We’d like to say thanks to this week’s GigaOM sponsors: PEER 1: Fully Scalable Hosting Solutions Concentric: Hosted IT Services Mozy: Simple, Automatic, Secure Online Backup SoftLayer: SoftLayer delivers on-demand virtual data center services and solutions. Salesforce: Force.com Cloud Platform PayPal: ...

As AOL lays off a third of its work force as it prepares to go independent, it’s looking to drop its ICQ and MapQuest units, according to reports by Kara Swisher. But with the deluge of information hitting web users these days, location and presence are two of the most promising ways to parse the online ...

Though there’s no lack of venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, you can count one more. Maveron this week announced it is opening a San Francisco office, headed by partner Amy Errett, the former CEO of Olivia.com who joined Maveron as an entrepreneur in residence two years ago. Errett (a fly-fishing ...

Verizon Test WiMAX Test Sprint held a happy hour last night to show off the WiMAX launch in here Austin, Texas, so I wandered over for some BBQ and broadband. I want to love WiMAX, but I can’t get excited about the promise of upload speeds of some 400 kilobits per second, which are only a wee bit more ...

Employee shares of Facebook are selling for $21 on SecondMarket, valuing the social network’s common stock at $9.5 billion, Bloomberg is reporting today. That’s up 42 percent in the past four months, which SecondMarket takes to mean that an IPO is nigh, but could also just reflect Facebook’s recent ...

Nokia is inching closer to declaring its allegiance to Maemo, according to unidentified (but loose-lipped) executives, and will ditch Symbian in favor of the Linux-based OS on its flagship N-series handsets by 2012. But given the massive head start Apple’s iPhone, RIM’s BlackBerry and the Android OS ...

Salesforce.com today announced Salesforce Chatter, an application that provides a social network for enterprise businesses. Salesforce Chatter incorporates social networking and real-time connection features as well as integrates Facebook and Twitter status updates, making it unique from other enterprise ...

The Asia-Pacific region is getting ever-closer to faster mobile broadband, with network operators in Japan, Singapore, Australia and Indonesia readying their Long Term Evolution networks. Today NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s largest mobile operator, affirmed its plans to deploy LTE in 2010; it also said it would ...

Fring, the mobile messaging and social communication tool that works on many smartphone platforms, is now available on the Android platform. Users of Android phones can get the client software from the Android Market or from Fring’s WAP site. Fring for Android works over 3G, GPRS or Wi-Fi connections. ...

Hulu music video play all about Norah Jones (NewTeeVee) Doing “Notmuch” to fix email (OStatic) Holiday Buying Guide: Picking the right digital camera (TheAppleBlog) Optimize your PC with TuneUp Utilities 2010 (WebWorkerDaily) Adobe AIR app adds Google Tasks to your desktop (jkOnTheRun) Commercial buildings ...