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With holiday shopping season now in full swing, it is time to revisit one of the strangest toys to come out this year. Yes, I am talking about the Barbie Video Girl. Or, as I like to call it, Surveillance Barbie. It is a Barbie doll with a video camera embedded into her chest, a USB port in .. read full article »

The Web is already abuzz in anticipation of Cyber Monday deals. In the U.S., Walmart is trending on Twitter in part because of its Monday deals, which have been extended to include the entire week, and dubbed “Cyber Week.”With this year’s Black Friday seeing a 15.9% online sales growth in .. read full article »

Making a gadget your own is much more fun than joining the anonymous ranks of consumers toting identical tech.We’ve found eight examples of top technology that can be custom made, tweaked, tailored, personalized, customized and otherwise made special just for you — some of it even before it .. read full article »

Last week while everyone was waiting for the COICA bill to move through Congress, the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency one upped the Attorney General and seized domain names from a group of over 70 copyright infringing websites. A visit to the blacklisted domains now results in the .. read full article »

I’ve seen the future of messaging — it looks a lot like Facebook Messages. More specifically, it looks like the new version of Facebook Messages that the company began rolling out two weeks ago. But I’m not sure that the future is Facebook Messages. At least not for me. Because that’s .. read full article »

Earlier today, my friend Oli emailed me to say he’d noticed that one of my sites was showing a 404 message. Specifically, he was emailing to congratulate me. According to the site in question - ispauldrinkingagain.com – it has been 404 days since I last drank alcohol. And, for reasons .. read full article »

Different phases of a startup’s lifecycle require different approaches to spending. In my previous post, I talked about the first phase: finding  product/market fit. I described how entrepreneurs should have a laser-like focus on finding it, and why they should conserve cash to get there. In .. read full article »

Different phases of a startup’s lifecycle require different approaches to spending. In my previous post, I talked about the first phase: finding  product/market fit. I described how entrepreneurs should have a laser-like focus on finding it, and why they should conserve cash to get there. In .. read full article »

Twitter has become a great resource for just about anything, including jobs. From industry chats to Twitter accounts dedicated to posting vacancies, there are a ton of resources for landing a gig.We’ve already chronicled how to get a job through Facebook and YouTube, and now we’re taking a .. read full article »

On Black Friday, Microsoft announced that consumers would be able to buy one Windows Phone 7 device and get the second free for purchases at all AT&T stores.These phones, which retail for $199, include the LG Quantum, HTC Surround and Samsung Focus.Is this just a typically lowball Black Friday .. read full article »

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.Social games, like FarmVille, Mafia Wars and MyTown, racked up a number of high-value brand partnerships during the past .. read full article »

Yesterday, I noted that we were giving away two free tickets to LeWeb ’10. But I was quick to point out that while the free tickets, normally priced at around 2,000 euros, are a great deal, you would still have to pay for your own travel to Paris and lodging for the conference, which takes .. read full article »

The U.S. government’s crackdown on file sharing and counterfeiting has taken a new and disturbing turn.Yesterday, we reported that the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement office had seized Torrent-Finder.com, a site that linked to other sites that hosted and .. read full article »

Whether they're for clients, customers or colleagues, visual presentations are an unavoidable part of doing business. For years, Microsoft PowerPoint has been the standard bearer of slide presentation applications, but several Web-based alternatives have emerged. For the most part, the .. read full article »

This post is part of the Mashable 10, Mashable’s gift guide of the 10 hottest gadgets that that our editors think should be on everyone’s wish lists this holiday season. All 10 posts, which make up the complete guide, are linked below.The holiday shopping season is officially upon us. At .. read full article »

Sébastien Pierre is the Founder of FFunction, a Montréal-based data visualization company. His company created an infographic titled: "What is Data Visualization?" We asked Pierre for an explanation about the infographic and how it defines data visualization. Sponsor According to Pierre, .. read full article »

Initial numbers for Black Friday sales are in, and things are looking pretty rosy for Internet retailers.Americans typically think of Black Friday as the biggest day of the year for brick-and-mortar stores, but another segment of the retail industry is seeing phenomenal year-over-year growth, .. read full article »

