Technology News

Visa Seeks to Extend Retail Dominance with Pay-with-iPhone Service

Source: All About Jazz
May 19, 2010

E-Wallet: A battle is heating up over the right to process payments when you wave your cellphone over a sensor to buy goods at a local merchant.

Visa made waves this week by announcing a collaboration with DeviceFidelity, which makes an iPhone case called In2Pay with a near- field communications microSD card embedded in it that will allow iPhone users whose devices lack a microSD card to get in on the action. To pay at any of Visas swipe-free payWave ...

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Germany Asks Google to Surrender Private Data

Source: Michael Ricci
May 19, 2010

Google came under increased pressure in Europe on Tuesday over its collection of private data from unsecured home wireless networks, as a German regulator threatened legal action if the company did not surrender a hard drive for inspection. The German demand underscored the seriousness of the quandary Google now faced following its admission last Friday that it had stored the snippets of Web sites and personal e-mail messages from people around the world while compiling its Street View photo archive. ...

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How to Transfer Your Stanza E-Book Library to iBooks for iPad

Source: All About Jazz
May 19, 2010

Stanza, our favorite iPhone e-reader application, has not yet been updated for the iPad. Maybe its coming soon and will be awesome, or maybe the current owner, Amazon, has killed it to reduce competition for its money-making Kindle app.

Either way, unless you want to read your e-book collection on a blocky, pixel-doubled screen, you'll have to switch readers. But what of all the books you already have in your Stanza library? Here we show you how to extract you ...

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Gmail's New API: Email as Enterprise Platform

Source: Michael Ricci
May 19, 2010

Google has announced the availability of a new Application Programming Interface (API) that allows 3rd party services to offer contextually relevant content and functionality inside the email interface of Google Apps Gmail users. It's just the latest sign that the email sector is heating up again.

If you've noticed the way that certain Google properties like YouTube and Picassa have been treated differently when linked-to inside an email viewed in Gmail (both have resulted in video or image previews for ...

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New Tool Highlights Facebook Users' Disregard for Privacy

Source: Michael Ricci
May 18, 2010

Think your Facebook profile is private? You had better double-check. A new website provides a voyeuristic look into the once-private social network by making Facebook status updates searchable.

“My boss is a jerk and always tells me what I'm doing wrong!", posts one user who we'll be kind enough to not name (although her full name is available on the site). “Shhh! Don't tell anyone, but I'm totally wearing my new corset to work today," another woman over-shares. “I totally ...

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Rejections and Careers Are Getting Shorter

Source: All About Jazz
May 17, 2010

Biz discovers it's a cold, cruel twitterverse. To save you time, here's a summary of this column: Tweets are in, manners are out.

Let me elaborate for those readers with pre-Twitter patience: In Hollywood, the process of rejection is becoming colder and more abrupt. And rejection is what most communications are all about. Talk to veterans of the scene, and the trend runs something like this: A few years ago if you wanted to cancel a ...

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YouTube at 5

Source: Michael Ricci
May 17, 2010

In just five years, YouTube became the go-to video site

YouTube had an extra-special Valentine's Day this year. Chad Hurley, YouTube co-founder and current CEO, announced that on Sunday, the site officially turned 5 years old. “When we registered the YouTube domain on February 14, 2005, we set out to create a place where anyone with a video camera and an Internet connection could share a story with the world," Hurley wrote on the company's blog. “Five years into it, ...

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Worlds Largest Social Network: The Open Web

Source: Michael Ricci
May 17, 2010

ON its Web site, Facebook says its giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.

But the online world outside of Facebook is already a very open and connected place, thank you very much. Densely interlinked Web pages, blogs, news articles and Tweets are all visible to anyone and everyone. Instead of contributing to this interconnected, open Web world, the growing popularity of Facebook is draining it of attention, energy and posts that are ...

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