The Social

eBay, which has been on quite the mobile start-up acquisition spree of late, made it public today that it has acquired Where, a company that makes location-based mobile applications and operates a network of local ads and deals.

More specifically, Boston-based Where has been purchased by eBay's PayPal division, which plans to make the start-up a part of its suite of services for local businesses while keeping the Where consumer app intact.

"Local commerce companies like Where are blurring the lines between in-store and online shopping," noted a PayPal blog post by senior director of global communications … Read more

This is a story we've most definitely seen before: Yahoo managed to beat Wall Street's expectations in its quarterly earnings, but that's mostly because expectations for the beleaguered technology company were so low to begin with.

In its 2011 first-quarter earnings, reported today, Yahoo revenue was $1.06 billion, a 6 percent decrease from last year, but earnings per share (excluding special items) was 19 cents per share, up from 15 cents in the first quarter of 2010 and exceeding Wall Street analysts' estimate of 16 cents.

Yahoo continues to attempt a difficult turnaround under the tenure … Read more

We should all be panicking, obviously: the omnipresence of glowing, wireless gadgets giving us constant access to an unlimited amount of news and social-media toys is bad for our brains.

To be more specific, earlier this month a team from the University of California at San Francisco published research that claimed digital information overload, from the onslaught of Twitter updates from the site of the latest natural disaster to your mom's FarmVille updates to that YouTube video of the baby raccoon freaking out in a bathtub, can impair mental performance. Appropriately, the results come right around a week designated … Read more

A report Monday in The Wall Street Journal claimed that Twitter is in "advanced talks" to acquire TweetDeck, a Twitter desktop client preferred by many of the social-media service's most active users, for about $50 million. "TweetDeck has emerged as a favorite of heavy users of Twitter, letting people track tweets about multiple topics at the same time," the story explained. "The program, which many people download and use on their desktop computers, also lets people write tweets longer than 140 characters, among other features."

But wait: Two months ago, TweetDeck was reported to have sold to UberMedia, … Read more

Google's first-quarter revenues announced this afternoon were slightly better than what Wall Street was expecting, but earnings per share were lower than anticipated.

Analysts were expecting about 25 percent year-over-year revenue growth--about $6.32 billion. Google ultimately reported revenues of $6.54 billion once traffic acquisition costs were removed.

"We had a great quarter with 27 percent year-over-year revenue growth," Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette said in an investor release. "These results demonstrate the value of search and search ads to our users and customers, as well as the extraordinary potential of areas like display and … Read more

Over at Twitter, they like metaphors that involve birds. Maybe a little too much. So here's one for them: Right now, according to a couple of in-depth reports about Twitter's past and present executive structure, the whole company sure looks like a flock of birds that can't quite tell which among them is the leader. And as a result, they're all crashing into one another.

These reports run the gamut from well-researched to wildly speculative, from a Fortune profile of the company's current management turmoil--co-founder Evan Williams is out, ex-CEO Jack Dorsey is back, … Read more

In what was a much more expedient process than many believed, Google's controversial plan to acquire travel search company ITA Software for $700 million is a done deal. After posting a blog entry on Friday that the deal was close to completion, Google added an update yesterday that said, "Our acquisition of ITA has now closed."

Google's announcement on Friday was that it had reached a settlement with the Department of Justice over regulator concerns that Google would have too much power by owning ITA Software, which provides its travel search technology to companies like Kayak, … Read more

A new app called Showyou launched Wednesday, taking a stab at success where many others have failed: a fresh, visually-impressive way to view and browse online videos. The Showyou app, now available for the iPhone and iPad, aggregates the videos that your friends have shared on Facebook and Twitter and uses Apple's AirPlay technology to bring the experience to an Apple TV device. Videos on the iPad app are displayed in a grid that looks something like a digital patchwork quilt; the most "relevant" videos are displayed in the upper left, and if you scroll either top-down … Read more

BERMUDA TRIANGLE--Last Saturday morning, about three dozen people, most in their twenties and thirties, packed into a small meeting room on board the Celebrity Century, a cruise ship floating somewhere between Miami and the western islands of the Bahamas.

They were eagerly listening to a talk by Scott Parazynski, the former NASA astronaut who is, at present, the only person on the planet who can claim to have both reached the top of Mount Everest and flown in space.

Parazynski flipped through a breathtaking slideshow of photos from, literally, the edges of the world with a combination of war-story nostalgia, … Read more