Top 10 Culture-Tech Stories of 2011

Technology is frequently examined as though it were the reason for its own being, a kind of byte-driven tautology or spectacularly dry religious sect. But technology is a means to address questions. In that spirit, here are the top 10 stories about how we've employed the social web to ask and answer questions about our lives. These are "top" stories in the sense that they are representative, not exhaustive. I'm focusing on culture, specifically...

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Instagram on Track to Oust Foursquare as Biggest Mobile Social Network

For a service that only exists on one platform, Instagram has been wildly successfully. The photo-sharing app for iOS is now on track to hit 15 million users, which as a post SocialFresh points out, is how many people are using Foursquare today. Among mobile-first social services, Foursquare is arguably the biggest right now, but the geolocation check-in app is on track to be surpassed soon, despite being a year older than Instagram...

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Join Storify's Story Of The Year Contest & Win An iPad 2

Storify is announcing a contest to find the best story of 2011. The team has pulled together 10 nominees, but all Storify posts are eligible to win. Users can vote by clicking the Storify 'Like' button at the top of each story. You can like as many as you want, but you can only like each story once. The story with the most likes by December 29 wins Story Of The Year, and the author wins an iPad 2.The Story Of The Year page will keep a running...

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Dumbest Moves of the Year in Web Enterprise Services

It was quite a year of mistakes, with Carol Bartz leaving Yahoo, HP trying once again to re-orient itself and hiring ex-California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman. On top of this comes various reports that once again email is dead or dying (this could be a tedious repetition of the "year of the LAN" that we went through in the 1990s, even though email has been incorporated at the main notification mechanism of just about every piece of...

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You Don't Have To Use Twitter To Invest $300M In Twitter

The $300 million secondary investment Twitter confirmed  Monday morning comes from a key figure in a region where Twitter is experiencing some of its fastest growth.Never mind that Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the Saudi investor whose Kingdom Holding investment firm has stakes in Apple, Citigroup, and now, 3% ownership of Twitter, isn't a big user of the service himself (Prince Alwaleed follows just 25 users with his account - including Fox...

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Facebook Has More Android Than iOS Mobile Users

AppData.com revealed that daily average use on Facebook for Android has, for the first time ever, surpassed  Facebook for iPhone. The Android Facebook app now has 58.8 million daily average users, while Facebook for iPhone has only 57.6 million daily average users. This new data also coincides with the worldwide rollout of Facebook Timeline, which finally happened on December 15, 2011.Last week, Facebook released Timeline  for Facebook.com...

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France gets four bids in 4G auction

France's telecoms regulator has received bids from all of the country's major operators for a second batch of higher-quality fourth-generation mobile licenses and will choose winners in the coming weeks.ARCEP said in a statement on Thursday that France Telecom, SFR, Bouygues and Iliad had submitted offers but did not disclose how much each company had bid.The French government aims to raise at least 1.8 billion euros ($2.33 billion) in the second phase of the auction, which offers "golden frequencies" in the 800 MHz band, so dubbed because they allow mobile signals to travel long distances without losing strength.France has already sold off...

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ABB to power Facebook data center in Arctic Circle

Sony Corp said it was keeping to its target to sell 15 million PlayStation 3 game machines in the year to end-March, even as a long-running debt crisis grips Europe, one of the Japanese electronics group's most important markets.Welsh-born Andrew House, who took over as head of Sony Computer Entertainment, the group's video games business, less than four months ago, told reporters on Thursday that PS3 sales were, if anything, slightly ahead of...

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ABB to power Facebook data center in Arctic Circle

Swiss engineer ABB has won an $11 million contract to power Facebook's first data centre outside the United States, covering an area in the Arctic Circle equivalent to 11 soccer pitches, it said on Thursday.Facebook chose Lulea, northern Sweden, as the site for its green data center -- set to be the largest of its kind in Europe -- because of its access to renewable energy and the cold climate that is crucial to help cool the huge server buildings.Data...

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Apple to open R&D center in Israel

Apple will open a research and development center in Israel that will focus on semiconductors, the Globes business daily reported on Thursday. The Israeli newspaper said the maker of iPods, IPads and iPhones has already hired Israeli high-tech veteran Aharon Aharon to run the center. Apple was not available for comment. Globes said that although Apple was a global innovation leader, it is a small investor in R&D. It invested $2.4...

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Sony eyes Vita push, feels Fitch heat

Sony Corp, set to report a $1 billion loss this year, is banking on a big slate of new software to drive sales of its new PlayStation Vita handheld games device, even as Fitch downgraded the Japanese electronics giant to a notch above junk. Welshman Andrew House, who took the top job at Sony Computer Entertainment in September, must plot a much-needed success story for the Vita, negotiating a minefield of consumer gloom and competition...

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