UPDATE, 12:32 p.m.Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, said during a Friday conference call that her understanding of Komen's announcement is that it's a complete reversal of the decision to bar funding to her group. "It's quite clear that Planned Parenthood and our health centers and our doctors are eligible now to work with Komen foundation again," Richards said, before adding that she hasn't actually talked to Komen leaders about the decision. "I certainly take them at their wor...  show all text

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If you live near a Microsoft retail store, you can now pre-order a Nokia Lumia 900 with a $25 down payment, the Verge reports. Unfortunately, even if you do that, you still won’t know how much the device will cost when it finally arrives, probably in March. The Lumia 900 sports a 4.3″ AMOLED ClearBlack display with a 800×480 pixel resolution, an 8-megapixel camera (as well as a 1-megapixel front-facing one for video chat) and LTE/HSPA+ support. With a 1.4 GHz processor, an Adreno 205 GPU and 512  show all text

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“I really think 2012 is going to be the Twitter Election,” Dick Costolo said on stage at AllThingsD‘s media conference in Laguna Nigel, Calif., Monday evening. It was an unusually confident declaration from a CEO who has hitherto appeared remarkably modest in his communications. By saying that 2012 would be a “Twitter Election,” Costolo was not suggesting that sentiment analysis of tweets would indicate the winning candidate. Instead, he meant that Twitter has become an essential platform for r...  show all text

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Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom can’t defend his top-spot score in the game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 from behind bars — he was recently bumped to the no. 2 spot by a player named Azaros. On Wednesday, a judge denied Dotcom bail, meaning he likely won’t be able to usurp Azaros’ Modern Warfare 3 title anytime soon. But Kim Dotcom, 38, has more troubling concerns than his gaming title. Last week, Dotcom appeared in court to face charges of copyright infringement to the tune of $175 million, and  show all text

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Sure, it's easy to grab a first name from a database or glean some info from a profile. But when you pretend to know me, you've already started our relationship with a lie. You've cheapened the tools we use to recognize each other and you've tricked me, at least a little. Direct mail used to take advantage of this technique a lot, and since they measure everything, they knew when it worked. Online, though, we're seeing less disciplined marketers (big and small) continually mess it up. The clues...  show all text

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Let’s face it: Apple is rich. So rich it could send a crowd of people to the moon to build a luxury hotel and hang out there for a few years. Here’s what else it could do, according to our friends at The Joy of Tech. It’s not surprising Apple is so deeply awash in cash, especially after its spectacular first-quarter earnings announced this week. You can see the details of Apple’s unbelievable numbers here, but will give you a highlight: the company’s revenues for the quarter were higher than its  show all text

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Most member states of the European Union have signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) at a ceremony in Tokyo, Japan on Thursday, Jan. 26. ACTA is a global treaty that tries to normalize copyright protection and IP standards. It’s similar to SOPA and PIPA, proposed U.S. laws which have recently been dropped after massive internet protests, but in many ways even more dangerous. Unfortunately (and unlike SOPA and PIPA), ACTA has been signed by many states without a wide, open public ...  show all text

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Google is opening up its social networking service Google+ to teens as of today, according to a post from Google’s VP, Product Management, Bradley Horowitz. The move puts the network in closer competition with Facebook, which also requires that individuals be at least 13 year old before creating an account. Says Horowitz, everyone who’s old enough for a Google account (13+ in most countries), can now create a Google+ account too. The announcement was made alongside news of a few new safety enha...  show all text

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The NFL is going to allow players to tweet during the game from this Sunday’s Pro Bowl. As first reported by CNBC’s Darren Rovell, players will be allowed to tweet from a designated area on the sidelines. The NFL, often called the “No Fun League,” famously disallowed in-game tweeting in July of 2009. The NFL later fined a player for tweeting from a training camp. Still, the league’s position regarding social media has evolved over time. Of course, this is the NFL, so the sanctioned Pro Bowl twe...  show all text

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I don't often get a chance to write about a startup from my home country (Belgium) that I'm super excited about, so consider me a happy camper. Meet CheckThis.com, a new micro-publishing service that lets you create and share a single, good-looking Web page in mere seconds.CheckThis is designed for people who need a little more space than a tweet but don't want to go through the hassle of setting up a new blog. In literally instants, you can use CheckThis to create a stand-alone page to sell yo...

