Android gets femtocell 'chameleon phone' app
Today, Intrinsyc Software announced an Android app called UX-Zone that detects when the user has entered a particular femtocell coverage area, and switches to a new home screen with appropriate apps for that area.
Femtocell is a relatively young technology, which acts as an indoor miniature cell tower, giving users additional wireless coverage with the help of their home or office broadband connection. With UX-Zone, a user's Android home screen automatically changes to "Home" and "Office" modes when femtocell presence is detected.
Function is the key: Why BlackBerry rules
From the workaday businessman to the President of the United States, for years, the American white-collar workforce has found itself choosing the Canadian BlackBerry. But after a recent period of aggressive marketing and promotion by Research in Motion which has coincided with a flare-up in consumer smartphone spending, the BlackBerry is also looking like the choice of the general populace.
As Verizon's exclusive entrant in the four-runner race of touchscreen smartphones, Research in Motion's BlackBerry Storm has proven to be a success among business and non-business users alike. RIM CEO Jim Balsillie has been widely quoted this week as saying, "That product was a huge success in terms of sales and adoption," adding that a next-generation device is on the Storm roadmap, off-handedly confirming rumors that began in April.
EA does Apple folk a Sim-ple kindness
Electronic Arts reported the results of its recently concluded fourth quarter on Tuesday as rumors fluttered concerning a possible buyout by Apple. EA also discussed the progress of its digital-delivery efforts, which company executives say are entering a new phase.
The Apple-buy rumor was going around this morning about Twitter as well, and didn't merit discussion on the hour-long earnings call. But there is good news for Mac and iPhone users, who for the first time will have versions of the newest edition of The Sims available to them on the first day of sale for the hotly anticipated title: The Sims 3 will launch on June 3, and the "Let There Be Sims" ad campaign should start flooding your consciousness in the next few days.
Top 10 Windows 7 Features #8: Automated third-party troubleshooting
Among the stronger and more flourishing cottage industries that have sprouted forth as a result of Microsoft Windows has been documenting all of its problems. One of the most successful of these efforts has been Annoyances.org, which sprouted forth from "Windows Annoyances" -- much of what Internet publishers have learned today about search engine optimization comes from revelations directly gleaned from the trailblazing work of Annoyances.org. Imagine, if you will, if the instructions that Annoyances.org painstakingly gives its readers for how to eradicate those little changes that Microsoft makes without your permission, were encoded not in English but instead in a language that Windows could actually execute on the user's behalf.
Windows 7 is actually making such an environment -- a system where, if you trust someone else other than Microsoft to make corrections to your system, you can accept that someone into your circle of trust and put him to work in Troubleshooting. Can't make that Wi-Fi connection? How do you test for the presence of other interfering signals? Streaming media suddenly get slow, or running in fits and starts? Maybe there's an excess of browser-related processes clogging up memory and resources. Did something you just install cause Flash not to work in your browser? Maybe you don't have time to check the 36 or so places in the Registry where that something altered your file associations.
Congress debates whether P2P users should be warned like cigarette smokers
Literally millions of unauthorized documents -- some of them personal, easily too many of them classified -- have made their way freely through P2P networks, many of them without any malicious user whatsoever even requesting or copying them. Sometimes, literally, they just show up. If the problem isn't P2P itself but the people using it, then shouldn't the users of P2P services be given warnings? That's the question being tackled by the US House of Representatives today.
H.R. 1319 or "The Informed P2P User Act" was heard today by the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection. The bill seeks to curb the inadvertent disclosure of tax information, health records, and confidential or personal documents over peer-to-peer file sharing networks.
CBS focuses its online radio properties
It's like the golden age of radio for the Internet generation. The same company that in 1927 formed a nationwide network from 16 affiliate radio stations announced it has spun off the single largest online radio service to date. CBS has formed a new business unit called the CBS Interactive Music Group, which rounds up more than 100 sites and 400 stations and combines them with AOL Radio, Yahoo LaunchCast, and Last.fm under a single governing body.
CBS says that in March, CBS Radio had over 6.5 million listeners who streamed a combined 83 million hours worth of audio. Taken alone, it sounds like a massive number, but when compared to the consumption of audio through sites such as Pandora and Jango, the grandiosity promptly dissolves. According to siteanalytics.compete.com, cbsradio.com enjoyed only 97,150 unique visitors in March while radio.aol.com only had 41,108.
How to really test the Windows 7 Release Candidate
Amazon expected to preview large-format Kindle
Just three months after rolling out Kindle 2.0, Amazon's hosting an event in New York on Wednesday, during which it's expected to preview another upgrade -- one with a bigger screen, PDF support, and annotation capability. The unit will be tested this fall at various universities.
An assortment of magazine and newspaper publishers are also invited to the event, hinting that a change in the relationship between those content providers and Kindle's no-ads-no-pricing-control philosophy may be at hand.
