When Siri was announced strictly for the iPhone 4S, the mod community likely took that as a challenge. Before long, the service had been hacked and shortly thereafter ported to a number of potentially compatible devices. The problem, of course, is that Apple gets to decide what devices are compatible, not the users.

Most of us know the guitarist and singer-songwriter Bob Weir as a founding member of the Grateful Dead. But Weir is also the founder of Tamalpais Research Institute (TRI) , a state-of-the-art performance studio which offers musicians the opportunity to distribute their work in high-end digital form

Back in May, a startup named Desmos launched at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC with the hope of addressing the fragmentation inherent to education by way of platform-agnostic software that allows users to build and share their own rich educational content. In application, this meant that, like Inkling, Kno, Apple and more are doing for textbooks, Desmos wanted to reinvent the whiteboard by making it browser-based and interactive. Of course, the real highlight of Desmos’ whiteboard has been its original, interactive online calculator, which graphs equations as you write them

Earlier today, Barry Diller introduced Aereo , a company backed by IAC, at a press conference in New York City. Aereo streams broadcast TV to your browser and provides a DVR in the cloud by miniaturizing TV antennas and packing them in equipment that sits on the network

As we mentioned in our coverage of Zynga’s fourth quarter earnings, mobile has been one of the fast-growing parts of Zynga’s business. On the company’s earnings call, CEO and founder Marc Pincus revealed that mobile users have grown five-fold to 15 million daily active users in 2011. That’s up from 13 million in December .

A life spent caught up in the drudgery of retail is usually pretty free of frills, but Verizon Wireless employees may soon be getting a shot at some swanky hardware if some newly-leaked images hold true. According to Android And Me , Verizon has reached out to their employees with an offer they may not be able to refuse: limited edition Droid RAZRs and Droid RAZR MAXXs. And what’s so limited about these edition then?

Lab42 , a startup that helps agencies and other businesses conduct market research, says it has raised “just under” $1 million in funding. President Gauri Sharma pitches Lab42′s services (which involve targeted surveys conducted over social networks ) as new way to conduct research

Following this month’s debut of  Lilyhammer , Netflix’s first scripted series, word is that the company is now preparing to launch a second original show. The company has ordered 13 episodes of  Orange is the New Black , a comedy from  Jenji Kohan , the creator of Showtimes’s  Weeds.  The show is based on the memoir of a communications exec who served time for drug charges in a women’s prison. The deal is being confirmed by Bloomberg (via  SFGate ,  AdAge ), who spoke to someone “with knowledge of the situation,” but rumors surrounding the negotiations for this show have reached as far back as November

Zynga’s first earnings release today makes the social game developer’s business look notably stronger than it had when the company went public in December. Its traffic, paying user base, and projected bookings are all headed into positive territory, whereas these numbers had  been flat or falling towards the end of last year. Bookings, the short-term measure of when the company sells a virtual good or other item, were already up last quarter

Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage today at the Goldman Sachs Technology & Internet Conference in San Francisco to talk about Apple’s unbelievable first quarter, as well as the company’s outlook going forward. It’s been hard to avoid the headlines: Apple is red hot right now, as MG recently pointed out that Apple’s $13.1 billion profits in Q1 was equal to the company’s revenues in Q4 2010. One year and one quarter later, and Apple is growing like it’s on steroids