Social Media

Sometime in the next 12 months, Google Chrome will become the world's most popular browser, knocking Microsoft's Internet Explorer off the mountain it has ruled for more than a decade.

This fact should scare the pants off of Facebook.

In July 2008, IE controlled 68.5 percent of the market, according to Statcounter, while Chrome wasn't even on the market. Now Microsoft's browser is down to 34.8 percent market share while Chrome controls 30.9 percent of total browser usage. Chrome has grown by a percentage point the last few months, while IE has dropped … Read more

STANFORD, Calif. -- One of the tricks of building a successful company is identifying new markets. So while you might never have known you wanted a digital scent delivery system, a startup called Scent Sciences thinks that's exactly what you desire.

Scent Sciences and dozens of other companies flocked to Stanford University yesterday for the annual Cool Product Expo, a showcase of some of the, well, coolest gadgets, toys, electric cars, and oddball beauty items around. Among the most interesting items on display were 3D Systems' Cube, a personal 3D printer that costs just $1,300 and is being … Read more

"Memes really do come true."

For Adam Smith and Stacy Lambe, it's been a week of seriously whirlwind proportions. But after seeing their mega-hit Tumblr blog, "Texts from Hillary", get international attention and even inspire a submission from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton herself, the two Washington, D.C., men are shutting it all down.

If you haven't followed this phenomenon, picture LOLCats crossed with pictures of Hillary Clinton texting. Add tens of thousands of viewers around the world, some hilarious captions, and a surprise invitation by Clinton to Smith and Lambe to meet … Read more

How much fun can you have adding funny text to someone else's photograph? If you're the U.S. secretary of state, apparently quite a lot.

It's already been proven that if you let the general public add their own cute sayings to pictures of cats, you can build an entire empire on top of it. And now, thanks to the Tumblr blog Texts from Hillary, you too can create your own snarky narrative involving, yes, pictures of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton texting.

It started as a quirky site where random people can make submissions … Read more

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--It's nearly 10 a.m. in the City Council chambers here, and 43 people are waiting for their turn to speak.

These are not citizens with civic matters on their minds; divided into two lines that stretch out from either side of the podium in the center of the room, these veterans of Google, Cisco, NASA, Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo, Microsoft, Boeing, Sun, and others, are here looking for a new lease on their professional lives.

One by one, they lean into the microphone to introduce themselves. They mention where they've worked in the past, list their skills, … Read more

Another week has flown by in social-media land, which means, you -- and I -- have missed a lot of developments, new products, and so on. Most of them, of course, don't matter, but these Week in Review posts (March 27; March 19; March 12; March 5; February 26; February 19) are meant to help you catch up with the ones that do. Wherever I can, I insert Twitter handles so you'll have some new folks to follow. Each week, you can help by posting links in the comments section or e-mailing me or tweeting with @sree&… Read more

"My new app is something that solves an age-old problem and an annoyance for all of us in the tech industry," is how the promising pitch starts. That problem and nuisance being described? "The real world."

"We are all so busy now," the "entrepreneur" continues, "We've all got emails to email, texts to text, tweets to tweets and birds to slingshot, that there's no real reason to be bothered by our actual surroundings any longer, you know. There's really no reason to look up from our phones ever … Read more

If Google's April Fools' Day reimagining of its Maps service for the Nintendo Entertainment System didn't provide you with enough retro absurdity for one week, check out Dutch Web editor Jo Luijten's take on an '80s-era Twitter.

The video, which appeared on YouTube recently, is just one of several such clips Luijten has posted that mash up iconic Web 2.0 products and services with outmoded OSes, interfaces, and other technologies. (We've embedded a few below.)

In addition to Twitter, Luijten -- who's also behind a "funny jokes and frivolities" Web site called Squirrel-Monkey.com and a very serious organization called the International Guild of DOS Users (the FAQ is good for a chuckle or two) -- has also conjured up an '80s version of Angry Birds and a '90s take on Facebook. And he beat Google to the punch by whipping up a look at an '80s incarnation of the company's search engine.… Read more

Zynga must be glad it dropped that $180 million on OMGPOP last month. Besides acquiring Checkers, Pool, and other online games, Zynga also got its hands on Draw Something--which topped charts today as the fastest-growing original mobile game ever, according to VentureBeat.

The wildly popular game, which most resembles the board game Pictionary, was released less than two months ago and within the first two weeks it skyrocketed with 10 million downloads. Quickly, both the free and paid versions were No. 1 on iTunes' download charts.