Barnes & Noble’s Nook adds Pearson as investor, warns of weak holiday sales

nooktablet

Barnes & Noble’s Nook Media e-reading and tablet subsidiary this morning announced a new investor, the Pearson education and publishing company, and separately warned that holiday sales are coming in below its projections. Pearson, which includes the Financial Times Group and Penguin publishing company, will invest $89.5 million in cash for a 5 percent stake in Nook… Read More…

Amazon is growing so fast it just hired a former member of the Presidents of the United States of America

dederer-pusa1

Nope, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton aren’t joining Amazon.com. But the fast-growing Seattle tech juggernaut recently hired another former President. Dave Dederer, one of the founding members of Seattle rock band The Presidents of the United States of America, has joined Amazon.com as MP3 content lead. Dederer is being a bit elusive as to what… Read More…

Is the free ride over on I-90? State to consider tolls on second floating bridge

tollbridge

The free ride may be over for thousands of geeks who cross Lake Washington each day on Interstate 90, one of two Lake Washington floating bridges that connect Seattle to the tech-heavy suburbs of Redmond, Bellevue and Kirkland. For the past year, drivers have had a clear choice: Jump on the state route 520 bridge… Read More…

RIM cast-off NewBay acquired in $55.5 million deal

newbay1

Well, that didn’t last too long. RIM has decided to cut ties with NewBay Software, selling the provider of mobile content delivery technologies to publicly-traded Synchronoss Technologies. As it turns out, RIM is taking a bit of a bath on the deal, selling NewBay for $55.5 million in cash. That’s about half the $100 million price… Read More…

How the ‘Internet of Things’ helped one parent keep Christmas gifts under wraps

Twine

Attention parents: File this one away as advice for next year. Microsoft’s Steve Clayton positioned a Twine sensor under the tree prior to Christmas and then set it up to send him a text message if it was moved — thereby alerting him if anyone in the house attempted to get a sneak peek at the presents. Welcome… Read More…

Hey, ‘disrupt’ this! 5 tech terms to banish in 2013

trashcan

The New Year is a time for us to reflect on the past, make adjustments for the future and — in tech — to clean up our language. Every few years, I whip myself into a linguistic frenzy and create a list. In writing (as well as marketing), the most-effective words are specific, staking a… Read More…

Study: E-book reading in U.S. jumps to 23% in 2012

kindletouch

Good news for Amazon’s Kindle business: The number of people who read e-books rose to 23 percent in 2012 — up from 16 percent the previous year — among Americans ages 16 and older, according to the results of a new study released this morning by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. Borrowing… Read More…

Windows Phone adds 75,000 apps and games in 2012

WindowsPhone8X_Front_Back

Microsoft’s Windows Phone more than doubled the size of its app catalog in 2012, adding more than 75,000 new apps and games from third-party developers, according to a Microsoft blog post published overnight. Todd Brix of Microsoft writes in the post, “We literally set a new foundation this year with the deployment of all-new infrastructure… Read More…

Trulia takes aim at Zillow patent suit: ‘Abstract ideas and principles are not patentable’

zillow-trulia-11

San Francisco online real estate company Trulia has filed its initial response to Zillow’s patent lawsuit, arguing that the case should be dismissed because the business method in question — Zillow’s online home valuation tool known as the Zestimate — is not patentable. The Zestimate utilizes multiple factors in order to assign automated home values… Read More…