Aardvark today expanded its answer service beyond its iPhone and instant messenger application offerings with the launch of Vark.com, a social search web site. Unlike Yelp and Yahoo Answers, Aardvark’s service lets you tap into your social graph to get answers to your questions. The launch of Vark.com also provides monetization opportunities for San Francisco-based [...]

  Music blogging site MOG will soon introduce an all-you-can-stream music subscription service, placing it in direct competition with existing services Rhapsody and Napster. Expected to go live by Thanksgiving, the new service — called “All Access” — will provide ad-free streaming from a library of 5 million songs for a monthly fee of $5. An [...]

  “The technology industry is always going through transition, and there are some big changes going on now,” said Dell Computer founder and CEO Michael Dell in Silicon Valley Tuesday night. He spoke onstage at a Churchill Club dinner event in Santa Clara, after making another appearance in the very rainy Bay Area earlier in the [...]

  Om’s Notebooks vs. Netbooks: Can You Tell the Difference? post sparked a healthy amount of debate when it went up Monday. Given how closely I’ve followed the burgeoning netbook sector since its birth, the discussion quickly caught my eye. Despite his observations as to how netbook makers are trying make their offerings more robust, however, [...]

  Salesforce’s revenue run rate is currently more than $1.2 billion, CEO Marc Benioff said during a talk at the Oracle World conference in San Francisco today. And over 63,000 customers are using the company’s cloud-based services, according to Benioff, who spent 13 years at Oracle. “The power of cloud computing is the democratization of technology, [...]

  Folks at Skype might be getting a tad desperate in their prolonged fight with JoltID, the intellectual property company controlled by the Skype founders — Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. And that’s why they might be looking to buy Gizmo5, a SIP-based calling service started by technology provocateur Michael Robertson. It’s rumored that the company [...]

  Did Cisco snap up Starent on the eve of the telecom equipment provider announcing a partnership deal with Juniper Networks, Cisco’s rival in both switching equipment and telecommunications gear? Two analysts seem to think so, with Nikos Theodosopoulos, an analyst from UBS, writing that Cisco’s $2.9 billion deal to buy Starent hurts Juniper, which was [...]

  Mobile 2.0 2009 focuses on mobile applications and services, mobile ecosystems, and disruptive mobile innovation, as well as provides a deep dive into technology platforms from a developer’s perspective. As a GigaOM reader, we are pleased to offer you a discount of $70 on the Business Day registration fee and a discount of $20 on [...]

  Google’s dominance on the Internet is unquestioned, but its mobile search offering will have to address four major factors if it is to dominate wireless the way it rules the online world. There’s no denying Google’s momentum in mobile: Its Android operating system is attracting handset manufacturers and carriers at impressive rates, its developer community [...]

  Two San Francisco-based startups — Samasource and CrowdFlower — today released a free iPhone application in the iTunes App Store called Give Work that lets you spend a few seconds of your time helping Kenyan refugees earn money, and in turn, improve their quality of life. An fbFund startup, Samasource is a non-profit that provides [...]

  NewTeeVee’s Next Big Thing list for 2009 (NewTeeVee)Is it time to update your operating system? (WebWorkerDaily)Google schedules its 2010 I/O Developer Conference (OStatic)New Moblin netbook image adds support for 3G, Bluetooth and more (jkOnTheRun)Transmission link: Using innovation to connect clean power (Earth2Tech)Windows 7 no threat to Mac: report (TheAppleBlog)

  Anybody who has spent any time around the technology industry knows that broad-based standardization is important, for many reasons. Likewise, openness in standardization processes is also important. Self-interested tech companies have pursued their own proprietary standards proposals and patent moats for years, and can often obstruct open standards, interoperability and more. At the same time, [...]

  The rush to deliver the web on the go has led Cisco to offer $2.9 billion for Starent, a telecommunications equipment company whose boxes help manage the different types of traffic traversing mobile and wired networks. The gear is especially important for mobile networks, as they handle more types of radio signals and where limited [...]

  Deutsche Telekom, the parent company of T-Mobile USA, yesterday squashed speculation that the German carrier would buy Sprint, saying the U.S. market has consolidated enough. Such a comment, made by CFO Timotheus Hoettges, raises questions as to just how competitive the U.S. mobile market is, especially as consumer groups argue we’ve reached a point at [...]