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Apple's iPhone 3GS and Palm's Pre has captured a lot of hype but don't count out Research in Motion's BlackBerry just yet, say experts.
"The buzz about other signature devices can make people overlook RIM's success," said Ryan Reith, senior research analyst at IDC.
While the iPhone enjoyed an initial pop in market share after the second generation version was released last July, that share has been nearly cut in half.
In the first quarter of this year, BlackBerrys had a 55.3% share, compared to 19.5% for iPhones, according to IDC data.
Category: Uncategorized Page 14 of 16
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T-Mobile is prepping to announce its second Android handset next week, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal that cites unnamed sources.
The fourth-largest U.S. carrier did not confirm the report, but has already said it would have Android-related announcements over the summer. The report said the next Android smartphone will be the HTC Magic, but it will be rebranded as the myTouch 3G. The handset is expected to go on sale this summer. -
Next time you ask your teen to “stop texting,” you may want to think twice. Your teenager may be gearing up for the National Texting Championship – and the fat check that’s bestowed upon the winner.
In New York yesterday, 22 contestants, 22 years old or younger, stretched their thumbs and prepared to test their texting dexterity at the third LG US National Texting Championship. The contest was sponsored by the mobile-phones division of LG Electronics, based in Seoul, South Korea. The 22 finalists, plucked from 250,000 eager texters, competed against each other over two days. Some of the challenges consisted of texting while blindfolded (a Harris Interactive Study reported that 42 percent of teens say they can text blindfolded) and texting while walking on a treadmill.
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I’ve been an Internet email user since early 1984 when I got my first Project Athena account as an undergraduate at MIT. Notwithstanding all the “email is dead” messages over the years, I continue to use email as my primary online communication mechanism. There are an enormous number of things that frustrate me about email, most notably the lack of fundamental innovation in email clients and servers. That said, as a messaging tool – it still dominates for me.
Several years ago I started saying that “my social graph is in email.” I found it interesting that Facebook and LinkedIn used email as a primary messaging layer to remind me to come back to Facebook and LinkedIn respectively to check what was going on. This signaled confirmation to me that these systems were making sure they were using the most persistent messaging layer to build and reinforce their social graphs. -
Lots of services try and rate the reputation of online users, particularly in the world of online commerce. So it’s not surprising that attention is being paid to rating users in the social networking space. Enter TweetGrade.
Purewire Inc. launched TweetGrade last week, calling it the authority in online user reputation on Twitter. “TweetGrade provides a quantitative assessment of a user’s reach and influence in the Twitter community, and it helps people understand a user’s online reputation, legitimacy and safety.”
The company pointed to some of the scams encountered on the micro-blogging site as evidence that its service is necessary, such as a “Best Video” scam. “Attacks such as this make it imperative to know the reputation of those people with whom you interact online. TweetGrade assures this trust by providing evidence of Twitter account legitimacy, protecting users from malicious or illegitimate accounts that attempt to send spam or spread malware.”
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Competition on Facebook was fierce late Friday night, as scores of users scrambled to personalize their Facebook pages in what many have likened to a virtual land rush.
It’s a land rush Friday night for personal domain names.
At exactly 12:01 a.m. ET Saturday, on a first-come, first-served basis, the vast social networking site gave users the green light to claim variations of their names or other nicknames of their choosing.
Within three minutes, 200,000 usernames were registered, according to the social media blog Mashable, which covered the registration process live from Facebook’s headquarters Friday night. -
Anyone worried that AT&T (NYSE: T) was going to charge a price premium for the ability to send picture and/or video messages can breath easy. AT&T recently noted that it won’t charge more to add the feature.
As far as I am concerned, AT&T had zero wiggle room here. Every other carrier offers unlimited messaging — which typically includes text, picture, video and instant messaging — for $20 per month. iPhone users who have unlimited messaging plans today are already paying $20 per month — just for text messages.
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In March, the organizers of a computer-security conference called CanSecWest challenged attendees to break into any one of five smart phones, among them Apple’s popular iPhone. The perceived difficulty of the task–especially breaking into the iPhone–meant that few researchers made any attempt to hack the devices, and none succeeded.
