ScribbleLive, from Toronto-based Scribble Media, was once nearly synonymous with the term "live blogging," but you'd be hard-pressed to find reference to that term on its site now. The company has matured and expanded considerably in the five years since its original founding, and with a new $8 million raise, it hopes to continue that maturation, to become the engine powering real-time content at media sites and other web-based properties in various industries.

Travel portal TripAdvisor continues to push ahead with its mobile and social acquisitions: today the company announced that it has acquired GateGuru, a mobile app that provides real-time information on airports, weather, and flights. Much of that is picked up from crowdsourcing, not unlike Waze -- acquired by Google last week -- does with road travel. Terms of the deal between GateGuru and TripAdvisor have not been disclosed but we are trying to find out.

BIG DATA costs big bucks. Perhaps then, it should be no surprise to see ERN, the London-based startup that's planning to use Big Data to enable banks and merchants to create loyalty-based offers for cardholders, has announced that it’s raised more funding before actually managing to launch. Following a $2 million funding round raised last December, the company has added another $1.6 million in seed funding to its coffers.

Netflix has announced that it will begin operating in The Netherlands later this year, further expanding its European footprint. The Netherlands, Netflix's seventh European country, is a relatively small market for the streaming video service, but in keeping with Netflix's more cautious approach to moving into new countries after its aggressive international expansion last year lost money.

The Wi-Fi Alliance unveiled a certification program for 802.11ac Wi-Fi (also known as 5G Wi-Fi) designed to make sure devices using the wireless technology interoperate with older hardware.

Alcatel-Lucent will refocus on IP networking and ultra-broadband access in mobile and fixed-line networks as it seeks to return to profitability by 2015.

A Dell special committee has rejected a new proposal from a key shareholder Carl C. Icahn, and said it will continue to support the proposal by founder Michael Dell and private-equity firm Silver Lake Partners to take the company private.

Facebook has been down on Tuesday night, giving users error messages or long response times.

Anyone who's tried to tether to their iPhone or iPad will recall how iOS manages to craft its own passwords when used as a personal hotspot. The aim is to ensure that anyone sharing their data connection will get some degree of security, regardless of whether they tinker with the password themselves. However, three researchers from FAU in Germany have now worked the structure behind these auto-generated keys -- a combination of a short english word and a series or random numbers -- and managed…

Behold, a ready-made answer for those who own a Linux-powered fruit machine but who are still looking for new ways to use it. It's a simple media center starter kit, fresh out and shipping today, which makes it easy to hook your Raspberry Pi up to an HDMI display and use it to play video or music from the internet or your home network through the wonders of XBMC. Known simply as "XBMC Solution," it consists of the Raspbmc software on a bootable SD card (this is an all-in-one install that combi…

How's about this for a coincidence? We've just benchmarked the Snapdragon 800 reference tablet, with some very nice results, and now Bloomberg is reporting that Microsoft will use a Qualcomm chip in its next refresh of the Surface RT. The report, based on insider sources, doesn't stretch to detailing whether we'll be looking at the flagship 800 processor specifically, but that'd seem like a logical upgrade for the current hybrid which runs on NVIDIA's Tegra 3 and already feels underpowered. As…

Keeping your Gmail account organized isn't that hard when you can tag and Star emails. Evernote Web Clipper's new function, however, promises easier access to missives you deem particularly important. Once the Chrome extension is installed, it saves any message you want along with its attachments in just one click. One note though: you'll need a premium account to search through any attached documents. Note that the Gmail clip will look like a garbled mess (especially if it's a lengthy thread)…

Since it arrived last year, the Galaxy S III has been the world's best-selling smartphone that wasn't born in Cupertino. An impressive feat, but one that—along with Samsung's Megatron-sized hype-machine—has made for sky-high expectations for the sequel.Our first impressions of the S4 left us a little cold, but we've now spent a full week getting to know it better. It's definitely one of the best phones you can buy. It's just shame it couldn't stay out of its own way. What Is It?Samsung's…

We're finding out about the new Xbox in just a few hours. But that doesn't mean we have no idea what's coming. Here's a rundown of everything we know, or think we know, about the next Xbox.The SpecsWe are pretty sure we know what the guts of the new Xbox look like. It'll have a 64-bit, 8-core, 1.6GHz processor made by AMD with x86 architecture and 8GB of DDR3 RAM. (x86 means, broadly, that it's a lot like the chips in your home computer, which is a change for Xbox, which had until now run on P…

With clear skies and rising temperatures around the country, the summer travel season is nearly upon us. And unless you've got money to burn or a first-born to offer, now's the time to book your travel plans. Here's how to get away without breaking the bank.Timing Is EverythingAirline ticket pricing is a fickle mistress. While prices overall have steadily risen over the last two years—and showing no signs of stopping any time soon—the cost of an individual ticket depends on a myriad of fa…

There's something on the internet that you desperately want to keep everyone from seeing. Something you're deeply embarrassed of. That would show all your friends how you're not actually as smart and fashionable and ironically self-aware as you pretend to be. And you really ought to get over it. We all have stuff like this. Maybe it's a gross Facebook album from college. Or a Xanga or Livejournal or Blogger account, or a dance you did, or an a cappella YouTube video. Or, god forbid, your dating…

Our days of sales-taxless, free-love internet revelry may be numbered. Thursday afternoon, the Senate voted to open the floor to a bill that could end tax-free online shopping once and for all.And strangely enough, everyone's favorite online tax-free haven is leading the charge. Et tu, Amazon? Also... why?The new legislation would require all internet retailers to charge the sales tax rate of the item's destination, overruling the 1992 Supreme Court decision in Quill v. North Dakota that made…