Google Offers, a daily deals program engineered by the search engine giant to compete with Groupon, launched in Portland, Oregon last April before expanding to New York City and the San Francisco area. After a successful beta launch in all the requisite tech markets, Google Offers announced that it will launch in five new cities: Austin, Boston, Denver, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. READ MORE
Tech media outlets have been buzzing for days about the drama surrounding the case of an iPhone 5 that went missing when an Apple employee left it at a San Francisco tequila bar. Sound like a familiar scenario? It is. Back in April 2010 the same thing happened when someone left an iPhone 4 prototype at a Bay Area beer garden. READ MORE
Believe it or not, another prototype of the next cool not-yet-released iPhone was lost in a bar in California sometime in July. The loss reportedly touched off a frantic investigation by Apple, which electronically traced the phone to a house in San Francisco–but a search of the house turned up nothing. READ MORE
Zynga, the San Francisco-based game developer behind FarmVille and CityVille, will delay its initial public offering. The company, which hoped to launch an IPO in early September, cited the rocky stock market, two sources told The New York Post. Zynga will now pursue an IPO in November. READ MORE
Facebook announced its annual big to-do today, sending out invites to developers for its F8 conference on Sept. 22. Each year, techies descend on the conference location, which will be at The Design Center in San Francisco this year, to chat, mingle, and listen to Facebook’s latest plans. READ MORE
The first pictures of Android’s long-awaited new upgrade were leaked and feature a new launcher, app drawer, notification bar, and colors. The “Ice Cream Sandwich” upgrade to the Android smartphone operating system was rumored for release around Thanksgiving, and it is unclear how the upgrade was leaked. READ MORE
Walmart and Amazon have figured out how to bypass Apple’s mandatory 30 percent cut for apps distributed through the iTunes store, reports The San Francisco Chronicle. Walmart has launched an iPad version of its Vudu online video streaming service using a desktop shortcut that lets customers click an “Add to Home Screen” button on Vudu.com to install an app-style icon on the iPad desktop. Likewise, Amazon unveiled the Kindle Cloud Reader which lets customers read Kindle e-books on the iPad even without an Internet connection. Both services use the HTML5 Web browser protocol and follow on the heels of The Financial Times of London which in June launched a Web-based version for smart phones and tablets to avoid Apple’s fee. “The flexibility of HTML5 allows us to build one application that automatically adapts to the platform you’re using – from Chrome to iOS,” said Dorothy Nicholls, director of Amazon’s Kindle division, in a statement. Amazon made its Kindle Cloud Reader compatible with Safari on the iPad as well as Google’s Chrome browser, and plans to add Internet Explorer, Firefox and the BlackBerry PlayBook browsers in coming months. Read more at The San Francisco Chronicle.
“If you could work for a start-up, any start-up, which one would it be?” READ MORE
It took Flickr, one of the world’s largest photo-sharing sites, close to 2.5 years to reach 150 million photos, which could be uploaded from any computer and shot on any camera. But it took San Francisco-based start-up Instagram roughly just nine months to hit that same milestone–with just one mobile app, available only on iOS, writes Austin Carr for Fast Company. READ MORE
Gogo, the in-flight connectivity subscription service that gives busy traveler’s web access during flights and was a Inc. Business Travel 50 winner for best wi-f, has debuted a streaming partnership with American Airlines. GogoVision will give passengers a selection of on-demand offerings without the need to purchase in-flight wi-fi. READ MORE
