Microsoft is designing a new smartwatch that could allow it to compete with upcoming devices from the likes of Apple, Google, and Samsung, The Wall Street Journal reports. The company has already asked suppliers in Asia to ship components for the device, which will reportedly boast a “touch-enabled” display.
Messaging standards are great! Maybe that’s why we have so many of them.
Don’t look now, but people communicate via the Internet. Whichever company can get the majority of users on their system wins. To quote Newman, the Seinfeld mailman: “When you control the mail, you control… information!”
The reason is that communication is where most of the online eyeballs are. And the network effect factor is overwhelming. (Network effect is: more users make a network more valuable to users, and users want to use networks that are more valuable.)
The carriers want everybody texting. It costs next to nothing to deliver text messages, but carriers can charge a lot and, for some reason, people pay. It’s free money, as far as the carriers are concerned.
Thousands of app makers want you to give up SMS and embrace some app-based communications system. Some work like texting. Others like an intercom system. Many of them are really great, but they’ve got an uphill battle getting everyone to embrace them.
Apple wants to get all OS X and iOS users messaging via iMessage.
Facebook wants to leverage Google’s Android to get everyone embracing Facebook Home.
And Google’s hatching a killer service based on Google+ called Babel. Allegedly.
LinkedIn has officially announced that it will acquire the popular mobile newsreader Pulse in a deal worth $90 million, following rumors that began circulating back in March. The company is hoping that the move will help it become the “definitive professional publishing platform,” expanding its business beyond the professional network it already provides.
Yeah, that’s a bit of sarcasm up there in the hed; there’s obviously no lack of choice regarding Bluetooth speakers. This year’s CES exploded with Bluetooth, and it doesn’t seem a day goes by that a manufacturer doesn’t release another model.
iHome is more about, well, more; so instead of releasing one, they’ve released four.
I’m sitting here bobbin’ my head to these fresh playlists, straight outta Liberty City, Chinatown, Vice City, and other locations in Rockstar’s flagship series of games, Grand Theft Auto.
I’m not playing the games through, either. All the songs are set up in Spotify and iTunes by Rockstar itself, from the radio stations in the GTA series, including Grand Theft Auto IV, Episodes from Liberty City, San Andreas, Vice City and more.
Looks like this whiteout winter may finally be waning. Time to soak up a little sunshine; so grab your bike, backpack, rod, oars, harness and a Pocket Ranger official State Park Guide app for Android or iOS and get yourself outside. Why a Pocket Ranger app? Because it’s stuffed full of info about anything and everything related to state parks in your area — for free.
U.S. District Judge Robert Scola believes Apple and Google-owned Motorola are more interested in using litigation as a business strategy than they are in resolving patent disputes. Both companies accused each other of infringing patents related to wireless technologies back in 2010, and today the case is still on going.
“The parties have no interest in efficiently and expeditiously resolving this dispute; they instead are using this and similar litigation worldwide as a business strategy that appears to have no end,” said Judge Scola in an order dated yesterday. “That is not a proper use of this court.”
You can get some pretty cool gadgets that can be remote controlled by your smartphones and tablets, such as helicopters, cars, and even tanks. But who wants one of those when you can control the real think?
At the Hack in the Box security conference in Amsterdam this week, Hugo Teso, a pilot turned IT technician, demonstrated the ability to remotely hijack an airplane using a smartphone and a radio transmitter.
Microsoft is planning a new lineup of Surface tablets that includes a 7-inch model designed to compete with Apple’s iPad mini and Google’s Nexus 7, The Wall Street Journal reports. The device will enter mass production later this year, according to people familiar with Microsoft’s plans, but it’s unclear when the company will bring the new slate to market.
Now that former Apple retail chief Ron Johnson has been fired from his CEO gig at JC Penney, there’s a lot of talk about whether or not the man who created the juggernaut of Apple’s retail experience will return to Cupertino, to fill the very role he vacated back in 2010.
In an interview with Bloomberg, former Apple CEO John Sculley was asked about what Ron Johnson should do now. Sculley notes that one of the best things about our business culture is that we allow people to fail, and that hiring Johnson would be a coup by any company.
First headhunter on the list? It should be Samsung, says Sculley.
Piper Jaffray has once again asked the teenage blight upon our fair nation to stop popping pimples and sexting for a second to tell them what gadgets they want to buy next year. And, duh, it’s the iPhone.
Thanks to those leaked screenshots that appeared on Tuesday, we’re pretty confident that Google Babel is no longer just a rumor, but a real product that’s patiently waiting to get its grand unveiling. And according to sources that are familiar with Google’s plans, it’s worth getting excited about.
