News Byte

New Tech Gadget News Site Name: The Verge

A new tech site, which has been founded by a number of former staffers of AOL-owned Engadget, will be announcing its new name — The Verge — during an appearance by Editor-in-Chief Josh Topolsky tonight on Jimmy Fallon’s late-night television talk show. The Verge, whose charter sponsor will be BMW, will debut in the fall as a new competing gadget property for the well-funded content start-up SB Nation.

Q&A: Bill Gross's UberMedia Goes for a Third Name and Strategy

NetworkEffect talks to UberMedia, the perpetually renamed year-old start-up, about the business of buying up independent Twitter clients that compete with Twitter’s own options.

Twitter Responds to WikiLeaks Document Demand by Feds–But Who's Next?

Earlier tonight, it was revealed in numerous news reports that Twitter had been ordered by a U.S. federal judge to turn over documents related to several people involved with WikiLeaks. Here’s what Twitter had to say to BoomTown in response, as well as what CEO Dick Costolo said onstage yesterday at the D@CES event about the importance of the free flow of information.

Australia's Scoopon Won't Sell URL for $286,000, So Groupon Sues

Here’s the kind of attention you get when everyone thinks you have deep pockets.

Liveblogging the Bing-Facebook Bromance: "Underdog" Search With a Little Help From Your Friends

BoomTown motored on down to the Microsoft campus in Silicon Valley on a fabulously sunny day to liveblog the latest Bing event. The software giant is updating its search service, announcing deep integration–part of a deal announced last year–with Facebook. The theme, according to Microsoft SVP Yusuf Mehdi, quoting the Beatles, search with "a little help from your friends."

Liveblogging Google's SF Mobile Event: Voices Actions, Chrome to Phone, No Video-Calling, But Will There Be Donuts?

BoomTown was sitting front row center–better to scare Google Mobile Product Manager Hugo Barra–at the Silicon Valley search giant’s press event in San Francisco this morning. Google called together a group of reporters to discuss some “cool new features” for its Android operating system. While many have been expectantly waiting for Google to announce a video-calling offering, to match Apple FaceTime service, that was not to be here. Instead, it was a low-key rollout of a few whiz-bang features we can all ooh and ahh at.

BoomTown in D.C. to Say Happy 25th Birthday to .Com and Wary Hello to Broadband Plan

Last night, I jetted east to Washington, D.C., for an unusual confluence of events: The 25th anniversary of the .com Internet domain name and the Federal Communications Commission’s release of the National Broadband Plan. Both are set for tomorrow in the nation’s capital and both concern the impact of the Web on the United States in the past and the future. And after a quarter-century, let’s hope the federal government finally starts to take the Internet seriously.

The Entire BoomTown Video of the Mossberg-Jobs Chit-Chat at Apple iPad Launch!

A video BoomTown posted earlier this week–following around my All Things Digital partner, Walt Mossberg, at the launch of the Apple iPad–has gotten an awful lot of attention, due to a little over two minutes of him kibitzing about the device with CEO Steve Jobs. Since that section of my longer video was in the middle, I decided to put all the Jobs clips I had together, all done in my usual shaky spycam style.

Memo to Apple: You Might Want to Dispatch an iPad Team to Stanford U ASAP!

Here’s a video that the intrepid All Things Digital intern, Drake Martinet, did on the campus of Stanford University–located in the heart of Silicon Valley–right after Apple launched its new iPad tablet computer earlier this week. His mission: To find out if the students at the famous institution of higher learning–presumably one of the big consumer targets for Apple–were going to go out and get an iPad asap.

Nexus Is a Perfect Name for the Trekkies of Google! (The Video Proof!)

Nexus? Well, it does sound futurey and all, but it got BoomTown to wondering how Google’s geektastic engineers settled on the name for their not-so-secret new smartphone, which is called the Nexus One. Thus, BoomTown consulted the instruction manual for the search giant–“Star Trek”–to find out.
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