Archive for December, 2010

Apple expected to hold event by Valentine’s Day to announce Verizon iPhone

Wednesday, December 29th, 2010

Apple is expected to hold an event “very soon,” perhaps by Valentine’s Day on Feb. 14, 2011, to unveil a new CDMA version of the iPhone compatible with U.S. carrier Verizon’s network.

In a report issued Wednesday evening by Bloomberg Businessweek, the alleged coming debut of the iPhone on Verizon is portrayed as an “enormous problem” for AT&T, the current exclusive carrier of the iPhone in the U.S. While AT&T has had sole access to the iPhone since 2007, problems with its network have caused bad press, including a recent reader poll from Consumer Reports ranking AT&T the worst carrier in America.

“Verizon enjoys a reputation for reliability,” author Peter Burrows wrote. “AT&T is notorious for dropping calls, especially in densely populated places like New York and San Francisco where iPhones are most common and cell towers get loaded.”

The report said that Apple would hold one of its own “splashy product introductions to announce a new version of the iPhone that work’s on Verizon’s network,” and said that event would “maybe” come by Valentine’s Day.

Some have speculated that Apple would instead allow Verizon to announce the product at the Consumer Electronics Show in early January, an uncharacteristic move for the typically controlling iPhone maker. But the report specifically stated that a CES unveiling is not in the plans.

“Apple’s introduction of an iPhone for use on Verizon’s network will come sometime after the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in early January, according to a person familiar with Apple’s plans who is not authorized to discuss them publicly,” Burrows wrote. (more…)

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Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen Re-Launches Suit at Google, Apple

Wednesday, December 29th, 2010

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen re-launched his patent lawsuit against Apple, Google and a host of other large tech companies.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s firm Interval Licensing LLC has decided to re-launch a patent-infringement lawsuit against some of country’s biggest tech companies, including Apple and Google. That comes despite the original lawsuit’s dismissal earlier in December.

In the wake of that dismissal, Judge Marsha J. Pechman, of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington at Seattle, demanded that Allen’s legal counsel revise the lawsuit by Dec. 28. Specifically, Pechman asked for more detailed allegations; the new case (No. C10-1385 MJP) indeed seems to delve more deeply into the defendants’ supposed patent violations.

Allen’s original lawsuit, filed Aug. 27, claimed violations of patents developed by his Interval Research Corp., a technology incubator. In addition to Apple and Google, other companies in the crosshairs include AOL, eBay, Facebook, Yahoo, Office Depot, OfficeMax, YouTube and Staples. The four patents in question involve technologies related to e-commerce and online browsing, such as online user alerts and ways for drawing users’ attention to a nearby screen. Microsoft is not named in the lawsuit.

“Paul thinks this is important, not just to him but to the researchers at Interval who created this technology,” a spokesperson for Allen told The Wall Street Journal Aug. 27. “We recognize that innovation has a value, and patents are a way to reflect that.” (more…)

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Facebook Top Searched Term

Wednesday, December 29th, 2010

Facebook was the top searched term overall in 2010, the second straight year that the social networking website has topped web queries, while it was also the most visited website this year, according to data provider Experian Hitwise.

Hitwise reported four variations of the term “Facebook” were among the top 10 terms and accounted for nearly 3.5% of searches overall.

The term “Facebook login” moved up from the ninth spot in 2009 to the second spot this year, Hitwise said. YouTube was the third most-searched term this year, followed by Craigslist, Myspace and Facebook.com. Analysis of the search terms revealed that social networking related terms dominated the results, accounting for 4.2% of the top 50 searches.

Facebook was the top-visited website for the first time in 2010, accounting for 8.9% of all U.S. visits between January and November. Google Inc.’s (GOOG) namesake website ranked second, followed by Yahoo Inc.’s (YHOO) Yahoo! Mail site, Yahoo, and Google’s YouTube.

Hitwise also reported Kim Kardashian was the personality that drew the most searches for the year, while Star Wars was the top movie draw and Lady Gaga was the most searched artist. In the sports category, Tiger Woods and the Dallas Cowboys topped the athlete and sports team searches, respectively.

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Apple’s iPad 2 rumored to have USB port

Wednesday, December 29th, 2010

With the bulk of the holiday shopping buzz dying down, rumors of Apple’s new iPad 2 have sprung to life. The most recent rumor, courtesy of the Mobile Review blog editor-in-chief Eldar Murtazin, says the iPad 2 will include a USB port.

The tweet, discovered by AppleInsider, reads:

“Talked with colleague which working with some ODM vendors connected with Apple. He is research guy. According to his sources iPad2 will have usb port.”

