Late last night, word began to spread around the tech community that one of Diaspora‘s four co-founders, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, had passed away. With much sadness, we’ve now confirmed this terrible news with the Diaspora team. The news is incredibly jarring, to the point that much else I could say escapes me. Ilya was just...
Diaspora sent out a new round of invites to a redesigned alpha version of its open source social network today. The invites came just before the saddening news broke that 22 year old founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy had recently passed away. Since it first administered invites a year ago, the service has launched hashtag following, direct...
Burma looks could be set to more than double its Internet users over the next five years following a new deal with China’s Beijing Xinwei Telecom company. The new agreement will see Xinwei’s wireless technology, which is already used to provide broadband in three key cities in Burma, expanded to provide services to an...
Jack Dorsey’s mobile payments startup Square is now processing $11 million a day in mobile payments, it was revealed today at the Techonomy conference in Tucson, Arizona. Host David Kirkpatrick threw the number out there as something Dorsey had told him backstage—the last official number was $10 million a day and Square may not...
Part of the Angelpad inaugural class, “Yelp for the outdoors” AllTrails is today announcing a $400K round of seed funding by 500 Startups and 2020 Ventures. In the same trail review space as Trails.com, AllTrails allows you to review and browse hiking trails based on location, popularity, recency, length and more granular (which is my word...
On November 15, 2011, we’re throwing a ReadWriteWeb Meetup near you! There are several great meetups planned already, but it’s not too late to put one together for your locale. The meetup in Seoul will be held at Shakr Media HQ and is going to be held at 7:30pm. More information on the location...
This morning, we received a tip pointing out some serious user interface redesigns on YouTube. Don’t rush off to take a peek just yet, though — the changes haven’t been rolled out to everyone. Google’s been known to test redesigns with small subsets of users, so it’s expected that only a few folks will be...
Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox at GigaOM RoadMap 2011 In 2007, it was pretty obvious to us that cloud was going to become a decades-long disruption, and in 2008, we hosted our first Structure conference. Soon thereafter, we launched Mobilize to cover the mobile Internet. Those two themes stemmed from my core belief that...
There are hundreds of local recommendation apps for iPhone that aim to help you find quality food and drink at venues near you. These apps let you rank places and then comment on menu items. Oink, on the other hand, lets you rank anything, from a hamburger, to a video game, to just a...
There’s a lot to be said for what Motorola has done in the Android phone market over the past couple of years. The original Droid was, arguably, the first Android phone to capture the attention of “normals” and its name has become as interchangeable with Android as Jell-O is with gelatin or Kleenex is...