A curated selection of the weekend’s most newsworthy tech stories from all over the Web. Sign up to get the newsletter delivered to you everyday.
- AOL closed its $315 million acquisition of The Huffington Post just one month after it was announced. Site founder Arianna Huffington will serve as AOL’s President and Editor in Chief of the Huffington Post Media Group, which includes all of the company’s media properties. The deal should give AOL a user base of 117 million monthly unique visitors. (TechCrunch)
- Google’s VP of corporate development, David Lawee, says the company “is going to continue to be aggressive” with buying up startups despite skyrocketing valuations. Smaller companies, which include previous acquisitions like Android Inc and DoubleClick will remain the focus rather than larger properties such as Groupon. (Wall Street Journal)
- Research in Motion’s chief marketing officer and ex-Nokia exec, Keith Pardy, is leaving for “personal reasons,” but will help the company out during a six-month transition period. The departure comes at a pretty bad time for RIM given its PlayBook tablet is expected to launch within the next two months. (Wall Street Journal)
- Twitter’s recent version 3.3 update, launched late last week, has caused an uproar among some over the introduction of a “Quick Bar” (nicknamed “Dick Bar” by detractors after CEO Dick Costolo) to the iPhone version which takes up valuable screen space with a constant tool bar that rotates trends, Promoted Trends, and will eventually sport ads, at the top of the Twitter timeline. Tweeted Daring Fireball’s John Gruber: “If an alerting mechanism is in your face *all the time*, it’s not a good alerting function.” As a result, Twitter submitted a new version of the app to makes the Quick Bar less invasive. (PCWorld)
- According to a new Nielsen report, Android became the most popular operating system in the U.S. between November 2010 and January 2011, with Google’s OS accounting for 29% of all active smartphones, and Apple’s iOS and RIM’s BlackBerry platform both claiming 27% of active smartphones. The report however does not reflect the recent release of the Verizon iPhone. (New York Times)
- Meet Mobilewalla, a recent startup out to help out new app makers with an online catalog and search engine that ranks each app for mobile platforms including iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone with a score with a score from 1 – 100 based on 114 different variables. The company should announce further plans later today. (AllThingsD)
- Apple 2.0 writer Phil Elmer-DeWitt takes another long hard look at Apple’s new in-app subscription rules, this time from 5,000 feet, while Google 24/7 writer Seth Weintraub discusses Google’s efforts to delete malicious apps from Android handsets. (Fortune)
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