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Zynga: The FarmVille creator has hired Steven Chiang as president of the development studios, CEO Marc Pincus announced on his blog this week. Chiang co-founded EA-owned Tiburon Entertainment, the studio best known for the Madden NFL franchise. A longtime EA executive, he was most recently SVP and group GM for EA Sports.

Fairchild Fashion Group: Patrick McCarthy, chairman and editorial director of Condé Nast’s Fairchild Fashion Group and de facto editor of the fashion magazine W is leaving the company at y...

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With the release of court filings in the three-year old copyright infringement suit between Viacom and YouTube, weve seen the video share site argue that it is not liable for infringing videos uploaded to its site, as it claims protection under the safe harbor provision of the Digital Milennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

But in Viacoms filing for a partial summary judgment, it makes the case that the sites founders and later executives of acquirer Google turned a blind eye to copyrighted material in an effor...

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For years, network operators happily called all the shots when it came to developers, effectively saying, You want to be on our network? Then jump through all these hoops to get approved, and be happy with whatever margins we pay you.

You cant get away treating people like that for too long. Indeed, these days, developers are calling the shots, requiring more open development platforms and a 70-30 split with mobile providers. Carriers such as O2 (Litmus) and SK Telecom have both agreed to the new arrangeme...

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Google has partnered with Sony, Intel and Logitech to develop a yet-unannounced product called Google TV, according to an article by New York Times technology writer Nick Bilton. Google TV will be based on Android, according to Bilton, and could come in the form of a dedicated set-top box or a software platform that could be deployed on Internet-connected TVs and similar devices, directly competing with solutions from Vudu, DivX and Boxee.

Details about Google TV are still scarce, as Bilton dindt get a...

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Despite the proverbial "the customer is always right," the relationship between the customer and the company has long been organized for the benefit of the latter. But the ability for companies to completely control this relationship has disappeared.

Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management, a report from the Altimeter Group released earlier this month, serves to help companies and organizations understand the changing territory. The report offers a thorough framework with which companies ca...

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Tim O'Reilly and DeWitt Clinton are both experimenting with Google Buzz as a long form -- well, longer form -- publishing tool. It's an interesting adaptation for Buzz, and I think they're on to something.

Here's why: Blogs are great for getting people to a site. Twitter is great for tossing around short-form ideas and quips. Facebook is great for talking with a defined community.

But blogs are not inherently social. They try to be, with comments and RSS, but they're still built in silos. Twitter is unb...

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1. Common MySQL Queries -- a useful reference.
2. MySociety's Next 12 Months -- two new projects, FixMyTransport and "Project Fosbury". The latter is a more general tool to help people organise their own campaigns for change.
3. riak -- scalable key-value store with JSON interface. (via joshua on Delicious)
4. Notes from NoSQL Live Boston -- full of juicy nuggets of info from the NoSQL conference.

Social gaming startup Playdom is putting this past falls $43 million funding round to quick work lately. The San Francisco company is investing $5 million in Argentina-based social gamer MetroGames as part of the South American companys first round. The investment comes a barely two weeks after Playdom acquired Offbeat Creations, the developer of several Facebook-based titles, including dice game Super Farkle.

Communications networks are eating up a lot of power and with the proliferation of online video and data-rich mobile applications, such consumption is set to climb even further. According to the Smart 2020 report, information and communication technology services are currently responsible for a full 2 percent of the total carbon footprint; communications networks alone account for a third of that consumption. And the report estimates that given user demand and production, those numbers are going to double ...

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After I participated in a rousing SXSW panel about content recommendations, Emmanuel Marchal, general manager of London-based LikeCube approached me in the hall to tell me about his company. I thought it was pretty cool, so I captured a video interview with him right there.

LikeCube was co-founded by a semantic web technologist and an anthropologist four years ago, and funded by the UKs National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts. It combines metadata, user activity and personalization to help c...

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The US Department of Justice this week released slides from a presentation deck titled Obtaining and Using Evidence from Social Networking Sites. The document was released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

The DoJ presentation describes Facebook as much more co-operative with law enforcement requests for user information than Twitter and MySpace are. It also explains to officers what the advantages of going undercover on social networking si...

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I've puzzled over Google's Fiber project ever since they announced it. It seemed too big, too hubristic (even for a company that's already big and has earned the right to hubris)--and also not a business Google would want to be in. Providing the "last mile" of Internet service is a high cost/low payoff business that I'm glad I escaped (a friend an I seriously considered starting an ISP back in '92, until we said "How would we deal with customers?").

But the FCC's announcement of their plans to widen br...

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When I blogged about truly open data, readers sent me a lot of interesting links. I've collected them all below. Enjoy!

1. The Centre for Environmental Data Archival (CEDA) -- hosts a range of activities associated with evironmental data archives. (Director is on Twitter, @bnlawrence)
2. CONNECT -- open source healthcare data exchange being developed with Brian Behlendorf, one of the original developers of the Apache web server.
3. Phil Agre's Living Data -- prescient article in Wired from 1994.
4. Factual -- web d...

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