We’ve gotten a tip that Solvate, a venture-backed marketplace for hiring freelance work, is shutting down. Apparently, the freelancers who do work through Solvate have been told that the service will end effective March 1. I’ve emailed and called Solvate, and haven’t gotten a response yet. (I will update this post if hear back.)...
Walmart is announcing this evening that it has upped its investment in Yihaodian, a massive B2C e-commerce company based in China. Walmart, which originally funded the retail giant last year, has made another undisclosed investment in Yihaodian to bring Walmart’s total ownership stake to approximately 51 percent. Closing of the transaction is subject to...
Nearly every designer shares a strong love for typography. Many will never become type designers, or even dedicated typographers, but somehow we all lust for the details of gorgeous type treatments, display and text fonts. Out of every genre hidden in the depths of typography, from black letter to grotesque, I have a soft spot for experimental...
Powerful People Targeted Botnets: the End of @ Political Satire? @_nicolassarkozy was managed by Kaboul.fr, a French political and satirical online webzine, that holds many other satirical Twitter accounts, like @_Carla_Bruni, Sarkozy’s wife, @_Jacques_Chirac, the former french president, and @FrancoisHolland, Sarkozy’s main competitor in the ongoing presidential race. According to Kaboul.fr, which, after complaining,...
Nokia’s Lumia line of smartphones is new enough that if you have some of its component handsets mentally twisted, fret not. Here’s the straight dope: the Lumia 710, 800, and 900 are real. However, rumors are running hot about Nokia’s Windows Phones, and so figuring out what is legitimate, and what is not, can be hard....
Will Silicon Valley kill Hollywood? Based on recent developments, it seems much more likely that the two will converge, as professional-quality original programming makes its way onto the Internet. Not only is it increasingly common for content producers to try their luck on platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo, but this move is now...
Over the past several years, the US Army has developed an exemplary program in exploiting numerous social media methods, and done so without a lot of flash, expense, or personnel. They have an engaged audience, numerous followers, and maintained a multi-pronged campaign into all of the major social media networks, including recent beach-heads in...
Google’s recent update to Google Maps for Android hit the Market with a small changelog of bug fixes and improvements to battery performance, but the search giant also appears to have added a new gaming element to its Latitude location service. The new update sees Latitude Leaderboards quietly launch within the app, awarding points to...
If you’re an every day user of Twitter’s official mobile app you may be noticing some inconsistencies when it comes to displaying photos that your followers post. Basically, every now and then when you view a tweet that has a photo hosted by Twitter by way of its partnership with PhotoBucket, the photo won’t...
Regressive, telco industry-influenced state legislators are at it again, trying to kill communities’ right to determine their own broadband futures. Anti-community broadband bills are rearing their ugly heads in several states. The anti-SOPA/PIPA crusades have given the public the taste of using the Net to stem some pretty ugly tides (The Internet Strikes Back),...