Open-source development organization Mozilla has renewed an agreement to keep Google as the default search engine on its Firefox web browser. The agreement replaces a similar default search deal between the two companies, which ended in late November. As part of the new three-year deal, Google will pay Mozilla for its default search engine placement in Firefox. Mozilla plans to announce. 

MasterCard on Tuesday announced that it was offering eligible small businesses a 10% discount on Microsoft‘s Office 365 cloud productivity service. The program, open to businesses that have a MasterCard Easy Savings Program account, is the credit card firm’s latest overture toward the small business category. In October, the brand teamed with Dell to choose “America’s Favorite. 

eRecyclingCorps, a company that rewards customers for recycling cell phones and e-waste, announced Tuesday that it received $35 million from Kleiner Perkins’ Green Growth Fund. The round was led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In order to keep as many cell phones out of landfills as it can, eRecyclingCorps not only makes recycling easy, it makes it worthwhile by offering rewards.. 

Startup founders and employees of GroupMe, Turntable.fm, Birchbox, RockMelt, Path and a slew of other companies have just put their spin on the Internet’s biggest hit of 2011 — Rebecca Black‘s “Friday.” The “holiday” parody from First Round Capital features 22 startups and a handful of venture capitalists belting out original lyrics set to Black’s inescapable auto-tuned. 

NBC and the National Football League have agreed to live stream the Super Bowl for the first time online and on phones in February, the two organizations announced today. As the Super Bowl is the most-watched television program around the world each year and commanded 111 million viewers for the last game, it’s a huge deal to see the distribution of it to move from analog to digital. With. 

You know those cabling contests that try to get systems administrators to show off their racks? If this article from the MIT Technology Review is right, those may become a distant memory as researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara, Intel and IBM have shown how they can send data between servers without those pesky cables using 60 GHz wireless and bouncing those radio. 

It goes without saying that Microsoft has come a long way from just purveying computer operating systems. 2011 proved to be a year of integration for Microsoft, and included partnerships with Nokia, Skype, Baidu, and perhaps most notably, Facebook. Xbox had a great year, nabbing a Guinness World Record title, and finishing 2011 with a bang — complete with a new interface, more features. 

Google.com is still one of the cleanest, calmest sites on the Web. At least, it is before you start typing. At this point, you don’t even have to hit enter before the page starts filling up with noise. Google has been hard at work on its core product this year. The changes have affected search quality in uneven ways. This year, Google’s Panda updates seemed careful and prudent,. 

The Recording Industry Association of America claims Google hasn’t been keeping its promises when it comes to fighting online piracy. “Google, as the overwhelming market leader in search and online advertising, has a special responsibility to lead and create a safe and secure Internet experience that works for consumers and the creative community,” the RIAA said in its report. 

A few months ago, it looked like the tech industry’s initial public offering window had slammed shut. But thanks to a year-end rally started by Groupon and rounded out by Zynga’s $1 billion stock market debut, it looks like 2012 could be a big year for the tech IPO market, according to a new report by PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC). As of the end of last week, the fourth quarter of 2011. 

We’ve been hearing that PayPal is going to be rolling out an in-store payments experience at a national retailer in the U.S. soon. It looks like the payments giant is testing another in-store payments experience in Sweden, using NFC technology, and partnering with two Swedish developers Accumulate and Point. You can find more information about the partnership here (in Swedish). Waroncash. 

Ending a month of speculation, Google has renewed its search exclusivity deal with Mozilla, who has long featured Google as the default browser on its Firefox Web browser. When the deal expired in November, it gave rise to speculation that Google might not renew it, which would deprive Firefox of about 84% of its annual revenue. That possibility seemed bolstered by the fact that Google’s. 

Facebook plans to migrate its Sponsored Stories ad platform into users’ news feeds early next year, the company says. Introduced last January, Sponsored Stories — a new ad format integrating your Facebook friends’ activities into small ads — began appearing in the column on the right side of the News Feed. Last month, the ads began appearing in the Ticker as well. Though. 

Apple has been duking it out with Android manufacturers for the past couple years, and very few are safe. Samsung has already suffered some big losses with the banning of its Galaxy Tab in Germany and Australia. HTC, however, has remained mostly safe from Apple’s wrath. In July the Taiwanese manufacturer had a close call, as Administrative Law Judge Carl Charneski ruled that HTC was infringing. 

On Monday, Mashable brought you the news that Facebook is all moved in to its new headquarter complex in Menlo Park. Now, we’re taking you on a virtual tour of the social networking giant’s new home. Facebook’s 57-acre campus currently houses some 2,000 employees, but has the potential to comfortably accommodate nearly 9,000 workers as the company looks to grow rapidly in. 

Startup founders are the new reality TV stars. No, really! Today, the producer of the TechStars TV show on Bloomberg TV, Cameron Casey, is announcing his plans to film a second startup-focused reality show. This time, the show will follow a group of entrepreneurs out in L.A., courtesy of a partnership with the Start Engine accelerator. But here’s the big news: this time, the show is planned. 

Starting in January 2012, Facebook will gradually begin showing Sponsored Stories social ads in the main news feed of the web version of the site, an representative of the company tells us. Facebook has never shown ads in the news feed before, so this has big ramifications for advertisers and the user experience. The ads will be marked “Sponsored” and a rate limit will ensure users see. 

The technology industry loves to come up with pet names and terms for trends. To name a few that have come out in the last year or so: gamification, social dynamics, check-in, onboard, pivot, open graphs, closed graphs, social graphs. Lots of graphs. Most of these words and terms are fine, if overused, additions to lexicon and fit well within the nerd nomenclature. Yet, there is one that. 

It’s not every American who can wow Paris. But earlier this month at Le Web, the author and communications expert, Carmine Gallo, impressed a Gallic audience with a brilliant speech about the innovation secrets of Steve Jobs. But whatever Loic can do, TechCrunchTV can do better, so we invited Carmine into our San Francisco studio to give us his own intimate insight into Steve Jobs’ innovation. 

Comics by Comixology has become the de facto tablet reading platform for comic books. That only happened because Comixology CEO David Steinberger spent time learning the business of comics before figuring out how to digitize it. “We took the time to understand where the market was and that you couldn’t just plow digital into it,” said Steinberger. Watch the interview with.