Spotify is a free, legal, cloud-based streaming music service delivered via desktop software with a nice social twist. A Swedish start-up with offices in London, it launched back in 2008 in Europe and now boasts around five million users and around six million tracks from the major labels as well as a…

Boxee has added popular comedy site Funny or Die to the repository of video content offered on its cross-platform home theater software. Boxee is a software application for home theater PCs (Apple TV, Mac, Linux or Windows) that brings web-hosted content to the TV screen and has a BitTorrent client for downloading …

Apparently, the Apple Tablet doesn’t need to actually exist to have a history. Well, that’s not entirely true: we all know it exists, but it hasn’t officially been announced yet by the company that is supposed to be selling it. Don’t be confused: when it comes to Apple …

We talk a lot about how big brands are embracing social media as a mechanism to connect directly with customers. Still, it’s much easier to talk about integrating social media into your brand than it is to actually do it. That’s why IKEA’s recent Facebook campaign is …

BBC Radio 5 Live featured Mashable’s Open Web Awards yesterday, highlighting the event as one of the web’s biggest annual awards. With host Jamillah Knowles, I discussed the aim of the OWAs, the power of the public vote and significance of online award shows as a way to reflect on the year’s…

Researchers in Italy and Sweden have spent the last ten years developing what they call the “Smart Hand,” a prosthetic hand which enables feeling in its fingertips. The hand — which was recently wired up to a test patient through a surgical procedure — has four motors and forty sensors which are linked directly to…

Hey, you — yeah you, the BlackBerry Storm owner over there. You listening? Good. That mythical software update we heard about just last week is obviously the real deal, and a screen grab from Verizon’s internal systems has shown up to prove it. We’re told that it should go live tomorrow (that’s October 25…

Following the US rollout last night, Facebook Lite , the lightweight version of Facebook that hides distractions like Apps, is now available internationally. As of this morning, our European editors are able to access the service at lite.facebook.com . Meanwhile, European Twitter users also report that the service is working for them. Mashable commenters…

While the Pirate Bay sale has dominated headlines recently, it wasn’t that long ago where the focus was on the Pirate Bay trial . The founders of the controversial peer-to-peer sharing website were convicted of copyright infringement, which factored into their decision to sell the website they created. The Pirate…

It’s not the kind of thing you’ll probably want to brag about winning, of course, but, according to new research conducted by the OECD , people in the US, Canada and Spain come out on the top of the heap when it comes to high cellphone bills . The research was conducted by categorizing bills…