Six years ago, I was sitting on my living room couch when my boyfriend asked me to be his wife. It was a Sunday -- our year-and-a-half anniversary, to be exact -- and he came down the stairs with a little box. I think my hair was wet, and at least one of our dogs was sitting with me.
New Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer recently made a splash when she declared that all food in the company's cafeterias will be free for employees. That's just how it was at Google, Mayer's former employer.
Ah, springtime! When a young single person's fancy turns to quiet desperation. The darling buds of April have shaken off their veils of snow, and you, dear reader, have done likewise with your veils of fleece and SAD-induced despair.
MTV is hoping to give its get-out-the-vote campaign a viral boost with an online game, inspired by fantasy sports, that rewards players for participating in the 2012 elections.
Sad face of the day: Adulthood is just an endless string of irritating to-dos.
CNN's Ayesha Durgahee looks at how apps have changed the way we travel.
It's just over a week until one of the biggest geek gatherings of the year, South By Southwest Interactive, kicks off in Austin, Texas.
Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley knows people think his location-based service is about a bunch of dorky teens and twenty-somethings running around and collecting virtual badges.
During one's bustling life there are a collection of moments -- fragments out of time -- that afford one a sense of slow-down reflection. A kind of reprieve from the mania that is living.
Remember the pre-Web personal diary? It had a lock on it, and after writing your thoughts about the day, it stayed tucked in a drawer. You talked about dreams and disappointments and school and love, and sometimes you culled it for phrases in the love letter you agonized over for a week before leaving it in the mailbox or locker of your interest. The last thing you wanted was for someone else to read it, at least not until the beloved saw it and said, "Yes."
The blue plastic envelope is packed with papers: security camera photos, cell phone records, business cards and letters asking for help.
An email landed in my inbox the other day from a startup called Timehop. In that email, there were pieces of my online life posted a year ago that day.
Recently, a reader dropped the following query into our inbox:
CNNMoney: Facebook buys Gowallaupdated: Fri Dec 02 2011 20:40:00
Facebook has acquired location sharing service Gowalla for an undisclosed sum, according to a source close to Gowalla.
There's essentially three options for a tech venture outgrowing its startup days: Get big, get bought or go broke. Sensing hard times ahead, a growing number of entrepreneurs are casting around for suitors and a shot at door #2.
Going to see live music has always been wrought with frustrations -- and now, along with the ogre who appears in front of you as soon as the band takes the stage, mosh pits and the dreaded "all ages" show -- you've got smartphones. Yup, it's society's technological crack pipe, without which we'd all be fiending freaks, tapping vaguely at the air in agonizing fits of withdrawal.
"Hey Dennis and Naveen How's it going? Hope all is well! My name is Tristan Walker and I'm a first year student (going into my second year) at Stanford Business School (originally from New York). I'm a huge fan of what you both have built and excited about what you guys have planned for FourSquare. It is an awesome, awesome service."
As it prepares to host its annual conference Thursday, Facebook is in a funk.
Virtually all smartphones now include a built-in GPS receiver to enable location tracking, but only 55% of U.S. smartphone owners have used their phone's GPS to help get local directions or recommendations.
There are no rules to naming a startup. And most entrepreneurs do assume that the name they choose will change before their businesses really start to gain momentum.
When the ground starts shaking, the tweets pour in.
If last week's volatile stock market was too much to bear, maybe it's time to start trading your friends, and strangers, based on their Facebook updates and how much they tweet.
Dennis Crowley of Foursquare, tells CNN about what makes Foursquare different from other social network sites.
Social-networking app Foursquare has snagged perhaps its highest profile user: President Barack Obama.
If you're sick of all your tech-literate friends bragging about their digital stature -- Twitter followers, Google+ invites, Klout scores -- then you will love McSweeney's list of pick-up lines "for the modern Internet persona."
As location-based apps go, Foursquare or Gowalla will work just fine if you're looking for the spot where all your buddies are having a beer.
Everyone knows Pandora -- that popular music-streaming site where robots pick songs for you based on equations.
There's a new front in the daily-deals battle: The fight to be the first to successfully blow up and reinvent the business model.
Cole Harper and his friends were trying desperately to find a bar with a good vibe. It was a cloudy Wednesday night in Chicago and their regular hangout had turned into a graveyard of stools.
