Social Media

Hewlett-Packard cut 270 employees from its troubled webOS division today, a move aimed at cutting costs, but which calls into question the company's recent statements that it is committed to the platform.

According to The Verge, HP slashed the positions because "it no longer needs many of the engineering and other related positions that it required before."

The company's decision comes not long after it said it would open source the webOS platform and after the recent departure of former WebOS chief Jon Rubinstein.

The Verge published a statement from HP about the layoffs this afternoon … Read more

Another week has flown by in social-media land, which means, you--and I--have missed a lot of developments, new products, etc. Most of them, of course, don't matter, but these Week in Review posts are meant to help you catch-up with the ones that do. Each weekend, you can help by posting links in the comments section or e-mailing me at sreetips@sree.net or Tweeting with @sree or #sreetips.

First stop: Mashable's 34 Digital Media Resources You May Have Missed by Matt Petronzio (@MattPetronzio) is where I go to catch up with the best of what … Read more

I know what my editor is thinking. "We hired this guy to blog about social and digital media, but for the second post in a row, he writes about a magazine cover?!?"

But just as my previous post about the "Loading..." cover of the New Yorker was about using digital artifacts in a print setting, the cover you see above represents the same thing.

In this case, Sports Illustrated's cover last week, featuring the #SILinsanity hashtag, a play on the regular #Linsanity hashtag, caught my eye. (Jeremy Lin is also on the cover this week, … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Talk to just about any entrepreneur in Silicon Valley these days, and there's a better than average chance one name will come up: Ron Conway.

The founder of SV Angel, an investment firm that has its fingers in dozens of the biggest names in technology today, Conway is known by many to be among the savviest investors around. His portfolio is a who's who of the best and brightest in tech--Twitter, Airbnb, Dropbox, Groupon, and dozens of others. He's not only successful, he's also prolific.

In a recent profile in Fortune, Conway explained that he … Read more

Want to play god much?

With Nukemap, a new tool that lets anyone test out--on a Google Map--the effects of some of history's most famous nuclear explosions on cities around the world, you can.

Say you're inclined to see just how bad the destruction would be in London if "Fat Man," the second A-bomb dropped on Japan by the Americans during World War II, detonated there. Nukemap lays it all out for you.

Nukemap lets you choose from a long list of cities to experiment with--or drag the map's marker wherever you want--and then choose either a custom yield in kilotons, or one of a list of famous bombs. When you click the "detonate" button, you quickly see a map with a series of colored circles that show the radii of the fireball, the air blast, the spread of radiation, and the spread of thermal radiation. … Read more

Coming soon to an iPhone or iPad app near you: simple and easy person-to-person voice chatting. No carrier required.

While Apple has made iMessage a staple of iOS communications, it's not behind this new development. Rather, it's Twilio, a San Francisco startup that has become a major player in the cloud communication space by giving everyone from small app developers to large corporations an inexpensive and efficient way to integrate voice communications.

Now, with the release of its software development kit today, Twilio is giving iOS app developers the same voice over IP (VoIP) tools. And while those … Read more

Talk about fast to market.

In the wake of "Linsanity," the worldwide hype that's blown up over the last couple of weeks surrounding New York Knicks sensation Jeremy Lin, there are already at least seven books, all electronic, about basketball's instant star.

From biography to poetry to trivia to Sun Tzu Art of War-type advice, the books run the genre gamut. And all have one thing in common: they were written, edited, and published at breakneck speeds.

According to Digital Book World, one the titles, "Linsanity: The Improbable Rise of Jeremy Lin," by Alan Goldsher, was turned around in just 72 hours. … Read more

In almost nothing in life is the most venerable institution also the most forward thinking. But, in the world of magazines, "The New Yorker" comes pretty close.

The magazine, founded in 1925, continues to be its outstanding self in print. I try to read almost every issue cover to cover. And the ones I don't? Well, they chastise me from the side of my bed when they pile up.

But what's unusual is how well the magazine has done in the digital space.

Smart use of its Web site: NewYorker.com offers up the right mix … Read more

Getty Images today unveiled an API designed to make it easy for a wide range of Web site publishers to access, search, and use the company's vast collection of stock photography.

The new service, known as Connect by Getty Images, is designed to give Web publishers built-in access to Getty images, as well as the search meta data associated with them.

Getty said it already has more than 40 customers using Connect, including Bleacher Report, ReachLocal, Zazzle, and many other ad agencies and publishing platforms.

The Connect API is free for Web site publishers to use, but customers who … Read more