Is Twitter a billion-dollar company? It is now, according to its investors. People familiar with the company tell me it has raised around $50 million in a funding round that values the start-up, which has no real revenue to speak of, at about $1 billion… Tweet This Post

Google has acquired reCAPTCHA, an open source technology that provides CAPTCHAs to prevent spam and fraud. Captchas are those security questions you find on Web sites that require you to decipher and type words or numbers and detects whether the user is a human… Tweet This Post

A team of ex-Google employees won the top prize at the annual TechCrunch50 startup contest. Their company, Redbeacon, is sort of a modern-day Yellow Pages. It lets you search nearby service providers — plumbers, painters, personal trainers, etc. — and schedule appointments online… Tweet This Post

Looks like the economy, and with it the urge to splurge, is back — especially in Silicon Valley. After a long chill, the M&A market seems to be thawing — welcome news for entrepreneurs and their backers, who have been stymied by the lack of exits and a moribund IPO market. And the recently announced [...]

Print has its advantages. In addition to its portability, a magazine or newspaper is easy to flip through to find what you’re looking for, or run across articles or ads you didn’t know you’d want to read. Whatever other advantages the Web has, and notwithstanding Dave Winer’s “river of news” concept, this kind of quick [...]

It’s less than a day before the third annual (and third sold out) TechCrunch50 launch event in San Francisco. Fifty startups are preparing to launch their new products on stage in front of thousands of people. Are they nervous? Yep. But its all part of a rite of passage into the wonderfully chaotic world of [...]

There’s no shortage of publishers who are eager to criticize Google (NSDQ: GOOG)—and specifically Google News. They accuse the company alternatively of building a business on the back of their content and not giving their original content sufficient visibility in search results. Despite high-profile efforts to reach out to publishers, including a keynote address by [...]

Nokia is set to announce today that it has acquired Plum Ventures, the San Francisco “microsocial networking” start-up, for an undisclosed amount, sources said… Tweet This Post

The Apple store was down for quite a while just now, and lo and behold when it was reinstated Mac OS X Snow Leopard became available to mankind – that is to say you can now pre-order a copy. The major update to OS X, aka 10.6, will start shipping next Friday August 28, as [...]

The PS3 Slim has officially been confirmed by Sony, and it’s coming in at a great price: $299.99. The system will be available in the first week of September, feature a 120GB hard drive, and will be around a third smaller and lighter than the first-generation systems. It gets better: if you don’t want to [...]

IDG News Service – Intel will focus on its next generation of smaller and faster chips at a conference next month as it prepares to ship new chips for systems in 2010. Intel plans to shed more light on the Westmere architecture at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF), which will be held Sept. 22-24 in [...]

All responses are in to the Federal Communications Commission’s query asking why Apple put Google Voice for its iPhone on ice. But chances are that the answers that the FCC has received from Apple and AT&T will only provoke more questions. Here’s the good news, iPhone users. Never mind that New York Times story citing [...]