Author: Connor Livingston

Many have billed Google’s Nexus 7 as a clear competitor to the Amazon Kindle Fire. Same price point, same size screen. The comparisons can really end there, though. The big difference other than superior aesthetic is in the way the software performs. There were plenty of unboxing videos but we wanted to wait to see how it performed long-term (which, in the tablet world, is a couple of weeks) and so far it has been very impressive. It is more responsive than the Kindle Fire and with the much-larger app store and front-facing camera, Google has created a superior device at the same price as the Fire. As…

Celebrities are people, too. That’s the premise behind this skit on Jimmy Kimmel Live where celebrities such as Katy Perry, James Van Der Beek, Zooey Deschanel, and Kristen Stewart read and often respond to the abusive and crude Tweets that are often posted about them. It’s funny, but it brings up a good point. Social media allows people to vent their frustrations and express their feelings, good or bad, about other people. Celebrities are often the focus of attacks because of their position of privilege and being a celebrity means taking the good and the bad. Without social media, most would simply…

There may be a lot more Chiefs fans coming to town soon as Google opens up their 1000 Mbps up and down speeds with no bandwidth caps and no overages. This, according to Google, is only the beginning of their plan to bring internet speeds in line with computing speeds and file size capabilities. According to The Verge: Google says there will be no monthly bandwidth caps, and no overages. It even comes with 1TB of cloud storage through Google Drive. But Google Fiber is more than just internet — it will also be a “great new TV experience.” Google Fiber TV comes with a Bluetooth remote and a search interface…

Put aside that the site was sold for a tiny amount relative to where it was a couple of years ago. Forget the fact that it still gets strong traffic and sends a decent number of visitors to various websites across the internet. Lastly, pretend like there’s no shame in being on top of the social news world at one point. Moving forward, is it better for Betaworks to take what they’ve done so far with News.me and other technologies and rebuild Digg as an advanced version of what it once was, or should they scrap the concept that Digg has focused on over the years and take the site in a completely different direction?…

It has been challenging for Foursquare to make money. The popular location-based check in app has made news, generated buzz, and been the subject of purchasing and partnering talks since it became relatively popular amongst the mainstream in 2010. The only thing it hasn’t done is generate a substantial amount of revenue with its efforts. Their latest attempt to enter the world of the profitable is Promoted Updates, a service whereby businesses can push their listings to the top in a way similar to promoted Tweets on Twitter. When a user opens the application, their mobile device’s GPS system…

The start is always the most important part of a new regime. With Marissa Mayer taking over at Yahoo, the scrutiny will be on her inside and outside of the company for several weeks. Everything she does (or doesn’t do) will be admired or criticized, heralded or ridiculed. Even her first memo. AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher’s knack for getting copies of internal memos paid off again as she intercepted the memo below. The gist: keep moving, you’re important, we’re going to succeed. …

Digg isn’t the first social media site to fall. MySpace collapsed under their own weight. Other social news sites like Propeller, Yahoo Buzz, and Mixx never got the traction they needed. Facebook pushed out a lot of would-be social networks over the years. When Betaworks bought Digg for a ridiculously-low amount, it didn’t mark the first failure of a social media giant. It was just the first time a social media giant fell for no apparent reason. Digg had the traffic. It had the buzz. It had the personality. It made one major misstep with the roll out of V4, but otherwise their faults were not any bigger…

A June update to the Skype software adds recipients to some of the instant messages you send out through the system. Instead of just sending it out to the person or people selected for the message, it includes other people as well without your knowledge. According to VentureBeat, Skype knows all about it: “We are aware that in rare circumstances IMs between two contacts could be sent to an unintended third contact. We are rolling out a fix for this issue in the next few days and will notify our users to download an updated version of Skype.” Be careful what you say and who you’re saying it about when…

One would have to look at politics or religion to find more divisive topics than an alien presence and specifically the Roswell incident of 1947. The letter above has been examined, ridiculed, lauded, and everything in between over the years with no consensus as to its authenticity. In researching this piece, it was clear that those who believed in aliens were adamantly in support of the document and claimed that attempts to debunk it were misdirection techniques from the government. Those who don’t believe in aliens called it things such as “a letter from Santa Claus” and refused to give it validity….

Social media is a realm that is open to men and women of every race and nationality (other than in the nations where they’re blocked, of course). There are a handful of networks that are geared towards one sex or the other, but for the most part men are perfectly welcome on Pinterest and women are encouraged to join Reddit. They just don’t, at least not very often. As this graphic shows, Pinterest is 82% women while Reddit is 82% men. Even the “equal” social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn show large degrees of separation with women dominating the two former and men controlling the latter….