Miscellaneous

Travel marketplace Airbnb raises $112 million

Airbnb, an online marketplace where travelers can find and book places to stay around the world, has picked up $112 million in financing, a move designed to help it grow in the U.S. and abroad.

The company will use the $112 million in Series B financing from investors Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, and General Catalyst to enhance its U.S. online community and expand and hire more people internationally. This latest round of capital adds to the $7.2 million raised on behalf of Sequoia Capital and Greylock in November, bringing the total investment to $119.8 million.

Airbnb … Read more

Samsung smartphone sales may outshine Apple

Samsung has passed Nokia and may have passed Apple in global smartphone sales during the second quarter, according to estimates from Strategy Analytics analyst Neil Mawston.

Responding to a recent series of questions from Bloomberg, Mawston pegged Samsung's second-quarter smartphone sales at anywhere from 18 million to 21 million.

Even on the low end, the numbers surpass those of Nokia, which sold 16.7 million smartphones for the quarter. And if they're are at or near the high end, it means Samsung also edged past Apple, which sold 20.3 million iPhones over the same period.

Either way, the numbers show Android gaining on Apple at the same time that Nokia is just trying to stay in the race, according to Bloomberg. An investor's report from Nomura Securities in June forecast that both Samsung and Apple would overtake Nokia in smartphone sales by the second quarter.

Though still the leading smartphone vendor across the world this year, Nokia's share has steadily dropped. A Gartner report in May discovered that the company's first-quarter share this year had dipped to 25 percent from 30 percent a year ago, its lowest level in 14 years.

In a bid to stay competitive, Nokia reportedly recently trimmed the prices of some of its specific smartphone models. In the meantime, the company is in a bit of a holding pattern as it tries to move ahead on its deal with Microsoft to jump from Symbian to Windows Phone as its core mobile operating system.… Read more

Join the nerd party at Comic-Con 2011 (roundup)

CNET descends on San Diego for Comic-Con, the massive annual show that has become the epicenter of geek culture, bringing together sci-fi and fantasy movies, TV shows, games, toys, and--oh yeah--comic books.

 

Videos

Uproar over Wonder Woman DC changed Wonder Woman's costume in June of last year, switching from the tried and true short-shorts to--gasp!--pants. Fans went ballistic. Is Wonder Woman as wonderful if you can't see her butt-kickin' legs?

Brian Tong's Top 5 favorite things from Comic-Con As hard as it was to narrow down to just 5, Brian Tong goes over the best … Read more

Cast-off gadgets peek into new owners' lives

There is an afterlife--for electronics, anyway. Ever wonder what it's like? Researchers at MIT tracked used computers to find out. The project gives you a glimpse of where cast-off laptops and smartphones end up.

Rather than simply providing statistics about the global flows of secondhand electronics and e-waste, the MIT Senseable City Lab researchers produced a series of images of the gadgets' new owners and their surroundings. The images hail from Indonesia, South Asia, and Africa.

For the project, dubbed Backtalk, researchers sent refurbished Netbooks to developing countries via nonprofit organizations. They set up the computers to record location and pictures, and send the data home to MIT--with their new owners' consent. The Netbooks carried stickers explaining the project in the local language.

The researchers captured the data using the open-source antitheft software Prey, which records a computer's GPS coordinates and takes a picture with the computer's camera every 20 minutes.… Read more

Oracle gets its trial date with Google this Halloween

Oracle was granted at least one of its wishes in its patent infringement suit with Google. The two will go to trial this October. However, Google was given a little room to wiggle.

On Thursday, both legal teams for the Silicon Valley giants continued to present their arguments at the United States Courthouse in San Francisco. However, all they received was a couple of stern lectures from Judge William H. Alsup without any answer to the joint motion filed earlier this week.

However, Alsup did promise an answer about where the proceedings would go next, and that answer is here. … Read more

This Day in Tech: DOJ takes swipe at EFF; fake Apple store in China

Too busy to keep up with today's tech news? Here are some of the more interesting stories from CNET (and elsewhere) for Friday, July 22.

• Encrypt your data? Here's a scoop you'll want to read: The U.S. Department of Justice swipes at the online civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation over encryption passwords. Here's the situation: A Colorado woman named Ramona Fricosu is being forced to decrypt her laptop for police. Phil Dubois, Fricosu's criminal defense attorney, told CNET's Declan McCullagh that "to force my client (assuming that she has the ability) … Read more

FBI strikes back at alleged hackers (week in review)

The FBI escalated its war on hackers, serving dozens of warrants across the U.S. and making more than a dozen arrests.

Sixteen people were arrested in the United States in connection with hacking attacks by the Anonymous group of online activists, as well as one person in the U.K. and four people in the Netherlands, the U.S. Department of Justice said.

The arrests of the defendants, who range in age from 20 to 42, followed the execution of more than 35 search warrants throughout the country by the FBI as part of its investigation into hacking attacks … Read more

Gartner: 141 million to use mobile payments in 2011

The number of consumers paying for items via their mobile devices will shoot past 141 million this year, says new data out today from Gartner.

That figure is a 38.2 percent increase over 2010, when mobile-payment users hit 102.1 million. The amount of money generated via mobile payments is expected to reach $86.1 billion this year, up almost 76 percent from the $48.9 million seen last year.

The surge in mobile payments will come despite the slow adoption of mobile-payment technologies.

The mobile, retail, and financial industries have been rushing to roll out near-field communication (NFC) … Read more

Study: 19 percent of people drop phones down toilet

Does the world have a problem with coordination? Is the increased level of drug ingestion causing people to lose their grip on the things that are most precious to them?

This certainly seems to be the case when one reads a blood-freezing piece of, no doubt, statistically pure analysis commissioned by online address-book site Plaxo.

As MSNBC tells it, Plaxo's research stunningly reveals not only people's utter incompetence in looking after their smartphones but also their desperate need for, well, Plaxo.

Allegedly, 19 percent of people drop their smartphones down the toilet. Please consider that for a moment. … Read more