Daily deal site BuyWithMe needs to sell more than coupons to stay afloat — the company is reportedly on a desperate search for a buyer, and has just laid off 100 employees with no warning and no severance. Employees reportedly knew the company was in trouble, but did not expect massive layoffs at this time. [...]

App developers who are chomping at the bit to increase search engine hits will soon be able to join the race to buy keywords. Search engine Chomp is launching a service to let developers bid for ads based on searches. Modeled on Google AdWords, the service will return results based primarily on relevancy, according to [...]

While Facebook users were busy posting and tweeting about its new look and new features, mobile content developers were absorbing the latest news about Facebook Mobile – the service now has 350 million active monthly users, up 100 million in the last six months. According to Inside Mobile Apps, Facebook for iPhone now has 90.1 million [...]

If you grew up on the West Coast, you may or may not have heard the term “hurricane party” before – it’s a multi-day party held during a hurricane, where guests bring sleeping bags, radios, food and other hurricane supplies. Of course in the chaos of a hurricane, the trick can be finding the party, and [...]

Mark Phillip is an MIT computer science major, the son of a Jamaican immigrant, and a lifelong sports fan. When he accidentally slept through the the second half of what he calls “one of the most exciting games in the history of the NFL” (Jets vs. Dolphins 200) he decided to use technology to prevent [...]

Microsoft says it is focused on helping developers build the next generation of client applications that are “tethered to a back-end cloud,” and app developers here in Austin are paying close attention. Microsoft is calling its new Windows Server 8 “the cloud-optimized server operating system.” The company says Windows Server 8 builds on its experience [...]

Social networking is expanding the audience for some of Austin’s biggest events this fall. During UT’s first football game of the season, thousands of fans who did not have access to the new Longhorn Network were able to watch an unsanctioned live stream of the game thanks to a series of tweets and blog posts, [...]

Austin-based Whole Foods Markets (WFMI) today became the first national grocery to offer a daily deal through a coupon aggregator. Whole Foods is offering $20 worth of groceries for $10 to visitors to the LivingSocial website. In addition, $5 of the proceeds from the promotion will go to the Whole Kids Foundation, which supports schools [...]

In a nation already burdened by billions in debt, spending money we don’t have is getting even easier. Handset makers are scrambling to release phones that can be used as credit cards. Near field communication (NFC) is the technology that allows data exchange between two enabled devices that are close to one another. A mobile-payment-enabled phone can [...]

Appconomy’s Steve Guengerich is not from Austin, but he says he got here as quickly as he could. He came in the 1990’s, moving his company from Houston when it was ready to go public. Now his latest venture puts him at the center of the mobile apps economy – which he has christened the appconomy. Appconomy builds [...]