In a blog post this week, Cisco revealed that the company will no longer be producing the Cius. The enterprise-focused tablet was released last year but never caught on with business consumers, who are increasingly opting for Apple's iPad, and other competitors to a lesser extent, as a mobile computing solution.
A Microsoft-sponsored IDC report released yesterday claims that annual support costs for Windows XP systems are five times higher than a Windows 7 system, as part of the software maker's latest effort to push users to move to its most recent Windows version. Last month, Microsoft (with uncharacteristic frankness) issued a statement that told organizations that if they have not started "the migration to a modern PC, you are late." Windows XP will finally be completely orphaned by Microsoft with no further support or patches in April 2014, nearly 13 years after it launched.
Representative Frank Pallone Jr (D-NJ), and John Barrow (D-GA) are pushing the Department of Justice to reopen the completed investigation of Google's Street View and Wi-Fi data harvesting while mapping America's streets. Pallone stated "In light of the FCC report on Google Wi-Spy -- which revealed Google intentionally collected personal information from Americans—I urge the Department of Justice to re-evaluate the Google Wi-Spy incident." The FCC and DoJ report on the incident found no laws were broken by Google during the mapping, despite Pallone's interpretation of the investigation that the data gathering was a “deliberate, software-design decision."
Toshiba won't bring any new netbooks to the US market, a company executive told Liliputing. This means that the NB510 netbook powered by Intel's Atom N2600 processor introduced at CES won't be sold in the US. Instead, Toshiba America will sell ultrabook computers, which are lighter and thinner, but also more expensive.
Verizon's $3.6 billion buy of AWS spectrum may be approved by the FCC after all, analysts believe, though it will require a number of conditions. For one, it may have to give up some of its spectrum, and has already offered to give some up in the past. What may stand in the way is the conditions of the sale, with all involved trying to get the most of it, CNET reported.
A report from China’s Sina Tech has tipped that Apple will integrate Baidu as a search engine in iOS for the Chinese iPhone. Baidu is the leading search engine in China with a massive 83.6 percent share of the market. The pairing is seen as mutually beneficial with Baidu gaining exposure on the smartphone platform with the most active on China’s mobile web, while its inclusion will be an additional selling point for the iPhone in China.
The US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) may purchase up to $3 million in Apple hardware over the next three years. Up to a thousand Macintosh and a thousand iOS mobile devices purchases are planned. The Apple equipment has been declared to be "critical to meet a variety of operational, programmatic, and mission-specific requirements" by the TSA.
Following last year's Microsoft partnership with Nokia, Bing Maps is the latest product to see a benefit. Starting today, users in 24 countries will be able to view active traffic data in Bing Maps as a result of Nokia services integration. United States traffic coverage will include side street traffic as well as freeway information. Behind the scenes, Nokia's geocoding services are now being used to offer improved turn-by-turn directions.
As part of Nvidia's annual investor meeting, the company's GM of Tegra operations, Mike Rayfield, boasted that the quad-core Tegra 3 platform is proving to be quite popular, powering 30 different smartphones that are expected to arrive on the market before the end of the year. Nearly half of the models are said to carry a transfer price below $300, in contrast to current Tegra 3-equipped phones that tend toward the high end of the price spectrum.
Apple earlier today filed an 8-K form with the Securities and Exchange Commission, indicating that the board of directors has decided to give restricted stock holders the same $2.65-per-share dividend they expect to give public shareholders. CEO Tim Cook has requested he not be awarded the dividend, however, costing him an estimated $75 million dollars over the next decade.
Fox, NBCUniversal, and CBS have all filed suit independently against Dish Network over the new AutoHop service, which with the right set-top box allows viewers to automatically skip commercials, assuming the recorded content isn't watched on the day of broadcast. The broadcast networks call the DVR technology a violation of their copyrights, a danger to quality programming, and an assault on their financial ecosystem. In an effort to counter the separate legal attacks, Dish has filed a countersuit against the three, plus ABC, in an attempt to establish the legality of advertisement skipping.
Google has shed more light on URL takedown requests that it receives from various companies reacting to alleged copyright violations. The search giant has broadened its transparency reports to visualize trends, highlighting the surge in takedown notices. More than 1.2 million takedown requests were processed just last month, issued from thousands of copyright owners and reporting organizations.
