Kevin Nakao is VP of Mobile & Business Search for WhitePages , a Top 40 Web and Mobile Publisher. You can find him on Twitter , and on the Whitepages Blog where he writes about mobile, local, and social media. While last year’s SXSW seemed to serve as the “coming out” party for …

If you take the guts of a Blu-ray or DVD player, blow it up, and spread it across a work bench, it looks like this. So you might be surprised to know that you’re looking at the future of storage . A laser beam whose wavelength is being monitored by this Soviet-looking machine…

“Lots of times the families will go down to Kinko’s,” the funeral director tells me. “They can do a memorial folder thing down there.” Do you help them get photos off Flickr, off Facebook? “We don’t really help with that.” * * * The old woman looks up from her…

How many 2-year-olds do you know with an iPhone? Fisher Price seems to think there’s a fair few out there, as it’s released three new iPhone apps aimed at kids aged between two and five. Perfect for keeping tots happy for five minutes or so on the go, …

Twitterers mostly consume news, MySpace users want games and entertainment, Facebookers are into both news and community and Digg’s audience has a mixed bag of interests. This is all according to online advertising network Chitika , who set out to analyze the interests of MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and Digg users by comparing the…

Bits don’t have expiration dates. But memories will only live forever if the media and file formats holding them remain intact and coherent. Time can be as deadly to data storage as it is to carbon-based life forms. There are lots of ways data can die: YouTube can pull a video offline before anybody…

It’s too easy to pat Google on the back for taking such a firm stance against China . The two behemoths’ fingers are twitching by their sides, ready to whip their pistols out. But what of the repercussions on the spectators? It wasn’t until January 2006 that Google.cn launched, with their …

Ninth time’s the charm, sometimes! At least that’s Microsoft’s hope with IE9, which they’ve just announced at Mix, brings new HTML5 support (including HTML5 video!), hardware-accelerated graphics for text and images, and a totally new JavaScript engine. Constantly updating. Microsoft issued a release just before the actual announcement and demo at the Mix…

It seems that the question on everyone’s mind over at SXSW this year is: What will be the next Twitter ? Well, as our own Pete Cashmore said the other day during an interview with Bloomberg, and during a recent interview with Time.com ’s Dan Fletcher: It’s…

A study by mobile application analytics company Flurry reveals that Apple’s App Store now has more than twice the number of applications as the Facebook Platform , despite Facebook ’s much larger market of users. Flurry estimates that as of its eighteenth month this January, the App Store for iPhone , iPod touch and (shortly)…