Consumer content

NEW YORK--AOL CEO Tim Armstrong wasn't yet at the company when it paid $850 million for social network Bebo two years ago, a purchase that's now considered to be one of the biggest tech industry M&A blunders of the past decade. On Tuesday, onstage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, Armstrong said, "I don't know whether or not I would have bought Bebo. Looking backward, the answer's no, but in that time period with what was going on, maybe."

Indeed, at the time, would-be Facebook rival Bebo was extremely popular with teenagers in … Read more

Justin Bieber is everywhere. And if you're like so many others over the age of 15, you've seen enough. Luckily, a new Firefox add-on lets you remove all mentions of Bieber from the Web in one fell swoop.

The tool, dubbed Shaved Bieber, evaluates any page a person is browsing and censors all mentions of the teen idol. It works on every site, from Twitter to Google to Wikipedia. People can even go to his personal home page and watch as every mention of Bieber is blocked out.

Shaved Bieber is available in two versions: an add-on, which … Read more

NEW YORK--When you ignore the map, sometimes you take a wrong turn. That's what Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz admitted her company did a few years ago when it stopped devoting significant engineering resources to its Yahoo Maps product.

Bartz held a press conference Monday with Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo to announce a partnership that will bring Yahoo's e-mail and messenger services to Nokia's Ovi service and Nokia's Navteq mapping service to Yahoo. While the story on the surface is that Yahoo is gradually shedding its properties that have fallen behind, handing over the reins of its … Read more

Update, May 22 at 1:35 PDT: The story has been updated to indicate that the original "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" Facebook page is back up, with an explanation of its removal.

A Facebook page that led Pakistan to temporarily block the social-networking site reappeared on the social-networking site Saturday morning, two days after it was taken down.

The page promotes "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day," scheduled for Thursday following an American cartoonist's satirical suggestion that people draw images of the prophet to promote free speech.

By Friday, the page no longer appeared on the site. … Read more

Microsoft filed a lawsuit this week accusing a Web site of engaging in a new type of click fraud called "click laundering" by getting credit for clicks on ads that were made by botnets or unsuspecting users on a site set up for that purpose.

The lawsuit names RedOrbit, a science news aggregator, as defendant, while a second suit names John Does to cover multiple unknown defendants who allegedly participated in click laundering on Microsoft's AdCenter network, Microsoft said in a statement.

To get around click fraud detection technologies, fraudsters are using so-called "parked" Web … Read more

Google, the search giant and so much more, this week appears to have disrupted yet another market sector with its introduction Thursday of Google TV, an Android adaptation that puts regular television and the Web in one user interface.

The announcement stole the show on day two of the Google I/O developer conference during a keynote speech that focused heavily on upgrades to Google's Android smartphone operating system.

With a panel of some of the most important CEOs in the world of consumer electronics (Sony, Best Buy, and Intel, among others), Google declared its intention to, "do … Read more

The silicon powering the Google TV technology is a window on Intel's future and an affirmation of its new credo: integrate, integrate, integrate.

The CE4100 is a system-on-a-chip, or SOC, which essentially means all of the various features of a computing device are packed onto one piece of silicon. Intel historically has not focused on this kind of highly-integrated chip, but rather ultra-fast processors designed for PCs and servers.

But designing Intel chips is now becoming an exercise in how many disparate features can be squeezed onto the proverbial head of a pin. In this case, the CE4100 turns a TV into a versatile computing device. "We are transforming TVs from essentially a dumb display device to smart computing device," Eric B. Kim, senior vice president at Intel, said in a phone interview Wednesday.

Intel is not taking its eye off performance, though. "High performance is needed to deal with large screens, multiple streams of high-definition audio and video. Google could not do what they want on today's SOCs," said Kim. "This is not something that you hold in your hand. This is something you plug into the wall," he said, referring to other chip designs that emphasize power saving features over performance. … Read more

One of the most interesting bits of news to come out of today's Google I/O conference was the company's stealth acquisition of Simplify Media a couple months ago.

Until March of this year, Simplify offered a free software application for PC and Mac that let users stream music from the iTunes or WinAmp libraries on their home computer, over the Internet, to other devices they own. The company also made an iPhone app that let the iPhone or iPod Touch receive these streams.

It was a nifty solution for users with big music libraries at home and … Read more

Recent changes to Facebook's privacy controls, as well as a litany of new products that share more user and demographic information with third-party partners, are ticking off a lot of users.

Weblogs and Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis recently joined GDGT founder Peter Rojas and prominent Googler Matt Cutts in the ranks of notable tech industry figures who have announced that they're deleting their profiles altogether. Rumors have been swirling about internal disputes at Facebook over whether the company really did cross the line and whether changes should be in store.

But I'm willing to guess that a … Read more