It's a verifiable fact that the Internet is basically for three things: porn, cats and awkward people (and any ensuing combination of the three).
A small startup with a nearly unsearchable name introduced a new model for mobile search Monday.
Remember INQ Mobile's Facebook phone?
As hot tech companies line up to test the IPO market, trading in restricted, private markets softened last quarter.
Groupon is believed to be the fastest growing startup in history, zooming in less than three years from nothing to a staff of 6,000 and annual sales that will reportedly top $3 billion this year.
Google Latitude, the search giant's location-sharing mobile app, is launching checkin offers nationwide, giving users the ability to unlock discounts with a handful of launch partners.
Making sense of a disaster is about to get a bit easier.
It's the festival that launched Foursquare and popularized Twitter.
Location-based social networks Foursquare, Gowalla, and Loopt have collectively raised almost $50 million in funding from investors, and racked up around 13 million users.
Almost 2,000 miles from New York, a posse of the city's tech entrepreneurs gathered Sunday at an SXSW offshoot to network, recruit and pitch investors over beer.
For the next five days, Austin will be the epicenter of the tech universe.
Throw a bunch of programmers into a room with laptops, Red Bull and pizza for a hours at a stretch and what do you get?
Facebook is making a play for a piece of the small but much-buzzed-about group text messaging market. On Tuesday, it announced that it has acquired eight-month-old Beluga.
Addicted to discounts? They're about to leap out of your e-mail and onto your mobile phone -- right as you're walking past the shop that wants to lure you in with a deal.
As the year draws to a close, writers from CNN.com take a look back at some of their original stories from 2010.
Spamming e-mail is so last year.
Foursquare has added two heavily requested features to its popular iPhone app that should make the service significantly more social: photos and comments.
A popular online video tells the story of the birth of Jesus through Google searches, tweets and Facebook updates.
CNN's Josh Levs shows how to spot hidden cameras disguised as everyday objects.
The opening passage from George Orwell's "1984" depicts a guy hustling up a stairwell that's plastered with giant posters of a man's face staring at him.
The story has become a cliché when talk turns to young people and the internet:
An average internet user can dig up all kinds of details -- both juicy and mundane -- about the life of Louis Gray, a 33-year-old from Sunnyvale, California.
The newest update to location-based networking service Gowalla adds a surprising feature: automatic check-ins on Foursquare, Gowalla's much-larger archrival.
Politics is serious business, but not all of the time. From the halls of Congress to the campaign trail to the international stage, there's always something that gets a laugh or a second glance. Here are some of the things you might have missed:
It's been exactly one year since the Federal Trade Commission implemented a new set of rules intended to crack down on bloggers who don't disclose that they've received freebies or money from brands.
One of our Twitter followers put it best:
CNN's John Sutter and Lisa Respers France duke it out over whether to shop online or hit the mall this holiday season.
Major retailers are entering the location game, offering users discounts for "checking in" on location based services like Facebook Places, Foursquare, and Gowalla during the busiest shopping day of the year.
Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley kicked up a firestorm last week when he said users "should get some kind of referrer's fee" when they get their online followers to buy items like movie tickets.
Location-based mobile apps such as Foursquare might be among the fastest-growing trends for plugged-in technophiles, but the vast majority of Americans still haven't used them.
President Obama's election in 2008 was historic. But in terms of internet traffic, Tuesday's midterm election was more popular, according to the internet traffic monitor Akamai Technologies.
"I forgot to vote" won't be a valid excuse for most Americans surfing the Web on Tuesday.
After months and months of your cubicle walls contracting in on you like some kind of demonic fun house, it's finally time for that most coveted of reprieves: a vacation!
Astronaut Douglas Wheelock checked in on Foursquare on Friday, 220 miles above Earth, becoming the first person to use the location-based social network in space.
That a cell phone can keep people perpetually connected and findable is no mystery. But such an always-on gadget can also be a valuable tool to help someone disappear.
Editor's Note: This is part of a five-day CNN.com series about smartphones and their impact on our lives and culture.
NASA and HBO on Thursday became two of the latest organizations seeking to capitalize on the growing popularity of mobile check-in apps.
