Earlier this week, we told you about a project by real-estate site Zillow.com to use their data to figure out which are the best neighborhoods to hit on the trick-or-treat circuit.

Initially, Zillow’s Trick or Treat Index was only available for Seattle and Los Angeles. But after being inundated by blog interest and requests for additional data, Zillow added lists of the top candy-harvesting neighborhoods in San Francisco, Chicago and Boston.

Zillow used the same factors to calculate its index for these cities as it used in Seattle and Los Angeles: home values, population density, neighborhood walkability and crime.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Next week, hundreds of high-tech’s most geekiest participants will flock to San Francisco for the Intel (INTC) Developer Forum, better known as IDF. But one of their most prominent cheerleaders will not be there.

Patrick Gelsinger, a senior vice president who also served in the past as Intel’s chief technology officer, says he will then be in Hopkinton, Mass., starting his new job at data storage giant EMC (EMC). His surprise departure from Intel was announced Monday along with a major management reorganization at his former employer.

After nearly 30 years at Intel, Gelsinger says it will be strange to miss IDF, which includes mind-numbing talks about chip developments, late-night carousing and offbeat attempts at humor that he fomented (such as mock fashion shows of generic-looking computer modules). “I’ve been fathering IDF so long I can’t quite remember not being there,” he says.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Google’s (GOOG) experiments to help the publishing industry adapt the Web continue.

In April, the company introduced an interactive news timeline, newstimeline.googlelabs.com, that displays summaries of news articles chronologically and allows users to slice and dice their view by source.

Last week, it disclosed its plans to help publishers earn money, saying it was working on improving its payment service to help publishers charge for their content online.

Monday, it was “Fast Flip.” Unveiled at a conference in San Francisco, the service allows users to scroll through screenshots of news articles page by page.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Last summer, well after Twitter had become the buzz of the New York and San Francisco Web crowds but months before its current moment at the apogee of Internet hype, I visited the start-up at its hip South of Market offices and wrote a feature on the company in Fortune. Its title, “The true meaning of Twitter,” now feels like a quaint moment in time when the very definition of the company’s name, let alone how you use its product, needed explaining.

Read the rest of this post

While much of the tech sector has fallen on hard times during the recession, the videogame industry has thrived, as penny-pinching consumers look for lower-cost entertainment. Why go out when a family of four can buy a videogame and get 50 hours of entertainment out of it?

And so the industry gathered in San Francisco for the annual Game Developers Conference to rally its troops. While the PC industry is expecting its second consecutive year of negative unit sales growth, much of the talk at the conference was of 5 to 10 percent annual industry growth, and of the prospects for another record-setter in 2010.

Nintendo was particularly buoyant at the show, where it introduced an Internet-enabled version of its portable DS player that will sell for $169, and announced its 50 millionth Wii shipment.

How’s this for confidence? Nintendo Of America President Reggie Fils-Aimé in an interview ruled out any potential for Nintendo to lower the price of its motion-controlled Wii game console this year. “Why would we?” he said.

Read the rest of this post

Virtual worlds have had some real problems. Google (GOOG), for instance, recently shut down an animated environment called Lively only five months after it was announced. And Linden Lab, whose Second Life online community was once front-page news, has neither reached many mainstream consumers nor created an important meeting place for corporate users.

But the San Francisco company is far from backing away. The latest bet: that users will pay real money for things that only exist “in world,” as Second Life fans call it.

Linden Tuesday night announced that it has purchased two small companies–Xstreet SL and OnRez–that act a bit like Amazon.com (AMZN) in providing one-stop shopping for virtual goods from other merchants. One component of their strategy has been to make it easier to buy goods through the Web, not requiring users to enter Second Life to acquire the items they may use there. Financial terms are not being disclosed.

Read the rest of this post

The footage is shaky and low quality, with chaotic shouts and protests from onlookers at a subway station in San Francisco’s East Bay. But it clearly shows three policeman roughly handling a group of young men–including one who is pinned to the ground by two officers and shot in the back.

