rumors

The murkiness surrounding Facebook's valuation got in the way of its attempt to acquire Twitter last year, according to a BusinessWeek article posted Sunday.

Early Facebook investor Peter Thiel's interview with BusinessWeek make it sound like while the talks were serious, they simply didn't go that far: "It became pretty clear it wasn't going to happen...The deal would have to be done with Facebook stock. And then you have to figure out how much the stock is worth." Twitter, according to an anonymous source, was told that the social network's valuation was … Read more

Back when the rumors of a Kindle 2 started last year, there was also some chatter about a larger form factor Kindle that would be designed partially for the educational market. Well, now that the Kindle 2 has arrived, the rumor mill is churning again with blog posts about a larger form factor Kindle 3 that has a touch screen.

The initial report comes from DigiTimes, which says sources within Prime View International (PVI), the makers of the Kindle's electrophoretic display (EPD), claim Amazon's next Kindle will launch by the end of this year and will be "… Read more

Ah, it's funny how rumors get started--and this one is truly back-channel if there ever was a back-channel rumor.

Kotaku is reporting that a developer at Acclaim, David Perry, wrote this message on his Facebook and Twitter accounts:

"I hear Sony FINALLY has the PSP 2. And thank goodness, they've removed the stupid battery-sucking UMD disc drive. I'm excited!"

Now that message is rapidly making its way through the blogosphere. Of course, it's unclear what it means exactly. As Kotaku says, no one knows if Perry has seen the new PlayStation Portable or is &… Read more

NEW YORK--"They have that saying, 'don't shoot the messenger,' but the reason they say that is because the messenger gets shot," Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman told me over coffee on Tuesday morning. "So I have to take my shots."

He was talking, of course, about the PR fiasco that ensued when the Emeryville, Calif.-based East Bay Express newspaper published a lengthy expose on the business reviews site, alleging that it strong-armed businesses into paying to remove negative reviews. As a fairly regular Yelp user, I was repulsed by the possibility that its corporate … Read more

Correction 11:56 a.m. PST: We messed up. The 9 to 5 Mac blog we cited below is in fact from September 2008, so it turns out this is an old rumor. Because it showed up in our RSS feed Saturday, we, like a number of other publications, took it as a recent post and went from there. Apologies for the confusion.

There have been rumors buzzing around the Internet for some time Apple is secretly preparing a CDMA version of the iPhone, probably headed to Verizon Wireless, and probably by the end of this year. It's no … Read more

iPodObserver has published a photo what appears to be a new revision of the Apple iPhone 3G.

The photo shows the bottom portion of the iPhone as pictured here. You can also see a new model number: "A1303" and that model number has not appeared on any released iPhone to date

According to the post, "The new iPhone case back appears to shed its glossy appearance for a matte black look, and also sports what may be etched markings which indicates the plastic used in the current iPhone 3G model may be dumped in favor of a … Read more

Talk about spilling the beans: A marketing brochure for law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges, which represented would-be social network ConnectU in its much-publicized suit against Facebook, claimed that the final settlement netted the site's founders a handsome $65 million in Facebook stock and cash.

Oops.

A Law.com article dug up the brochure and its claim, and has posted a .pdf file on the Web. According to the same article, principals at the law firm now regret posting the results. Meanwhile, ConnectU remains in a fee dispute with Quinn Emanuel, a fact which came to light … Read more

OK, so Dell and Apple have been locked in a marketing war for years. Dell has long been considered the default PC for enterprise, while Apple has positioned itself as the most influential consumer computer brand in the world. But Apple has branched out from computing with the iPod and, of course, the iPhone.

Now it's looking more and more likely that Dell might be going the way of the smartphone, as well, but don't look for an iPhone competitor, at least not at first. Dell tried something similar to take on the iPod, but the effort felt … Read more

When Palm's new smartphone, the Pre, debuted at CES, many GSM users (this reporter included) were chagrined to note that the maiden device was branded for Sprint, a CDMA carrier.

Almost all of Palm's past smartphones have had both CDMA and GSM flavors, and there's no reason to expect anything different from the Pre. And, according to rumors swirling around the Internet, we'll see the first GSM Pre at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain, this February.

The first GSM device will likely be an unsubsidized and unlocked version. Internet clairvoyants are guessing the … Read more