Earlier this week, BoomTown headed to downtown San Francisco to the hip HQ of Yelp to talk to its CEO, Jeremy Stoppelman, about a range of issues related to the local business review site. That included his thoughts about the explosion of social location services such as Foursquare, Yelp’s burgeoning mobile efforts, controversial lawsuits alleging questionable advertising sales practices, future features to come and more. What he…

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Until Toyota stepped in last week, Daimler was the only major auto manufacturer to take a stake in electric car startup Tesla Motors — a company that has now become synonymous with next-generation transportation. Now it wants to work the same magic with BYD , the Chinese battery and electric vehicle maker, to establish its own transcontinental dominance in the market. Daimler announced today that it is partnering with BYD to build…

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Facebook’s recent announcement of its Open Graph (an effort to map the Web’s content in social terms) and the manner in which it impacts privacy have been the subject of pointed debate for the past few weeks. While these developments will certainly raise questions among Facebook users, they’re also cause for concern for the other major stakeholders in this graph of the Web: …

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Late last week, BoomTown sat down with Josh SIlverman, CEO of Skype, to get an update on the popular Internet telephony company. When we last checked in with Skype, it had turned into the “Peyton Place”–look it up, kids!–of the online telecommunications arena, with lawsuits flying, venture capitalists getting slimed and a general tone of very purple drama. But in November, settlement of the …

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Last week, outside the Facebook f8 developers conference, BoomTown checked out the new 2011 Fiesta model, which will be the first vehicle in which smartphone apps can be voice-controlled via its in-car synching software. While getting a test, I interviewed the Ford dude–Julius Marchwiki–who has been in all the YouTube videos of late touting its digital prowess. Ford has been trying to fast-forward …

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Here’s the latest (iPad) action: iPad’s influence will extend beyond units sold – Sarah Rotman Epps predicts that Apple will only sell 3 million of its iPads in 2010, but it will still change the way the world thinks about portable computing. Milo.com tells you where to find your iPad — The web site, which allows people to research local deals , will have real-time stock updates for Best Buy …

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Nikon’s D300S isn’t exactly tailor made for D300 owners, but for those waiting patiently to jump into the semi-pro DSLR game, it offers up a pretty delightful array of specs. Boasting SD and CF slots, a 720p movie mode and 12.3 megapixels of sharp shooting goodness, this here cam received overwhelmingly positive reviews late last year. Strategically positioned between the full-frame D700 and the lesser-specced D90, we’re …

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Apparently General Motors still has some surprises in store when it comes to its highly-anticipated Chevy Volt . The company says it will be announcing something big on Jan. 7 during the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. There are several things this could mean. First, the company could put a definite date on the car’s release next year. So far, we know that the hybrid-…

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You don’t need booming sales figures to tell you that netbooks have taken over the world — the mobile computing world, at least. Their screenless and battery-free brethren, however, have yet to find quite the same success. Nettops are great tiny little machines but in general they’ve been under-powered and, while people love eking out another hour or two of battery life on the road, few sadly care whether…

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Sometimes the newest gadgets are too far out on the bleeding edge. They don’t work out of the box, and they have a few too many bugs in their initial versions. They’re also usually too expensive. But the following list of 10 cool gift ideas focuses on products or services that have been around for a while. The kinks have been ironed out and the prices are lower. They …

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