Google is in talks to acquire local review site Yelp, at a price that reportedly could surpass $500 million. "On the odds of the deal happening -- one source says it's 80% likely," reports TechCrunch. "Not signed, sealed and delivered, but past the term sheet stage." According to The New York Times, "The two companies have had conversations for several years, but a more serious round of acquisition talks began two months ago." What's really at stake for Google, asks blogger Robert Scoble. "Well, when you search for restaurants or businesses on Google, what do …

Sufficiently convinced that a Google-branded smartphone is imminent, industry bloggers have moved onto rumors of a Google-branded "netbook."   According to TechCrunch, the search engine has reportedly been talking to at least one hardware manufacturer that may or may not have plans for building the netbook, which Google may or may not announce sometime before the 2010 holiday season.   Insisting that Google is in no rush to release anything, TechCrunch says, "Next Christmas you may be getting a high performance Google-branded netbook running Chrome OS for next to nothing." According to TechCrunch's source, Google gave …

Facebook, once dominated by White and Asian users, now has percentages of Black and Hispanic users that are equally proportionate to the US population. For the research, two Facebook staff members, along with two grad students from Cornell and Princeton, compared users' last names on Facebook to US Census data about the percentage of people with those last names who reported particular racial backgrounds. According to ReadWriteWeb, once a larger number of Facebook users have public profiles -- something that's probably happening very rapidly thanks to the "radical" new privacy settings the company just began recommending -- analyzing things like …

Feast your eyes on a research visualization project, which explores where readers of The New York Times's Web site come from, and what kind of devices they use to read its content. The project, developed in The Times's research and development labs produced, among other research, two videos showing the traffic to NYTimes.com on June 25, 2009, the day Michael Jackson died. The 24-hour period is compressed into a little over a minute and a half. One video represents readers coming to the Web site from the United States, while the second video shows a map of global readers. Of …

Apple's iPhone finally unseated Microsoft devices in terms of overall use in October, according to new data from comScore. To date, studies have found that the iPhone was outselling Windows Mobile devices, and had a greater presence online, but this latest survey of mobile operating system marketshare found that the iPhone spiked to nearly 9 million U.S. users by the month of October, pushing it well past Microsoft's total of just over 7 million users. In July, the two companies were about even in total mobile OS market share. Furthermore, comScore has found that about 36 million Americans own a …

Blackberry maker Research In Motion says some North American consumers using the device are experiencing interruptions receiving personal e-mail messages. The company said technicians are working on the outage, and that phone service and Web browsing have not been affected. The email outage, meanwhile, is apparently affecting all BlackBerry users, regardless of their carrier, who rely on RIM's Internet-based service for e-mail delivery instead of corporate servers. Not only do businesses and governments worldwide rely on BlackBerrys to communicate with mobile workers, but an increasing number of fickle consumers who can choose between an array of fancy smartphones. RIM, which …

In a development sure to infuriate many a Hollywood resident, a producer from Uruguay who uploaded a short film to YouTube in November was just offered a $30m contract to make a Hollywood film. The movie is expected to be sponsored by director Sam Raimi, whose credits include the Spiderman and Evil Dead films. Fede Alvarez's short film "Ataque de Panico!" (Panic Attack!) features giant robots invading and destroying Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay. The movie Alvarez has been asked to produce is a sci-fi film to be shot in Uruguay and Argentina, which he intends to start from scratch …

Santa himself couldn't have thought up a nicer gift to give mobile marketers for Christmas. Morgan Stanley just released a bulky report predicting that the mobile Web will eventually be "at least 2x size of Desktop Internet." Driven by 3G adoption and the increasing popularity of smartphones, the financial services provider predicts that smartphones "will out-ship the global notebook + netbook market in 2010E and out-ship the global PC market (notebook + netbook + desktop) by 2012E." In particular, Morgan says that Apple's iPhone/iTouch/iTunes ecosystem "may prove to be the fastest ramping and most …

Have you heard about the "Apple Gestapo"? According to Gizmodo, that's what Apple employees call a clandestine group of moles who spy on Apple consumers and employees, and report directly to Steve Jobs and Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's SVP and Chief Financial Officer. "Apple has these moles working everywhere, especially in departments where leaks are suspected," a source who goes by the name Tom tells Gizmodo. "Management is not aware of them." While it admits that secrecy is paramount to success in today's extremely competitive marketplace, the tech blog mourns the company's loss of innocence, "from a happy hippie company, to …

Microsoft has agreed to offer European consumers a choice of rival Web browsers, and, in turn, regulators have dropped their antitrust case against the software giant. According to the Times, the settlement averted a second costly legal battle for Microsft. Per the agreement, Microsoft will give Windows users a choice of up to 11 other browsers from competing companies, including Mozilla, Apple and Google. Beginning next year, European users of Microsoft's Windows operating system and its Internet Explorer browser will receive an option to switch browsers via a software update. In a statement, Microsoft said it was "pleased" with the …