blogsJam : U.S. Technology & Startups

According to various reports from the last Digg Townhall/meetup this week, Digg's CEO Jay Adelson announced that Digg will soon let its users create and manage their own 'sub-Diggs.' Digg's main competitors like reddit and Mixx have already given their users this ability, and Digg has been .. read full article »

After yesterday's story about some trimming at AOL (NYSE: TWX), including its Weblogs Inc blog unit, AOL has sent out another internal memo to its blogging team, which it says supersedes previous communication on the same subject. It stresses that there are no specific budget cuts, just trying .. read full article »

Garmin and TomTom may need to guard their backs in the portable navigation device market. Americans are increasingly using their cell phones for navigation, according to data from comScore, which says that navigation on the cell phone as of the end of May was up 82 percent over the same period a .. read full article »

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1,000,000,000,000. That’s how many URLs Google has found on the web. Obviously, that’s a huge number and it’s even more impressive considering that it is only unique URLs — to get to the number, Google removed all pages that have multiple URLs with the same content. Other things of note .. read full article »

Verizon will start selling FiOS TV in New York City on Monday. The announcement will be made at a glitzy ceremony at the Grand Central Station, and will be webcast as well. NYC had granted Verizon a television franchise in May, and the franchise was confirmed by the New York Public Service .. read full article »

As more and more students choose online courses either as alternatives to the traditional college experience or as a supplement, a lot of colleges have started to worry about how to prevent these students from cheating on remotely administered exams. According to the Chronicle of Higher .. read full article »

With the news coming out of F8 this week, it was hard to not get caught up in the enthusiasm for Facebook Connect, the new authentication methodology which will allow you to login to third-party web sites using your Facebook ID and port your friend graph from Facebook with you. On the one hand, .. read full article »

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. STARTUP DETAILS: Company Name: Streamfile 20-word Description: .. read full article »

The lure of hundreds of millions of potential customers is still apparently not enough incentive for job sites to jump on board the MySpace application train. To date, there are only three job sites with apps on the popular social networking site. And only one - Simply Hired - is a known .. read full article »

Rusty Coats, an online vet in the newspaper industry and a good friend of ours, has been named VP of interactive for the newspaper division of The E. W. Scripps (NYSE: SSP) Company. Coats, 42, will lead the newspaper division's Internet strategy, working closely with the division's publishers. .. read full article »

So the lawsuit has had the desired effect: RedLasso, the controversial online video clip and sharing service, is suspending its open service for now. "It has no alternative but to suspend blogger access to its video search and clipping Beta site for the immediate future. The company will .. read full article »

Redlasso, the video site that allows bloggers to post clips of television content, has shut down its beta in response to a recently filed lawsuit by Hulu-backers Fox and NBC. In May, Fox, CBS and NBC issued Cease and Desist notices to Redlasso for copyright violation, which the company largely .. read full article »

It seems that everywhere I look, there’s someone telling us why corporate blogs are not only a waste of time if you’re looking for something to read, but they offer no value and should be taken down as soon as possible. The detractors claim corporate blogs lack transparency, fail to adapt .. read full article »

-- Professional video CPMs to grow faster than user-gen: The hope for user-gen video to effectively compete with professionals is dashed in a report by the Diffusion Group. The group says CPMs on long-form web videos are now $40. The amount is expected to hit $46 by 2013. Meanwhile, CPMs for .. read full article »

Harbinger Capital today offered satellite service provider MSV/Skyterra $500 million to pay for the company’s launch of its two new satellites. The private equity firm also made clear it’s planning to push for a deal to acquire British satellite company Inmarsat. The acquisition attempt .. read full article »

Steve Ballmer sent an email to Microsoft employees this week in which he acknowledged the success of Apple — and what the Redmond giant needs to do in order to better compete. “Today, we’re changing the way we work with hardware vendors to ensure that we can provide complete experiences .. read full article »

socialbrowse, the Firefox plugin that lets you surf the Web in a link-sharing social manner, has just re-released its service with a couple of major new features. The Y Combinator-backed startup as been in private beta for some time, and will remain in private beta for a little while longer, .. read full article »

