Twitter has announced in a blog post a glorious new ability: “the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world.” At last! There are two ways of looking at this new “ability,” one optimistic and one pessimistic.

Sure, your mom carried you for nine months.

Finding the right cofounder is often the hardest part of doing a startup, as most anyone with experience will tell you. As a personal example: the cofounder of my first company,  Phil Kast , was an old high school buddy employed as a whitewater rafting guide in Colorado when we started talking about working together. He happened to be hitting the off-season right when I was trying to get started — and everything went from there

It looks like publishers and advertisers are warming to mobile ad startup Moolah Media . The company says that in 2011, it generated 7 million leads for its advertisers — and 1.9 million of those leads (27 percent of the year’s total) came in December. Also in December, Moolah says its ads reached 45 million Americans

Motorola Mobility released their fourth quarter and year-end financials today, and now we can see why they made it a point earlier this month to downplay analyst expectations. The company’s new figures reveal that while Motorola raked in $3.4 billion in Q4 2011, they also incurred a net loss of $80 million. Things don’t look much more promising when we shift our attention to their mobile offerings.

The New York Times has published a long article on Foxconn which, while it doesn’t provide much in the way of new information, does act as a sobering reminder of just how companies like Apple can make so very much money. When our own John Biggs visited Foxconn , he focused on the company itself, its scale, its intentions. When I wrote about Apple’s suppliers failing to meet environmental standards , it was more about the laxity of regulators within China.

7 of the world’s most powerful tech companies have been accused of forming an antitrust conspiracy to suppress the compensation of their employees by entering into “no poach” agreements. Today , a San Jose judge will hear a motion to dismiss a class action civil lawsuit in which former employees seek damages from defendants Apple, Google, Adobe, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, and Lucasfilm

In a world of personalized, distributed information sharing, Techmeme and its sister sites have successfully gone the opposite direction. They’re machine-powered, human-controlled news aggregators that have readers — especially media types — following like drug addicts jonesing for another hit. The flagship site, Techmeme.com , has just gotten a big redesign that modernizes the look and feel of the interface, and emphasizes new social features. Here’s one junkie’s reaction.

As a gamer with admittedly poor impulse control, the newly-released Steam app for iOS and Android has me very worried. On the one hand, it seems like an ideal way to to keep tabs on the popular gaming service on the go.

Y Combinator -backed Verbling , a site that aims to connect language leaners with native speakers via live video chat, has raised $1 million from DFJ, Learn Capital, Start Fund, Inspovation Ventures, SV Angel, Meck Investments, Ace & Company and others. The new funding will be used towards hiring.