According to The Business Insider, Facebook has long had a reputation in Silicon Valley for being "a place that, despite its white-hot user growth, still somehow had a hard time recruiting top talent." Arguing that Facebook's recruiting prowess could eventually make or break the top social network, The Business Insider asked employee-reviews site Glassdoor.com to compile a list of the 20 best and worst things about working at the company. Among other perks, Facebook employees can count on stock options; flexible work hours; "awesome" food; a "very social" and "very open" work environment; a "great opportunity to grab …

Amazon Web Services, an Amazon.com subsidiary, said it would now offer variable pricing for clients of its cloud computing service. The pricing, dubbed "Spot Instances," allows users to bid for access to unused computer time for as long as their bid exceeds the current spot price for an hour's worth. The spot price will fluctuate regularly as it will be determined by supply and demand, according to the company's chief technology officer Werner Vogels. "Spot Instances are well-suited for applications that can have flexible start and stop times such as image and video conversion and rendering, data processing, …

What's next for the notoriously ambitious Google? Nothing less than obliterating humanity's many language barriers, according to Marissa Mayer, the company's vice president for search products and user experience. "Imagine what it would be like if there was a tool built into the search engine which translated my search query into every language and then searched the entire world's Web sites," she tells the Telegraph. "And then invoked the translation software a second and third time -- to not only then present the results in your native language, but then translate those sites in full when you clicked through."

TechCrunch takes a close look at the white-hot area of location-based services and social platforms, and addresses a few challenges looming over the industry. First, there's Facebook, which is developing its own location-based technology that is sure to displace rival services. There's also the contention that the average consumer will most likely only want to share their real-time location with, at most, a few dozen "friends" -- a likelihood that severely limits the growth of related tracking services. That, according to TechCrunch writer MG Siegler, points to a larger problem he's starting to notice with these location services: …

Lost in all the excitement over the prospect of a Google-branded smartphone, today, is news that likely has far greater implications for the future of the search giant. Just months after the Los Angeles city council approved a $7.2 million deal to switch to hosted Google email and application services, Google Monday said that the City of Angels is officially "in the cloud," with 34,000 of the city's employees switching to its online services for email and collaboration. According to Google, "The cloud computing system will improve the security and reliability of city email, transitioning …

More than 81% of all online video viewers click away if they encounter a clip rebuffering, according to a new study by video distribution and analytics startup Tubemogul. Surprisingly, the study -- which analyzed 192 million video streams over 14 days -- found that just 6.81% of all streams rebuffer at some point, while about 2.5% rebuffer twice. Tubemogul also measured how many times rebuffers occur across several popular content delivery networks, and found that Limelight performed the best, Bitgravity's streams had to reload the most, and Akamai's performance fell somewhere in the middle. Tubemogul's research is based on both …

iPhone users experience something akin to Stockholm Syndrome, according to new research from Strand Consulting -- which, for what it's worth, the 9to5Mac blog says are a group of "anti-iPhone analysts." In short, the research claims that Apple users devote huge amounts of energy "defending" its products, "despite the shortcomings and limitations of both past and present versions of the iPhone." Furthermore, "When we examine the iPhone users' arguments defending the iPhone, it reminds us of the famous Stockholm Syndrome. Going one step futher, Strand writes that "the iPhone is surrounded by a multitude of people, media and …

Microsoft's name is mud, according to Mark Anderson, who writes the Strategic News Service, a predictive newsletter that apparently has a wide following among technology executives and venture capitalists. "Except for gaming, it is 'game over' for Microsoft in the consumer market," Anderson tells The New York Times' Bits blog. "It's time to declare Microsoft a loser in phones ... Just get out of Dodge." But aren't "phones" just a piece of a far larger software and technology services market? Not for long, writes Bits. "The smartphone is becoming the innovative hub of software development and applications, far …

Asa Dotzler, a founding member of the Mozilla Foundation, just took a swipe at Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and at a recent speech Schmidt gave on privacy. "That was the CEO of Google telling you exactly what he thinks about your privacy," Dotzler wrote in a blog post. "There is no ambiguity, no 'out of context' here." The fact that this is coming from some a prominent Firefox member is pretty big news, according to DownloadSquad, which points at that Google is Mozilla's primary revenue stream. Dotzler even recommends Bing over Google, citing a better privacy policy. What's …

Apple has responded to a suit filed by Nokia, which claimed that Apple violated 10 of its patents, including ones for devices that connect wirelessly to LANs or 3G networks and stream data, or coded speech over them. Nokia's VP for Legal and IP, Ilkka Rahnasto, went so far as to claim that Apple was getting "a free ride on the back of Nokia's innovation." Now, says Bruce Sewell, Apple's General Counsel and senior vice president, "Other companies must compete with us by inventing their own technologies, not just by stealing ours." Indeed, the countersuit alleges that Nokia …