After HTC and other suitors walked away from potential acquisition, HP has just stepped up to announce it will buy the beleaguered Palm for $1.2 billion. This is very close to the previously rumored acquisition price and represents $5.70 per…
Today I caught up with 4INFO CEO Zaw Thet, who walked me through the advertiser, publisher and user facing aspects of its mobile network. Though it's often thought of an SMS ad network, the company continues to diversify ad formats,…
Before there were 185,000 iPhone apps (or an App Store) Urbanspoon was one of our "preseason" picks for favorite app. It became not only one of the most popular local apps, but also a shining example of a new breed…
One of the hottest topics across the tech media and blogosphere (besides iPad and Facebook updates) continues to be social location based services. It was a big theme at Twitter's seminal Chirp event, Foursquare's escalating valuation, and continued speculation over…
Foursquare continues to boost efforts to get local merchants to promote specials to its users. Its last few moves are outlined in past posts (here and here). The latest is a new tool for business owners to claim their listings…
I'm at AdTech today speaking on a mobile marketing panel and squeezing in whatever briefings I can. I just had the chance to meet with Scanbuy, one of the companies in the quickly growing mobile bar code scanning space. As…
Today is Foursquare day (4/16 is four squared). The movement started with a Florida optometrist to celebrate with meetups and merchant offers in cities that include Miami, San Diego, New Orleans, Portland and London. Interesting how a user phenomenon --…
Today Charles Laughlin and I had the chance to talk to European Directories’ group vice president of mobile, Carey Bunks. He was more forthright than most when it came to mobile monetization strategies and real numbers. Specifically, EDSA is generating…
At today's Chirp event in San Francisco, Twitter's prevailing message was growing revenues and resources applied to running a tighter ship. This includes communication and support for the legions of third-party developers building Twitter products. As it's been a hot…
As reported in The New York Times and elsewhere, Twitter has taken a big step toward more substantial monetization with a new "Promoted Tweets" program. It's essentially a form of search marketing, where sponsored tweets will take the top spot…
A new word cloud generator is on the scene (via TechCrunch) called Tagxedo. Word clouds were all the rage a couple of years ago as one of the iconic symbols of Web 2.0. blogs and social bookmarking tools everywhere were…
As reported this morning here and everywhere else in the world, Apple's anticipated iAd program was given a name and a face. First, this is big. It's a bold but logical platform for building, distributing and displaying mobile ads. Its…
At today's iPhone 4.0 software unveiling, a slate of new Apple products and usage data were presented in true Steve Jobs style. Nothing was revealed about the event beforehand except that it was for iPhone 4.0 and of course the…
I continue to catch up on missed items from the past few weeks of conferences and iPad frenzy. During the week of our Marketplaces conference, a new SMB reputation management tool called Chatmeter was launched by former V-Enabler Collin Holmes.…
We're just a day from the iPad's official release and the media storm has predictably begun. An early set of extremely limited units were given to entertainers like Stephen Colbert and David Letterman, and shows like "Modern Family," reflecting a…
The early iPad reviews are out from Walt Mossberg and David Pogue, and their reactions are mostly positive. We're generally not a product review house but happy to link to the experts to handle that. What's more interesting to me…
I just heard from a reliable source at Apple that iPads have shipped early to Apple stores and are available for purchase. They aren't advertising the availability, so some casual shoppers will get a surprise. The list of stores wasn't…
Prompted by my writeup of Google's new mobile pay-per-call program, I had the chance today to speak with the executive team at RingRevenue. The company provides a platform for partners to monetize incoming calls. It private labels the platform for…
One of the challenges of running conferences is keeping our analyst hats on and covering the world outside the venue walls. We're still catching up on notable media and tech news items from last week. But luckily there's a fair…
As my colleague Peter Krasilovsky notes below, eBay has rebranded its global classified company Kijiji as eBay Classifieds. Parallel with that announcement, the company has launched two new iPhone apps and some projections about the merchandise value it expects to…
