Twitter is blocked in China but that hasn’t stopped microblogging flourishing in the country, and proof of that comes with the announcement that Sina Weibo broke 300 million registered users in the last quarter. News of the landmark, published on Sina’s tech site (and translated by Tech In Asia), also reveals that mobile-based usage has overtaken that from...
One of the iPad’s more intriguing business uses is making presentations before a live audience. The device is portable and fun to use, and the swipe and pinch gestures can make for some dramatic presentations. Sadly, iPad presentations haven’t lived up to their potential – especially for users of Microsoft PowerPoint. But the lastest...
Germany’s Earlybird Venture Capital is on a roll. They’ve just moved operations to Berlin (PDF), raised $100 million for their new fund – target size $200 million – and a number of portfolio companies are doing very well (case in point: madvertise). Today, the company is announcing that Konstantin Guericke, a co-founder and former...
Cloud-based telephony API startup Twilio has made significant inroads into VoIP and other carrier services like SMS by launching products that work on the web and in iOS apps, supporting 30,000 developers in the process. Today it’s widening that net considerably with the launch of a new Android client, the first SDK from the...
When Facebook made it easy to share what videos you were watching, companies like Socialcam, Metacafe, DailyMotion and Viddy rocketed up the app-charts and saw a sharp increase in the usage and downloads of these apps. Of course, with this friction-less sharing actions came howls of complaints from Facebook’s users. Well, it seems the party...
Japan’s leading operator DoCoMo has announced a series of cloud based services that will soon launch under its new ‘docomo cloud’ initiative, that seeks to tap into the country’s growing smartphone market. DoCoMo has been working on language translation technology for some time and, on June 1, it will introduce a Mail-Hon’yaku-Concier service that...
When I was younger, my parents liked to listen to the big soft rock stations in Los Angeles. Once in a while, the sappy love songs would be interrupted by an emotional dedication from a boy/girlfriend to their significant other. It was awkward, but also kind of beautiful. But mostly awkward. Now it sounds...
There’s a principle of application design that beautiful means usable, but a new study out of Google suggests that’s not always the case. Rather, the researchers found, while beauty doesn’t necessarily affect perceived usability, poor usability can negatively affect perceived beauty. The study is far from conclusive, but as consumerization continues to sweep through...
A funny comeback from Ford on the heels of news that GM is pulling its entire $10 million advertising campaign from Facebook… GM said it was pulling its ads because they didn’t work. Ford said on Twitter that, if GM’s ads didn’t work, it’s because GM didn’t know what it was doing: Ford’s Twitter...
We still don’t quite understand what Color is up to—something social, mobile, and local, with video? But we do know this much: He’s really, really excited about his company’s new Verizon-backed video app and a deal to broadcast backstage from Saturday Night Live this weekend. We asked if Nguyen would be on stage during the...