AppleInsider reports that Murtazin is a trusted insider with good sources and the news of the integrated USB could be the result of a European device-maker pact that decided micro-USB ports should be standard device charging ports. Apple, of course, uses the 30-pin dock connector for its mobile devices, including the iPad.

Including an integrated USB port would also quickly make obsolete the USB adapter kit provided by Apple for the iPad. Currently, the USB adapter only supports importing photos from digital cameras, though some other peripheral devices have been said to work.

There is no word whether an integrated USB port would offer greater functionality. In the meantime, expect rumors to keep flowing from various sources as the new iPad gets closer to be announced and released.

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Microsoft Tablet Aimed at Fighting iPad Faces Long Odds

Monday, December 27th, 2010

Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer, said to unveil new software for tablets at the Consumer Electronics Show next week, will face skeptics who say his company won’t soon narrow Apple Inc.’s iPad lead.

“By the time Microsoft gets it figured out everybody will already own an iPad,” said Keith Goddard, CEO of Capital Advisors Inc. an investing firm in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that holds Apple shares. “That train has left the station.”

Microsoft will announce a full version of the Windows computer operating system that runs on ARM Holdings Plc technology at the show, which begins in Las Vegas on Jan. 6, two people familiar with Microsoft’s plans said last week.

Allying with ARM is Microsoft’s way of stepping up rivalry with Apple, which has garnered the largest share of the tablet market with its iPad, a touch-screen device introduced in April that handles video, music and computing tasks. The effort may falter unless Ballmer can match the features consumers have come to expect from the iPad, Goddard said.

The new Windows version would be tailored for battery- powered devices, such as tablets and wireless handsets, the people said. Chips based on ARM technology are made by Qualcomm Inc., Texas Instruments Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co.

Frank Shaw, a spokesman for Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft, declined to comment, pointing instead to remarks by Ballmer in July.

“We’re tuning Windows 7 to new slate hardware designs,” Ballmer told analysts then. He also said, Apple has “sold certainly more than I’d like them to sell.” (more…)

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Microsoft Office 365 beta: Potentially useful, occasionally frustrating

Monday, December 27th, 2010

Microsoft Office 365, a suite of business-focused, cloud-based applications that was recently released in beta, is actually a repackaging and updating of various Microsoft offerings — optimized for the cloud. The intent is to give small businesses the kind of benefits that up until now only large companies have been able to get from services such as Exchange and SharePoint.

Don’t be confused by the product’s name — it’s not a new or updated version of Microsoft Office. Office 365 is an upgrade of Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS). This revamped and renamed version of the suite adds subscription-based access to Office 2010 to BPOS and includes hosted versions of Exchange, SharePoint and Lync (Microsoft’s communications server), along with Office Web Apps, the Web-based version of Microsoft Office.

Some versions of Office 365 do include a subscription-based version of Microsoft Office Professional, and there are some links between Office 365 and Microsoft Office: You can use your local version of Microsoft Office to pull down and edit documents from the cloud, or use Office Web Apps to create and edit documents.

Apart from that, though, there are no connections, and you don’t need Microsoft Office in order to use Office 365. It’s one more example of confusing branding and naming from Microsoft.

From what I’ve seen in the beta, Office 365 offers an excellent set of tools for companies that want the power of Exchange, SharePoint and Lync but don’t want to host them. It will be especially welcomed by small and midsize businesses that can’t afford data centers and sizable IT staffs.

But the product, at least in its current form, has enough rough edges that it feels more like a series of applications bolted together than a well-thought-out, integrated whole. (more…)

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The Top 40 iPhone Apps of 2010

Sunday, December 26th, 2010

The iTunes App Store is huge. More than 300,000 apps huge. I’ve watched this monster start from nothing and turn into a billion-dollar industry in only a few short years. We’ve been approaching this point for some time now, but it’s more apparent than ever that app exposure is of critical importance. A healthy majority of iOS app users discover new applications directly from their device as opposed to using iTunes. If you look specifically at the iPhone, the amount of real estate for discovery is only available to a very small percentage of the total apps.

There are currently 20 overall categories, with Games offering an additional 20 subcategories. Each subcategory is broken into three lists and displays a max of 100 apps on the iPhone. Throw in a small number from the Top 25 and Featured lists and you wind up with roughly 12,000 apps being shown at one time. This works out to only about 4% of all apps that receive visibility. One can browse beyond this number on iTunes, but that quickly becomes an overwhelming, laborious task.

