. The asking price? A hefty $70 million to $100 million. AOL is hoping to make something off the drama of the past couple of years: $70 million would net the struggling Internet company about $10 million profit  show all text

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Ego tracking and Social Media Monitoring for twitter, facebook, YouTube, MySpace, bit.ly and Google Analytics. Free for individuals.

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Are you annoyed by all those automatic Facebook news apps? Apparently you're not alone. They're falling off a cliff right now. The Washington Post was the first publication to experiment with a "frictionless" social reader app, which launched last year. If you use Facebook you've probably come across it: it manifests as a clustered list of stories that are almost completely unrelated except for the fact that they all come from the same publication. If you decide to click on a link it doesn't ...  show all text

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A board remains in lock step with Rupert Murdoch, despite a growing storm of investigations.

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"Chasing the past, I stumbled into the future". - T A Sachs I've always been a firm believer that in order to look to the future, we must look back to and fully grasp the past (and the present). Having had several recent engaging conversations with smart people who I respect, I've picked up a hint of exhaustion around usage of the word "social". Could it be that some who saw the "change" coming years ago are weary of having carried that torch for so many years as we move into the heavy lifting?  show all text

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Fashion retailer C&A may be a fading brand in much of Europe, but its Brazilian arm is doing what it can to stay on the pulse of social media. A new initiative called Fashion Like allows people...

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At the local gym, it's not unusual to see hardcore members contorting themselves to fool the stairmaster machine into giving them good numbers. If you use your arms, you can lift yourself off the machine and trick it into thinking you're working yourself really hard. Of course, you end up with cramped shoulders and a lousy workout, but who cares, the machine said you burned 600 calories... The same thing happens with authors who put themselves and their readers through the wringer to get a spot...  show all text

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Updated. Today was just another Saturday morning in blog land when Robert Scoble, the well-known tech startup enthusiast, went to post a comment on a Facebook post written by Carnegie Mellon student (and TechCrunch commenter extraordinaire) Max Woolf about the nature of today’s tech blogging scene. Scoble’s comment itself was pretty par-for-the-course — generally agreeing with Woolf’s sentiments and adding in his own two cents. But when Scoble went to click post, he received an odd error messag...  show all text

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A little under one month after its acquisition of Instagram, Facebook has acquired Highlight competitor and ambient location app Glancee. The social network has already shut down the developer’s passive location app and all three co-founders, Glancee’s only full-time employees, will join Facebook, which now owns its technology. Eric Eldon described Glancee as, “A nice-guy ambient social location app for normal people,” so its ideas and founders should fit in well building for Facebook’s mainstr...  show all text

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Adam Yauch one-third of the pioneering hip-hop group the Beastie Boys has died at the age of 47 Rolling Stone has learned Yauch also known as MCA had been in treatment for cancer since 2009 The rapper was diagnosed in 2009 after discovering a tumor in his salivary gland "It is...

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LinkedIn has just acquired professional content sharing platform SlideShare for $119 million in cash and stock. We’ve pasted the release below. SlideShare is a sharing platform for business documents, videos and presentations. SlideShare lets anyone share presentations and video and also serves as a social discovery platform for users to find relevant content and connect with other members who share similar interests. The company also has a huge enterprise following, and companies like IBM and ...  show all text

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It's official. To transition from a startup into a late-stage company that aims to be around for 100 years, Evernote today confirms it's raised a $70 million Series D round of funding at a $1 billion valuation.  Meritech Capital and CBC Capital were chosen to lead the round because they're the firms that can help Evernote prepare for an eventual IPO.Evernote doesn't need the money. It still has much of the $96 million that it's raised to date in the bank plus over one million paying customers o...

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