They claim Babel aims to be “everything we have ever asked for in a unified messenger service,” with cross-platform syncing and a “first class iOS experience.”
Google has been stepping up its game with app curation in Google Play. TechCrunch has discovered that a record 60,000 apps were pulled from the store in February alone. Coincidentally, Google just launched a major redesign of Play today that focuses on highlighting great Android apps.
While not all of the bad apps are being pulled by Google directly, many of the deletions are related to spamming and other Google Play terms of service violations. You don’t normally think of Google when you hear about an app being pulled, but Apple isn’t the only one who regulates its app store—the two companies just do things differently.
Google Glass looks like the coolest piece of technology since the invention of the iPhone. Even though a ton of businesses will probably ban it, we can’t wait to try Sergey Brin’s new eyewear out.
Google Glass seems like it came right out of Star Trek, but the way this technical masterpiece works is actually pretty simple. Martin Missfeldt created the following infographic that lays out all the details on how Google Glass works so you can impress your friends with your scientific knowledge. Take a look:
EE has announced plans to double its 4G LTE network speeds in ten U.K. cities by the summer. The move will boost headline speeds to 80Mbps, and increase the average speed to 20Mbps for both new and existing subscribers. The carrier says this is part of its ambition to “stay one step ahead” as rival carriers prepare to launch their own 4G networks in the coming months.
Babel, a new chat service rumored to be on its way from Google, has been shown off in a bunch of leaked screenshots ahead of its official unveiling. The images reportedly come from a Google employee, and they show Babel running on a desktop. Not only do they confirm the service’s name, but also a number of its features.
WhatsApp has denied that it is holding sales talks with Google following reports that the company is on the verge of a $1 billion buyout. One source claimed last week that the hugely popular cross-platform messaging service has been in talks with Google for the last 4-5 weeks, but WhatsApp’s business development lead, Neeraj Arora, denies any discussions.
The iPhone 5 is set to launch on T-Mobile this Friday along side T-Mobile’s new “uncarrier” no contract strategy. Not wanting to get left behind, Virgin Mobile is planning to win over T-Mobile’s pre-paid customers by offering them $100 to switch sides.
In a new ad campaign called “Retain Your Brain” Virgin is offering $100 to T-Mobile customers to move their number over to one of its unlimited plans that start at $35 a month and could result in $334 of savings over two years.
There are a couple of cross-platform messaging apps that will help you bridge the divide between your friends on iOS and Android, but over the last year, WhatsApp has become the most popular option, and it’s caught the attention of Google.
A new report claims that Google is in talks to buy WhatsApp for $1 billion, but the talks have been going on for four or five weeks and haven’t been finalized yet.
The App Store and Google Play continued to drive mobile app downloads during the first quarter of 2013, while BlackBerry World and the Windows Phone Store remain “distant challengers.”
That’s according to the latest figures from Canalys, which say a whopping 13.4 billion apps were downloaded across these four stores over the last three months, raking in $2.2 billion in app sales, in-app purchases, and subscriptions.
Google’s got an Android problem, and a big one. And it’s a problem Google shares with us fans of Google content-delivering services, such as Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, Google+ and others.
That problems is that companies like Amazon and Facebook increasingly hijack Android to divert user attention away from Google services and toward their own or their partners’.
This post isn’t about the problem, which I’ve written about extensively here, here and here. It’s about the solution.
Still, let’s understand both the problem and the solution.
Real Racing 3 is set to get its first update since hitting the App Store back in February, and it’s going to be a big one. In addition to adding two new cars, users will see more than 100 new events, a new game mode, and iCloud save syncing. EA has published a teaser trailer ahead of the update’s release, which shows off the new cars.
Google has confirmed that it will drop WebKit for its own rendering engine called Blink in “around 10 weeks.” The company has already begun testing Blink in Chrome Canary builds — the beta version of its popular browser — but it will rollout the change to stable Chrome builds with version 28 for both desktops and Android devices.
Samsung has today announced its estimated earnings for Q1 2013, and it looks like the Korean electronics giant is set for another record quarter, exceeding Wall Street expectations. The company has forecast a 53% rise in profit to 8.7 trillion won ($7.7 billion) for the three-month period between January and March, driven by smartphone sales.
Today Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled “Home,” his company’s new experience on Android devices. Rumors leading up to today’s event said that Facebook has been working on its own Android device in conjunction with HTC, and that has turned out to be true.
Zuckerberg started by explaining how modern smartphones are built around different apps that communicate with people, and that Facebook wants to switch that paradigm and focus on people first. Home allows you to quickly interact with your Facebook account anywhere from your device, including the lockscreen.
