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Rip Empson is a writer and rabble-rouser at TechCrunch. He covers startups, music, social, mobile, health, and education. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com ? Learn More Tonight, Twitter quietly rolled out another feature — one that may seem simple and straightforward at first glance but could actually have big implications. The company said via its very own Twitter account that users can now click on stock (or “ticker”) symbols in any tweet to view search results for those stocks and companies. To make this possible, Twitter is essentially introducing a new hashtag — or what is being called a “cashtag.” Instead of the ubiquitous “#”, the addition of the symbol “$” added in front of any ticker will instantly provide context for that stock, aggregating all tweets that use the ticker under one label. Twitter gives the example of “$GE” — General Electric’s ticker symbol — although this will obviously work for any company, like Apple ($AAPL) or Google ($GOOG), allowing users ...

That was fast. Just a few days ago, Google officially opened registration for the 1 gigabit fiber network it is launching on both the Kansas and Missouri sides of Kansas City. Within just two days, more than 20% of the eligible neighborhoods on the Missouri side have already reached Google’s thresholds for bringing its super-fast fiber network to their “fiberhoods” and quite a few others are just a few signups away from reaching their goals. Things aren’t moving quite as fast in Kansas City, Kansas, though, where the median household income is significantly lower than on the other side of the city. There, only three neighborhoods have met Google’s goals so far and many are still hundreds of signups away from meeting Google’s thresholds for bringing fiber to their houses. When Google officially launched Google Fiber last week, it set up an unusual system for deciding where to roll it out first: the company separated the metropolitan area into “fiberhoods” with 250-1,500 households and...

Just 48 hours after its official launch, Apple’s Mountain Lion, the latest version of Apple’s desktop operating system, has already captured 3.2% of Mac web traffic according to a report by ad network Chitika. Given its low cost ($19.99) and the fact that it’s available as a download and very easy to install, chances are these numbers will continue to increase quickly over the next few days. Mountain Lion has already passed OS X 10.4 (Tiger) in Chitika’s stats and is on its way to pass Leopard in the near future. Last year, Chitika reported that the adoption of OS.X 10.7 Lion was lagging behind expectations and that users weren’t updating from Snow Leopard at their usual rates. Judging by the data Chitika released today, that continues to remain true, as Snow Leopard remains the most popular Mac OS on the company’s network (45.5%), followed by Lion (35%). As our own MG Siegler pointed out in his review earlier this week, though, “If you didn’t like Lion, you’ll probably love Mountain...

Google’s Nexus 7 tablet is off to such a good start that Google can’t keep up with demand for the 16GB model. The company hasn’t released any sales data yet, so it’s hard to gauge whether Google is selling out because it just grossly underestimated demand and didn’t produce anywhere close to enough devices, or whether the Nexus 7 is really selling at unprecedented levels (for an Android tablet, that is). To get a better grip on how well the Nexus is doing after just over a week on the market, the folks at ad networks Chitika provided us with some data about what they are seeing on their network. According to Chitika’s engineers, the Nexus 7 is posting “impressive usage figures” across the company’s network. It currently accounts for 0.3 impressions for every 100 iPad impressions. That doesn’t sound like much, but the Nexus is actually on track to quickly catching up with other popular Android tablets like the Kindle Fire and Samsung Galaxy Tab. As usual, it’s important to note that t...