David Needle

Imagine you’re a tech startup with a great new Web service or product idea. You get enough funding to build out the staff and start developing the product in earnest. A year later, you realize the market’s changed; another company already offers 90 percent of the functionality of your SuperWebWonderWidget along with a bunch of […]

SAN FRANCISCO — Can competing for a job be fun? Coders might enjoy the challenge of Trollim, a programming skills assessment and comparison platform that launched here Tuesday. The multi-level, cloud-based system is designed to let programmers of similar skill sets and coding proficiency compete against each other in either one-to-one “battles” or many-to-many “rumbles” […]

You remember Bob Borchers. What’s that, name doesn’t ring a bell? Borchers’ was the anonymous Apple marketing guy who hosted the original, 24-minute iPhone guided tour video back in June of 2007 when the device first came out. Yes, it was only a few years ago, long before “There’s an app for that,” that Apple […]

The number of mobile device users tapping cloud computing services is a tiny fraction of the overall mobile market today, but just wait. Over the next five years, ABI Research predicts there will be almost a billion subscribers to mobile cloud services, up from only 42.8 million in 2008. Or put another way, ABI Research […]

An Apple-branded TV? It might seem laughable, if it weren’t for the fact that the iconic Silicon Valley company has already entered more than one consumer market with big, established players and rewritten the rules of the game — think portable music players and smartphones. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster wrote in a note to […]

A new study details the growing use of Facebook and social networks in general in the enterprise with many changes still to come. The “Enterprise Social Networking — End User Survey” by Wainhouse Research showed LinkedIn to be the most popular social networking site used personally by respondents at 67.3 percent. Facebook was a close […]

PALO ALTO, Calif. — What’s the next big thing to drive the Silicon Valley innovation engine? Don’t count on green tech anytime soon, at least according to two prominent investors here during a panel discussion focused on “Silicon Valley in the New Millennium.” “I expect a lot of disappointment. Green tech is over-hyped and over-funded,” […]

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Mobile advances are coming fast and furious, judging by the lineup of presenters here at the day two wrap up of the AlwaysOn Summit. Kicking things off was Mplayit, which showed off its Mpowerplayer, what it calls a social app store that aggregates content for mobile users in one Web location. […]

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Google isn’t only crawling your Web site, it’s looking at your source code as well. That was the introduction for Chris DiBona, the open source programs manager at Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), one of several keynote speakers here at OSCON 2009 today. While Google Code Search has been available through Google Labs […]

Is it safe to go short? Generally yes, but security firm MessageLabs says in a report this week that there are many reasons to be careful about clicking on the shorter links or forwarding them blindly to others. To recap the issue: Anyone who Twitters knows the value of shorter URLs. Twitter famously limits posts […]

The latest figures from TechServe Alliance confirm that IT hiring has taken a serious hit in the current economy. Figures released this week show a .9 percent drop, or some 34,800 IT jobs were lost in May of this year. After peaking in November 2008 at over 4 million, IT hiring dropped off the next […]

In what might turn out to be an unintentional boost to Starbuck’s sales, more than 200 Apple stores across the country will open at 7 a.m. Friday morning to make the first load of new iPhone 3G S phones available. Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) unveiled the new model earlier this month and more recently announced it’s […]