The expectation is that the market will dictate an app’s worth, but it doesn’t always work out that way. If you look at the top lists, they are littered with clones, cheap knockoffs and impulse grabs. Ninety-nine cent buys are just too tempting. Without proper exposure (and potentially more appropriate pricing schemes), many truly great apps never see the light of day.

With that said, I’ve compiled what I believe to be the best apps that have come out this year. Some got well-deserved exposure, while others were lost in the shuffle. The difficult part of assembling a “best of” list is striking a balance between apps with mainstream appeal and those with real innovation. There are a number of factors that took place in the selection (such as the merits of an app itself, not just the usefulness of an established service it utilizes) and not every good app could make the cut. (more…)

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What’s on IBM’s “Next Five in Five”?

Sunday, December 26th, 2010

By 2015, you could see the 3-D image of a person calling you and might be able to plan in advance the shortest and less traffic-congested route to the office.

Not enough? Even “breathing” batteries and laptops powered by kinetic energy could be on the way over the next five years, according to the latest technology predictions from IBM.

The Armonk, N.Y.-based computer giant has released its annual “Next Five in Five” list of five innovations expected to hit the ground by 2015. The predictions are based on surveys conducted with more than 3,000 researchers at IBM’s Almaden research lab.

People could be able to interact with faraway friends in 3-D and even conduct videoconferencing through holographic cameras that fit into cell phones allowing video chat, IBM researchers said.

The company also expects that today’s lithium-ion batteries could be replaced by batteries using energy-dense metals that only need to interact with the air to recharge and that those kinds of batteries could last 10 times longer than the current battery technology.

“If successful, the result will be a lightweight, powerful, and rechargeable battery capable of powering everything from electric cars to consumer devices,” IBM said. (more…)

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Facebook 2010 Sales Said Likely to Reach $2 Billion

Friday, December 17th, 2010

Facebook Inc., the world’s most popular social-networking service, is likely to generate 2010 revenue of about $2 billion, a larger sum than projected earlier, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Sales will more than double from 2009, said the people, who declined to be identified because the privately held company doesn’t disclose revenue. Facebook had $700 million to $800 million in sales last year, and the 2010 figure was previously expected to be closer to $1.5 billion, according to two other people familiar with the matter earlier this year.

Facebook’s more than half a billion users have made it an attractive target for advertisers, including Coca-Cola Co., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Adidas AG. In October, Facebook surpassed Yahoo! Inc. when ranked by the number of global users, making it No. 3 behind Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., according to ComScore Inc., a research firm in Reston, Virginia.

“The love affair of consumers with social networks is an abiding one,” said Karsten Weide, an analyst at IDC in San Mateo, California. “All the big brands are there.”

Jonathan Thaw, a spokesman for Palo Alto, California-based Facebook, declined to comment.

Facebook, founded in 2004, would reach $2 billion faster than Yahoo and at almost the same pace as Google. Yahoo, founded in 1994, posted revenue of $1.6 billion in 2003 and $3.6 billion in 2004. Google, founded in 1998, reached $1.5 billion in 2003 and then $3.2 billion in 2004. (more…)

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Google Chrome OS Has Enterprise Friend in Citrix

Thursday, December 9th, 2010

Citrix Systems has pledged its support for Google Chrome OS in 2011. The company will pair its Citrix Receiver virtualization app with Chrome OS netbooks for its customers.

Google’s Chrome Operating System isn’t yet ready for prime time on notebook computers, but the company has landed corporate remote access power Citrix Systems as a partner.

Google Dec. 7 said at an update event that it consumers would be able to purchase netbooks based on its Web operating system, which lets users run Web apps in the Chrome browser, from Samsung and Acer in mid-2011.

Concerns about bugs, performance tuning, and connecting digital cameras to the mix are a few of the reasons why Chrome OS had been delayed in the market.

While most enterprises wouldn’t dare to embrace such a nascent offering, Citrix plans to use Chrome OS in 2011 to support Citrix Receiver, a software client for application and desktop virtualization.

Citrix customer employees will be able to bring Chrome OS netbooks into their office and get immediate access to their enterprise apps through Receiver.

Gordon Payne, senior vice president of Citrix Systems, demonstrated Citrix Receiver running Microsoft Excel on Chrome OS, with the document actually hosted in the company’s data center. He also showed off a Solid Works CAD app and Hyperion business intelligence app running the same way.

Touting Citrix’ long track record of helping users shuttle business apps from their PCs to corporate data centers and running them on different computers inside and outside the central office, Payne said Chrome OS lends itself nicely to Citrix’ service delivery model. (more…)

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