Mobile

Ever since Instagram got a new friend in Facebook, the popular photo-sharing service has, slowly but surely, been distancing itself from its old pal Twitter.

Today's news is that Instagram photos no longer display correctly in Twitter. This is because Instagram has disabled its integration with Twitter Cards in favor of links that direct Twitter users directly to Instagram.com.

"This is an evolution of where we want links to our content to go," Instagram's Kevin Systrom said of the change on stage at the LeWeb conference in Paris.

Instagram has been busy beefing up its Web presence, … Read more

Shares of Research In Motion, the makers of the BlackBerry, are, by some Thanksgiving miracle, up by a whopping 26 percent this week. Yes, you read that right.

On Monday, shares of RIM were trading on the Nasdaq at $8.69 apiece. Now they're trading at $11.76 per share with no signs of stopping.

Wait, we're talking about RIM, right? The same company that continues to bleed customers and cash like a bad Kung Fu movie? The same company whose outdated BlackBerrys are being tossed aside in favor of iPhones and Androids? And the same company whose … Read more

Update: AllThingsD reports that Apple is simply acquiring Color's talent, leaving the rest of the company to be wound down.

Everyone seems to be getting mixed signals about Color, the controversial and high-profile startup that started as a photo-sharing app but never could find its groove.

Color is well-known for three things: founder Bill Nguyen (a veteran of the tech industry with a history of exits), raising $41 million prelaunch, and its failure to turn Nguyen's knowledge and that cash into traction.

The rumor mill started with a VentureBeat article claiming that Color's board had voted to … Read more

Imagine you are Apple CEO Tim Cook. You control the single most profitable phone on the market, the iPhone. You have full control over your mobile OS -- iOS -- and the applications that run on it.

Except that's not actually true. You don't have full control over your mobile OS, because two of your default applications rely heavily on technology and data provided to you by Google, your greatest enemy. I am talking, of course, about YouTube and Google Maps, which have been part of iOS since the very first iPhone.

Removing YouTube is simple enough. Google wanted full control of the YouTube app, … Read more

Mobile is the future, and nobody wants to be left behind, because losing would mean certain death.

The iPhone accounts for a whopping $150 billion of Apple's revenues over the last five years. Google spent $12.5 billion in order to acquire Motorola. Microsoft and Nokia have finally built a flagship Windows phone (though they seriously need to fire whoever named it).

Amazon is the company everyone should be watching in this space, though. The online retailer first struck gold with the Kindle e-reader in 2007. A few years later, Amazon decided that Apple and Google needed some competition … Read more

Not long before his death, Steve Jobs told Walter Isaacson, the author of Jobs' authorized biography, about his pure hatred for Google Android:

"I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this."

Few things angered him more than Android, a mobile OS that he believed was copied from … Read more

YouTube will no longer come standard on the iPhone and iPad, and the Internet is jumping to conclusions as usual.

The next version of Apple's mobile OS -- iOS 6 -- will be missing the familiar YouTube app from its home screen. Instead, users will have to download a new YouTube app from the App Store. Apple claims it's simply because its five-year deal with Google has expired, while Google isn't even talking about the circumstances of YouTube's departure from Apple's devices.

Apple and Google don't exactly like each other, and Apple has been … Read more

When Google co-founder Sergey Brin demoed Google Glass, the search giant's attempt to build a next-generation wearable computer, with skydivers live streaming their descent, it became very clear that Glass wasn't some side project -- it was Google's future.

Glass won't be available to consumers until 2014, but a select group of developers will have the chance to purchase the "Explorer" edition of Glass in early 2013.

Why is Google giving Glass to developers more than a year before its consumer debut? Simple: Google wants to turn Glass into the next major developer platform.… Read more

Nintendo is one of the most iconic companies in gaming, but it faces the real possibility of oblivion if it doesn't find a way to turn its fortunes around.

In October 2007, less than a year after the release of its blockbuster Wii console, Nintendo was worth $78.50 per share. That equated to a market cap of $85 billion -- double the value of Sony at the time.

However, Nintendo's fortunes have only gone south since then. With Wii sales cooling and mobile apps the hot trend in gaming, Nintendo's stock collapsed this month to $14.… Read more