Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta , two Stanford grads who signed up for the Launch Pad class at the University’s Institute of Design (aka d.school ), could have hardly chosen a better path to try their hands at startup life . The pair has gone from idea to a (very cool) digital news app for the iPad in just 5 weeks, and they’re just getting started

As we know from breaking news right now over 10 people have died after Israeli commandos boarded a convoy of ships carrying aid to Gaza, sparking an international controvery. But we’re not going to get into the politics of that situation. What we’re interested in is what happened on Twitter today

As I walked in the headquarters of the Jawa Pos —the flagship newspaper of one of South East Asia’s largest print media empires—I was wondering just how screwed my profession is; globally I mean. Is the death of print a world-wide certainty or merely an American reality? After all a lot of “old economy” businesses are thriving in emerging markets thanks to Greenfield advantages and rising middle class economics.

According to a new research report from Sweden-based wireless analyst Berg Insight , mobile location-based service revenues in Europe are forecasted to grow from €220 million in 2009 to €420 million in 2015. Berg Insight adds that local search, navigation services and social networking are poised to become the top applications in terms of number of users, which is sort of a give-away as those categories have already proven to be the most popular and fastest-growing among smartphone users worldwide. Berg Insight, which offers business intelligence to the telecom industry and provides analysis to companies such as AT&T, Microsoft, France Telecom, IBM, KPN Mobile, NTT Docomo, Nokia, Telefonica O2, Vodafone Group, Alcatel and Motorola, estimates that one third of all mobile subscribers in Europe will use “some kind of location-enhanced application” on a regular basis by 2015

On Monday, a Pakistani court ordered authorities to restore access to social networking site Facebook after company officials reportedly apologized for a page deemed offensive to Muslims and removed its contents.

It’s Sunday afternoon in San Francisco, and while my American friends are out in the sun, celebrating some holiday or other – is this one Memorial Day or Labor Day or Arbor Day? – I’m confined to my hotel room, finishing the final edits of my book manuscript. Specifically I’m editing a chapter that begins with me being thrown out of a Starbucks in Chicago for swearing on my cellphone

Few will dispute Amazon’s role as current king of the e-commerce space, but this week’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference raised an interesting question: Did Amazon miss the boat on social commerce? At the conference last week in New York, John Caplan , CEO, OpenSky ; Rob Kalin , CEO, Etsy ; Susan Lyne , CEO, Gilt Groupe and Dan Porter , CEO, OMGPOP sat down to discuss the idea of social commerce and where the marketplace is going in the future in terms of both monetization and socialization

A guest post by researcher Lars Erik Holmquist of the Mobile Life Centre, Kista, Sweden The rate of innovation in mobile services is just about to take a quantum leap. We are going from a divergent and messy ecosystem, where every new concept has to be made into a specialized ”app” that works only on a small sub-set of mobile handsets (even the mighty iPhone only has around 3% of the global mobile phone market), to an environment much more like the web.

By now, just about everyone on the planet has heard the term “Apple Fanboy.” If you’ve ever said anything good about an Apple product, you’ve likely been called one. But a new class of fanboy has emerged — one that, amazingly, may be be equally as passionate. The Android Fanboy

After exploring the mobile and Internet landscapes in Shanghai and Beijing, the GeeksOnAPlane (GOAP) group (30+ techies mostly from the Silicon Valley) continued their Asian field trip to Korea today. In Beijing , the GOAP attended two of China’s largest tech conferences: CHINICT , “the largest conference on China tech innovation” (which was livestreamed on TechCrunch), and the “Global Mobile Internet Conference” (GMIC), both of which are held in the city every year.