Internet & Media

Trulia for Glass video on Vimeo.

From aiding first responders to real-time language translation, Google Glass has software developers excited for the potential of wearable computing. But the true test of success for Glass may be how quickly it's adapted to more commonplace uses, such as helping real estate listing company Trulia sell and rent properties.

"It's an exploration tool," said Jeff McConathy, Trulia's vice president of consumer engineering, of his company's in-development app during a visit to CNET's San Francisco office. "It's not about deeply engaging with the content, it'… Read more

Google continues to slowly build Google Now into its services. It made the data-rich Now-styled notifications available through an advanced option setting in Chrome for Mac on Thursday, following basic implementation in Chrome for Windows and Chrome OS earlier this year.

You can activate Google Now notifications in Chrome for Mac by typing chrome://flags into your address bar, scrolling down to the Enable Rich Notifications, and changing the setting to Enable. The setting is limited to the most unstable of the browser's builds, Chrome Canary. Canary will only work on OS X 10.6 and newer.

Google Now … Read more

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said Friday that his company has never participated in a program to give any government direct access to its servers.

The categorical denial, posted to Facebook, comes a day after The Guardian and The Washington Post reported that the National Security Agency has backdoor access, through a secret program called PRISM, to nine major Internet companies including the social network.

"I want to respond personally to the outrageous press reports about PRISM," Zuckerberg wrote in a post published to his Facebook profile. "Facebook is not and has never been part of any … Read more

The young people these days are really into the Google, even more than the Apple or the Facebook.

That's the finding of a poll conducted for The Washington Post in which 94 percent of respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 reported having a favorable opinion of the Mountain View, Calif., behemoth, with 72 percent saying they have a "strongly favorable" view of Google.

That officially makes Google more popular with twenty-somethings than chocolate, which 90 percent of people say they "love."… Read more

Snapchat is finishing a financing round that will net it around $100 million in fresh funds and a valuation of nearly $500 million, according to GigaOm.

The 2-year-old mobile app, extremely popular with youngsters, offers people an impermanent way to send text, pictures, and videos to friends that disappear after a few seconds. Members upload more than 150 million images every day, CEO and co-founder Evan Spiegel said in April.

Just a few months ago, the Los Angeles-based company behind the app picked up $13.5 million in funding in a round led by Benchmark Capital. The deal reportedly valued … Read more

The Pirate Cinema chaotically visualizes the most popular video torrent files found on The Pirate Bay in a mesmerizing and sometimes visually overwhelming way.

Created by artist Nicolas Maigretto and programmed by Brendan Howell, the cinematic collage involves a custom-programmed box that intercepts real-time peer-to-peer file sharing among the top 100 torrent files (on The Pirate Bay) and projects flashes of the actively downloaded video content on one of three screens.… Read more

At this point, Apple is all but certain to unveil iRadio -- or whatever it calls its Internet radio service -- at Monday's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

Early Friday, Apple reached a deal with Sony Music, the last of the three major labels it needed to sign up, according to people familiar with the deals. And now Apple has also signed up Sony/ATV/ That deal, first reported by Billboard, was confirmed to CNET by a Sony/ATV spokesperson.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

Sony/ATV, the world's largest publishing house, is jointly owned by … Read more

If a man in the street offers to sell you a Rolex, it is likely a worthless piece of metal.

Similarly, if a man in the street offers to sell you an iPad, it is unlikely to be anything other than a piece of wood or a box of apples.

Or, in this case, potatoes. … Read more

Only a handful of the thousands of scripts plugged into Amazon Studios have gotten picked up, but the company has set up a program that could help breathe a little more life into the stories.

Amazon Studios, the "Hollywood" division of the online shopping giant, launched a free online tool Friday that will let aspiring film and television makers create storyboards for scripts, complete with characters and dialogue that can then be shared with others for feedback.

"Storyteller provides a digital backlot, acting troupe, prop department and assistant editor," Roy Price, the director of Amazon Studios, … Read more