Online media company RealNetworks has settled a lawsuit brought by the Washington State Attorney General regarding the company's practice of charging some users for services they did not want. MSNBC reports that, over the course of seven years, more than 500 people complained to the Better Business Bureau about RealNetworks' practices. As a result of the settlement, RealNetworks will establish a $2 million compensation fund for subscribers who were overcharged between January 1, 2007 and December 31, 2009.
The Munich Regional Court has found Motorola to be in violation of Microsoft's text-messaging patent involving "communicating multi-part messages between cellular devices using a standardized interface." The judgement follows an International Trade Commission-ordered import ban against Android-based Motorola devices that infringe on a different Microsoft patent for event scheduling.
Research firm IDC has published its latest smartphone market-share report, finding Android and iOS to be responsible for eight out of 10 smartphones shipped in the first quarter of 2012. Android captured 59 percent of all sales, while iOS took 23 percent of the 152 million smartphones shipped in the first quarter. Linux phones maintained the same small share held for four quarters. Symbian and Blackberry shipments continued to drop precipitously.
Pascal Cagni, Apple vice president for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, is stepping down from the position, reports French newspaper Le Figaro. Cagni, who has been with Apple since 2000, is said to have tendered his resignation yesterday. Cagni steps down in the midst of a successful stretch, as Gartner recently reported that Apple's European sales were up 20 percent year-over-year by the end of 2011.
Google has introduced in-app subscriptions to its Play store, according to the a post on the company's official Android developers blog. From today, App developers can use in-app billing to sell monthly or annual subscriptions from within the app itself. The addition brings Google's app portal in line with the Apple App Store in offering recurring billing to its customers and developers, with all subscriptions being auto-renewing by default.
Apple has reportedly established a licensing agreement with patent holder SimpleAir, putting an end to the patent infringement battle that began late in 2009. SimpleAir had filed its original lawsuit in the federal district court for the Eastern District of Texas, a venue frequented by plaintiffs in intellectual-property lawsuits, however the settlement was said to have been reached shortly before the formal proceedings commenced.
New York State Senator Thomas O'Mara is attempting to push "right to know" legislation that would effectively ban online speech posted anonymously. The bill aims to "amend the civil rights law" to "protect a person's right to know who is behind an anonymous Internet posting."
Netflix has admitted that it may play a role in keeping its subscribers from doing "something." That, Ad Age reports, was as far as Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos was willing to go when asked whether the streaming service was responsible for market cannibalization. The executive stopped short of accepting blame for viewership declines among broadcast and cable channels, though, and touted Netflix's role in bringing in new viewers for some shows.
Just two months after Foxconn bought a 10 percent stake in Sharp, the two companies have announced a collaboration on a plant in Chengdu, China that will be used to build iPhone displays and potentially displays for other products. Foxconn will build the plant, and Sharp will assist by supplying technology, which may be used to further expand its ability to produce displays using its IGZO formulation, along with possible poly-silicon LCD screens.
Application and file sharing app Bump (free) has been updated to allow for photo transfers between a phone and a computer. Users of the app can go to the Bump website on a computer, then after selecting photos to share, can bump the phone into the spacebar to send the images to the browser. Images could then be saved to the computer or shared through social networks with a short link.
Apple CEO Tim Cook is on the cover of this week's Fortune Magazine with a story by Inside Apple author Adam Lashinsky profiling the intensely private CEO and noting some of the changes -- some subtle, some not -- introduced by Cook early in his tenure as head of the world's most valuable company. Lashinsky's story posits that in some ways, Apple is becoming a more "traditional" company under Cook.
A cybercriminal who is responsible for hacking into and sabotaging the computers of more than 30 million people has been sentenced to four years in prison. According to the BBC, Georgiy Avanesov was tried and judged by an Armenian court. He was arrested at the country's Yerevan airport in 2010.
In a pair of related developments, Microsoft has retreated from earlier claims that its phone OS was more popular in China than iOS just as new figures for the first quarter of 2011 show that Apple has nearly tripled its sales of iPhones in the country and raised its share from eight to 19 percent, mostly due to the launch of the iPhone 4S, which was launched with two of China's major carriers in January to great demand and some crowd issues.
North Carolina's Utility Commission in Raleigh has approved Apple's application to build a 4.8-megawatt fuel cell for the company's Maiden data center, the largest privately-owned such fuel cell in the country. The cell will consist of 24 energy servers provided by Bloom Energy, and will use conventional natural gas off the grid to power itself. Apple will offset the natural gas by buying or producing and equal amount of biogas locally.