We're all big fat liars. Most of us spit out one or two intentional deceptions a day, and in a week we BS about 30 percent of those with whom we talk one-on-one, according to old but seminal research from the University of Virginia.
Mobile check-in app Foursquare's Monday outage happened after staff tried to fix one problem and somehow triggered another.
What if browsing the internet felt like playing an arcade game?
If your social network ran a restaurant, it might feel a lot like 4food, a new Manhattan burger joint.
One of the many unfortunate effects of the Great Recession was felt by longtime professionals who found themselves looking for a job for the first time in decades. These skilled and experienced workers discovered that the job market was significantly different than it was 20 years ago, or in some cases, even just five years ago.
It's been two weeks since Facebook users took to blogs and message boards to voice their concerns about Places, a location-based service that allows people to check in to gathering spots via the social network.
Remember the good ol' days, circa mid-naughts, when most people's phones just alerted them of incoming calls and the occasional text message?
Seth Priebatsch was at a burrito joint in Boston recently when a message popped up on his smartphone from an app called SCVNGR.
Intrigued by Foursquare, or Facebook's new Places feature, but not sure anybody would be interested in where you go every day?
Facebook has rolled out its long-awaited location feature, Facebook Places, an application that lets users "check in" on their mobile phones so friends know where they're hanging out and what they're doing.
Social-networking giant Facebook has entered the check-in world.
Facebook this week launched "Places," a service that allows any user to "check in" to restaurants, stores and other local businesses -- thereby sharing their location with friends.
The long-rumored geolocation "check-in" feature at Facebook is slated to debut within weeks, multiple sources familiar with the matter told CNET.
There was a great conversation Thursday at Y Combinator's AngelConf in Silicon Valley. Anthony Ha of Venturebeat had a couple posts on it that I just read, one on Paul Graham's comments, and another on Ron Conway and Mike Arrington's comments. I would have enjoyed being part of that discussion, so I'll join in now.
Google has invested billions of dollars building dozens of different products across a wide swath of the technology industry, from productivity tools to mobile phones to e-commerce.
So you've had your heart ripped from your chest -- the left ventricle cleaved from the right. The aorta geysering blood across your bedroom floor, on which you are currently sprawled.
What does one of the hottest mobile app startups do when it closes a $20 million funding round? Buy chairs.
The stakes just got raised in the fight to dominate the hottest corner of the mobile apps market.
It's something everyone dreads upon breaking up or having a falling out with a friend: the inevitable run-in.
Earlier this week, Twitter announced a new location-based service, Twitter Places, which could make mobile tweeting more interesting.
Trying to create the next "David After Dentist" or become the next "Numa Numa" guy?
Dealing with other people is hard enough IRL ("in real life," for those among you who are not abject tech geeks). Add social media into the equation, and you have myriad opportunities to make enemies and alienate people.
The New York Times launched an iPhone app Thursday to help users navigate New York City based on recommendations from its staffers.
Dennis Crowley was jogging across a New York bridge when he spotted something exciting: a cartoon mushroom, spray-painted on the sidewalk.
If you think an electric toothbrush is high-tech, wait until you hear about the Internet-enabled version.
Part of Foursquare's appeal is the mystery, the sense of flying blind when you're trying to earn a badge or mayorship. No one really knows how many times you must check into a location to become mayor.
For all their buzz and value, location-based social networks haven't really gone mainstream yet. Only 7 percent of Americans are aware of location-based social networks, according to data from Edison Research.
Earning badges and climbing a ladder of "levels" used to be the respective domains of Boy Scouts and devoted video gamers. No more: It's officially the hottest craze in social-media marketing to make your customers think they're playing a game.
In these economically challenging times, consumers are actively on the hunt for deals. And coupon clippers are hungrily turning toward the Web for savings while dining.
It was billed as the "location wars" -- a fight for the affections of the smartphone-wielding techie elite that converged on Austin this week for the South by Southwest Interactive festival.
One year ago, the founders of Foursquare stepped onstage before a tech-savvy crowd in Austin, Texas, to announce their concept: a smartphone app that lets you tell friends where you are.
Foursquare, a location-based app, lets you explore new places, find friends, and even become mayor.
It's billed as a showcase for the brightest minds in technology -- a place to network with industry leaders and see the latest Internet innovations.
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