Silicon Valley

Today in Tech: Google testing streaming music service

A curated selection of the day's newsworthy tech stories from all around the Web. Read on, and sign up now to have Today in Tech delivered to your inbox every morning.

Facebook relaunched its Questions feature which looks more like a poll app. But instead of going the Quora route -- asking a question to receive lengthy user answers -- Questions just has users voting or offering up short, pithy answers of MORE

Economics of dissent: How Twitter and Facebook tipped the revolutionary equation

Perhaps it is time to update the phrase "The pen is mightier than the sword" to "The Internet is mightier than dictators."

By Othman Laraki, contributor

While the above statement is made tongue-in-cheek, it is undeniable that we are living through a time of accelerated change. Suddenly, we are witnessing decades-long regimes being challenged by oppressed populations. It is not entirely clear what has changed, but the advent of the Social Internet seems MORE

The annotated 'Tech Supper'

For a piece of Silicon Valley iconography, this photo is hard to beat

Below: The attendee list and who sat where, courtesy of Search Engine Land.

The Silicon Valley Summit produces iconic picture

Held at venture capitalist John Doerr's house last night in the suburb of Woodside, President Barack Obama met the leaders of Silicon Valley to discuss jobs and innovation.

Full size, suitable for wall mounting, here. via Whitehouse Flickr

From the White house Flickr account comes this iconic picture of the heads of the largest Silicon Valley Tech companies including:  

Formspring: The site for prying questions gears up, but will it grow up?

A year later, with new funding on the way, Formspring.me continues to expand its base of both users and skeptics. In many cases, those are the same people.

By Daniel Roberts, reporter

Formspring, the Q&A site that allows users to ask each other questions anonymously, just celebrated its one-year anniversary in November. You may not know much about it, but among a certain set of young web surfers, it's got an MORE

An Obama shout-out for Steve Jobs

Cites Apple's CEO as an exemplar of the American Dream

"We celebrate wealth," said President Obama in his year-end press briefing Wednesday afternoon.

"We celebrate somebody like a Steve Jobs, who has created two or three different revolutionary products. We expect that person to be rich, and that's a good thing. We want that incentive. That's part of the free market."

Obama, who went out of his MORE

How Google can thrive in the age of Facebook

By some measures. we're hitting an Internet age that leaves Google behind. But here's a prescription to keep search relevant in the face of Facebook's social empire.

By Kevin Kelleher, contributor

Being king of the web is a short-lived gig. Only several years ago the web was navigated by search and Google was the clear king of innovation. Now, as the web takes on an increasingly social structure we seem to be MORE

New York (Yes, New York!) is tech city

Watch out, Silicon Valley. Thanks to Google, Foursquare, and others, the Big Apple is fast becoming home to some top Internet talent.

New York's tech cred is on the rise: Manhattan-based Foursquare's geolocation service is the envy of Silicon Valley. Facebook bought out two New York startups, and Google just purchased the huge Chelsea building where it employs nearly a tenth of its global workforce. Now incubators are sprouting downtown, venture MORE

Apple's latest Cupertino land grab

Its campus "bursting at the seams," the company gobbles up another slice of its home town

In the second major expansion of its corporate headquarters in four years, Apple (AAPL) has purchased a 98-acre parcel of land in Cupertino, according to a report in Thursday's Silicon Valley Mercury News

The new parcel -- formerly the Cupertino campus of Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) -- is adjacent to 50 acres Apple acquired in 2006. Together, the MORE

Fast times at iPhone High

The New York Times paints two very different pictures of a Silicon Valley high school

Matt Richtel's 4,000-word story on the front page of Sunday's New York Times -- part of the paper's Your Brain on Computers series -- reads like an indictment of a generation driven to distraction by shiny gadgets, their minds permanently rewired by too much time spent texting, networking, surfing the Web and playing video games.

The 7:45-minute MORE