Perhaps you recall that late last year, Google was in discussions to buy Yelp. Despite a supposed offer of $550 million plus earn-outs, Yelp walked away from the deal. But that isn’t stopping Google for entering Yelp’s business. Today, Google continues their fast-moving assault on local and location with a revamped Google Maps for mobile. Central to Maps for mobile 4.4 is Google Places, the newer ...

We’ve posted videos and interviews of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak before – the man happens to have a lot of interesting things to say. But do check out this recent video, recorded last week at the Campus Party in Valencia, Spain. In a conversation with a live audience, Woz speaks out on Antennagate (again), Apple and its relationship with Google and his own relationship with chief exec Steve...

Online marketing services company ValueClick is buying financial information and investing education website Investopedia from Forbes for approximately $42 million in cash. The reasons for the purchase: content, traffic, advertiser relationships and its team, says ValueClick – the site had been put up for sale back in June. Founded in 1999, Investopedia provides visitors with a glossary of financial terms,...

In the past, I’ve written pretty extensively about my disdain for business cards — they add to clutter, and when you actually need to look up someone’s contact information, it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. Alas, they’re still here, but fortunately plenty of startups are working to make them better. Today sees the launch of CardMunch, an iPhone app that lets you take a snapshot of ...

An interesting post just went up on the Twitter Engineering blog. Usually, that blog contains posts that are more interesting to developers working on Twitter’s platform. And this post is that as well, but it also states two much larger things. First, Twitter won’t be using the Cassandra database system to store tweets. Second, Cassandra will be used for Twitter’s realtime analytics product. The...