Technology Internet News Blog

Poor MySpace.

First, the audience it stole from Friendster left for Facebook. Now, Owen Van Natta, the former Facebook executive Rupert Murdoch hired less than a year ago to reverse the site’s declining fortunes, has also left, MySpace announced late Wednesday night.

The bell has been tolling for MySpace for years, with users leaving the site pretty much as they found it: as a place to hear what a band sounds like and see what they look like in a matter of seconds, rather than as a place where they establish an online identity and communicate with friends.

After signing on last April, Van Natta wisely acknowledged this change in how people were using MySpace — as a media site rather than as a social network — by doubling down on the ad-supported MySpace Music service. However, the company was not able to fix problems with the service including poor integration with existing band pages, which left many users confused or uninterested in the service. Read the rest of this entry »

SAN FRANCISCO — Google will become directly involved in deploying energy technologies, the company’s director of climate initiatives said Monday.

The company has long supported and invested in renewable energy but kept its participation to greening its campus and funding several solar, wind and geothermal companies. In September, Google announced it was Read the rest of this entry »

Having gained a certain degree of expertise in developing and designing its own energy efficient data centers, Google thinks it’s in a position to help spur on the adoption of even more renewable energy sources.

The Mountain View company announced on Tuesday a new research and development group whose mandate will be to continue to develop electricity from renewable energy sources much cheaper (and cleaner) than coal. The new initiative, dubbed Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal, will primarily target energy sources like advanced solar thermal power, wind power technologies and enhanced geothermal, according to Google co-founder Larry Page, and the company plans to shell out tens of millions of dollars in 2008 on R&D and related investments. Read the rest of this entry »

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has granted Google Energy, a wholly owned subsidiary of the search giant, the right to behave like a utility.

The order grants Google Energy the power to sell energy, capacity and services at market rates.

Why does Google want to do this? Right now, the company rakes in billions of dollars from ads and it doesn’t have to have extensive support desks and remote repair teams — the kind of people-power providers must have on staff — in order to do it. Selling power is a much more hands-on business. Read the rest of this entry »

Samsung’s new TL500 compact comes with a fast, wide zoom lens, and goes straight for the throat of Canon’s G11.

The lens has a fairly pedestrian 24-70mm range (35mm equivalent), but the maximum aperture runs from Read the rest of this entry »

ANAHEIM, California — The Willy Wonka of guitar pedal builders is giving away the keys to his kingdom.

Zachary Vex, the mastermind behind the handcrafted and hand-painted Z.Vex line of boutique guitar effect pedals, has decided to release his designs Read the rest of this entry »

If you take photos with anything other than a little point and shoot, you will have, once in your life, lost a lens cap. Shortly afterwards, you would have found out that a simple plastic disk can be sold for almost $20 (or even $40). Read the rest of this entry »