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You talk to friends on Facebook. You play games on Facebook. You even watch movies on Facebook. And according to a new report, you could soon be catching up on your news reading from within the social network as well.

Forbes reported today that Facebook is at work with a number of media companies including The Washington Post, CNN, and News Corp.'s The Daily to cook up something called "Facebook editions," which would launch later this year. Forbes' Jeff Bercovici described them as something akin to "app versions" of the news outlets that live inside … Read more

The U.S. wind energy market took a hit in 2010 with a decrease in investment compared with 2008 and 2009.

That's according to the Department of Energy's "2010 Wind Technologies Market Report" (PDF) released yesterday.

The report measures investment in terms of how much wind energy capacity was built and connected to the national electric grid. About 5 gigawatts' worth of wind energy farms were installed in the U.S. in 2010, representing an $11 billion investment, according to the Department of Energy report. That represents a decrease in wind energy installations overall when compared … Read more

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said today that his company will "launch something awesome" next week, Reuters is reporting.

According to the news service, Zuckerberg told reporters in his company's Seattle office that the team there had developed the upcoming project. Facebook's Seattle office played an integral role in the development of the social network's recently improved mobile site, prompting Reuters to suggest the upcoming launch could be mobile- or tablet-related.

If the launch is tablet-related, it could be Facebook's long-awaited iPad application. The company currently offers an iPhone app, but iPad owners have so … Read more

A new FCC report has found that the wireless phone market is growing more concentrated, but it did not leave any clues as to how the agency might rule on an AT&T/T-Mobile merger.

It's the second year in a row that the Federal Communications Commission has said the industry is "concentrated." But it did not say whether it finds the industry to be competitive. Last year the FCC reversed years of findings that the market was considered to be competitive.

The annual report released yesterday contained data gleaned from the wireless industry from 2009 … Read more

Google received 14,201 requests from 25 countries for private user information in the second half of 2010, according to data released today in the company's Transparency Report.

Among the countries listed in the report, the U.S. accounted for 4,601 requests, of which Google complied with 94 percent. The U.S. had the most requests of any single country.

Other countries high on the list included Brazil with 1,804 user data requests, India with 1,699, and the U.K. with 1,162.

The search giant's Transparency Report is designed to shed light on the … Read more

GoDaddy, the world's largest registrar of domain names, might be acquired soon, according to a report today.

Private-equity firms KKR & Co., Silver Lake Partners, and Technology Crossover Ventures are currently nearing a deal to buy GoDaddy Group for between $2 billion and $2.5 billion, The Wall Street Journal is reporting, citing people with knowledge of the proceedings.

The Journal said the deal between the companies could be announced next week, but so far, GoDaddy has not signed a definitive agreement to sell its business to the firms.

GoDaddy has reportedly been seeking potential buyers for months. In … Read more

A gargantuan new GigaOm Pro report titled "A field guide to the cloud: current trends and future opportunities" (subscription only) was released today as part of the Structure 2011 conference in San Francisco.

The report examines the cloud-computing landscape with a focus on five specific areas: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), cloud storage, and private/internal clouds. And despite the relative newness of the cloud market, there is quite a bit going on.

According to the report, IaaS is driving the cloud-computing discussion but has yet to reach … Read more

Set in 2054, "Minority Report" revealed a future in which natural user interfaces play a major role. A memorable scene features Tom Cruise controlling a large interactive screen with illuminated gloves, gesturing back and forth to navigate through an NUI.

Less than a decade after the movie hit theaters, we now have Microsoft's $150 Kinect accessory for Xbox 360, which provides a similar experience to the one seen in the movie--without requiring special gloves or a multimillion dollar computer setup.

People have primarily used a mouse and keyboard to interact with computers for decades; this seems silly considering that nearly every other computer component has evolved significantly in the same time frame. Now that the Kinect SDK is available for Windows 7, natural user interfaces have more opportunity than ever to change how we interact with computers.

Supportive technology such as speech recognition (which has already matured greatly, as this week's launch of Google Voice Search for desktop computers highlighted), Microsoft Surface, and 3D Immersive Touch are all stepping stones to something far greater in the evolution of computer interaction. It's inevitable that years from now, aspects of these technologies will work together to free us from pressing keys and clicking buttons.

So, what do you think the most exciting possibilities for natural user interfaces are? Vote in our weekly poll. And please be sure to elaborate in the comments section.… Read more

Facebook is working on a new mobile platform designed to take on Apple's App Store, TechCrunch is reporting.

Dubbed Project Spartan, the project will work only on mobile Safari, the social-media blog claims, citing anonymous sources. The new platform, aimed at iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad, will reportedly be HTML5-based, making it compatible with mobile Safari. TechCrunch says that people "familiar with the project" believe Facebook wants to "use Apple's own devices against them to break the stranglehold they have on mobile app distribution."

TechCrunch's report about Project Spartan follows another … Read more