Media

Spotify's 2012 dominated by Gotye, Rihanna

Spotify has rounded up its 2012, and revealed that Gotye, Rihanna, and David Guetta had huge years on its service.

According to Spotify, the most popular track this year was Gotye's "Somebody That I Used to Know" both in the U.S. and worldwide. Fun's "We Are Young" and Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" rounded out the top three most popular songs in the U.S. this year.

Spotify then turned its attention to artists, and discovered that Rihanna was the most popular female artist this year. David Guetta took … Read more

Predicting the most unlikely tech events that will happen in 2013

The other day I was lying on the beach when an older, bronzed man came and lay down next to me.

He made some groaning noises and chatted on his flip phone. He was Iggy Pop.

This, in itself was unusual. However, at the very moment he was there I was reading a book called "Paris, I Love You, But You're Bringing Me Down," by Rosencrans Baldwin. It's the story of an American writer who moves to Paris with his wife to write silly ads for Louis Vuitton.

I happened to be on page 167, where … Read more

More proof that social media experts aren't

Sometimes I worry.

I worry that at the bottom of the fiscal cliff is another fiscal cliff.

I worry that my future wife who currently won't acknowledge me will only, in fact, acknowledge me when I have another future wife.

And I worry that social media experts have all the expertise of a Labrador offering a lecture series on the cat-mouse conflict.

It's not merely that "Saturday Night Live" and the Onion (embedded here) have offered bitingly believable critiques of these self-appointed gurus.

It's that I have before my eyes the results of a survey … Read more

Theater tweet seats: A highway to hell?

The pragmatic and the weak tend to believe that if you can't beat them, you should join them. However, a significant number of the world's humans would just as soon carry on beating them.

Please choose sides, then, on a subject that may divide the artistic community from here to eternity.

The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis is the latest to offer something that might stick in a throat or two: tweet seats.

Yes, this is a specially cordoned-off pen in which digital obsessives whip out their iPhones and tweet: "Oh, look. The fat lady's dead!" … Read more

DotCom promises splashy launch for Mega

Kim DotCom, the New Zealand-based entrepreneur, is up to his old tricks again.

In a ploy to promote the launch of the Mega cloud storage service, DotCom has taken to Twitter to promise a "press conference like no other."

The press conference will take place at DotCom's mansion, so we should probably expect the extravagant entrepreneur to lay on quite the show. Reportedly worth $30 million, the property comes complete with a fleet of vintage cars, customized shotguns and even an inflatable tank or two.

The founder of MegaUpload also mentions on his Twitter feed that he … Read more

Twitter: Five predictions for 2013

If there was one thing you could say about Twitter's 2012, it was that it wasn't boring. Over the course of the year, the service became bigger than ever, hosted major events like a Q&A with President Obama and another with Pope Benedict XVI, and became an essential tool for those looking for information about everything from Hurricane Sandy to the civil war in Syria.

But 2012 was also contentious for Twitter. The microblogging service put new restrictions on what it would allow third-party developers to do, and then had to deal with a rebellion by … Read more

Social media: Five predictions for 2013

When you think of social media these days, you probably think primarily of Facebook and Twitter, and perhaps Instagram. But while those services have massive -- and growing -- user bases, they're of course not the only games in town.

The world of social media is filled with other services, and millions of people get a daily fix without ever going near Facebook or Twitter. There are big general networks like Tagged, and plenty of smaller, purpose-built ones like Path or celebrity-focused ones like Lady Gaga's Little Monsters. There's even a revamped MySpace.

So what does 2013 … Read more

Twitter: The five biggest stories of 2012

Let's face it: Twitter is an integral part of everyday life. And while that's been true for some time, 2012 was the year the microblogging service became truly mainstream. It was a vital tool during catastrophes, it was the medium of choice for presidential candidates, and it was at the center of political turmoil around the world.

2012 was also a year of business battles for Twitter, with strife between it and Instagram ramping up slowly over the course of the year, and a standoff between Twitter and developers.

But in the end, Twitter's biggest moments of … Read more

Ho ho ho! How a 5-year-old got a porn-filled Nintendo for Xmas

Refurbishing is an art, as well as a craft. The whole point is to make a gadget feel pristine, even when it used to be owned by a cult leader, a scout leader or an exhibitionist.

Sadly, someone in a Colorado GameStop stopped refurbishing before the job was complete.

So much so that 5-year-old Braydon Giles opened his Xmas gift -- a Nintendo 3DS -- and discovered images of naked people doing less than pristine things. As Channel 9 News tells it, Braydon showed the 3DS to his brother Bryton. He wanted his help to remove these weird pictures.

Bryton … Read more