In the white heat of the current tech market it’s sometimes easy to forget that some companies, although taking their time, simply become viable businesses – instead of waiting for a call from Facebook or Twitter that may never come. I’ve been covering web site and shop builder Moonfruit for longer than I care to remember (they launched in 2000), but along the way husband and wife team Joe and Wendy White kept on pushing the company until it was one of the most innovative of its kind out there....  show all text

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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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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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An ode to the father of the electric age. View

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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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When it comes to the traditional screen that families gather around, live television is competing against a growing array of self-selected content, and audiences are bolting.

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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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[Re-posted from last night.] Below is a remarkable document. It's a memo circulated by Jan van Lohuizen, a highly respected Republican pollster, (he polled for George W. Bush in 2004), to various leading Republican operatives, candidates and insiders. It's on the fast-shifting poll data on marriage equality and gay rights in general, and how that should affect Republican policy and language. And the pollster's conclusion is clear: if the GOP keeps up its current rhetoric and positions on gays a...  show all text

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“I am honored to be doing this cover. It’s a celebratory moment for our country, and that’s what I tried to capture. (I don’t especially like those rainbow colors, but they are what they are—I had to use them.) I wanted to celebrate the bravery of the President’s statement—a statement long overdue—but all the more appreciated in this political year. We are on the right side of history.” —Bob Staake, the artist who created “Spectrum of Light,” the cover of next week’s issue.

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One of the things I’m fascinated by are the small lies we tell ourselves. They usually take the form of aphorisms that seem to be true. Or more to the point, they have an important subtle message, but they’re perceived as whole truths. And, often they’re so ubiquitous we don’t even give them a second thought. But, these small lies end up having a pretty distorting effect on our behavior or our perceptions. One example of this is the statement “life is short.” I hear it all the time. I understand  show all text

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One man’s ruthless, relentless pursuit of market minutiae.

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From the blog ABC News Blogs: President Obama today announced that he now supports same-sex marriage, reversing his longstanding opposition amid growing pressure from the Democratic base and even his own vice president.

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In an extraordinary intelligence coup, the would-be suicide bomber dispatched by the Al Qaeda branch in Yemen last month infiltrated the terrorist group and volunteered for the mission, officials said.

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Mr. Sendak, known in particular for “Where the Wild Things Are,” was widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century.

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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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More than two decades after selling lifetime passes for unlimited first-class travel, American Airlines begins scrutinizing the costs — and the customers.

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

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In just six years, Twitter has become the life-support system for those seeking news, humour, wisdom or a shot of esoteric web weirdness. Here, introduced by Lauren Laverne, 50 top tweeters reveal their three favourite follows. Plus, five experts on the Twitter accounts that define their fields The internet is like a talking bear: undoubtedly miraculous but best approached with caution. This has never been truer than in the case of the time-thief Twitter. In the six years since its inception, t...  show all text

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Fox is the empire’s good son, but also its most toxic legacy.

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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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Mr. Yauch, whose nom de rap was MCA, helped make the first hip-hop album to top the Billboard chart, and later became involved in championing freedom in Tibet.

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Mr. Yauch, who went by the moniker MCA and was one of the founders of the seminal hip-hop group, died of cancer at the age of 47.

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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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I like to look at raw numbers every once in a while, without external influence, to recalibrate my ability to judge the magnitude of things. Here are some of the numbers from Facebook's most recent S-1 filing (published on May 3rd) which I think are important as metrics to compare against when thinking about relative success and opportunity. (Sources are at the bottom.) Total users and engagement 125,000 M Friendships 2,000 M Likes per day 1,000 M Comments posted per day 901 M Monthly active us...  show all text

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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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