Sometime this month, Alibaba Cloud Computing -- a unit of China's Alibaba Group - is expected to release an English version of its mobile operating system. "Chinese Internet companies are expanding into the mobile hardware space as they try to bolster market share in a nascent but rapidly growing market," Reuters reports. Also, in the next two month, Alibaba said is plans to launch its own tablet device. Wang Jian, Alibaba Group's chief architect and president of Alibaba Cloud Computing, told reporters on Friday that the firm was in talks with global hardware vendors on partnerships regarding its mobile …

Two ex-Googlers on Friday debuted a new mobile travel guide, which -- in true Google form -- aims to organize the world of disparate travel information, and, of course, make it easily searchable. The new service, Triposo, "is based on the simple idea that travel guides can be designed in the same way that Google based its aggregation and search on some kick-ass algorithms," writes TechCrunch. "And a little bit of indexing and semantic icing to boot." Sites like Wikipedia, Wikitravel and Openstreetmap have limitless quantities of travel-related content, and Triposo wants to be the site that ranks …

Despite publishers' best efforts, The Wall Street Journal reports that it's actually getting harder to profit off online advertising. The reason? Too much content! "It's a simple rule of any market," The Journal explains. "The more information that is created, the more the value is reduced. And despite attempts to woo spending with bigger, bolder and more targeted ads, services that help consumers navigate that content, namely search, remain the big money makers online." As as result, as Web traffic explodes, Web companies are struggling to profit off ads shown next to the articles, videos and other content …

Amazon.com appears to have cut a tentative deal with legislative leaders in California that will allow it to postpone collecting sales taxes from state residents for another year. "The company, in turn, would drop its battle to overturn the state's new law that required it and many other out-of-state online retailers to collect the taxes," The Los Angeles Times reports. The new law had mandated that Internet retailers start collecting state taxes in July if they had offices, workers or other connections in California. As the LA Times notes, Amazon had refused to collect the taxes and poured …

Taptu, which MobileBeat dubs a "news DJ app company," shortly plans to let any old Joe build their own app using a laymen-friendly "news mixing engine." Aiding the effort is $3.5 million in second-round funding from DFJ Esprit and Sofinnova. "The move makes sense for Taptu, since powering other people's apps is its next logical step after finding success with its own news DJ apps on the iPhone, iPad and Android (including both phones and tablets)," MobileBeat writes. Anyone should be able to use the company's Tapform to create their own social news aggregator apps, or even add …

Klout has now ranked the social influence of over 100 million people, the social influence ranking service said this week. "One hundred million people with Klout Scores means that there are 100 million voices effectively leveraging the social Web to share their opinions, hopes and dreams and shaping the decisions of the billions of people now listening to them," Klout's CEO Joe Fernandez said on the new. "While this is a nice measure of success (on some levels) for the Klout team what it really does is speak to our need to measure anything and everything," writes Marketing …

Three top near field communication (NFC) specialists have formed global alliance to promote the technology as a viable mobile marketing tool. "All three already have experience in running successful NFC-based campaigns that have helped connect brands to their audiences on a large scale," according to TechCrunch. The firms involved in the NFC World Alliance each represent a specific geographic region, and include Blue Bite -- America's region -- Proxama - EMEA -- and Tapit -- Asia-Pacific. Presently, the short-range, high-frequency technology is more commonly associated with mobile wallets and mobile payments systems than with advertising. "In the future, …

Netflix appears to be cracking down on streaming customers who share their accounts with family members and roommates. According to Stopthecap.com, Netflix has implemented strict new limits on the number of concurrent video streams available for viewing. "Netflix has always unofficially had streaming limitations," its notes, though enforcement was apparently lax. The new restrictions appear to be timed to coincide with Netflix's recent price increases, Stopthecap.com notes. "Now, large families sharing a Netflix account will either have to reserve time to watch their respective favorites or pay considerably more for a combo disc-rental/streaming plan which unlocks a corresponding …

Even in a social content, it turns out, YouTube appears to be a far more effective platform for "broadcasting" content online. According to a new study from link-shortening service Bit.ly, most links -- published on Facebook or Twitter -- stay fresh for about three hours, while YouTube keeps them fresh for closer to seven hours! Bit.ly evaluates the freshness -- or "persistence" -- of a link by calculating its "half life," i.e., "the amount of time at which this link will receive half of the clicks it will ever receive after it's reached its peak." Between Facebook and Twitter, …

Groupon is reportedly reevaluating plans for an IPO, which was originally expected to achieve a $20 billion valuation. The culprit? "Stock-market volatility," reports The Wall Street Journal, citing a source. While the daily deal leader has yet to officially yank its IPO, it is reportedly reassessing the timing. "The drop in the market has got everybody running scared," David Menlow, president of independent research provider IPOfinancial.com tells The Journal. But market mayhem isn't Groupon's only problem. Among other issues, "When the company filed to go public in early June, it attracted criticism for its high marketing costs and …