We’ve observed a lot of western companies looking to cash in on the explosive growth of China’s mobile population by taking their products into the country. Now here’s an example of a Chinese giant looking shop its own mobile services abroad: the internet portal Tencent is now distributing its QQ…

Update: Adobe (NSDQ: ADBE) how now posted an item on its own blog confirming that it will stop developing Flash for mobile devices, and will instead concentrate on apps using Adobe Air and HTML5. It will continue to support Flash for PC browsing, it said. Original post below. Widely debated,…

It looks like Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) could be jumping its last major regulatory hurdle in its bid to buy Skype: it is expected to get clearance from the European Union’s competition commission, paving the way for the transaction to close by the end of this year. The deal was first…

It seems so simple, so obvious: mobile developers of the world, unite behind the web and finally achieve platform independence! It turns out that abandoning an app-focused mobile development world in favor of web technologies based around HTML5 is one of those tech industry ideas that everyone agrees is fantastic…

How do you dramatically increase the number of people using a privacy feature in just a few months? Apparently, just by putting it somewhere they can find it. A new study shows that more than 6 percent of users of the newest version of Firefox are now selecting the “Do…

When the practice of browser ‘history sniffing’ was first revealed in December, it spurred headlines and lawsuits, and criticism from a key FTC official, who urged browser companies to alter their software to prevent the practice. After those controversies, you might have expected history sniffing to fade away. But new…

Looks like we might be at a tipping point in the market for mobile apps and how they are becoming the go-to place for digital content. A new bit of number-crunching from the app analytics company Flurry claims that for the first time, this month in the U.S. mobile app…

It must have sounded like a great idea to someone at News Corp (NSDQ: NWS) at the time: “Hey, I know how we can sell more subscriptions through the New York Post iPad App! Let’s block access through iPad Safari and make them go to the app instead.” What they…

Part of an occasional series on startups that are focusing on privacy. Disconnect is a startup that lets users shut off the tracking features of web sites without logging them out of the web services they want to use. But Brian Kennish, the former *Google* engineer who founded the company…

This week, the iPad app world is frantically sorting through some recent changes in its environment. Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) has quietly altered its app approval policies in a way that will make publishers – in particular, subscription-based publishers like The New York Times – much happier. Specifically, Apple has relaxed…

You had to attend both days of *Google* I/O to get the full effect: having been present for just one of the two visions of mobile computing detailed by Google (NSDQ: GOOG) this week would have left you with the impression that the project you witnessed was the company’s brightest…

They’re nearly six months late, but the first systems running Chrome OS, which will henceforth be known as Chromebooks, were showcased Wednesday at Google (NSDQ: GOOG) I/O ahead of their launch on June 15 in the U.S. Here’s a little more information about the systems themselves and what’s in store…

The second day of Google (NSDQ: GOOG) I/O was all about Google’s Chrome Web browser and its budding Chrome OS project. Google’s Chrome leader, Sundar Pichai, ran through a morning of announcements, which included pricing details on Chromebooks, welcome news about Angry Birds on the Web, and a business-oriented subscription…

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) has been promoting its “Tracking Protection Lists” in the new version of Internet Explorer as the best route for users to protect their online privacy right away—and that hasn’t changed. But the company will be including a Do Not Track header as a “secondary mechanism” in IE9,…

All talk these days is about Google/Android and Apple/iOS, but here’s a nifty infographic that underscores just how fragmented the picture really is for which mobile phone browsers dominate.

One more app publisher is adding its voice to those decidedly against Apple’s new subscription rules for App Store apps: Readability—which creates apps and web services that let users have pared-down, text-based versions of online articles to make reading them easier—has written an open letter to Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) today,…

In Steve Ballmer’s keynote today, his first ever at Mobile World Congress, the CEO of Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) said that the new version of Windows Phone 7 will feature multitasking, a top-of-the-range mobile web browser and integration with Microsoft’s buzziest product of the moment: Xbox Kinect: in short, everything that…

Updated with news from Microsoft’s IE9 launch today in San Francisco. When it comes to online privacy, the two leading browser companies, Mozilla and Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), have laid out their differing strategies. Mozilla is going with an HTTP-based header that tells websites when users don’t want to be tracked,…

Google’s decision earlier this week to ditch support for the dominant web video codec, H.264, in its Chrome browser unleashed a fair bit of debate around the web. It sounds a bit geeky, but this brewing standards war will likely have a huge impact on the future of web video.…