Fortune's curated selection of weekend tech stories. Sign up to get the round-up delivered to you each and every day.
"Yeah, Google's a great company, and I think we want to look at and learn from everything that they do. But at the same time, people have shared a lot on Facebook and have already told a lot of their life story on Facebook. And we think that we have by far better tools for doing that." -- Mark Zuckerberg on whether Google+ is a threat (The Next Web)
* CNNMoney reports that Facebook bought the location-based service Gowalla for an undisclosed sum. Most of the Gowalla team will move to Facebook's Palo Alto headquarters to work on the social network's recently-introduced Timeline feature. (CNNMoney)
*With market share of its desktop browser declining and a tiny 1% share of the mobile browser space, can Mozilla's Firefox browser survive? The company is doing all it can to stay competitive -- making mobile a priority, hiring new talent -- but the question remains whether those efforts will be enough against heavyweight browser competitors like Google (GOOG) and Apple (AAPL). (Bloomberg Businessweek)
* SAP (SAP) plans to buy the Web-based enterprise software company SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion. The deal is expected to close early next year and comes roughly two months after rival Oracle (ORCL) agreed to purchase RightNow Technologies, a customer service software maker, for $1.4 billion. (The New York Times)
* Salman Khan made waves when Khan Academy's free online collection of education videos took off. Now, Khan wants to do it again by integrating those videos into the school curriculum, starting 36 institutions around the country. (The New York Times)
* Traditional game companies like Microsoft (MSFT), Nintendo, and Sony are readying a new wave of gaming hardware, but is next-generation gaming actually already here? (Fortune)
* With celebrities like Lady Gaga, Justin Timberlake, and Leonardo DiCaprio getting in on the investing game as of late, GigaOm explores whether we're seeing a fad or the future. (GigaOm)
* Meet Senzari: a Pandora-like startup with $2 million in angel funding that wants to outperform Pandora itself by offering a wider selection of music (10 million plus vs. Pandora's 900,000) to users around the world. Senzari is currently in private beta in the U.S. and Brazil, but plans to expand to Latin America, Spain, and Australia. (TechCrunch)
* THE PARTING SHOT: A look at Facebook's "Open Graph" and why the social network is pushing automatic sharing (aka "frictionless sharing") so hard. (Robert Scoble/Scobleizer)
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Google updated its browser again today with a pretty significant new feature.
Google's (GOOG) newest browser, Chrome 11 Beta, has the ability to understand the spoken word. This isn't just a Java Plugin or Flash tool either. This is all done in HTML5 with something called the HTML5 speech input API.
Today, we're updating the Chrome beta channel with a couple of new capabilities, especially for web developers. Fresh from the work that we've MORE
Seth Weintraub - Mar 23, 2011 1:29 AM ET
A curated selection of the day's most newsworthy tech stories from all over the Web.
"Chrome OS will be killed next year (or "merged" with Android). ... Chrome OS has no purpose that isn't better served by Android (perhaps with a few mods to support a non-touch display)." -- Gmail creator Paul Buchheit (Boy Genius Report and TechCrunch)
Unfortunately, Yahoo finally made good on all those layoff rumors by cutting roughly 600 jobs, MORE
JP Mangalindan, Writer - Dec 15, 2010 7:59 AM ET
Every day, the Fortune staff spends hours poring over tech stories, posts, and reviews from all over the Web to keep tabs on the companies that matter. We've assembled the day's most newsworthy bits below.
Comcast lost 275,000 basic cable subscribers during the company's third quarter, attributing the loss to the economy, the housing crunch and competition. Despite that, the company reported third quarter revenues of $5.91 billion, up 7% from a year MORE JP Mangalindan, Writer - Oct 28, 2010 6:00 AM ET
UPDATE: Microsoft's own tests find IE8 faster than Firefox. See links to pdfs here. Independent reports treat the company's tests somewhat skeptically. See here and here.
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I have not tested Internet Explorer 8 -- the new version of Microsoft's (MSFT) industry-leading Web browser, which was released here on Thursday. And since Microsoft has made it clear that it has no intention of writing a version for the Apple (AAPL) MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Mar 19, 2009 11:47 AM ET