Who killed Google TV?
BlackBerry Messenger 6 launches, integrates live presence, chat into apps
Feeling the heat from both Android and iOS in the global smartphone market share battle, Research in Motion on Thursday announced the availability of BlackBerry Messenger 6 (BBM 6) the latest version of the smartphone maker's trademark instant messaging application which integrates BBM functionality into other BlackBerry apps for a boost in social usability.
With the debut of the BBM Social Platform SDK earlier this year, BlackBerry app developers got the ability to embed BBM functionality into their apps. The platform is extremely promising, as it could put real time communication into any application. Users could, for example, see that one of their contacts is available to play games, and an invitation could be sent. Then, once the game has begun, users could have a live in-game BBM chat session.
Spotify sued for patent infringement in US and the Netherlands
Just two weeks after it launched here in the US, music service Spotify finds itself the target of a patent fight. San Diego-based PacketVideo sued the company in both the US and Netherlands on Thursday, claiming it could not come to an agreement over licensing of its technologies.
"PacketVideo has a strong intellectual property portfolio, and will take any necessary action needed to protect its intellectual property and prevent the misuse of its patents," the company's general counsel Joel Espelien said in a statement.
SMBs get more efficient servers with virtualization
Editor's note: This article was commissioned by Dell. To learn more about Dell's solutions for improving responsiveness while reducing costs with virtualization, please visit Dell's site by clicking here.
As hardware power increased over the years IT pros used to wonder about what we'd do with all that capacity, but no longer. Virtualization has enabled everyone, from SMBs to enterprise IT, to get better utilization out of their hardware and make management easier too.
Asus semi-officially reveals ultrathin MeeGo netbook
At Computex 2011 in Taipei last month, there was a significant amount of movement stirring in the MeeGo camp. The fully open source mobile operating system from Intel was being shown off on An Acer Iconia tablet, as well as on notebooks from PC makers Lenovo, Samsung, and Asus.
Earlier in July, an FCC filing from Taiwanese PC maker and netbook pioneer Asus showed that its MeeGo-powered X101 could possibly be coming to the United States
Mark Russinovich and Aaron Margosis introduce 'Windows Sysinternals Administrator's Reference' [video]
If you've administrated Windows for any length of time, surely Sysinternals is in your toolkit. If not, it should be. I remember first using the software to recover a locked-up Windows NT 4 PC in 1996 (was it called Winternals back then). Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell founded Winternals that year, and Microsoft acquired the company 10 years later.
"Russinovich, Technical Fellow working on the managed cloud OS kernel -- you know this as the Windows Azure Fabric Controller -- is the primary author of these powerful tools", Charles Torre explains in the blog post introducing the video above. "Aaron Margosis, meanwhile, is a Microsoft Consultant and Sysinternals user with expert-level knowledge and experience using Sysinternals tools. They are an important part of his job. Aaron yearned for a book that encapsulates detailed information about all of the Sysinternals tools. Mark agreed and asked Aaron to coauthor it with him--be careful what you ask for!"
Plex Media Server: Your content from anywhere on iPad, iPhone or Mac
Media files like photos, video and music can quickly swallow up gigabytes of drive space. Then there's the issue of viewing or listening to those files on more than one Mac or device. Do you diligently copy the files you need across to your second computer, or create a network shared folder that everyone can access?
A third option -- which has the added benefit of providing you with a fuss-free, attractive user interface for browsing and accessing your media collection -- lies with a tool such as Plex Media Server; it has been updated to version 0.9.3.4.
With AT&T/T-Mobile merger still possible, Sprint teams up with LightSquared
Sprint & LightSquared on Thursday announced a 15-year agreement to share the responsibility and profits of the LightSquared wholesale 4G LTE network.
Number 3 US wireless network carrier Sprint has repeatedly spoken out against the possible merger of AT&T and T-Mobile USA, saying it would cause the wireless industry to "regress inexorably toward a 1980's-style duopoly."
MP3 Skype Recorder: It's free but there's a price
Skype has revolutionized the way we communicate, and armed with a headset you can slash your phone costs either by calling fellow Skype users for free or taking advantage of its cheaper call rates to communicate with both landline and mobile phones.
If you've ever needed to record a voice call, you'll have no doubt browsed the Skype Extras shop and discovered a number of paid-for solutions are available. If you can't justify the cost, and your needs are relatively basic, then you can record any Skype voice conversation for free with the aptly titled MP3 Skype Recorder.
Find out what's really happening on your PC with ProcessThreadsView
It's barely a week since NirSoft owner Nir Sofer released his last creation, CustomExplorer. But the prolific developer is already back with ProcessThreadsView, a powerful low-level system monitoring tool that displays in-depth information on the threads of whatever process you specify.
And we do mean "in-depth". Choose a process and you'll get to see each of its threads, along with their creation time, thread ID, status, number of context switches, base and dynamic priority, window title (if appropriate), class and a whole lot more.
Rev up your websites for free with Google Page Speed Service
Would you like to take advantage of Google's worldwide network of fast proxy servers, not to mention their coding expertise? Now you can, and for free, just by signing up for a service of theirs.
Two years ago Google released the Page Speed Browser Extensions for Chrome and Firefox. These gave web developers performance analysis on their pages to help them optimize their sites based on a set of best practices developed by Google.
Who are these people watching Hulu on Apple or Google TV boxes?
Nielsen has a new study out looking at how Americans use Hulu and Netflix. What I found surprising -- 1 percent of the 12,000 respondents say they use Apple TV or Google TV to watch Hulu. The service isn't supported on either device, last time I checked. So who are these people?
Well, they could be bleeding edge consumers who have hacked the boxes. But I expect for the most part it's erroneous reporting. People don't always know what to answer or what they've got.
iOS security hole much easier to exploit than first thought
Apple may have thought an update released Monday to fix issues with security certificates wasn't a big deal, but security researchers disagree. The flaw is easy to exploit thanks to an update to a publicly available application that can snoop on the data stream of iOS devices.
That application is called SSLSniff. An update to the application also released Monday allows it to now intercept secure communications of unpatched iOS devices.
5 things you should know about Samsung Galaxy S II
The hottest Android phone is coming to America, as soon as next month from some carriers. Should you grab one or hold out for iPhone 5 -- or something else? Here are some things you should know that otherwise might be lost in the constant babble from tech blogs and news sites obsessed about Apple's next-gen smartphone.
The Samsung Galaxy S II, or S2, announced in February, features a 4.27-inch Super AMOLED display with 800 x 480 resolution; dual-core Samsung processor; 8-megapixel rear-facing and 2-megapixel front-facing cameras; Android 2.3 (Gingerbread); 1080p video recording; Bluetooth 3.0+HS; and HSPA+ network support, among other features.
Qualcomm rolls out Augmented Reality dev kit for iOS
A full year after Qualcomm debuted its Augmented Reality (AR) platform for Android, the chipmaker has released an AR software development kit for Apple's iOS.
iOS developers can now freely download Qualcomm's QCAR SDK, and then use Apple's XCode IDE and the Unity3 3d engine to build 3D augmented reality apps for iOS. The QCAR SDK supports iOS4 and iOS5 on the iPhone4, iPad2, and 4th generation iPod touch.
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