Resource Edge, the creators of resume-spidering software TalentHook, have released the latest version of their product, TalentHook Sphere. The new version, which now spiders 800 additional Web sites, has a redesigned user interface, shared tracking features, and expanded search .. read full article »

Mashable is headed on its second leg of the Summer Tour, beginning with Austin, followed by Miami, Boston, and ending at New York City. During each of these SummerMashes, attendees have a chance to score some sweet tickets to Austin’s hottest interactive festival. That’s right, the nice .. read full article »

Kicking off the call, Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) CEO Reed Hastings predicted that the DVD-by-mail segment would continue expanding for another 5-10 years, despite the deteriorating economics of the DVD business and the emergence of digital distribution. He immeditely got into the company's digital .. read full article »

Over the past few years, the quaint and sleepy town of Bangalore has been transformed into a highly compressed version of Silicon Valley, only with worse housing and transportation problems. Some of the bigger technology companies — Texas Instruments, Intel and Qualcomm — have offices there, .. read full article »

Back when the RSS aggregator web site Alltop launched in March of this year, we compared it to another daily start page favorite of ours at the time, OriginalSignal. Designed to bring RSS to the masses, Alltop, like both Original Signal and Popurls, provides categorized selections of feeds that .. read full article »

Weakness in display advertising caused online ad company ValueClick (NSDQ: VCLK) to warn investors last week that earnings in the second half of year would not be as high as expected. And now, with the poor Q2 earnings report from Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) this week, within the last several days has .. read full article »

When was the last time you bought software that came in a box, an actual CD that you put into your disc drive in order to load it onto your computer? It’s probably been a while, since most applications are now downloaded straight from the Internet. Today a growing number of companies are .. read full article »

Local broadcaster Belo Corp (NYSE: BLC).—not to be confused with its newspaper sibling AH Belo from which it split last year—saw Q2 net earnings drop to 27.7 percent to $26.3 million from last year's $36.4 million. Revenues slid as well, coming in $188.9 million from $198.2 million, a fall .. read full article »

The 140 million dollars that Google dished out for Russian contextual ad company Begun now seems rather cheap, given their fantastic financial results for the first half of 2008. As reported by Profy, Begun has had 25% higher profits in the first two quarters of 2008 than in the entire 2007. .. read full article »

Scripps' (NYSE: SSP) big comparison services Shopzilla and uSwitch continued on a decent turnaround path this quarter. On the company's conference call, management said that for the year they expect $8-$10 million in profit for the two services. CFO Joseph NeCastro warned, however, that .. read full article »

Four Google (NSDQ: GOOG) executives may be standing trial over failing to adequately monitor third-party content posted to their Italian language site. Italian prosecutors are preparing to file charges in a two-year old case against the Google employees over a video uploaded to the search .. read full article »

Earlier today Corvida set a difficult challenge for RWW readers, based on a new service called 12Seconds.tv. The challenge is to say "ReadWriteWeb" 5 times really fast in 12 seconds or less. Now, it's well known that the name 'ReadWriteWeb' is a tongue twister - even I have trouble pronouncing .. read full article »

Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) reported Q2 revenue of $337.6 million, an 11 percent increase from $303.7 million a year ago. Net income was up just 3 percent to $26.6 million. A significant reduction in shares outstanding, however, meant that EPS rose 13.5 percent to $.42 per share from $.37 per share. .. read full article »

Thanks to this week’s advertisers and partners for helping us grow to be the #1 social news blog in the world. Advertise with us and get noticed. Help us to help you. Mashable is seeking out site sponsors for our large diverse audience — social media users, venture capitalists, PR people, .. read full article »

Continuing the tradition of selling bad Web businesses for less than they were bought for (in the vein of Cnet selling Webshots for $45 million three years after paying $70 million for it), AOL is trying to unload online storage service Xdrive. Three years after buying Xdrive for a rumored $30 .. read full article »

According to the latest government data, China now has 253 million internet users, due to recent sharp growth - 56 percent from last year. The inevitable has happened: China now has more internet users than the USA, which is at 223.1 million with 71% online penetration. The fact that the Chinese .. read full article »