This shooting of 22-year-old Oscar Grant–who died later in hospital–has outraged many in California and triggered riots in Oakland in a case that many feel echoes the brutal beating of Rodney King by LA police in 1991.

Transport police were called to the Fruitvale train station in the early hours of New Year’s Day after reports of a fight. Grant was one of a small group of men taken off the train and restrained, at which point several passengers began to film, using mobile phones and cameras.

Read the rest of this post

Steve Jobs didn’t show up to the first Macworld Expo, which was held in San Francisco in January 1985, one year after the introduction of the Macintosh. He was in the city, but he spent most of his time holed up at the Union Square Hyatt Hotel with his strikingly beautiful blond girlfriend, whom I only knew as Tina. I know this because Jobs and Tina came to the Macworld magazine dinner party I put together at the Sutter 500 restaurant to celebrate the success of the first expo, and of the first year of the Mac itself.

There were about 20 of us at the dinner, including the late, great Chronicle columnist Herb Caen; Will Hearst, then editor and publisher of the competing San Francisco Examiner; John Sculley, CEO of Apple (AAPL); John Warnock, founder of the software company Adobe (ADBE); and Ted Leonsis, the AOL executive, who these days owns the Washington Wizards basketball team and the Washington Capitals hockey team.

Read the rest of this post

Tokyo is currently the largest city of origin of Twitter messages in the world, more than twice that of second place San Francisco and New York in the U.S. as of this summer.

(Incidentally, while the Japanese Kanji language Twitter service, which only launched in April of this year, contains advertising, the rest of the planet’s Twitter service currently does not.)

International usage of Twitter is pretty extensive, with multiple languages and character sets available. The recent attacks in Mumbai, India, had a pretty substantial online communications element to them, with the tag #mumbai widely used to track events in multiple languages, and with the attackers using BlackBerrys and mobile phones to collaborate and to monitor the media.

Read the rest of this post

Why is Kevin Rose on a publicity binge? In the past two months, the founder of headline-voting site Digg has garnered two magazine covers. There he is, with a smoldering leer on local San Francisco magazine 7×7. The look reminds everyone why Diggnation cohost Alex Albrecht once said that Rose, a prolific dater, has “plowed through everyone in town.” For Inc., Rose participated in a wacky crowd shoot that echoed the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night.” It’s obvious why Rose is a hot commodity: Write about him, and traffic to your magazine’s Web site will soar. (Will he sell print copies? I doubt Digg users visit newsstands.)

Read the rest of this post

Vroom, vroom, vroom: I was driving south on 280 from San Francisco late this afternoon and found myself following an ultra-cool dark-colored Tesla (I think it was dark green. Maybe black.) with a piece of blue duct tape on the rear bumper. And, oh my, that car was flying. I was following him in my Prius, the official car of Santa Clara County, trying to see who was driving it (there aren’t a whole lot of them on the road so far) and before long I was doing 90, and he was pulling away.

Read the rest of this post

More risk remains for Garmin (GRMN) and TomTom (TOM2.AS), the two leading providers of personal navigation devices. That’s the conclusion of Pablo Perez-Fernandez, an analyst at Global Crown Capital, in San Francisco. Perez-Fernandez picked up coverage of both companies this morning with an Underweight rating, asserting that both stocks could drop 20 percent or more over the next six months. He notes that the GPS device business is “under stress from competition, suffering a major slowdown and under the threat of the mighty smartphone.”

He contends there is a “strong likelihood” that both companies could miss their full year 2008 guidance given light PND unit shipments. “We see downside around the next two earnings calls,” he writes, with the fourth quarter posing particular risk.

Read the rest of this post

Apple’s much-anticipated “Let’s Rock” media event yesterday featured a group of largely expected announcements on updates to iTunes, the iPod Nano and the iPod Touch that left investors distinctly uninspired.

The stock dropped sharply yesterday during and after the event, held in San Francisco, rebounding modestly today.

The Street’s reaction to the announcements was largely mixed. Expectations heading into Apple (AAPL) product launches are often far beyond the rational; almost all of yesterday’s product news had already leaked into the rumor mill.

Read the rest of this post