[DANNY WOOL, SV411]

The FTC has approved Google’s acquisition of San Mateo-based AdMob, despite anti-trust concerns. The $750 million purchase strengthens Google’s position in the mobile advertising market.

Although observers long thought that the FTC would oppose the purchase, this changed after Apple acquired Quattro, one of AdMob’s leading competitors, and announced its plans to launch its own iAds mobile advertising system for the iPhone.

Read More at the Business Journal.

[DANNY WOOL, SV411]

There’s a lot of talk going on about whether Facebook has any respect for privacy anymore. Even CNN has started asking questions, which means that Rick Sanchez is getting kind of worried. But rather than reading the novelesque new Privacy Policy or trying to make heads or tails of what that policy really means, it’s probably best to go right to the source, in this case, founder/CEO/geek extraordinaire Mark Zuckerberg himself.

In a private IM to a college buddy when Zuckerberg was still at Harvard, he boasted that he had already collected 4,000 emails, photos, and whatnot from his peers.

Continue reading Trust Facebook? Dumb F#&k

[DANNY WOOL, SV411]

Mark Pincus of Zynga, the social gaming network, is known for not taking crap from anyone. Ina Youtube video he famously said that he’d do “every horrible thing in the book to just get revenues right away.” That could even mean biting the hand that feeds him.

Zynga is getting ready to bail on Facebook, the social networking site where players find its games, like Farmville and Mafia Wars.

Facebook, of course, is partially to blame. It takes a 30 percent fee for purchasing credits to use in Zynga games, and Zynga wants that money for itself. It is also

Continue reading Zynga, Facebook Feuding

[MASHABLE]

Remember Kip Drordy—the sad, sad little boy from last week’s episode of South Park, “You Have 0 Friends”? Well, screw friends—a Facebook Fan page set up to look like Drordy’s profile has attracted more than 100,000 fans.

“You Have 0 Friends” got scads of media attention last week, as the South Park kids took Facebook to task over social media obsession and the troubles that it can breed. Drordy served as the episode’s sad catalyst: a boring, friendless boy whose status updates are basically akin to the most mundane of ruminations: “There was a bee in my room.”

The page is replete

Continue reading Friendless South Park Character a Big Hit on Facebook

[DANNY WOOL, SV411]

Intel wants to know what’s on your mind. Really. A project they are developing with Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh will enable computers to read your mind, and avoid the need to type or use voice. Instead, a headset will measure electrical signals in the brain using a combination of EEF, fMRI, and MEG scans, convert them into discernible messages, and relay them to another machine. This may sound like the wildest dream of some science fiction geek, but the technology is not that far down the road. A primitive version of it is already being

Continue reading Intel Inside Your Brain

Not every community across the U.S. got the same coverage as Duluth and Topeka, as they vied to test out Google’s new high-speed fiber-optic network. In fact, towns from just about every state (except for the Dakotas) had applied to be the test site. A full list is forthcoming, but the 1,100 communities that applied can be found on a
Google map.

Google has said that it will announce the winning community (or communities) by the end of the year, after meeting with local leaders and third-party groups.
Read More at the Business Journal.

Poor Bono. He may have a great voice. He may have a string of number one hits. He may be the front man for one of the most popular bands in history. But when it comes to taking care of his money, Bono may also be “the worst investor in America.”

There was Palm. There was Forbes. There was Move.com. And then there was Yelp, which some people say is more of an extortion racket than a business.

Of course, Yelp doesn’t agree. Its CEO Jeremy Stoppelman says that it’s all a little misunderstanding about how its automated algorithmic review filter works—or

Continue reading The ‘Bono Curse’ Strikes Yelp