Webware

Microsoft will be formally launching the next version of its Internet Explorer browser, IE9, at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi) on Monday--an interesting place to launch, given that the Austin, Texas, geek fest is packed full of the hordes who have long since ditched Internet Explorer for the decidedly hipper pastures of Firefox, Safari, or Chrome.

The new browser, which had its first and only release candidate land in users' hands in early February, will fully launch to the public at 9 Pacific time that night. In a blog post, Internet Explorer senior director Ryan Gavin described the … Read more

When a former Yahoo employee leaked a list of products that the troubled company plans to shut down, many people were up in arms over the fact that one of the items on the list was Delicious--a social-bookmarking company Yahoo acquired in 2005 that still has a handful of loyal users.

But Delicious says it plans to find an exit strategy from Yahoo, not shut down.

"We are not shutting down Delicious," a post on the Delicious blog read. "While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo, we believe there is [an] … Read more

Just in time for New Year's resolution season, a site called Fitango has launched, intending to provide a marketplace where people can buy "plans" from experts who can offer online tutorials in anything from training for a marathon to transitioning to a vegan diet to learning as much Italian as possible one month before traveling to Florence.

It's structured like an app store. Pick an "Actionplan," pay for it (though some are free), and you'll receive instructions, including video and audio, where applicable, over a given span of time. You're invited to … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--"We don't think that a modern messaging system is going to be e-mail," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a press conference this morning as it unveiled a hotly anticipated revamp of its messaging system that many pundits had characterized as a "Gmail killer."

But unveiling an e-mail product wouldn't take into account all the other means of digital communication that have sprung up and are now used by hundreds of millions of people around the world, the young executive insisted. He says he was inspired by conversations with high schoolers who … Read more

Little has been known about stealth start-up RockMelt except that it's a browser, specifically (and yet ambiguously) a "Facebook browser," and it's backed by browser godfather Marc Andreessen. Well, now RockMelt has crept out of the woodwork into a limited beta for Mac and Windows, and the world can get a peek at it.

RockMelt is indeed a "Facebook browser," if only because Facebook is the social-media service that's best integrated into it at launch. It's clear that ultimately the browser's team plans to make it more customizable with other services. … Read more

Long gone are the days when then-Digg execs Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson would make joint appearances at tech industry conferences and giddily discuss a cluster of new features coming to the social-news site--as well as the fact that they were, invariably, looking to hire new employees.

On Monday, following a report in AllThingsD that publisher and Chief Revenue Officer Chas Edwards was bailing for a start-up, Pixazza, CEO Matt Williams e-mailed staffers to announce that "the burn rate is too high" at the company and that it would be laying off 25 of its 67 staffers, a … Read more

Consider the blind mole rat. The evolutionary process has given these subterranean rodents, classified as the genus Spalax, massive teeth and tough claws for digging--and more or less zero eyesight. But blind mole rats still have eyes. They're just very, very small and so obsolete that they're now completely covered by a layer of skin. This is what's taught in biology classes as a "vestigial feature," along with other zoological examples, such as the human appendix, snakes' pelvic structures, emus' wings, and whales' hind leg bones.

Now, take a different kind of evolution: the constantly … Read more

There's a new partnership for GetGlue, a start-up that lets users "check in" to the movies or TV shows they're watching, music they're listening to, and books they're reading. The company announced Tuesday that it's partnered with four major book publishing houses to launch "stickers," the equivalent of Foursquare's achievement badges, for the season's biggest-ticket fiction and nonfiction books as well as bestselling authors like Tom Clancy and Paulo Coehlo.

On board are Hachette Book Group, Simon and Schuster, Random House, and Penguin. The largest publishing house that isn'… Read more

Something's very wrong with the servers at mobile check-in start-up Foursquare, which had experienced problems on Monday morning and then ultimately crashed altogether and hadn't been resuscitated as of 8:00 p.m. PT.

Reached via e-mail, one of Foursquare's executives said the company was not yet willing to disclose the cause of the outage but promised that a postmortem blog post would explain the situation when it had been mitigated.

"The light at the end of the tunnel seems oh-so-close. Should have some good news soon!" a tweet from Foursquare's Twitter account read … Read more