Microsoft just announced that Windows 8 will come in three different flavors: Windows 8, Windows 8 Pro and Windows RT. Windows 8 will be the mainstream consumer edition. The Pro version will bring a number of features that most mainstream consumers don’t necessarily need to Microsoft’s next operating system

A big hire for Google announced today, and perhaps a sign of some sharper viral marketing coming out of the company going forward: the company is adding Iain Tait to the team at Google Creative Lab, the company’s in-house team that creates marketing campaigns for all things Google, covering products like Android, Chrome, Google+ and more. Tait comes from ad agency Wieden + Kennedy , where he had most recently been executive creative director, credited with having a key role in such iconic campaigns as the hugely popular and award-winning Old Spice campaign of viral videos, as well as work for Levi’s, Coke and Nike. Tait had been with the agency for two years, according to Creativity Online , becoming a partner just in December

Well, it’s officially official: Following a wave of rumors and reports, Path just announced that it has raised more than $30 million in new funding. “We are delighted to announce that last week we closed a significant round of funding with a new set of investor partners,” CEO Dave Morin said in the press release

If you needed any more proof that Google Drive was alive, look no further than this screenshot of the OS X app. I’ve been able to download and run the app and it is currently idle, sitting quietly in the corner, unable to connect to the mothership. The version we were given is 1.0.2891 and seems to run without issue

On average, brands advertising on Facebook pay more per click than social game companies do, according to data provided to us by third-party vendor AdParlor . Facebook ad costs continue to rise across a number of industries as competition increases, particularly among consumer brands and the hardcore social game sector

An entrepreneur we met in DC, Mili Mittal, told us about her site, mor.sl . Unfortunately, she didn’t describe it fully, leading me to believe it was far less cool than it really is. That failure has been averted thanks to a quick browse and subsequent salivation.

There is hardly a program or ad on TV these days that doesn’t ask its viewers to like its Facebook page or tweet about it. According to a new survey by global consulting firm Accenture, there’s a simple reason for this: those social media symbols actually work

Rumors and reports of Google Drive’s imminent launch have been coming hard and fast lately, but this one may just take the cake. The folks at The Next Web managed to get their hands on a draft of an announcement from one of Google’s official Drive partners, and have just revealed a few titillating details about the storage-service-that-almost-wasn’t

Hotspots.io , a startup promising to deliver “social media intelligence that you’ll actually use”, just announced on its home page that it has been acquired by Twitter.

While Google’s advertising cost per click fell 6% since Q4 2011, Facebook keeps commanding higher prices from advertisers with CPC up 23% in key markets during same period according to a study of the last full quarter before the social network is expected to go public. It seems the shift to mobile where users are harder to monetize hasn’t phased Facebook’s ad rates yet, which could make its stock very appealing come IPO day. Ads tool developer  TBG Digital saw the average cost per thousand impressions (CPM) of the ads it runs on Facebook increase 15% over Q4 2011 and a whopping 41% over Q1 2011 in key markets