Yahoo Reportedly Looking To Buy Tumblr For That Magic $1B Yahoo is in talks to acquire the blogging site Tumblr for as much as $1 billion, All Things D reports. This could be the “big deal” Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer…

Google+ has never looked and felt as it good as it does right now. Alas, looks aren’t everything. A massive overhaul of the service, announced Wednesday during a keynote at Google’s I/O conference for developers, has brought it in line with the most modern and functionally powerful Web design principles. It now has a multi-column [...]

If you’ve ever used the Internet — and you know who you are — you’ve undoubtedly had apps or various services stop working unexpectedly. For ordinary users, this usually just means no access to Twitter or Gmail for a while. But for developers, whose apps and services rely increasingly heavily on hooks into popular Web [...]

A year ago, I left Google’s annual I/O developers conference convinced it was making a major strategic shift into being a hardware company. As this year’s I/O wraps up, I’m left questioning that conclusion. The message Google is putting forward in 2013 is very different: It’s all about what developers can do with the software [...]

Amazon’s 1-Click arguably offers the best shopping experience on the Web—desktop and mobile. But 1-Click has been slow to expand beyond Amazon’s walls. While Amazon offers the convenient checkout service to retail-website builders, competitors are understandably loath to embrace the e-commerce giant’s tools.   Now a wiser, bloodier Google has re-entered the fray, taking lessons [...]

With a whirlwind of announcements at its Google I/O developers conference this week, Google’s vast suite of social products is finally starting to look like it was created by a single company and not cobbled together via a series of haphazard acquisitions. Here are the highlights of what’s changed: Hangouts: Google Messaging, Unmessy At Last [...]

The universe of apps for Google Glass, initially limited to the New York Times and the social network Path, is expanding rapidly. Google on Thursday announced several more entries to its Glassware stable: Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Tumblr, CNN news updates, Elle fashion features and a Glass-only game called Ice Breaker. Look for more Glass apps to surface [...]

I’m a devoted Pathhole—a hardcore user of mobile social network Path. For all that I make fun of Path’s twee, artisanal, and bespoke nature—on a recent visit to its lovely office in San Francisco, I was tempted to ask CEO Dave Morin if his software engineers were cruelty-free—I have a soft spot for the service [...]

In one of the more popular Google I/O sessions of Day 2, two members of the Google [x] team behind Project Glass explained how to enable root access on your expensive eyewear — a step that will also void your warranty, just like it does when you root an Android smartphone. What does root access do? [...]

A few years ago, Google’s cloud services focused on simply storing and managing objects: email, documents, music, and movies. The 2013 version of Google is now using the cloud to connect and build relationships between them, responding to and anticipating the desires of its users. Google used its I/O keynote to describe how its vast [...]

Google bombarded thousands of attendees at its I/O 2013 Keynote with enough information to force that hi-res photo of Vic Gundotra’s forehead into their dreams tonight. Here are the eight best moments: Google Variant Of The Samsung Galaxy S4 One of the briefer announcements at I/O was the introduction of a variant of the Samsung Galaxy S4 [...]

What’s in Google’s Wallet? Under the Wallet name, Google has been mostly selling failure. It’s offered a confusing array of payment services—most notably, a way of paying for items in stores by tapping your smartphone to a device on the counter. That in-store payment service has been, let’s say it, an outright disaster. But Google [...]