When News Corp. and VeriSign came together in the Jamba joint venture in 2006, Fox Mobile's then-President Lucy Hood was slated to take over as CEO of a "new venture." Now, VeriSign and Hood are out and Fox Mobile Group takes shape with the former Jamba CEO at the helm.
Two weeks ago, News Corp. announced that it had purchased VeriSign's remaining share of the mobile entertainment joint venture Jamba, which is known more familiarly for its Jamster brand in the US, after having already a majority stake in Jamba in September 2006.
About three weeks ago, Motorola disclosed intentions to BetaNews around building Android devices. Details have yet to be announced -- but now, some of the specifics might be indirectly emerging.
A report released this morning predicts that Motorola will release an Android phone with "social network friendly" features in early 2009. Although specifics around Motorola's first Android device have yet to be confirmed, the report could make sense in light of T-Mobile's stated intentions for a series of Android devices geared to different "user experiences."
After last month's mistrial in the proceedings against accused copyright infringer Jammie Thomas, a defendant in a similar file-sharing cases is using the decision as a precedent for retrial.
Whitney Harper was not even old enough to be tried as an adult when MediaSentry discovered that her KaZaA shared music folder contained some 544 copyrighted songs available for sharing. Thirty-seven of these songs, from artists such as Madonna, Faith Hill, Brooks & Dunn, and Good Charlotte were included in the initial filing for summary judgment (PDF available here) against the 16-year-old's father.
In the latest indication that manufacturers are bracing themselves for the worst, the leading provider of flash memory cards for countries including the US is reducing its stake in two key factories where NAND flash is made.
It is a very safe bet that CE devices are already taking a hit in sales, especially including MP3 players, digital cameras, and any kind of devices that use NAND flash memory. SanDisk is a major supplier, representing more than one-third of US sales of NAND memory cards for devices that use interchangeable memory, according to hardware analysis firm iSuppli.
If you're tired of the election season, you "don't want to hear another word about it." The rest of the country, however, had words of its own to get out during the recent debates.
Google, which rarely misses a chance to show off a nifty search, has been tracking the popular search terms during the McCain-Obama face-offs and the Biden-Palin match. The site's Google Trends function doesn't offer sufficiently granular results as to see moment-to-moment trends (at least not to those of us outside the Googleplex), but the keepers of the official Google blog favored the Web with some stats.
Sprint heralded the launch of its Xohm WiMax network in Baltimore last week by calling for the death of wireline broadband. But how does it stand up against cable and DSL, or wireless 3G services? BetaNews has been using Xohm for the past month in order to find out.
The promise of WiMax is nothing short of grand: blanket cities across the United States and around the world with 4Mbps wireless at a cost cheaper than existing services and with the simplicity of connecting to a Wi-Fi network. 4G wireless, Sprint proclaims, is an inevitable future. The company even offered a symbolic photo-op for journalists at its launch event: Xohm chief technology officer Barry West, joined by Sprint CEO Dan Hesse and other WiMax partners snipping an Ethernet cable.
Tesla, the buzzed-about clean-tech electric car maker, has delayed its S-model sedan, demoted its CEO, and closed its Michigan office -- the last action, via blog post.
Even in a world were romantic breakups via text messages aren't uncommon, the message from company chairman Elon Musk has stirred outrage. Meanwhile, the nature of the dismissals -- the Rochester Hill, Michigan office housed the engineering team working on the new midrange ($60,000) vehicle -- raised eyebrows among some observers who see a pattern in canning the tech employees rather than the money guys.
The 18-year-old Hubble Space Telescope hasn't sent any pictures for the past three weeks, and fixing the system in outer space hasn't exactly gone as smoothly as NASA officials hoped. Restoration of the telescope's operations fot hampered by a couple of unexplained problems -- or "anomalies," in NASA-speak -- earlier this week.
On Wednesday, flight controllers at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD started to reinstate data transmsission for the telescope. To work around an inital failure that happened on September 27, the engineers began reconfiguring "six components of the Hubble Data Management System and five components in the Science Instrument Command and Data Handling (SIC &DH) system to use their redundant (or B) sides," says a Hubble status report.
Just one year after the launch of the Eee PC, Asus is celebrating its surprise success -- and consumers are finding the device on sale in unlikely places for less than the cost of an iPhone.
Asus is largely responsible for the current "netbook" craze. It was not the first company to offer shrunken notebook computers, and it certainly does not offer the most elegantly designed, but through the proper balance of price, power, and availability, the Eee PC legitimized a form factor with an uncertain future.
Google announced a 26 percent rise in third quarter profits on Thursday, while also dropping strong hints that even the phenomenally successful search engine giant has concerns about how to keep thriving during the tougher economic times ahead.
"Thanks to everybody's hard work. Google had a good quarter. Traffic and revenue were both solid and we kept tight control on costs," summed up Google CEO Eric Schmidt, during a conference call with analysts today.
Qwest this week became the latest in a lengthening list of telcos sued by customers over early termination fees (EFTs), in a class action filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington State.
Specifically, the suit by plaintiffs Rob Vernon and Rory Durkin challenges the practice of charging ETFs for broadband ISP services in so-called "price-for-life" plans.
Vulnerabilities in two IRS systems -- including the Customer Account Data Engine (CADE) developed to replace all existing tax processing systems at the agency -- were known and repeatedly raised during the nine-year development process but not addressed, according to an in-house report.
A statement from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), which released the September report publicly on Thursday, says that "Security weaknesses in controls over sensitive data protection, system access, monitoring of system access, and disaster recovery have continued to exist even though key phases of the CADE and the AMS have been deployed. As a result, the IRS is jeopardizing the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of an increasing volume of tax information for millions of taxpayers as these systems are put into operation."
Yahoo has renewed its approach to making its site more social, rolling out a beta of its updated open profile system. The feature will enable Yahoo to better track and target ads to its users.
Yahoo has continually lagged behind the other "big four" search engines in the social networking space. Google owns Orkut and controls ads on MySpace, Microsoft has its own Windows Live Spaces and a minor stake in Facebook, and AOL owns Bebo.
Although it didn't announce any new content for its iTunes Store, Apple reiterated that it is now carrying content from all four major television networks alongside news that it has sold 200 million TV episodes.
Apple began selling television shows via iTunes almost exactly three years ago, starting with a handful of programs from Disney's ABC. Since that time, Apple has expanded its library to over 30,000 episodes from most of the major TV networks.
Some Mac veterans are in an ecstasy of grief over the absence of Apple's own FireWire port from the new low-end MacBook. But what does it mean?
Mac support and discussion forums have been blazing away since Tuesday's announcements, with users of FireWire video gear, musical equipment, and peripherals bewailing the absence of FireWire from the lower-end MacBook. The port is still present in FireWire 800 form on the MacBook Pro; FireWire 400 is no longer offered.