At the National Press Club in Washington, DC Thursday, the X PRIZE Foundation launched its .4 million oil spill clean-up competition called the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge. The Foundation, which currently also has a million challenge to develop a 100 mile per gallon car, first announced this competition at an independently organized TED event in June dedicated to the Deepwater Horizon oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.
Read More...Facebook today officially introduced a new feature called Facebook Questions, the social network’s take on crowdsourced question and answer sites like Yahoo Answers, Quora, and Hunch.
The new feature, still classified as a beta, lets users ask questions of the vast Facebook community of more than 500 million simply by typing them into a new field labeled “What do you want to know?”
Read More...By Joe Wilcox, Betanews
July 29, 2010 may be remembered as the most important day in Steve Ballmer’s career at Microsoft. Tomorrow, the company hosts its annual Financial Analyst Meeting, or FAM. How much Ballmer and his core leadership team spend concretely talking about the future, rather than the past, will foreshadow how long the chief executive can remain the big boss. Nearly as important: Which executives will make presentations.
Read More...Delivering on a promise the company made back in June, Apple on Wednesday released an update to Safari 5 which turns on extensions support akin to what browsers such as Firefox and Internet Explorer have been offering for years.
In addition to the debut of these plugins, Apple also plugged several security issues, including a widely publicized flaw in the AutoFill feature that could open up users to information disclosure.
Read More...Last Week, the future of Qualcomm’s FLO TV mobile TV business came into question after CEO Paul Jacobs said the chipmaker was “engaged in discussions with a number of partners,” about what to do with the asset-rich service. The company recently gave Betanews some further information on what to expect from MediaFLO and FLO TV moving forward.
Read More...