Every day, the Fortune staff spends hours poring over tech stories, posts, and reviews from all over the Web to keep tabs on the companies that matter. We’ve assembled the day’s most newsworthy bits below.
“I’ve only seen one major company built on the Facebook Platform. … Justin Shaffer of Hot Potato and Sam Lessin of Drop.io — both of those companies essentially failed.”
— Fred Wilson, VC and principal of Union Square Ventures (All Facebook)
- FCC head Julius Genachowski recently admitted Verizon and Google’s backroom net neutrality proposal, which excluded wireless broadband, did more harm than good. “It slowed down some processes that were leading to a resolution,” he said. (DSLReports)
- Dell mobile president Ron Garriques said he’s leaving the company as part of the company’s mobile division restructuring. The company is merging the communication solutions section into its individual home, business, enterprise and government sections, eliminating the need for a separate mobile group. (Electronista)
- Meet CityVille, the latest social gaming effort from Zynga. The Sim City-like, Flash-based Facebook app will hew to the “build your own metropolis” concept but also allow players to share goods and build relationships with neighboring friends’ cities. (CNNMoney) [cnnmoney-video vid=/video/technology/2010/11/17/t_tt_zynga_cityville.cnnmoney/]
- A report delivered to Congress states that a Chinese state-owned telecomm company redirected Internet traffic through its own servers in April, raising concern over whether the redirected data — some of which included U.S. government and military info. — was somehow illegally examined. (betanews)
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Twitter co-founder Evan Williams. Photo: Getty Images During his appearance at the Web 2.0 summit, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams revealed promoted trends increase Twitter conversation about that particular topic by three to six times. And on making money off the popular social network: “There’s a million ways to make money on Twitter … I’m sure we’ll try more.” (CNNMoney)
- One of the ways it looks Twitter intends to make money is by selling 50% of all Tweets for $360,000 a year through social data streaming service Gnip, or 5% of all Tweets for $60,000 a year. Buyers can only analyst the messages, not display them, and resale of the content would be illegal. (Read Write Web)
- Given the impending rollout of its faster LTE networks, Verizon is considering pricing future data plans based on data connection speeds on top of the usual data consumption. (Phone Scoop)
- Hulu Plus emerged from beta and dropped its monthly price point from $9.99 to $7.99. All subscribers who initially subscribed with the $9.99 price point will be credited towards the difference. (Hulu Blog)
- LinkedIn now claims 85 million members — the professional social network pulled in the last million of those during the last nine days alone. (Erictric)
