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We know, we know, you’re sick of future iPhone OS rumors… but one more couldn’t hurt right? The folks over at 9to5Mac have been exploring the new iPhone 3.2 beta 4 SDK, and have found a few files that could indicate more gestures are coming to the next iPhone OS. Something we reported on a pretty decent amount of time ago. The two files, “3Tap.plist” and “LongPress.plist, are located in the “gestures” library folder and, according to 9to5Mac, are not in previous versions of the SDK. Now, we know that “three taps” does not have a defined OS-wide function in Read More...

Today, ComScore released its search engine market share numbers for February 2010, and to be honest, there wasn’t much movement. Google and Bing both gained a little ground: Google’s market share rose 0.1 percentage point from 65.4% to 65.5% while Bing’s share gained 0.2% rising from 11.3% to 11.5%. Yahoo and Ask both gave up a little bit of the search pie: Yahoo declined from 17% to 16.8% and Ask fell slightly from 3.8% to 3.7% market share.  AOL’s slice of search remained unchanged at around 2.5%. We’ve got the full report, and all the insipid details that go with Read More...

A leaked internal memo reveals that the nation’s largest carrier is trying to jump on the Apple bandwagon by encouraging its employees to push its MiFi device as an accessory to the upcoming iPad. The idea itself is worthy of consideration — save $130 by purchasing the Wi-Fi version of the Apple iPad and pair it with a MiFi to get 3G wireless connectivity on the go. What Verizon fails to mention is that the MiFi requires a two year contract and will cost $60 per month for the unlimited data plan, meanwhile the 3G iPad can rock on an Read More...

There are two sides to the proverbial “cloud coin” for small business owners. You can view cloud services, like Google Apps, as a time and money saver, allowing you to focus on your core business as opposed to IT needs. Or, you can view them as your worst nightmare, and shun the thought of having all your business data stored on third-party servers. For those whose views align more closely with the former perspective, Google wants to offer you greater flexibility and options for your cloud data. Yesterday, Google announced that Google Apps customers will have the ability to purchase Read More...

Last month, Verizon Wireless and Skype announced their exclusive partnership in the U.S., along with their plans to bring Skype’s popular VoIP calling and messaging service to your Verizon cell phone. Now, through the miracle of animation — and the help of a woman with a really high pitched voice — Verizon and Skype are shedding a little light on how Skype integration will work on your phone. The video doesn’t get too in-depth, but we do learn that Skype calls will arrive to your Verizon Wireless handset just as normal calls do and the Skype application will run, always Read More...

Online legal tool platform Legal River launched Attorney River today to connect attorneys to other attorneys. Attorneys can use the service to post requests for other attorneys. Once a lawyer posts a request, for example for outsourcing work or looking for a specialist in a different state, Attorney River alerts all lawyers with matching profiles and allows them to respond through the service. Attorneys can register and post issues to the site for free, but to respond to a post, attorneys must buy points, with one point required per response and each point costing $10. This prevents spamming in response to Read More...

Sony today officially entered a new phase in the lifespan of the PlayStation 3 console by touting the PlayStation Move, a wireless motion-controlled device that rivals Nintendo’s Wiimote and Microsoft’s upcoming Project Natal. Introduced at E3 2009 with the working title the PlayStation Wand, the PlayStation Move resembles a light-weight microphone with a colored crown. The PS3 manufacturer, which revealed the device at the Concourse Exhibition Center in downtown San Francisco, Ca., says it provides intuitive and accurate 1:1 response, and showed nine playable games that utilized the Move in a variety of ways ranging from the military shooter SOCOM 4 Read More...

M-Via, a young mobile phone payment service that lets you send or receive money internationally on any type of phone — even if you and your recipients don’t have bank accounts — has raised $5 million in debt financing, according to a filing with the SEC. Systems like m-Via’s are becoming increasingly important in the developing world, particularly in Africa and Latin America, where most people’s primary screens, and connections to the internet, are their phones. More and more capabilities need to be added to the most affordable, perfunctory handsets, to allow people to Read More...

Turiya Media, which helps game publishers mine and analyze user data, was just selected as the top startup in the Who’s Got Game Competition at our GamesBeat@GDC event in San Francisco. The company says its Leafnode product uses advanced predictive algorithms to track hours of logged time by individual players and create individual behavioral profiles. It focuses on three areas of the game user lifecycle — acquisition, retention, and monetization. All this data helps publishers retain and make money from their players. You can read more about Turiya here. To get to this point, five finalists were selected from 37 applicants, and Read More...

Hopefully, this doesn’t herald the end of the ChatRoulette party. A mashup called ChatRouletteMap pins screenshots of the site’s users to a map. This doesn’t collect every single one of ChatRoulette’s users. It looks like a person built a program that has connected with more than two thousand ChatRoulette players and used their IP addresses (which are revealed on the service) to identify where they were and then took a screenshot. (I’ve contacted the people behind ChatRouletteMap and am waiting to hear back.) ChatRoulette is an explosively popular anonymous video chat service created by a 17-year-old student in Moscow named Andrey Ternovskiy. When Read More...

As the cloud is getting more players and interfaces, best and worst practices are emerging. As the market grows and more companies try to plug in, the cloud may benefit from guiding principles. Similar to new technology movements in the past, a natural process is underway to define “what is good”, which, for some in the industry, equates to “what is open”. Like religion itself, open can be defined in ways that are uplifting, or on the other side of the coin, restricting. Also, we learn again, nothing is free. Sponsor Cloud APIs Must Walk on Water If Read More...

Since the announcement went live yesterday about the Google Marketplace, we’ve had a number of companies come to us about how its applications will fit with the service. We’ll do a fuller look at these companies this week but for some immediate perspective we decided to take a look at Zoho, a service that competes with Google Apps. So it is it interesting that the company joined Google Apps Marketplace in its launch. Sponsor Buy why would Zoho offer its applications to integrate with Google? Yes, the companies compete. But Raju Vegesna of Zoho says that it is far more important to Read More...

Google just launched a new Google Labs product for Google Reader: Google Reader Play. Reader Play is a new, highly visual way to browse your Google Reader subscriptions that is somewhat reminiscent of Google’s Fast Flip. It replaces the busy Google Reader interface with an interface that focuses on a single story. Whenever a post includes videos or images, Play with highlight these and give you the option to read more of the text as well. This new interface allows you to browse through the feeds you already subscribe to, but Google Reader Play also emphasizes Google Reader’s ability to Read More...

We’ve all heard of the big company that started as two guys in their garage, but these days, with startup organizations and incubators, more and more success stories seem to feature companies that built their success from group collaboration. One excellent example of how startups can take advantage of collaboration is to work in a coworking environment with other companies and entrepreneurs. Sponsor Tuesday I had the opportunity to chat with Harry Lin, CEO of Lottay, an online gifting service that has spent a large portion of its short history coworking with outside developers and entrepreneurs. Starting in October of last Read More...

As many in the Twitterverse have dubbed this week, the battle of location based apps continues, as both Gowalla and Foursquare release yet another update to their iPhone apps today. And these are some big guns coming out to accompany the various real-life incentives, contests and whatever else these the two companies can do to take the focus at this year’s SXSW. Both apps are showcasing new design features the companies are calling “fresh” and other such things, and while they surely are, some of these other features are what really stand out. Sponsor Foursquare is surely the less notable in this Read More...