InternetNews Staff

Twitter is closing a round of funding that will value the company known for its 140-character, stream-of-consciousness blogs at $1 billion, technology news site TechCrunch reported on Wednesday. The company will raise around $50 million, and CEO Evan Williams told employees about the funding round, TechCrunch said, citing multiple unnamed sources. Twitter did not immediately […]

Lightweight netbooks have rocketed to 10 percent of Toshiba’s U.S. laptop computer shipments just months after the Japanese electronics maker began selling them for the first time. Larger rivals like Hewlett-Packard and Dell have sold netbooks in the United States for more than a year. Toshiba unveiled its first two U.S. netbooks — cheap, ultra-light […]

The Wall Street Journal soon will begin charging people to read the paper on mobile devices such as their BlackBerrys, the paper’s owner Rupert Murdoch said on Tuesday. The move, which News Corp. CEO Murdoch announced at a Goldman Sachs conference in New York, is an attempt to find a new way for the business […]

BEIJING — Schools in Beijing are quietly removing the Green Dam filter, which was required for all school computers in July, due to complaints over problems with the software. China last month formally backed down on a plan to preinstall the Internet filter software on all new computers sold in the country after July 1 […]

Source: Reuters SAN FRANCISCO — Google is disappointed with the lack of breakthrough investment ideas in the green technology sector but the company is working to develop its own new mirror technology that could reduce the cost of building solar thermal plants by a quarter or more. “We’ve been looking at very unusual materials for […]

A cybersecurity coordinator is expected to be announced by President Barack Obama in the next week or two, and the lead candidate is Frank Kramer, who was an assistant Defense secretary under President Bill Clinton, a source said on Wednesday. The source, who has direct knowledge of the matter, asked not to be named because […]

JOHANNESBURG — A South African IT company on Wednesday proved it was faster for them to transmit data with a carrier pigeon than to send it using Telkom, the country’s leading ISP. Internet speed and connectivity in Africa’s largest economy are poor because of a bandwidth shortage. It is also expensive. Local news agency SAPA […]

U.S. President Barack Obama meets students yesterday after a speech at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Va. Source: Reuters President Barack Obama warned American teenagers on Tuesday of the dangers of putting too much personal information on Internet social networking sites, saying it could come back to haunt them in later life. The presidential words […]

Google defended its scanning and publishing of millions of books online on Monday by saying the project was making finding information on the Web more democratic. The Californian company struck a deal with author and publisher groups in the United States earlier this year, allowing it to copy books for the Internet. But the agreement […]

MOSCOW — Russia’s state anti-monopoly service, FAS, said on Monday it had closed a probe into Microsoft as it had found no violations of antitrust laws over cutbacks in supply of the Windows XP operating system. The FAS launched a probe against Microsoft in June, saying it thought the company had violated legislation by cutting […]

Photo: Reuters Kai-fu Lee, Google’s former China chief who quit the search giant this week, said on Sunday he will launch his own business next week to fund Chinese technology start-ups. Lee, described by Chinese media as the face of Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) in China, said on his Twitter page that he will launch a […]

Italy’s antitrust agency said on Friday it was broadening its investigation into allegations that Google’s Italian news Web site coerced Italian newspapers into posting their stories to include U.S. parent Google. The competition authority launched the probe this week after the Italian Federation of Newspaper Editors alleged that any publication refusing to appear on the […]