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Zynga plans to announce Thursday that its FarmVille game has become the largest and fastest-growing social game in history. The game now has more than 11 million active daily players since its launch on June 19 on Facebook. They all play their roles as virtual farmers, creating and managing their own farms

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Nokia announces Nokia Money, a payment-by-phone service that will launch next year — The service will let anyone send and receive money with a text message or a voice call. All you need to know to send someone money is their phone number

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AT&T customers may finally get the iPhone service quality they expected when they spent $200 or more on a phone. U.S

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A total of 274 new patents were filed for companies developing green and alternative sources of energy in the second quarter ended June 30 — the highest amount in the space to date, according to the Clean Energy Patent Growth Index .

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Small companies that are growing fast often can’t expand their computing infrastructure to keep up. Amazon is announced a test version today of its Amazon Virtual Private Cloud service to let those companies tap into a much bigger computing infrastructure. Startups and big companies alike can tap into Amazon’s web services infrastructure, dubbed the “cloud”: which consists of racks and racks of servers in the data centers that keep web sites humming.

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Terra Firma , the private equity firm chaired by well-known British investor Guy Hands, has acquired EverPower Wind Holdings for an estimated $350 million — indicating significant European interest in U.S. wind developments.

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Over the next few days, I’ll be talking here a little more about the exciting program we have in store for DEMO , next month’s technology conference in San Diego. For starters, we’ve invited a number of legendary alumni entrepreneurs back to the DEMO stage. Each of 16 individuals will join me and Co-Executive Producer Chris Shipley on stage in an interactive town hall open format

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At the Hot Chips chip design conference at Stanford University, chip researchers spelled out some of the toughest computing problems of the future and the solutions to deal with them. Hearing these pioneers and visionaries talk was both inspiring and disturbing. They talked alternately about running into technological brick walls, and about ways to get around them

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While consumer-product Web 2.0 sites flail and fail, many boring back-end business IT companies are doing just fine despite tough times on Sand Hill Road. Reston, VA based Approva has closed another round of funding from its existing investors, which include several firms with Valley offices: New Enterprise Associates, Sierra Ventures and Gold Hill Capital

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Kutano , a commenting system that travels where you go on the web, is integrating Twitter so when visitors reach a page they can see what others have said about it on the microblogging network. Kutano is a bookmark plug-in that works by tracking shared links on Twitter and repackaging them into a sidebar that goes with you as you browse the Web

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