Ohai has grand ambitions of jumpstarting an industry for social massively multiplayer online (MMO) games. Think World of Warcraft crossed with FarmVille — engaging and rich, but also easy to use and social. The San Francisco-based company has a great ambassador in CEO Susan Wu, a former venture capitalist who became fascinated by the emerging market for virtual goods, then teamed up with MMO tech wizard Don Neufeld, formerly of Sony Online... 

Betaworks , a New York City-based Internet company, has raised $20 million in new venture funding, according to company executives. Intel Capital and previous investor RRE Ventures led the current round, which included Softbank, Founders Collective, DFJ Growth, AOL Ventures and the New York Times. The company had previously raised $8 million. Betaworks, the brainchild of former AOL executives John Borthwick and Andrew Weisman, views itself as... 

Digg, the San Francisco-based social media company, is dropping MySQL and instead betting its future on Cassandra, an open-source data store. It’s just the latest sign of the growing popularity of the software, which was developed (and open sourced) by Facebook to search through its inbox. While Facebook has since backed off Cassandra, Digg plans to open source all its work on Cassandra and champion the software’s development and... 

Facebook redesigned at the beginning of February, moving its search box from the right side to the top middle of its home page, and it seems to have paid off, with the company’s U.S. search queries growing 10 percent in February, according to new data released today by comScore . That’s a significant one-month jump, and it’s great news for Bing, which powers Facebook web search and announced last month…  Read More →

As part of the Federal Trade Commission’s ongoing hearings into the future of journalism, Google’s chief economist Hal Varian gave a presentation on newspapers and their financial problems that is well worth taking some time to read (or view). The slide deck is embedded below, and Martin Langeveld has a great overview at the Nieman Journalism Lab that also includes a transcript of Varian’s presentation. The Google economist... 

It goes without saying that Google has gigantic ambitions. We hear a lot about its various products but i’s hard to contextualize those efforts. A new video from Australian weekly news show, Hungry Beast , is a graphical representation of Google’s grand ambitions. It’s also a lot of fun. Especially when you see former Intel CEO Andy Grove call Google  Read More →

Apple has secured a patent for a system that would enable consumers to use an electronic gadget — say, um, an iPhone — in place of keys to unlock their cars and front doors. It’s an effort that could finally move the needle for the short-range wireless connectivity technology known as near field communication . As first reported by the Daily Telegraph , Apple would allow users to enter a PIN code and wave the phone over an... 

In the coverage of New York Times writer Zachary Kouwe, who resigned recently amid accusations of plagiarism, much has been said about the demands of writing for the always-on Web, and how this might have contributed to Kouwe’s missteps – something the writer himself referred to in a discussion of the incident as described by NYT public editor Clark Hoyt. But…  Read More →

Since the start of March, some European versions of Microsoft Windows have been delivered with a so-called “browser ballot screen,” a screen designed to give users a choice of 12 web browsers instead of having Microsoft’s Internet Explorer forced on them. But while it’s already bringing new users to alternative browsers, criticisms of the screen are being leveled, too. The European Commission’s hope for the screen... 

Do you feel that Internet access is a fundamental right? Four in five adults in more than 26 different countries agree with you, according to a new poll sponsored by the BBC World Service. The poll asked more than 27,000 adults about their attitudes towards the Internet, and found that 87 percent of those who regularly use the Internet believe that access should be “the fundamental right of all people.” More than 71 percent of non-Internet... 

The FCC will deliver its National Broadband Plan to Congress a day earlier than originally scheduled — on March 16. Also on that day, the five FCC commissioners will vote on a “mission statement” intended to represent the spirit of the submitted documents. The plan, which Congress called for as part of the stimulus package passed last year, will recommend ways to provide universal broadband access as well as encourage Congress... 

Six months ago, it looked like mergers and acquisitions were heating up again. Om thought it was good news for startups , while I fretted about companies being pressured to make deals that didn’t make strategic sense. I needn’t have worried. After the usual end-of-year lull, deals are starting to be made again. And no sector is riper for deal-making than tech , especially those companies active on the web. Not only has the economy been stable... 

Android news this week was dominated by Apple — in the form of a lawsuit Cupertino filed against Android phone maker HTC alleging that it infringes on 20 patents that Apple holds “related to the iPhone’s user interface, underlying architecture and hardware.” The move is clearly a shot at Google as Android is at the heart of all of the HTC phones named in the suit. I believe Apple is also running scared ahead of the Chrome OS release... 

Burbn , a stealthy startup that brings mobile location check-in gameplay (à la Foursquare and Gowalla) to the mobile browser, has raised $500,000 from Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. Burbn founder Kevin Systrom confirmed the round to us after it was written up in TechCrunch this afternoon. Burbn is a nifty little HTML 5 mobile web app that offers yet another place to tell your friends where you’re grabbing a coffee or seeing... 

Mark Josephson, CEO of hyper-local news aggregator Outside.in , doesn’t seem all that concerned about AOL’s plans to pour $50 million into its own hyper-local news operation, Patch.com. That’s because while AOL is trying to generate its own custom content for dozens of small cities and towns in New York state and elsewhere, Outside.in is happy to take on the much less resource-intensive job of pulling…  Read More →