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Gearing up for Twitter’s self-serve advertising launch — currently in beta stage with only a small selection of advertisers — the company announced its acquisition of spam and malware protection service Dasient on Monday. Dasient will be integrated into Twitter’s “revenue engineering team because they have a deep understanding of advertising-platform security issues,” says Rachael Horwitz, a spokesperson for Twitter. The team will be very valuable as Twitter continues to expand its ad products....  show all text

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Following weeks of speculation, it appears Research in Motion (RIM) is finally ready to oust Co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis. The two are, according to a press release from RIM, stepping aside on Monday and will be replaced by company insider and former COO Thorsten Heins. Heins, who also joins the company’s board, is already listed as President and CEO on RIM’s executive bios page. The change in leadership may have come at the behest of Lazaridis who explained in a statement, “There c...  show all text

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News spread quickly Saturday evening that former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno had died. Except, he hadn’t. Here is an account of how it happened. [View the story "False reports of Joe Paterno's death" on Storify]

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Apple once bragged that its products were made in America. But it has since shifted its immense manufacturing work overseas, posing questions about what corporate America owes Americans.

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Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up-to-date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention. What’s New This Week? Facebook Announces Tight Integration of 60 Apps to Timeline, More on the Way: Facebook now allows developers a tighter integration with Facebook’s Timeline. “More than 60 apps are immediately going live, including such favorites as Pinterest, eBay, Foodspotting, Airbnb and Foursquare.” Check out the new  show all text

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Google announced today that it is closing a number of services that it wasn't able to attract millions of users to without making any effort. The worst of the lot to lose are two: the Social Graph API and DIY data extraction service Needlebase. Following on the heels of the kitten-stomping-bad sunsetting of Postrank, these latest closures are really meaningful, even if the adoption of the services never was. Back when there was hope for Needlebase, the Social Graph API and for Postrank, those s...  show all text

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Most modern smartphones have a problem – their battery simply doesn’t last long enough, especially with heavy usage. As the smartphone screens get bigger and bigger, the battery drain increases, but now Arman Ahnood, a researcher at the London Centre for Nanotechnology, has an elegant solution: smartphone screens with built-in solar cells. According to Ahnood, only 36% of the light produced by an OLED display is projected out and the rest is wasted. This wasted light, which is scattered or “ble...  show all text

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You've got to feel sorry for the SOPA guys.They did all the right things. They got legislation introduced that would protect their industry from inconvenient threats -- like that pesky Internet. They spent millions on lobbying from their $63m budget. And they even hired a high-profile, well-connected, just-out-of-Congress Senator for the bargain price of a $1.5 million base salary to run their organization. And yet it appears that their support is collapsing and are resorting to a rather pathet...

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Motorola has started rolling out Android 4.0 or Ice Cream Sandwich to Motorola Xoom owners in the U.S., but only those who have the Wi-Fi version of the device. This will bring a redesigned app launcher, a better web browser, resizable widgets and many other goodies to the tablet. As for the 3G version of the tablet, Motorola said it will get the update as well, but did not give an exact date. The update will be rolling out in “phases over the course of a few weeks,” so don’t be perturbed if yo...  show all text

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The time has come for another Facebook launch event, and we’re here to cover it live. Rumor has it that the social network will be launching more apps based on the Open Graph and Gestures — that is, apps that let you “verb” any “noun” (read a book, hike a trail, ride a bike and so on.) SEE MORE: Facebook Announces Tight Integration of 60 Apps to Timeline The event starts at 5pm Pacific Time, 8pm Eastern — and we’ll be here to chat and answer questions a half-hour beforehand. Stay tuned! More ...  show all text

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The widespread Internet blackout Wednesday, in which sites such as Wikipedia and Reddit went dark to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), seems to have influenced members of the U.S. Congress. PIPA co-sponsor Florida Sen. Marco Rubio pulled his name from the bill Wednesday, and SOPA co-sponsor Arizona Rep. Ben Quayle pulled his name Tuesday. Rubio communicated his withdrawal via a Facebook post, titled “A Better Way to Fight the Online Theft of...  show all text

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Fantasy sports, just like everything else, have also been making the transition to mobile, with news aggregating apps turning to fantasy sports (a la Taptu, Evri, and more). But few of the big media properties have gotten with the times and opened their data-rich platforms to indie developers and data hounds. Today, it looks like CBS Sports is leading the way, as it is officially opening up its fantasy sports service to third party developers, companies, and startups looking to create apps for ...

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Jon M. Huntsman Jr. informed his advisers on Sunday that he intends to drop out of the Republican presidential race, ending his candidacy a week before he had hoped to revive his campaign in the South Carolina primary.

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