Tech Newz

Two years ago, we launched Structure, our conference devoted to Internet infrastructure and cloud computing. At the time, it was clear as a sunny California day that the Internet was entering a brand-new phase of growth that would see everything from pipes to routers to web services scale up, all thanks to digitization. The emergence of cloud-based services such as Amazon’s EC2 and S3 was the first sign of this big shift.

Greg Papadopoulos (Sun) and Werner Vogels (Amazon) on stage ..read more

One of the more solid and genuinely useful Internet startups out there, travel fare aggregator Kayak, was dissected in a report released today by NeXt Up Research for SharesPost. NeXt Up thinks that with a heavy advertising spend, Kayak should have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18 percent from 2009 to 2012. Based on estimated revenue and comparison to competitors, the report estimates Kayak’s market cap at between $705 and $771 million.

Is Kayak a promising IPO candidate? You ..read more

Facebook redesigned at the beginning of February, moving its search box from the right side to the top middle of its home page, and it seems to have paid off, with the company’s U.S. search queries growing 10 percent in February, according to new data released today by comScore. That’s a significant one-month jump, and it’s great news for Bing, which powers Facebook web search and announced last month that deeper integration is on the way.

Facebook had 436 million U.S. ..read more

The FCC said today that as part of its National Broadband Plan it might allocate spectrum for a free or low-cost wireless broadband network as a means to help address the affordability of broadband for poor people. If all this sounds familiar to you, maybe you recall the efforts of M2Z Networks, a Kleiner Perkins backed venture that tried to offer filtered, low-cost broadband using WiMAX.

A source at the FCC assures me that the agency’s efforts, which will be detailed ..read more

While social sites drive an increasing portion of traffic to content publishers compared to long-time referral giant Google, one sharing service reminds us today that email is still a major source of shared links and clickthroughs. Email — the original social network — is responsible for 70 percent of total shares and 48 percent of visits generated by shares, according to data collected by link tracker Tynt.

Source: Tynt

Widget maker Gigya recently attributed 44 percent of its shared items to Facebook ..read more

The FCC will deliver its National Broadband Plan to Congress a day earlier than originally scheduled — on March 16. Also on that day, the five FCC commissioners will vote on a “mission statement” intended to represent the spirit of the submitted documents. The plan, which Congress called for as part of the stimulus package passed last year, will recommend ways to provide universal broadband access as well as encourage Congress and industry to use broadband in health care, education ..read more

Six months ago, it looked like mergers and acquisitions were heating up again. Om thought it was good news for startups, while I fretted about companies being pressured to make deals that didn’t make strategic sense. I needn’t have worried. After the usual end-of-year lull, deals are starting to be made again.

And no sector is riper for deal-making than tech, especially those companies active on the web. Not only has the economy been stable for nearly a year, but web ..read more

Mark Josephson, CEO of hyper-local news aggregator Outside.in, doesn’t seem all that concerned about AOL’s plans to pour $50 million into its own hyper-local news operation, Patch.com. That’s because while AOL is trying to generate its own custom content for dozens of small cities and towns in New York state and elsewhere, Outside.in is happy to take on the much less resource-intensive job of pulling together what is created by others — from traditional media outlets such as newspapers and ..read more

Pretty much everything you’ve read about the U.S. mobile industry is true: The networks suck — some more than others — and the iPhone is still a king-maker. Yet according to data collected by Wireless Intelligence, during the quarter ended Dec. 31 2009, 5.9 million net new subscribers signed up for wireless services, the highest number of new adds made during a three-month period in three years.

The battle for subscribers among carriers is best reflected in the recent moves made ..read more

I don’t often look at my cellular phone bills, but I happened to glance at the latest one from T-Mobile. My first full monthly billing cycle didn’t show anything out of the ordinary, but the monthly data usage happened to catch my eye. I thought I chewed up more than 437 MB of mobile broadband, but I’m sure that T-Mobile keeps accurate records. After thinking over my usage patterns, I recalled the recent post James wrote in which he asked ..read more