Back in early February, Path met with some serious backlash when Arun Thampi revealed that the social app was uploading address book data without explicit permission from its users. Path responded by taking Mike Arrington’s advice , deleting the entire collection of user-uploaded contact information from its servers, and an update added an opt-in feature to ask users for permission before using its data

1DollarScan — the service that offers to digitize books and documents for as little as, yes, $1 — is now promising an improved experience through a service called Fine Tune . The company is a subsidiary of Bookscan Japan, and it launched last August with the goal of bringing the Bookscan service to the US market

Google has had a few teething problems with its ambitious mobile payments service Google Wallet, but it is also putting some money down to get it on the right track. Today the company announced that it would buy TxVia , a mobile payments technology company, for an undisclosed amount

The increasing ubiquity of compact, portable video recording devices has given rise to a burgeoning set of amateur videographers.

We’ve learned that Ivan Koon , the CEO of cloud collaboration company YouSendIt , will be stepping down from the company. We’ve confirmed this with YouSendIt. A replacement has not been named, and Koon, who has been at YouSendIt for six years, will be leaving the company.

Arizona’s legislature has passed some proposed amendments on Section 13-3916 of the State Statutes.

When you publish on Tumblr, you can now auto-share your post to the Facebook News Feed and feature it prominently on your Timeline. More Facebook referral traffic will be the result of these improvements as well as Ticker and Timeline sharing of your Likes and replies that were announced today

There are few more iconic figures in the digital community than Stewart Brand , the effervescent founder of the Whole Earth Catalog , The Well , The Long Now Foundation and the guy who almost single-handedly connected the counterculture with cyberspace . So it was a real thrill to sit down last week with Stewart at The Economist ‘s excellent Innovation event in Berkeley to talk about the origins of the gift economy, what the hippies got wrong (sex, the family & optimism), why the US and Europe have become so timid and how all the innovation is now coming from the south. This is the first of a series of conversations that I’ll be running all week from the Innovation event.

Plink , a Facebook Credits-based rewards program, closed an angel investment round of $633,000 at a $5 million valuation. Consumers who sign up for Plink can earn Facebook Credits when they use their credit card at brick-and-mortar locations, such as Taco Bell, Quiznos and 7-Eleven. Plink is one of a few companies betting on the rise of the social network’s virtual currency, Credits.

DataSift , a data analysis company that provides developers and third parties with access to Twitter , Facebook and other social data sources, is teaming up with NewsCred to allow clients to perform deep data analysis and monitoring of social media and news sources. For background, developers, businesses, media companies and organizations can essentially use DataSift to mine the Twitter firehose of social data, as well as Facebook and other sources. But what makes DataSift special is that it can then filter this social media data for demographic information, online influence and sentiment, either positive or negative.