Facebook is now showing Sponsored Stories in users’ News Feeds, a Facebook spokesperson tells us. These paid units include a subtle indication that the post is “Featured.” However, to respect the user experience, the social network is putting more controls on the the type of messages advertisers can display here than it did when it previously included ads in News Feed in 2007 .

The web, as we all know, was built for humans. A nice graphical interface to the internet, which has been around much longer.

Facebook has partnered with another national restaurant chain to test a feature that lets pages post coupons and promote them with Sponsored Stories.

This morning, Google began rolling out a major change to its core search engine that intertwines results from Google+ (and Picasa) with the ‘normal’ algorithmically-generated results we’ve come to expect. There have been plenty of critiques of the news, including John Battelle’s discussion on how this isn’t actually integrating ‘Your World’, as Google calls it, but rather just its own social network

The hottest and coolest thermostat on the market this year was clearly the Nest .

As Semil showed back in November , social travel sites are all the rage these days among the entrepreneurs, offering plenty of interesting approaches to offering recommendations on where and how to travel. You may not have heard of HipGeo , but if you’re a traveler, this is something that will likely pique your curiosity. HipGeo has developed a location-aware platform that records and displays the places users go and how they get there, and today they’ve released a new app that is essentially a travel diary for the modern Web

After the onslaught of media that is CES, who wouldn’t want more CES? We definitely do, which is why we’re running the TC Gadgets Webcast live at 4pm Pacific/7pm Eastern straight out of our posh studio on the CES show floor.

IK Multimedia unleashes a plethora of new hardware this week at CES 2012 within their iRig line. This triumvirate of products look to make it easier than ever to use iOS devices, live and inline, with analog musical instruments like guitars, bases, vocals and regular DJ consoles.

February 8 – 9, 2012 | San Francisco

Corel’s new AfterShot Pro software runs on Windows, Mac, Linux(!) and offers a $99 package for managing photos including RAW handling, image editing, and quick library management.