Webtonic Solutions :: Online consulting and web development

Argus Labs, the Belgian company behind soon-to-launch mobile virtual assistant Jini, has closed a €500,000 ($640,000) seed funding round from a number of angel investors, including Samsung President and Chief Strategy Officer Young Sohn.

There’s a change at the top at Facebook….in Japan, where the company has hired former McDonalds and Boston Consulting Group marketing exec Atsushi Iwashita as its new Managing Director.

Sina, the firm behind China’s hugely popular Sina Weibo microblogging platform, announced improved financial results for Q1 2013 as increased revenue saw its net loss reduced to $13.2 million. That’s down from a loss of $13.7 million one year prior.

Today Google sat with a number of its Glass employees to answer a few formal questions, and a number from the audience that packed Room 7 of the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The session was a brief 40 minutes, as have been other moots at the I/O event, excepting that mammoth 215 minute keynote that kicked the event off.

Recently at The Next Web Europe Conference Europe 2013 in Amsterdam, Global Technology Performance Director at Aegis Media CEO Craig Le Grice shared his experience in the advertising, marketing, media and digital space. Le Grice has been working in these areas for more than a decade and has a very unique perspective on how to bring all these industries closer together.

Steve Lee, Product Director for Google Glass, Isabelle Olsson, the lead industrial designer on Glass, Senior Developer Advocate Timothy Jordan and Glass engineer Charles Mendis held a chat with developers and press on Thursday at the Google I/O conference.

Update: At a Google I/O fireside chat, a question about privacy was raised to the Google Glass team. They responded by saying that Glass does have facial recognition and there are indicators on the device for people to know when they are being recorded. Nevertheless, Steve Lee, Glass’s product director, says that the company has thought about the social implications and etiquette since day one.

Today, during a session at the Google I/O conference, Google [x] Software Engineers Hyunyoung Song and P.Y. Laligand explained to developers how to take Google Glass beyond the standard Mirror API functions.

Immigration reform is a hot-topic issue in the United States. There are many who are now vocal in their stance about what Congress should legislate, but while their opinions may differ about how it should come about, all sides share one thing in common: they want reform to happen now. Today, business collaboration service Convo is throwing their hat into the ring and is sending a message to the country’s leaders demanding immediate action.

A U.S. judge on Wednesday denied class-action status to copyright owners suing Google Inc over the use of material posted on YouTube without their permission.

Akamai released its Q4 2012 State of the Internet Report in April 2013, showing that Android Webkit and Mobile Safari are the most popular mobile browsers.

It’s been a long time coming, but SEGA has finally released Sonic the Hedgehog on Android via the Google Play store.

A little over two weeks ago, word got out about Opera filing a rather nasty lawsuit against a former longtime employee and contractor, designer and musician Trond Werner Hansen.

Floorplanner, which offers an online 3D floor-planning platform to some 7 million users, has announced its acquisition of Mydeco3D (Mydeco).

Support for SMS was one of the notable omissions from Google Hangouts, the cross-platform messaging service that launched at the Google I/O event yesterday, but it appears the absence may only temporary according to details within the Google Play store.