Claiming that the Department of Justice is completely wrong in its approach and interpretation of the circumstances and public remarks of its entry into the e-book market, Apple has filed a formal response [PDF link] to the lawsuit that accuses it and major book publishers of conspiring to fix prices on e-books and undermine Amazon's ability to discount them. The response echoes Apple's few public statements on the matter, saying it fostered competition where Amazon would have destroyed it.
Patrick Spence, 14-year veteran of Research in Motion (RIM) and its head of global sales, has departed the company. Spence "will be taking on a leadership position in a different industry," according to RIM spokeswoman Rebecca Freiburger. No comment has been made if the move is in response to the announcement of RIM's new Chief Operating Officer and Chief Marketing Officer three weeks ago.
Dell has announced its fiscal-year 2013 first-quarter results on Tuesday, as the continuing skid in profits continues. Quarterly revenue was down four percent from a year ago to $14.4 billion. Profit continues to fall and dropped a staggering 33 percent to $635 million. The consumer division continues to weigh down the company, with a revenue of $3 billion, a 12 percent decline year-over-year.
Facebook is in the process of launching a system to allow advertisers to measure the impact of their advertising efforts on the social network. The company is also looking to allow external advertising agencies to buy premium ad slots in users' news feeds. As The Financial Times reports, the changes to the site's advertising policies come as Facebook attempts to instill confidence in its capacity to leverage its massive user base in the world of targeted advertising.
Apple is by far the largest buyer of all kinds of microprocessors, buying 50 percent more RAM, processor and other chips than any other company, with its appetite having tripled since 2009 due to the success of its iOS devices (and to a lesser extent its growing Mac business). At an industry conference, IHS iSuppli researcher Dale Ford said that the company will buy $27 billion worth of chips, up from $9B in 2009.
Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski, speaking during Boston's The Cable Show, has voiced support for data caps on Internet plans. The chief feels that tiered pricing will "increase consumer choice and competition" and result in "lower prices for people who consume less broadband," though he did not clarify what mechanism would drive prices down. Consumer advocates and public-interest groups immediately responded, decrying the comments and urging the FCC to more closely examine the effect of broadband data caps on the market, pricing, and innovation.
HP has reported its fiscal second-quarter financials, pointing to a slight slide in net revenues to $30.7 billion. Earnings per share fell to $0.80, slightly higher than the internal forecast of $0.68 to $0.71, however the company nonetheless confirmed plans to eliminate eight percent of its workforce.
A jury at the US District Court of Northern California has determined that Google has not infringed on six claims contained in two Oracle patents. The unanimous decision is viewed as a partial win for the search giant, however the company still faces potential damages in an earlier verdict that focused on copyright violations for a number of Java APIs.
Storage drive makers Seagate and LaCie on Wednesday announced an agreement that will see the former buy a majority, 64.5-percent share in LaCie. The deal will see about $186 million change hands, and the product portfolios will be merged. The focus will also be on expanding the storage market in Europe and Japan.
Apple and Samsung have failed to reach any kind of settlement after court-ordered talks on Monday and Tuesday, according to the Korea Times. A Samsung official tells the publication that the companies could find "no clear agreement" on their patent dispute. The talks were extremely high-level, involving Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Samsung CEO Choi Gee-sung.
Siri, the voice command system on the iPhone 4S, is being blocked on IBM's internal networks, the company's CIO has revealed. Jeanette Horan mentioned the fact in an interview with MIT's Technology Review this week. The core issue involves the way Siri translates speech; rather than performing the task on a phone, it uploads recordings to Apple servers, where the speech is deciphered before results are sent back. Accompanying this is user data, such as the names of people in Contacts, since the information is needed to interpret some requests.
Apple design guru Jonathan Ive has revealed to The Telegraph that Apple’s current projects are ‘the most important and the best work’ that his team at Apple has ever done. In the UK to formally receive his knighthood from the Queen, Ive said that it will likely be this work that will be his legacy. Ive’s comments, while revealing nothing specific, are likely to set speculation alight ahead of expected revamps of key Apple products as well the rumored Apple TV.
Following last week's compromise between Motorola, RIM, and Apple resulting in a nano-SIM design submission, Samsung has filed a complaint with the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) complaining about the voting process on the final design. After an initial denial of Samsung's appeal, Samsung filed the letter with ETSI stating that Samsung believes the vote was advanced before enough time was allowed for discussion and "consensus building" within the organization. Regardless of Samsung's complaint, voting continues and is expected to conclude sometime this week.
