Wednesday, October 21, 2009
There Really Might Be a Google Phone. No, Seriously!
We’ve gone back and forth on the existence of a Google phone for a long time now.
We’ve gone back and forth on the existence of a Google phone for a long time now.
If I were to tell you that Apple’s app economy was worth more than $2.5 $2.4 billion a year, you would laugh hysterically, shake your head and walk out of the room, yes?
Dave Winer’s ability to peer into the future is uncanny.
Late last week, a day before the Federal Communications Commission started to investigate the Google Voice App fiasco, I spoke with the new FCC chairman, Julius Genachowski. He managed to carve out a few minutes from what has been a very busy first month on the job.
We all know that in a few years, Long Term Evolution (LTE), the 4G wireless broadband technology being embraced by mobile carriers across the world, is going to rule the airwaves, becoming an important way for us to connect to the Internet. But for now, it seems HSPA, aka High Speed Packet Access, the 3G wireless broadband technology, rules the planet. HSPA is a common term used to embrace all acronyms for HSDPA and HSUPA as well as HSPA+.
Can Google be your phone company? The answer is yes. I came to that conclusion after I met with Vincent Paquet, co-founder of GrandCentral (a company acquired by Google) and now a member of the Google Voice team.
For much of this decade, Mozilla and its Firefox browser were the upstarts, out to beat the big, bad Microsoft and its Internet Explorer browser.
If the growing number of games being played on it are any indication, then San Francisco-based micro-messaging service Twitter has the potential to become the next major casual gaming hub.
As investors and analysts digest this morning’s Oracle-Sun news, some are wondering what will happen to Sun-owned MySQL, and whether combining the Oracle and MySQL database businesses would represent an antitrust concern.
Yesterday, New York-based start-up incubator Betaworks raised $2 million in funding for its URL-shortener project, Bit.ly, and spun it out as an independent company.
Earlier this week, comScore reported that daily web usage on mobile devices had doubled in the last 12 months, with nearly 22.4 million U.S. mobile users using their devices to go on the web.
Today, another research firm, Infonetics Research reported that despite the global economic downturn, the demand for mobile broadband is only going to increase. They expect that there will be more than 1 billion mobile broadband users by 2013 vs. 210.5 million at the end of 2008.
Five major U.K. carriers are banding together to pool customer data so that it can be put into a giant database and then be used to sell advertising, The Register reports today. How long do you think it will take before this “database” idea lands on American shores?
With nearly 2,000 “friends” on Facebook, I should be a regular visitor to the site. I am not. Instead, I prefer to use Facebook’s mobile application on my iPhone to send messages, update my status, upload photos taken on the go and sometime even scroll through the news feed to see what my friends are up to. We are at the cusp of a new era in which the mobile and the wired web converge.
You know that saying–if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it must be a duck. Same goes for portable personal computers–whether you call them netbooks or laptops. Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia agrees. “Netbooks are not a new category, instead they are just cheap PCs,” he said at a dinner last night with a handful of technology journalists.
Americans, by nature, are an optimistic bunch. Even in tough times, there is something to be optimistic about. Where others see the glass half empty, we see it as half full. That is probably the only reasonable explanation for the findings of this survey conducted by Glassdoor, a Sausalito, Calif.-based start-up that ranks employers by taking anonymous feedback from their employees.
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