While paper books are still the norm, e-books now account for up to 20 percent of book sales in categories like romance and sci-fi. The shift in publishing isn’t just about going digital on the iPad or Kindle instead of killing trees; authors now have the options of self-publishing e-books on Smashwords , posting research materials on Scribd , connecting to readers on Facebook and Twitter, and transforming the experience of a book with... 

Facebook tonight presented its long-awaited Facebook Places product to a large gathering of press at the company’s Palo Alto, Calif. office. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted the company had been working on the product for “a little bit more than a few months.” Though much of the functionality duplicates that offered by location startups Gowalla and Foursquare, representatives from both companies swallowed …  Read More →

Redbeacon is just a year and a half old, until recently was bootstrapped, and has deployed its local-services marketplace in only one region, but something about what it’s doing clearly makes people think the company’s on to something big. It’s won four separate startup competitions, including TechCrunch 50 and Silicon Alley Insider’s top prizes. People seem to really like the idea of using a website to find and negotiate... 

Still hoping to plan a last-minute summer getaway? There are plenty of great web and mobile travel tools that have become popular in the last five years or so, like Kayak and TripIt , but there are two new ones you might find worth checking out. TravelPost and Tripline take the more general web products of social Q&A and embeddable mapping, and make them specific to travel. TravelPost recently launched a Q&A site called TravelPost... 

Google this morning confirmed what had already been widely reported — that it has bought Slide , the social application maker. (In fact, it’s already been reported who made what from the $182 million sale, with an additional $46 million paid in retention bonuses.) Google’s blog post on the matter, written by engineering director David Glazer, is incredibly vague as to what Slide will actually be doing for Google. He’s... 

Last night a group of M&A gurus from the corporate development teams at top tech acquirers Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco, Facebook and Twitter gathered to share insights into their business with a group of startups at a fancy-pants Los Altos Hills, Calif. mansion. Though Facebook and Google might have been the most notable active acquirers lately, everyone on the panel said they are out shopping. They each have a bit of a different style,... 

Y Combinator put on a tour de force Thursday. After five impressive years’ worth of molding fresh batches of startups, it packed 150-odd people with money into a room and schooled them in the art of giving its companies funding. The incubator’s second Angelconf , held at its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. today, packed the room with people with an interest in breaking into the frothy angel investing space — a mix of... 

Twitter rolled out User Streams to its users for the first time this week, through limited beta offerings by third-party applications TweetDeck and Echofon for Mac . This new, streaming API has been long in the making for Twitter, but may not reach regular users until the end of the year. It’s a significant architectural change for the company that should make Twitter much faster and more reliable. TweetDeck’s Richard Barley called the... 

People put a lot of thought and work into having a universal login for the web, whether it’s from a single provider or something more decentralized like OpenID. But we don’t just authenticate ourselves on websites — we also buy things with credit cards, use tickets to get into events, and keys to unlock doors. An ambitious startup named Enole is trying to bring the spirit of OpenID to the mobile environment, by creating a proximity-based... 

The origin of Facebook, as Mark Zuckerberg now tells it , came out of long talks in his dorm room with his college friends about how to make the world more open. Given there are records from Zuckerberg’s sophomoric blog at the time, I think it’s fair to say that’s revisionist history. But there’s revisionist history, and then there’s a Hollywood movie written by Aaron Sorkin. In a draft script for the upcoming movie... 

Earlier this year I did some research into the world of online dating. There must be something new and innovative going on besides Match.com and eHarmony after all these years, I thought. But the impression I got was that it’s all about distribution, not innovation. You have to have a lot of fish in your sea before people will believe the one for them is in it. Adding cool social features or location awareness or some other sort of modern... 

It’s a beautiful thing to watch people tweet. Especially when you try to figure out what they’re tweeting about, how they feel, and where they’re tweeting from — then put that all on a map and animate the changes over time. Researchers from Northeastern University and Harvard College recently built a pretty and captivating visualization of U.S. Twitter users’ moods, as determined by sentiment analysis. You can watch... 

Remember how the iPad was supposed to herald a new era of media consumption? Well, that day is finally here — or at least an early glimpse of it, with the new iPad application Flipboard , built by a new company of the same name. Flipboard , backed with $10.5 million from Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures, has built a beautiful application that reformats web articles, photos and status messages into a magazine-style…  Read More →

Analysts pelted Google executives with concerns about mobile advertising effectiveness and revenue generation on the company’s quarterly earnings call today. Google’s growth in cost-per-click was only 2 percent during the quarter , compared to 4 percent a year ago. Google admitted that mobile may be dragging down its average CPC, but said that mobile clicks are growing more quickly…  Read More →

AT&T doesn’t want mobile data usage to slow, but it’s herding users toward new punitive mobile data plans and Wi-Fi hotspots. The company handled 20 million Wi-Fi connections in first five weeks of 2010, the same number as all of 2008, said John Donovan, AT&T CTO of Operations, speaking at the MobileBeat conference in San Francisco today. And today 51 percent of AT&T’s post-paid subscribers have devices that...