I know there’s a good portion of you that are going to instantly groan at the headline, either because it’s a territory that’s been hashed out a number of times from a number of different angles or because you’re one of those folks who simply doesn’t believe there are such thing as .. read full article »

The as-yet unlaunched MySpace Music will likely partner with Amazon to handle all music ecommerce transactions, we’ve heard from multiple sources. Apple and Rhapsody are also bidding for the business, however, and one source says a final decision hasn’t yet been made - Rhapsody may still be .. read full article »

In case you wonder what I do at my day job... read full article »

Yesterday, our EconCeleb conference went well, despite the technical/audio troubles. Everyone seemed surprised no one had thought of doing a conference on this hugely popular category of media...well, we did, and thanks everyone for coming and making it a success. Full coverage from the .. read full article »

Yesterday, our EconCeleb conference went well, despite the technical/audio troubles. Everyone seemed surprised no one had thought of doing a conference on this hugely popular category of media...well, we did, and thanks everyone for coming and making it a success. Full coverage from the .. read full article »

AOL plans to shutter a bunch of businesses: Among the businesses on the chopping block are Bluestring, Xdrive, and AOL Pictures. Apple is testing update for iPhone software: Apple is testing version 2.1 of its iPhone firmware. It includes improved location features. Vonage getting new CEO? .. read full article »

Is Indian media group Bennett, Coleman & Co, owner of Times of India newspaper, eyeing another cheap UK acquisition? The shares of British media group Trinity Mirror rose more than 5 percent on Thursday on market rumours that the Indian media giant is looking to bid for the UK company whose .. read full article »

Our network blog last100 has an interesting interview with Nicolas Gramlich, founder of anddev.org - an online community for Android developers. As editor Steve O'Hear notes in his intro, there have been issues with Google's mobile OS of late - an incomplete and buggy SDK, favoritism towards .. read full article »

Our top jobs in digital media and mobile content, posted since last Friday: Congressional Quarterly Inc: Chief Financial Officer Synacor: Vice President of Marketing NBCU: Vice President of New Media Twistbox Entertainment, Inc.: Creative Director of Mobile Games Lots more listings with .. read full article »

Nokia and Qualcomm buried the hatchet this week, deciding to settle matters out of court and become friends. While the details of the settlement aren’t clear - The Wall Street Journal reports that as a result of this settlement, Nokia will pay less to Qualcomm. The deal ensures that Qualcomm .. read full article »

Yesterday, the guys from eBuddy send me a press release that made me wonder: with the rise of flat rate data plans for feature-packed mobiles and high speed 3G network becoming coming place, will Mobile IM start to eat into the lucrative SMS business? The data from eBuddy would suggest so - the .. read full article »

Twitter may be experimenting with a new design, but even its new interface still leaves something to be desired. Tweenky, a new mashup that launched in private beta last week, is looking to offer Twitter users an alternative. The site sports an AJAX-heavy design that borrows heavily from Gmail .. read full article »

Piczo, a social network with a strong teenage following, has launched a new developer platform that allows users to quickly generate content from partner sites while helping brands increase their exposure on the network. Piczo has never reached near the popularity of mega-networks like MySpace .. read full article »

Some belt tightening has started at AOL (NYSE: TWX), as it prepares and dresses itself up for a sale: It is discontinuing some of its tech projects, and also trimming some of its content blogs under the Weblogs Inc network. According to an internal memo sent by Kevin Conroy, AOL's EVP of .. read full article »

TheFind, a technology-heavy shopping search engine, is introducing an iPhone application for the site that it says should launch on August 4. The application allows users to search for stores in a region that are selling a particular product (the site claims a database of over 200,000 retail .. read full article »

Blockbuster (NYSE: BBI), which recently abandoned its foolish quest to buy Circuit City, is now on to the next thing, which it has been talking about for the last year: its digital re-invention. The company has a strong presence at Comic-Con going on this week in San Diego, and is also demo-ing .. read full article »