Here’s our roundup of the week’s tech business news (shorter than usual due to the Thanksgiving holiday). First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days: Oracle wins a whopping $1.3B verdict against SAP — Piracy doesn’t pay … at least not for SAP. With .. read full article »

Editor’s note: Henry “Hank” Nothhaft, Jr. is the co-founder and CMO of Trapit, a virtual personal assistant for Web content still in private beta that was incubated out of SRI and the CALO project (as was Siri, the conversational search engine bought by Apple). One of the most interesting .. read full article »

Maybe it’s the tryptophan, but Thanksgiving week moves slowly in the United States. And with Black Friday having come and gone, most of the big holiday releases are already on shelves. Nevertheless, the week did see the release of one of the year’s biggest titles: Gran Turismo 5 for the .. read full article »

Thanksgiving has finally come and gone and all of us at Mashable hope you had a wonderful Turkey Day. Whether you were recovering from all that food or you were tuning in to the parade from overseas, it’s OK if you missed one or two of our tools and resources from the past week or so. Heck, we .. read full article »

Do you code in Haskell, but dream of being able to use Lisp instead? If so, you may be in luck. There are no less than two projects dedicated to bringing Lisp's syntax to Haskell: Liskell and Lisk. Although Liskell's creator, Clemens Fruhwirth, claimed that the project isn't dead yet, updates .. read full article »

Stream of consciousness you say? Trying to find something on what used to be called the Internet is now officially a full time job. It’s not so much that various media strategies and hardware devices have carved things up into a tangle. It’s that what passes for interesting has been shorn of .. read full article »

Back in October, we came across a mysterious site called Google Demo Slam a couple days before it actually launched. It turned out to be a fun site featuring demos of different Google products where you can watch two demos side by side and vote for the best one. Some of the demos are by Google .. read full article »

We're always on the lookout for upcoming Web tech events from around world. Know of something taking place that should appear here? Want to get your event included in the calendar? Let us know in the comments below or email us. Sponsor Discuss read full article »

Earlier this week, a group of independent filmmakers decided to put their 35-minute film on YouTube.Wong Fu Productions‘ Agents of Secret Stuff has since performed fabulously, garnering more than 2 million views for the full film itself and nearly 2.7 million views for the trailer.Wong Fu .. read full article »

Ever need to edit a .tex file, but stuck on a machine with no LaTeX editor? You can now use ScribTex, a web-based LaTeX editor, to create, edit, share, collaborate on LaTeX documents. You can even use Scribtex to easily and quickly compile to PDF. There's also a mobile web version so you can .. read full article »

Website monitoring startup WatchMouse is now monitoring the top 100 retail websites for availability around the holiday shopping season. The starup tested retail sites including Apple, Amazon, BestBuy, Borders, Overstock, Walmart and Zappos, for availability and performance during the month .. read full article »

Here’s the latest from VentureBeat’s Entrepreneur Corner: Cash? Equity? How should a startup pay its attorneys? – Cash is king, but it’s sometimes in short supply when you’re a startup. Some firms swap out equity for legal representation. Others cut back in other areas to pay in cash. .. read full article »

Google TV might be in a bit of a pickle if a Best Buy and Sony sale is any indication. The platform launched a few weeks ago with the Logitech Revue and Sony Internet TV. Both are loaded with the same system and so both are suffering the fate of Big Media’s blockade. It’s a sad story, .. read full article »

As part of the ongoing Mashable Awards, we’re taking a closer look at each of the nomination categories. This is “Entrepreneur of the Year.” Be sure to nominate your favorites and join us for the Gala in Las Vegas!Every year, Mashable covers the launch of hundreds of new companies. While .. read full article »

Holidays and Hogwarts dominate this week’s Twitter trends list.The Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S. topped this week’s list as people tweeted well-wishes and recovered from tryptophan comas. It was followed closely by another event that might be considered a holiday in its own right by many .. read full article »

A new iPhone and iPad jailbreak always top our list of the week's biggest stories and this week was no different. Spoiler if you haven't read the post yet: It's a tethered jailbreak for iPhones, which can be a real pain (something I found out the hard way). In our coverage of other top Internet .. read full article »

