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Matt Cutts, a software engineer and an eloquent corporate spokesman for Google, spoke at PubCon earlier this month and later gave a video interview to Web Pro News, in which he said that the speed at which web pages are available might become a factor in SEO moving into 2010. He said that because many within Google consider fastness to be vital to the web, the company is considering making web sit...

AdMob, a mobile advertising network, which has been releasing mobile metrics for a while now and touting the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch metrics as headlines, is instead focusing on RIM, Symbian, Android and even Windows Mobile devices in its October 2009 mobile metrics report. I guess when you are soon going to be part of Google, why give arch-nemesis, Apple and its iPhone any airtime. AdMob is i...

AOL will launch a new look and logo along with its official spinout from Time Warner on Dec. 10, as it tries to become a content-centric company. Wolff Olins, a global brand and innovation consultancy, worked on this new look and logo which seeks to replace the older, more iconic AOL branding. The minute I saw the logo (and its various interpretations), my first reaction was simple: lame. It is am...

TripIt, a travel aggregation service that is currently offered as application on the iPhone and Blackberry is now available as a beta app for Google’s Android platform and can be downloaded from the Android Market. Just like us, our colleagues at jkOnTheRun, WebWorkerDaily and TheAppleBlog are all fans of TripIt and the Android version will allow more people to use this fantastic service.

The rise of video streaming is dramatically affecting the Internet, according to a two-year study of Internet traffic trends that Arbor Networks recently presented to the North American Network Operators Group. Two years ago, Internet traffic was distributed evenly among a dozen Tier-1 network providers, but today the majority of traffic flows through direct peering agreements among large content ...

With the spin-out from eBay complete, its legal troubles with founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis settled, Skype is looking to the future where it wants to become a ubiquitous real-time communications platform. And that means thinking about the next generation Skype architecture and also hiring a lot of smart people, said CEO Josh Silverman in a conversation earlier today.

“We are looking t...

The Internet is abuzz over Google’s release of the open-source version of its Chrome OS, and for good reason. It’s free, which will save hardware manufacturers licensing fees, and it appears ideally suited for the netbooks that have become such a hot item for the mobile crowd (GigaOM Pro, sub. required). But Chrome is not without its detractors, and it’s worth remembering that Google isn’t King Mi...

The brutal economic downturn that’s being called “The Great Recession” is, at least in a technical sense, over. Online advertising and IT spending are inching back up, and many tech companies have seen their stock prices more than double from the lows reached in March.

Even if it’s not the most robust of recoveries, it’ll do. So why are tech companies suddenly slashing jobs again?

The past couple ...

Android is like a snowball rolling downhill — it won’t be long before it’s moving too fast for anything to stop it. That movement is surely going to spread from the smartphone sector, where Android has its roots, to that of smartbooks. Knowing this, ARM and the Android folks have put their heads together and formed the Solution Center for Android Alliance.

The sole aim of the group, which was unve...

As compute demand increases, demand for power in data centers is soaring. To help IT professionals halt the spread of watt-consuming servers, the industry needs to develop software that can communicate the ways in which the various layers of the data center perform and interact. They need a binary version of Cesar Millan — a data center whisperer.

Speaking at a panel held Wednesday night in Austi...

We’d like to say thanks to this week’s GigaOM sponsors:

• PEER 1: Fully Scalable Hosting Solutions
• Concentric: Hosted IT Services
• Mozy: Simple, Automatic, Secure Online Backup
• SoftLayer: SoftLayer delivers on-demand virtual data center services and solutions.
• Salesforce: Force.com Cloud Platform
• PayPal: Innovate 09 – The Intersection of Ideas and Money

Layoffs are cropping up all over the tech industry, with workers at companies ranging from AOL to Adobe to Microsoft getting pink slips. But while most people know to turn to the big online job boards and social networks ranging from LinkedIn to Facebook to help land a new gig, there are a lot of off-the-beaten-track online paths that can be taken as well. Below are 12 proven tech job search resou...

You’ve gotta hand it to Google: The company is never shy about throwing the proverbial spaghetti against the wall to see if it will stick. Over the years, it’s introduced countless projects that have gone through long beta cycles only to fail miserably — or achieve a degree of success far below what was expected. Google Docs, for example, was supposed to topple Microsoft Office, and is still predi...

