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The U.S. House of Representatives votes Friday on a major cyber-security bill that changes how companies like Facebook can share personal information. Privacy advocates are in uproar and the Obama Administration is threatening a veto. What's going on?

A new survey released Friday by the Pew Center for Internet and American Life shows that despite the ever-increasing importance of the Internet in daily life, many people either don't go online at all, or do so only through a smartphone. One in five American adults doesn't use the Internet at all, according to the survey.

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New tools like the Kindle have led to an explosion of self-published books, but that has meant more competition for existing authors. How do they make money now? Writer Seth Godin says they first have to give up the idea that they deserve to be paid.

5 March 2012 10:19 GMT / By Stuart Miles Netflix is to focus on delivering exclusive content in the UK, and that includes securing the first window rights to Peter Jackson's forthcoming blockbuster The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

Ad delivery firm Videoplaza is taking the wraps off a new system that it says will help advertisers and media companies make money from their content on every device in the market - without having to cope with the headache of managing them all.

Education is a busy space for startups right now, with online tools like Planboard introducing its lesson planning tool for the K-12 bracket, and Rafter launching to help post-secondary schools manage their course materials.

New Research in Motion boss Thorsten Heins says that Europe -- where the BlackBerry's market share remains higher than in the U.S. -- can save it from the brink of disaster. But he's wrong: the reality is that the only thing that can save it is itself.

ShopLocket is launching today to let users embed and sell a product anywhere, no storefront required. Somewhere between selling an item on Craigslist and setting up an online store, it allows users to embed a product for sale anywhere they’re already driving visitors – Facebook pages, blogs, their own website – instead of directing people to a storefront on a tool like Shopify, all without writing a line of code.

NYC-based fund IA Ventures just announced that it raised a $105 million fund focusing on “companies that create competitive advantage through data.” Startup Visual Revenue, which uses data predicting how long an article should on the front page to optimize performance, is one of the companies IA Ventures has already funded.

Groupon announced its acquisition of NYC-based Hyperpublic over the weekend, a startup focused on layering data on top of maps to make it easier to provide contextual information about places on a hyperlocal level. Groupon also acquired Kima Labs, the company behind Barcode Hero and TapBuy, in a deal announced just hours after the Hyperpublic buy.

In the 2011 documentary The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock creates a film funded fully through product placement and brand sponsorship. It was a look at sponsorship in action, and one that made it apparent that there’s big money to be made in connecting brands with indirect advertising opportunities.

Flickr founder Caterina Fake’s latest startup has been shrouded in mystery ever since she announced she was working on it in June of 2011, and she recently pulled back the curtain to reveal details about the company. The app, Pinwheel, is a way to find and leave notes around the world.

This week has been an exciting one for kid-focused web startups. U.K.-based Moshi Monsters, the online social game where kids can adopt their own virtual pet and then share it with friends, told Reuters it’s considering an initial public offering and is expanding to the U.S. Just a day later, another U.K.

Digital publishing is a hotbed of startup activity, though that activity is somewhat threatened by recent moves Apple has made to enter the space. Some companies aim to gain traction based on the hype Apple brings to any industry it takes on rather than be crushed under the weight of its sizeable influence.

Social TV startup Loyalize has been acquired by Function(x), the company behind recently launched mobile app Viggle. According to former Loyalize CEO Todd Greene, the Loyalize product will remain a white-label platform for networks and content providers to build their own apps to increase engagement with TV programming as it's being watched.

The mobile messaging market has been crowded for a long time, with some of the tech industry's true leviathans weighing in with their own apps and services that seemed ready to squeeze smaller players out of the space. Facebook, Google and Apple have all introduced their own versatile messaging platforms that extend beyond specific devices, and incorporate group conversations and multimedia messaging.

February 13th, 2012 // 362 Comments It's tough being a journalist, especially if you're covering technology and living in Silicon Valley, because it seems as if everyone around you is getting fabulously rich while you're stuck in a job that will never, ever make you wealthy.

February 13, 2012 at 8:36 am PT Roku is one of the cord-cutter's favorite tools, because its devices make it easier to get video on your TV without paying for a cable subscription.