By Gerry Shih

(Reuters) – Video website YouTube unveiled on Wednesday a way for users to automatically blur human faces in videos they upload, a feature that would help protect the identities of political dissidents, YouTube parent Google Inc said.

Once known more as a repository for fuzzy, home-made cat videos, YouTube has become a growing destination for slick, highly produced entertainment and serious news content. Earlier this week, a study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism said amateur “citizen journalism” footage from events such as the 2011 tsunami in Japan were some of the most-watched clips on YouTube.

SAN FRANCISCO, July 18 (Reuters) – Some of Zynga’s
most sophisticated games, including “FarmVille,”
generate greater revenues on smartphones than on Facebook’s
Web-based platform, the company’s chief executive, Mark
Pincus, said Wednesday.

Some of Zynga’s deeper-engagement games — titles like
“FarmVille” that falls into what the company calls its
“invest-and-express” category — successfully generate revenues
from smartphone users because of their mobile format as well as
gamers’ demographics, Pincus said.

SAN FRANCISCO, July 12 (Reuters) – New York tech incubator
Betaworks acquired the website Digg on Thursday in a deal that
included the remaining brand assets, a humble close to what was
once a celebrated online property that heralded the social media
era.

Launched in 2004 by then 27-year old Kevin Rose, Digg rose
to prominence as an aggregator of online content, becoming at
one point one of the more highly-trafficked stops on the
Internet. The site let users vote up – or “Digg” – links, an
early precursor to how Facebook and Twitter help spread
“viral” content today.

SAN FRANCISCO, July 11 (Reuters) – Is Twitter a technology
platform, a media company — or both?

With Twitter’s recent moves pointing toward “media company,”
there is a growing concern among technologists that a trend for
greater content control will compromise both innovation and
Twitter’s future in favor of short-term profits.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Zynga Inc CEO Mark Pincus said Tuesday he remains wary of investing as heavily in mobile games as he has in proven Web-based titles like FarmVille despite an industrywide push toward catering to mobile devices.

Game industry observers in recent months have stressed that developers must adapt as Internet users worldwide shift toward spending time on smartphones and tablets rather than desktop computers.

DETROIT/SAN FRANCISO (Reuters) – General Motors Co and Facebook Inc are discussing the return of the U.S. automaker as a paid advertiser almost two months after GM said it would stop running ads on the social networking website, sources close to the situation said on Tuesday.

Although the two companies remain far from reaching an agreement, Facebook executives have assiduously courted the world’s largest carmaker. One source said Facebook was not pushing for GM’s immediate return, but offered to provide data showing the effectiveness of the website’s paid ads.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Law enforcement agencies in the United States are behind the overwhelming majority of requests for Twitter users’ private information, the social media company revealed Monday in its first ever public report on the subject.

Of the 849 total government requests for user information during the period spanning January 1 to June 30 this year, 679 — or 80 percent — took place in the United States, typically for use in criminal investigations, Twitter said.

SAN FRANCISCO, June 28 (Reuters) – Google Inc’s
Chrome, the world’s top Internet browser, is now available on
the iPhone and iPad, as Apple Inc finally granted
access to its arch-foe’s more popular Web-surfing app.

At Google’s annual I/O developer conference in San Francisco
on Thursday, company executives announced the development as
well as a limited launch of a cloud-computing and hosting
service to take on Amazon.com’s thriving Web services
arm.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Zynga Inc unveiled interactive features and a gamers’ social network dubbed “Zynga with Friends” on Tuesday, as it aims to reduce its reliance on Facebook as a platform and seeks to connect hundreds of millions of its users across the Internet.

The company founded by Mark Pincus also plans to provide programming tools to help third-party developers devise online and mobile games based on its own software, to expand its slate of games beyond mainstays such as “Farmville” and “Mafia Wars” on Facebook Inc’s network.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Facebook Inc named Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg a director on Monday, adding the first woman to a board that includes seven men.

For years one of the most vocal critics of the gender imbalance in Silicon Valley’s executive ranks, Sandberg, 42, joined Facebook in 2008 and played a central role in guiding the social networking company to its $16 billion IPO in May.