TechCrunch reader Saul Lustgarten checks in to tell us he logged on to Facebook this morning and noticed that the list of his friends who are having their birthday today was preceded by a crude message, reading “fuck you bitches”.
Yeah right, we thought. I checked it out on my Facebook profile and didn’t notice anything off.
Then, I followed Saul’s suggestion of switching my main language to Spanish instead of English, and lo and behold (click for full-size image):
We’ve contacted Facebook to see if they really mean it.
CrunchBase InformationFacebookInformation provided by CrunchBaseAmazon announced the Kindle 3 last night, and it doesn’t look too shabby at all. The most important part is the inclusion of the next-generation E-Ink display, previously only found in the too-big-for-casual-use Kindle DX. (The low price, $139 for the Wi-Fi version, certainly doesn’t hurt.)
Immediately following the announcement, I saw something that confused me. For whatever reason, it seems plenty of people are comparing the Kindle to the iPad, almost as if these people want the Kindle to be the iPad. Why is that?
How’s this for absolutely dominating an increasingly lucrative and fast-growing segment?
Google currently boasts a mobile search market share of 98.29%, with it closest competitor Yahoo taking up just over 0.8% of market share and Microsoft’s Bing barely touching even half that, according to recent data from StatCounter as relayed by Pingdom.
This graph, made by Pingdom, puts it all in perspective:
As you can tell from the graph, put together using global visitor stats for more than three million websites, Google’s near-100% piece of the mobile search pie is even a good deal larger than their still impressive share of the overall search engine market. Note that the red bars represent non-mobile search market share, not a combination of both.
As for Yahoo, Bing, and the ‘others’ – good luck taking on Google on that front.
CrunchBase InformationGoogle SearchInformation provided by CrunchBaseApp store analytics provider Distimo in its latest report once again focuses on in-app purchases across a variety of mobile application stores, Apple’s App Store in particular.
According to Distimo, the percentage of applications with in-app purchases is significantly higher in the App Store for iPad (10%) compared to that for the iPhone (2%).
One of the main reasons for that, still according to the startup, is the fact that the App Store for iPad became available after in-app purchases were introduced, contrary to the App Store for iPhone. Another reason to take into consideration is that the iPad may currently be used more as a media consumption device than the iPhone, with magazine and newspaper publishers selling much of their content as in-app purchases.
Evidently, the fact that there are more applications available for the iPhone than for the iPad also skews the numbers.
In any event, the Games and Social Networking categories in both stores have the highest proportion of applications with in-app purchases available, the startup posits.
The most successful free applications that monetized using in-app purchases this month in the Apple App Store for iPhone were MobiTV and ESPN 2010 FIFA World Cup, which isn’t surprising considering there was this little event called the World Cup going on.
As for paid applications: the apps that saw the strongest level of monetization with in-app purchases this month in the App Store for iPhone were Guitar Hero, TomTom U.S.A. and Call of Duty: World at War: Zombies II.
Pages and iBooks (both apps are published by Apple) are both, again, the number one paid and free applications on the Apple App Store for iPad in terms of total download numbers.
Netflix for iPad, introduced back in April, is the second most popular free iPad app, while RSS reading app Pulse comes in at second place in the paid applications ranking.
CrunchBase InformationDistimoInformation provided by CrunchBase“All I’ve done is compile public information into a nice format for statistical analysis.” So says the man who is being called the Facebook hacker. Ron Bowes, a security consultant who’s also an nmap developer, is under fire from certain sections of the Internet for creating and uploading a torrent that contains more than 100 million Facebook users’ information. The thing is, all of this information was already publicly available in the Facebook directory. So to call him a “hacker,” well, would be incorrect.
Elon Musk certainly hasn’t been on the down-low lately. Well, with the Tesla’s IPO and then Toyota huge investment and manufacturing deals. Then there’s the lawsuits and his devoice. So yeah, it’s no wonder that Jon Favreau modeled his Tony Stark character after Elon — or so says Wikipedia.
But last night he had a friendly fireside chat with Stephen Colbert, where it was really nothing more than reading of the man’s resume and talking about his ventures. Of course Colbert talked circles around the PayPal co-founder as he tends to do. It’s not like The Colbert Report is known as a hard-hitting news program anyway. That’s more the style of The Daily Show. Click through for the video.