“I’m sure many of you here are nerdy enough to carry around a mobile printer,” Lady Gaga teased a tangled mob of techies in Las Vegas Thursday. Then, she raised the roof with her signature-GaGa declaration, “I know I am.” In two brilliantly delivered sentences, the inimitable Lady Gaga drove nerdiness fashion-forward; and, more...
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Polaroid goes GaGa at CES2011
Facebook financials fuel paranoid frenzy.
Late Saturday night and early Sunday morning, rumors of Facebook’s imminent demise spread across the internet like wind-driven fire through dry brush, topping Google Trends and inspiring a flurry of very troubled Tweets. Consider them the equivalent of Chicken Little gone viral, and count them as more living proof of the internet’s capacity for...
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Consumer Electronics Show stages Vegas take-over.
Once upon a time, “techies” may have haunted a subterranean American sub-culture, living in their mother’s basements and alternating between annihilating one another on “CounterStrike” and innovating apps, gadgets, and platforms. Their combined computing power might have taken-over the world, but they remained interested in dominating all things virtual. This week in Las Vegas,...
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All Oprah, all the time. Now, one full week on the air.
The pundits point out, “Never before has a celebrity tried to brand an entire channel in her own image.” Of course, never before has the broadcasting world known a powerhouse the equal of Oprah. And if the Kardashians can dominate E! for nearly half of every broadcast day, surely the Empress of Talk can...
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Facebook tops 2010 hit list.
World domination may still remain just beyond Facebook’s grasp, but the monster social networking site continues its relentless conquest of the internet. The latest in its string of jaw-dropping accomplishments: Facebook ranked first in the Experian Hitwise calculations of most-visited American websites, accounting for nearly 9% of all US wbsite visits between January and...
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FCC adopts “net neutrality” rules.
The FCC prevailed today in the latest skirmish of the long-running war over internet ownership and control, voting to adopt rules reigning-in major service providers’ discretion over preferred access to their networks. The still-ambiguous rules prevent ComCast and Verizon from blocking legal content, but they permit the nation’s leading networks “reasonably” to manage consumers’...
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Resurgent RIM reluctant to relinquish #1 rank.
Announcing strong sales and earnings late last week, Canadian giant Research in Motion allayed investors’ and analysts’ fears about its future. Despite forfeiting big chunks of market share to iPhone and Android, RIM’s Blackberry sales grew 40% year-over-year during the third quarter, and its command of the business market remained, for the most part,...
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Zuckerberg scores some serious face time.
Facebook founder and feature film icon Mark Zuckerberg smiles from the cover of this week’s Time magazine, his wry smile befitting his anointing as Time’s Person of the Year. Announcing the honor, Time editors wrote, “For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them, for creating a new...
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FIFA announces 2018 and 2022 World Cup sites
FIFA announced Thursday that Russia will host the 2018 World Cup Tournament, and tiny Qatar will provide the pitches for World Cup play in 2022. Gathered in Zurich to make their final presentations to the FIFA site-selection committee, delegates from both Russia and Qatar cheered wildly when officials announced their choices. The 2018 get-together...
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Old Apple sells for a cool quarter-million dollars.
Back in the day, when Silicon Valley was just another upper-middle class collection of tract homes south of San Francisco, two guys named Steve built computers in a garage and sold them for an un-superstitious $666.66. Earlier this week, one of those original Apple-1 computers sold at a London Christie’s auction for a reported...
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