Internet & Media

Less than three weeks before Google Reader shuts down, a top alternative called Feedly has begun switching the foundation of its RSS-reading service off Google's technology and onto its own servers.

Feedly released a new iOS app Tuesday that is "Now powered by the Feedly cloud," according to the app description. "Let's all wish a happy retirement to Google Reader."

Feedly got its start as a new interface to Google Reader, a service that lets people subscribe to Web site updates using the RSS and Atom technologies. But in March Google announced it's axing Google Reader on July 1, … Read more

If smartphone users have problems with your site, here's some incentive to fix them: Google said Tuesday it plans to punish problematic sites with lower placement in search results.

"To improve the search experience for smartphone users and address their pain points, we plan to roll out several ranking changes in the near future that address sites that are misconfigured for smartphone users," said Yoshikiyo Kato, a mobile search team programmer, and Pierre Far, a Webmaster trends analyst, in a blog post.

The pair gave some examples of common problems:

• Redirecting visitors trying to use assorted PC-optimized … Read more

For Renaud Laplanche, founder and chief executive of Lending Club, things are looking up -- or more accurately, up and to the right.

That's the desirable direction that the startup's finances are heading at present. Lending Club connects investors who have money to lend with borrowers who need it, making money on fees as it goes. Of late, the value of the loans it's arranged has been increasing at 9 percent each month. In May, the San Francisco-based company funded $148 million in loans, and Laplanche expects 2013 will total $2 billion.

Laplanche, a 42-year-old born in … Read more

Statements, bills, legal notices, and other official communications are steadily shifting to paperless delivery, but even four years from now paper will still dominate in the United States.

So concludes a study released Thursday by InfoTrends, which surveyed 2,025 consumers and 267 businesses on the matter. The analyst firm forecasts that paperless document deliveries will increase from 4.2 billion in 2012 to 8.6 billion in 2017, while paper deliveries will drop from 19.5 billion to 15.9 billion over the same period.

Obviously, paper will still dominate our lives for a long time coming. While going … Read more

Prohibitions against renting living quarters to out-of-towners are just as outmoded as attempts to ban cars shortly after their arrival in 1908, Airbnb co-founder and Chief Product Officer Joe Gebbia said Wednesday.

"Can you believe cities tried to outlaw cars in the United States? Imagine driving car for a year then going back to horse and buggy," Gebbia said at the LeWeb London conference. Eventually, though, "the policymakers adjusted to meet the demands of the people. What people demand is what the policies serve."

Of course, that message is self-serving: Airbnb is in the business of … Read more

Web-based photo editing took a second step forward Tuesday with the release of WebRaw, a tool that uses Mozilla's ASM.js technology for the computationally intense process of handling raw photos.

Raw photo formats, available on high-end cameras, offer better image quality and more editing flexibility, but they also are much more of a hassle than standard formats like JPEG, in part because they're so burdensome for computers to decode. That's why the demo, from Mozilla's Vladimir Vukicevic, is interesting: processing raw photos is the sort of chore that only a couple of years ago would … Read more

Feedly, the feed reader whose developers are trying to pick up where Google Reader left off, announced Monday that the service will get faster, work on Windows 8, and function without a browser extension.

The Web service, also available as an app for iOS and Android, lets people read Web sites via their RSS and Atom feeds. It's a technology that's popular among those with voracious information appetites, but it hasn't made it to the mainstream. In March Google announced that it's killing its Google Reader site on July 1.

Google's table scraps are a … Read more

The Android version of Chrome has begun carving a niche for itself in the mobile browsing market.

In May, usage of the mobile version of Google's browser on smartphones and tablets accounted for an all-time high of 3.2 percent, according to Net Applications' usage statistics. That figure may not sound like a lot, but the browser only crossed the 1 percent threshold in November 2012, and it's now surpassed Microsoft's IE at 2 percent of mobile browser usage.

At the same time, Google's unbranded Android browser, which predates Chrome, appears to be waning. Its usage … Read more

With a project called Portable Native Client now making its way into Chrome and potentially onto the Web itself, Google is violating its own principles for its Blink browser engine, a Mozilla programmer said Friday.

Portable Native Client, or PNaCl, is a Google technology to let Web apps run specially created software at nearly the speed of the native apps that run on operating systems like Windows or iOS. It plugs into the browser with an interface called Pepper.

Mozilla representatives have been frosty toward Native Client for years, but one programmer, Robert O'Callahan, issued a new criticism Friday, … Read more