Get the Windows 7 Release Candidate right here!
The first release candidate of Windows 7 has been posted for download, and will remain available until the end of July. Windows 7 RC is a free download as part of the Customer Preview Program, and will expire on June 1, 2010 (at which time you should be running the final release).
Microsoft suggests a system with a 1GHz processor or faster DirectX 9-enabled graphics processor with WDDM 1.0+, 1 GB RAM and 16GB of storage for a 32-bit installation, or 2 GB RAM and 20GB of storage for 64-bit. Both the 32- and 64-bit versions are available in English, German, Japanese, French, and Spanish.
Craigslist crook stole more than just the laptops
NextGov has a depressing little item from the Associated Press concerning a former government contractor who's going to jail for a year and a half for stealing at least 83 laptops from his employer and fencing at least some of them on Craigslist. It's a mighty light sentence for Darryl Lyles considering he stole from us taxpayers; it's even worse when you hear what effects his actions had on his co-workers. Sorry stuff.
Top 10 Windows 7 Features #9: Native PowerShell 2.0
Ever since the command-line tool code-named Monad escaped by the skin of its fingernails from Microsoft's laboratories in 2006, there has been debate and dispute over whether the company has finally, once and for all, replaced DOS. Since that time, we've seen the arrival of an entirely new generation of Windows users who believe "DOS" is an acronym for "denial of service," and who are baffled as to the reasons why anyone would want to command or control an operating system using text.
It isn't so much that text or command-line syntax is the "old" way of working and that Microsoft Management Console is the "new" way. As Microsoft discovered, to the delight of some in its employ and the dismay of others, using the command line as the fundamental basis for Exchange Server improved its usability and efficiency immensely. The graphical environment simply does not translate well -- or to be fairer, not effectively -- to the task of administration.
Mobile handsets: Get smart or go home
On the Sprint Nextel earnings call Monday, CEO Dan Hesse said that attractive handset offerings are a hugely important factor in getting ordinary customers to stick with his company. A survey out late last week from IDC gives a clearer picture of what that means for the providers themselves. Hint: Think smartphones, try not to think about the economy, and don't expect leadership from the bigs.
According to Ryan Reith, a senior research analyst with IDC's Mobile Phone Tracker, smartphone sales may account for fully half of all handset sales for the biggest mobile providers such as Sprint Nextel. Smartphone sales climbed 4% year-to-year even while overall handset sales dropped a nasty 15.8%.
Has Sprint Nextel stopped hemorrhaging subscribers?
They're clotting: Sprint Nextel's Q1 '09 earnings report reported a loss per share of 21 cents in its latest report released Monday, but the long struggle back from consumer service perdition seems to be paying off as subscriber losses diminished remarkably for the Kansas-based mobile provider.
The company reports a net loss of $594 million, which compares year-over-year to a loss of $505 million. It's got a cash balance of $4.5 billion and total liquidity of $5.9 billion -- not bad, points out CEO Dan Hesse, considering the economy, especially since the company just paid off all its 2009 debt maturities. Sprint generated $796 million in free cash flow during the quarter.
Europe: Get the US and other countries out of Internet governance
In the boldest statement yet from European government leaders on the need for globalization of Internet authority, Commissioner Viviane Reding called specifically upon President Obama to allow the US' oversight of the world's domain name authority to lapse after this September, but then to allow the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to become a fully privatized entity. Such an entity, the Commissioner said, would be answerable mainly to the global community of users, represented -- as she foresees it -- by an international tribunal.
"To continue reaping the benefits of the online world, the Internet must evolve on a solid and democratic base," stated Comm. Reding in her weekly address (PDF of full transcript available here). "ICANN is a private not-for profit corporation established in California. Since it was created more than 10 years ago, ICANN has been working under an agreement with the US Department of Commerce. At the moment, the US government is the only body exercising some oversight over ICANN. I believe that the US, so far, done this in a reasonable manner. However, I also believe that the Clinton administration's decision to progressively privatize the internet's domain name and addressing system is the right one. In the long run, it is not defendable that the government department of only one country has oversight of an Internet function which is used by hundreds of millions of people in countries all over the world."
HP and RIM announce new allied services
The mobile enterprise sector has got its newest supergroup. Today, HP and BlackBerry maker Research in Motion announced their alliance and that their first collaborative efforts are ready to be shown to the public: HP CloudPrint for BlackBerry Smartphones, and HP Operations Manager for BlackBerry Enterprise Server.
CloudPrint is a product of HP Labs, which, in short, is a cloud-based print server. It allows Internet-connected mobile devices to print e-mail attachments, Web pages, photos, and documents, and has been in various stages of development since 2007. Through its partnership with RIM, HP will make the service available to BlackBerry Internet Service subscribers and BlackBerry Enterprise Server customers.
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