Author: Sal McCloskey

Sal is a tech blogger in Silicon Valley who (sadly) falls into the stereotype associated with nerds. Yes, he's a Star Trek fan. His glasses are thick and his allergies are thicker. Despite all that, he's (somehow) married to a beautiful woman and has 4 kids.

Call it a comeback: Groupon posts profit, share prices surge

Yesterday by Sal McCloskey | add comment

Stocks shot up 18% after a report that Groupon had slayed expectations from The Street to post its first quarterly profit. Better decisions on marketing spends and an increase in customers and merchants were the trigger point that marked the first real turn more »

Hold on Facebook purchase of Instagram will benefit Twitter, Google

May 12 by Sal McCloskey | 2 comments

Don’t be fooled by reports that Google and Twitter have become “ensnared” in the Federal Trade Commission‘s investigation of Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram. Both the search giant and microblogging platform are exactly where they want to be. This is the best news for both Google and Twitter with some suggesting that they may have both had their more »

Second time is (hopefully) a charm with HP putting Windows 8 on new tablet line

May 11 by Sal McCloskey | add comment

HP has not had much luck in their early attempts at penetrating the tablet market after launching and subsequently canning their WebOS TouchPad in less than 2 months. They’re hoping that luck will change and they are officially making Windows 8 their operating system of choice after rumors more »

Demand for Facebook IPO is "weaker than forecast". Are you worried, yet?

May 10 by Sal McCloskey | add comment

The biggest IPO in tech history is appearing to be smaller than people thought according to a recent report from Bloomberg. With growth prospects for their advertising model raising warning flags, the company has been strict with their policy of not allowing revenue to get in the way of user experience. To the all-important more »

Dear Hollywood: If illegal downloads hurt your industry, Avengers should have flopped

May 8 by Sal McCloskey | add comment

The math is pretty straight forward. It was likely the most widely-downloaded camcorder recording of a movie ever. Following the thinking of the MPAA, this dramatically hurts the profits of ailing Hollywood studios because illegal downloads more »

IPO will keep Eduardo Saverin's party going in Singapore

May 5 by Sal McCloskey | 1 comment

The Social Network portrayed jilted Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin as a victim. His character portrayed by The Amazing Spiderman‘s Andrew Garfield was trying his best to implement profitable strategies at the startup while Jesse Eisenberg‘s Mark Zuckerberg and Justin Timberlake‘s Sean Parker partied their more »

BRAD: The ridiculously automated dorm room at Berkeley is much cooler than yours

May 4 by Sal McCloskey | add comment

The dorm rooms that are often the most visited by friends are the ones with a fridge, a Playstation, and a Bose stereo. The gadgets and features of the “lucky” kids in the high-dollar dorms are great but they have nothing on BRAD. Take a few hundred dollars more »

Email isn't dead and mobile devices are to blame

May 1 by Sal McCloskey | 3 comments

There was a time not too long ago when technology bloggers and pundits (myself included) believed that email was going away. We thought that the system would be replaced by Facebook messaging, IM, social networking, and other variations of more »

Social networking ties gaming as #1 mobile activity

Apr 27 by Sal McCloskey | add comment

For the first time in 40 months, gaming has a partner at the top of the charts for time spent on mobile devices with social networking reaching the 24 minute mark up from 15 minutes a year ago according to research by Flurry. Gaming dropped a minute to be more »

Visualizing pi (4 million decimal points worth of it, at least)

Apr 26 by Sal McCloskey | add comment

Pi is an irrational number and the project conducted by TWO-N might seem like an irrational project, but it yielded a mind-blowing visualization. “We are representing 4 million digits at a glance,” TWO-N designer Hermann Zschiegner said more »

Will disappointing Facebook numbers scare away investors?

Apr 24 by Sal McCloskey | add comment

The short answer is no. They will have an extremely successful IPO on launch day followed by volatility for a month. How they handle the volatility will determine how successful it will be long-term, but the first few months will be measured more »

Can Gawker reinvent blog commenting?

Apr 21 by Sal McCloskey | 1 comment

For years, the Gawker network, which includes Gizmodo, io9, and Kotaku, has fought a battle against commenters, particularly trolls. The huge blog network is driven in many ways by the comments on the site and founder Nick Denton doesn’t like it. He went so far as to call more »