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It seems we're all just searching for a way to keep score.

The beauty of sports is that there is always a winner. The beauty of life is that it's not like sports. Sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose. Sometimes you get two-thirds of what you expected after leaving something on the table to get that far, and sometimes you fall short of a goal but find yourself better for the experience.

That's why we have sports, to amuse ourselves with contests that fulfill a need for clearly defined winners and losers but that don't … Read more

Mahalo launched a new Firefox extension last week at Gnomedex. It's called "Follow," and once installed, it does just that. It's a mix of a toolbar and sidebar that pulls up related search results from whatever page you're on. It's got a built-in Mahalo search box in an attempt to ween you off your Google and Yahoo search tendencies. It's also got a StumbleUpon-like function to recommend whatever page you're looking at to others with yes, no, and maybe buttons, along with a button to take you to a random Mahalo … Read more

Apple seems to be doing pretty well these days.

For its fiscal third quarter, the company reported profits of 92 cents a share after the close of the stock market Wednesday, 9 cents higher than Wall Street was expecting and 26 cents better than the company's own projections. And the magic number? Apple reported selling what appears to be 270,000 iPhones during the two days before the quarter ended on June 30.

UPDATE 2:14 P.M. PDT: Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer has confirmed 270,000 iPhones were sold in those two days.

Revenue for the quarter was $… Read more

Counting iPhones is harder than it looks, at least from the outside.

Coming off iPhone Weekend, the numbers game flew through the air as financial analysts tried to guess how many iPhones were sold by Apple and AT&T on June 29 and June 30, the last two days of the second quarter. Estimates ranged from 200,000 to 700,000 for the whole weekend, which is why AT&T's report of 146,000 iPhone activations on Tuesday was quite the buzzkill heading into Apple's earnings Wednesday. Apple's stock closed down $8.81, or 6.… Read more

This quarter was all over the map for Advanced Micro Devices.

It was just too hard to come up with an quick summary of AMD's fortunes. Overall revenue was up, but AMD didn't have a graphics division this time last year. Profits were horrific, but gross margins improved. Chip revenue was down compared to last year, but chip shipments were up 38 percent compared to the first quarter of this year (usually, second-quarter shipments are flat or down compared to the first quarter).

So, rather than glaze over everything in trying to present a comprehensive narrative, here's … Read more

Intel CEO Paul Otellini's 2006 cost cuts, painful as they were for Intel employees, paid off Tuesday as the company's second-quarter profits rebounded compared with last year.

The chipmaker posted a 47 percent increase in net income during its second quarter, up to $1.3 billion or 22 cents per share. The Wall Street crowd had been expecting 19 cents per share. Intel said it had 90,300 employees during the second quarter, way down from the 102,500 employees it had at this time last year.

Revenue was also a little stronger than had been expected, up … Read more

Sproose is a relatively young search engine that now allows its users to control search results via voting. Each search result gets its own vote count and the option to click "I like it," which brings the result up to the top of the heap. The obvious comparison here is Digg.

Sproose searches through videos, using Blinkx, although these results cannot be re-ordered or voted on. Users can also opt-in to have their votes recorded on their profiles for others to see and vote on. All results get their own comment area, where users can talk--although I doubt … Read more

Recently, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a story about how Yelp had empowered local restaurant-goers and helped them improve several local eating establishments with their constructive reviews. One thing that caught my eye was the mention of Yelp's sponsorship program, where local businesses can pay for premier placement in Yelp's search results and "sponsor" favorable user reviews so they appear at the top of the list.

The sponsorship program has been around since early 2006, and many businesses have participated in it as a way to enhance their identity on the service. The sponsorship package includes … Read more