In a trio of recent announcements from cable giant Comcast, the company announced Voice 2Go, adding a new assortment of features for the Xfinity Voice suite pulled from the smartphone feature set. Also at Boston's The Cable Show Comcast's new next-generation customizable user interface codenamed "Project Dayview" was demonstrated. Rounding out the trio of announcements, the X1 cloud-based IPTV service was also shown. All three services will be rolled out to select markets by the end of this year.
It is a terrible cliché when a writer begins a story by claiming that a series of real-life events "reads like a Hollywood movie script," but occasionally dramatic stories occur that are hard to distinguish from the intricate plottings of screenwriters or novelists. An unusual operation involving the US-based Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) hiring investigators to spy on a UK couple that ran a "links to streaming video" site has resulted in prosecution with the help of a US defendant.
Alibaba, a Chinese-owned e-commerce giant, has bought half of Yahoo's stake in the company through a buyback deal. The previously speculated arrangement, announced on Sunday, sees Alibaba receive half of the 40 percent stake Yahoo has in the company in exchange for $6.3 billion in cash, and around $800 million in new Alibaba preferred shares. Yahoo will also receive preferential treatment if Alibaba conducts an initial public offering, with either Alibaba buying or Yahoo selling 25 percent of the remaining stake.
MSI and Asus have announced and detailed their first Thunderbolt-equipped motherboards. The companies have released specifications for their Ivy Bridge boards, both using Apple's Mini DisplayPort implementation of Thunderbolt, rather than Sony's custom Light Peak adaptation. Neither company has announced pricing and availability. Both boards are expected to make their debuts at the Taipei Computex show in two weeks.
Libelium has revealed a new technology that can track the amount of foot or vehicle traffic by counting the number of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi radio signals from user's smartphones. Integrated into its Meshlium Xtreme multiprotocol router, it will allow the tracking of vehicles as well as their speeds, the amount of time people stand in front of store windows or landmarks, and can even differentiate between local residents and tourists. Any mobile device with a Bluetooth or Wi-Fi radio can be tracked, and no app needs to be installed on the devices.
At The Cable Show in Boston, Verizon Wireless on Tuesday announced it will soon release a new platform called Viewdini that will allow streaming of video content to subscribers of Comcast Xfinity, Hulu Plus, mSpot, Netflix, and TV sites to their mobile devices. Also, 4G mobile plans are required, and the service will only be available to Android-powered devices first, though support for other platforms is promised, as is content from Verizon FiOS.
Apple led the market in mobile PC shipments during the March quarter, at least when including the iPad, according to preliminary NPD data. The company shipped 17.2 million iPads and MacBooks, representing a 118 percent jump year-over-year, and 22.5 percent marketshare during Q1. About 80 percent of those units were iPads though, whereas the other top sellers succeeded on the basis of notebook shipments.
Google has announced that its proposed acquisition of Motorola Mobility has been closed, following necessary approvals from the US Department of Justice, European Union and other international agencies. Current Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha will continue to help complete the transition, however he will step down as chief executive as Google veteran Dennis Woodside takes the leadership role.
At a time when businesses are exchanging more and more information online, with a corresponding risk of data theft from cyber hackers, Internet security is more critical than it has ever been. Evizone has developed a unique approach enabling the secure exchange of files, view-only copy protected messages and documents so that businesses can be confident that their vital corporate information remains only in the hands of its intended audience. MacNN recently had the opportunity to put some questions to Evizone CEO Andrew Coutts about what sets Evizone apart from the crowd and why businesses that value corporate security should consider it instead of email and other file sharing services.
Yahoo's former senior director of business management, Robert W. Kwok, and a former mutual fund manager at Ameriprise Financial have agreed to settle insider trading charges. The Securities and Exchange Commission maintains that Kwok and fund manager Reema D. Shah shared confidential information after a chance meeting in 2008 and continued with the information exchange into 2009. Kwok pled guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud, and Shah pled guilty to conspiracy. Both await sentencing.
A group of notable public figures, including two US presidents and a class of schoolkids -- along with the reunited "Mac and PC" team of Justin Long and John Hodgman -- paid tribute to Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs at the Webby Awards held yesterday in New York City. As part of the ceremony, a video tribute was run featuring "five words" (and sometimes more) from various celebrities and politicians who in turn paid tribute to Jobs, who died in October.