Air Canada is testing an in-flight Wi-Fi service from Aircell on its flights between Toronto and Los Angeles and Montreal and L.A. From now until Jan. 29, passengers can plunk down $9.95 per flight to surf on a laptop and $7.95 to access the Internet on smaller devices such as a smartphone or WiFi-enabled media players like the iPod touch. AirCell also provides its GoGo in-air Wi-Fi service on Del...

BitTorrent after The Pirate Bay: Do you still need trackers? (NewTeeVee)
3 next-gen applications for Smart Grid 2.0 (Earth2Tech)
Microsoft’s bad image should be a warning to Apple (TheAppleBlog)
4 open-source file shredders that delete data forever (OStatic)
How to get a Magic Mouse to touch-scroll in Windows (jkOnTheRun)
Finding web worker gear deals on Black Friday (WebWorkerDaily)

Twitter COO Dick Costolo, speaking today on a panel at TechCrunch’s Real-Time CrunchUp event in San Francisco, shed some light into the micromessaging service’s revenue plans, promising that it will begin taking a cut of its partners’ advertising revenues “early next year.” Meanwhile, it will “foster mechanisms that allow partners to do more sophisticated things” with its APIs. Twitter also plans ...

The Windows 7 trumpets are blasting with gusto, with Steve Felice, president of the small and medium-sized business (SMB) division of Dell, claiming that Microsoft’s new operating system is fueling a surge in demand for PCs, according to Computerworld. “As soon as Oct. 22 hit, both our consumer business and our SMB business had a very healthy increase in demand,” Felice is quoted as saying. Meanw...

Infoaxe is revealing to the world today its alter ego: a search engine. Unlike other real-time search engines such as OneRiot, Infoaxe doesn’t depend on Twitter streams and the like. Instead, it anonymously harvests data from its millions (low millions, for now) of people who use its personal search history plug-in.

The idea is to observe every page an Infoaxe user visits, not just the ones they ...

Nokia said today it’s slashing 330 research and development jobs in Europe as it looks to consolidate its handset lineup and focus on high-end smartphones. The move is a small one and long overdue, but it is a step toward getting Nokia back in the game.

The Finnish company’s success selling low- to mid-range smartphones in developing markets is well documented, but Nokia continues to lose ground ...

The New York City Council is voting on a resolution this morning supporting the idea that Internet service providers cannot discriminate against web traffic on their networks. As gestures go, this resolution supporting net neutrality is more symbolic than it is useful, and to that end has already yielded a couple of photos of FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg shakin...

In my first week back on the web beat at GigaOM, one of the topics I wanted to focus on was location. Let’s just say that hasn’t exactly been a difficult task. Coming at us from Boulder, San Francisco and London, here are today’s top three geo-tagging developments:

SimpleGeo launched today, promising to build a contextual infrastructure of points and eventually polygons for the world so that pe...

With Azure, Microsoft is trying to strike a balance between giving customers the ease of a platform as a service and the customization that power users need to build tailored applications — both in-house and in the public Azure cloud. After the Redmond giant’s developer conference this week, where it detailed more of its plans, it became clear that Azure is striving to be a general-purpose cloud ...

Perhaps no other digital music company this side of Apple has made the transition to the mobile sphere as seamlessly as Pandora, the Internet radio company that was fighting for its life as late as of this past summer before a royalty agreement stabilized its future. I chatted with CTO Tom Conrad this afternoon, and he shared a few stats that showed just how significant mobile uptake has been in t...

As AOL lays off a third of its work force as it prepares to go independent, it’s looking to drop its ICQ and MapQuest units, according to reports by Kara Swisher. But with the deluge of information hitting web users these days, location and presence are two of the most promising ways to parse the online world (GigaOM Pro sub. required). They’re also two of the most innovation-rich veins of the las...

Text messages and banners on the mobile web are the most noticeable kinds of wireless ads, according to new research from Parks Associates, but mobile video and click-to-call campaigns draw the best response from consumers. Such contradictions underscore why advertisers need to use a variety of tools as they deploy their mobile campaigns.

Text-only ads generated the highest recall rates of 11 type...