The UK’s High Court has ruled that news monitoring agencies will have to pay publishing companies to use their web content, effectively re-classifying headlines as separate literary works subject to copyright. The moves follows a legal battle between the Newspaper Licensing Agency, owned by .. read full article »

On December 8 and 9, the LeWeb conference will descend upon the city of Paris for two days of non-stop tech. This year, the event will have a bit more TechCrunch flavor, as several of us are going, and the startup competition has been tweaked a bit to be more like our own TechCrunch Disrupt .. read full article »

Just like Steve Jobs said we eventually stopped making fun of and just plain got used to the word “pad” in the name of his magical device, no longer thinking of that other thing also called a pad whenever we pass by an Apple store. In fact, we’re already debating the hypothetical merits of .. read full article »

By most estimates, 2010 will be a record year for online sales during the all-important months of November and December (collectively known as the holiday season.) And so far, things are off to a rocking start. While it is too soon to say how many dollars are changing hands – comScore predicts .. read full article »

By most estimates, 2010 will be a record year for online sales during the all-important months of November and December (collectively known as the holiday season.) And so far, things are off to a rocking start. While it is too soon to say how many dollars are changing hands – comScore predicts .. read full article »

Industrious Briton Ben Marsh has taken advantage of the epic ten inches of snow forecast in the UK this weekend to bring his fellow citizens together. On his site UKSnow, users who tweet about the weather in realtime can now have their location coordinates and snow descriptions plotted on a .. read full article »

BlueWave Computing is an IT management company out of Atlanta that helps small and medium-sized businesses manage computers, servers and networks. BlueWave Computing traditionally offered IT outsourcing and managed IT services. Last year, the company saw an opportunity to offer hosting with .. read full article »

Google may have announced its Chrome OS operating system a year and a half ago, but it looks like the company’s executives are still wrapping their heads around its significance and potential. At least, that’s what I took away from a New York Times article about the OS. Acer recently told .. read full article »

As a VC and five-time entrepreneur, I frequently see two common mistakes being made by startups: Companies spend too much attempting to grow the business when it’s not ready for such growth; or Companies don’t spend enough money when the business is ready to scale. It’s a CEO’s .. read full article »

As a VC and five-time entrepreneur, I frequently see two common mistakes being made by startups: Companies spend too much attempting to grow the business when it’s not ready for such growth; or Companies don’t spend enough money when the business is ready to scale. It’s a CEO’s .. read full article »

Last Friday I ran WhereCamp5280 in Denver, which attracted over 70 people (many from out of state and a couple from Canada), used thousands of dollars from top-tier sponsors and was organized in probably less than six hours total. An unconference is a conference in the loosest of terms. People .. read full article »

Torrent-Finder.com is down today; the site was apparently seized by government agencies for reasons unknown. In all likelihood, the site was taken down due to intellectual property concerns including copyright infringement and trafficking in counterfeit goods.The agencies named in the notice .. read full article »

As part of the ongoing Mashable Awards, we’re taking a closer look at each of the nomination categories. This is “Entrepreneur of the Year.” Be sure to nominate your favorites and join us for the Gala in Las Vegas!Facebook, Google and Microsoft would not exist today if it weren’t for the .. read full article »

It’s Black Friday, which means that many of you woke up this morning at the crack of dawn, shrugged off your Thanksgiving food comas, and made your way to the dreary parking lots of electronic stores across the country. Right about now, you’re probably just waking up from your recovery nap .. read full article »

Google announced Chrome OS in 2009, promising the cloud-centric operating system would be available in 2010. Unfortunately, it will be next year before Chrome OS is widely available, Engadget confirmed this week. Google may release its own Chrome OS netbook next month, and there are already .. read full article »

Intel launched a beta version of its AppUp Center online store last January. Under the beta program, developers have known AppUp(SM) as a single storefront primarily supporting netbook applications developed in C or C++. Unfortunately, this history does not put the overall value of AppUp in .. read full article »

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.Name: DealeryQuick Pitch: Dealery brings together daily group deals from multiple sources in .. read full article »