A recently published business development analysis by research firm Gartner looked into social networks’ need for a more structurally sound revenue stream, and came to the conclusion that to maintain viability and competitiveness, they will soon enter the financial services industry. One Gartner analyst, Juergen Weiss, went so far as to predict that by the [...]

Today Facebook announced open registration for its second annual Hacker Cup, a competition for the best hacker. Programmers from around the world will race to accurately solve algorithmic problems, advancing through five rounds of challenges. The winners will walk away with prizes. Only one programmer will take home the title of world champion and the [...]

Google is making incremental improvements to the Android platform to ease the burden of fragmentation on developers and original equipment manufacturers. While still allowing manufacturers to create custom skins, Google is doing its best to standardize the rest of the of the Android development environment with version 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. Themes are a big [...]

For most print publishers, the transition from ink to pixels has been at least somewhat painful. Over the last few years, the industry has seen widespread layoffs, furloughs, bankruptcies and newspaper closures. The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News are no exception. The company that previously owned the two daily papers filed for bankruptcy in 2009 [...]

The promises from Intel on the week before CES 2012 in Las Vegas speak of a device that’s as lightweight as a tablet, but that has the full keyboard users require to do real-world work, and the Windows 8 operating system they need for their everyday software. It’s a “tablet plus,” if you will. But [...]

Today Zynga launched Hidden Chronicles, a new Facebook game all about discovering hidden objects in an abandoned estate. It’s sort of like “Where’s Waldo?” in that users click on an image still over and over again until they finally find the objects within. Perhaps not-too-surprisingly, Hidden Chronicles is Zynga’s first foray into the world of [...]

The social Web is noisy. Each individual social network is noisy enough, but there’s a second layer of noise – notifications – in which all the social apps compete with each other just to draw the user in. The creator of Handpick sent me along his solution today, and I love where it’s going. Handpick [...]