Now two researchers hope to make things considerably easier for would-be iPhone hackers. Next month, Charles Miller, a principal analyst at Independent Security Evaluators, and Vincenzo Iozzo, a student at the University of Milan, in Italy, will present a way to run nonapproved code on Apple’s mobile device at the Black Hat Security Conference, in Las Vegas. -
When Guy Kawasaki talks about business innovation, as he did recently at a University of Pennsylvania technology conference, he brings more than 25 years of major-league experience to the conversation — a background that the good-humored investor and entrepreneur calls “my checkered past.” After getting a psychology degree at Stanford and an MBA at UCLA, the Hawaii-born Kawasaki became the second software “evangelist” at Apple Computer, where his job from 1983 to 1987 was to convince people to create software for the Macintosh. Kawasaki fondly recalls his colleagues at Apple as visionary, driven and “arguably the greatest collection of egomaniacs in the history of California — though the record has subsequently been broken by Google.”
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I am a genius. I'm charismatic, kind and understanding. I'm also a Disney princess named Aurora and the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe.
But I'm not crazy (at least, not completely). I've just been taking a lot of online quizzes lately — you know, the ones all over the Web promising to reveal your IQ, personality traits or celebrity resemblances. Aside from discovering my inner Sleeping Beauty, I've also learned something important: These quizzes are about far more than providing users with enlightening or entertaining information. -
Apple Inc. announced a new version of its popular iPhone on Monday, upping the stakes in the fast-growing market for smart phone devices.
The new iPhone was the highlight of Apple's annual gathering of developers in San Francisco, in which company also cut the price of its current iPhone 3G to $99 and debuted a revamped line of MacBook Pro notebook PCs. Also, Apple showcased major software updates that include new operating systems for both its computer line as well as existing iPhones.
Shares of Apple /quotes/comstock/15*!aapl/quotes/nls/aapl (AAPL 136.79, -0.18, -0.13%) ended the day down by 82 cents to close at $143.85. The stock has surged by more than 60% over the last three months.
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If you like to search for “music lyrics” or “free” things, you are engaging in risky cyber behavior. And “free music downloads” puts 20 percent of Web surfers in harm’s way of malicious software, known as “malware.”
A new research report by U.S.-based antivirus software company McAfee has identified the most dangerous Internet search words that place users on pages with a higher likelihood of cyber attacks.
The study examined 2,600 popular keywords on five major search engines — Google, Yahoo, Live, AOL and Ask — and analyzed 413,000 Web pages. -
As the automobile industry sheds jobs, it comes as good news that over the last decade or so the Internet has created 1.2 million jobs, many paying higher salaries than average, a new study finds.
Internet business contributes 2.1%, or $300 billion, to the total GDP (gross domestic product) of the U.S. And IT and related online business may be faring better in this recession than they did in the dotcom bubble of 2000-2002, still growing revenue but at slower pace.
Consumers are now making 10% of their retail purchases online, with the exception of groceries, on the Internet, and Internet-based advertising has increased four-fold since 2002 to more than $20 billion, said John Deighton, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, and one of the authors of the study along with Hamilton Consultants Inc.
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If you like to search for “music lyrics” or “free” things, you are engaging in risky cyber behavior. And “free music downloads” puts 20 percent of Web surfers in harm’s way of malicious software, known as “malware.”
A new research report by U.S.-based antivirus software company McAfee has identified the most dangerous Internet search words that place users on pages with a higher likelihood of cyber attacks.
The study examined 2,600 popular keywords on five major search engines — Google, Yahoo, Live, AOL and Ask — and analyzed 413,000 Web pages. -
As the automobile industry sheds jobs, it comes as good news that over the last decade or so the Internet has created 1.2 million jobs, many paying higher salaries than average, a new study finds.
Internet business contributes 2.1%, or $300 billion, to the total GDP (gross domestic product) of the U.S. And IT and related online business may be faring better in this recession than they did in the dotcom bubble of 2000-2002, still growing revenue but at slower pace.
Consumers are now making 10% of their retail purchases online, with the exception of groceries, on the Internet, and Internet-based advertising has increased four-fold since 2002 to more than $20 billion, said John Deighton, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, and one of the authors of the study along with Hamilton Consultants Inc.
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Amazon EC2 is among the more potent items in Amazon’s web services arsenal. You’ve probably heard of many of the other services such as S3 for storage and FPS for payments. EC2 is all about the “elastic compute cloud.” In layman’s terms, it’s a server. In slightly less layman’s terms, EC2 lets you easily run and manage many instances (like servers) and given the proper software and configurations, have a scalable platform for your web application, outsource resource-intensive tasks to EC2 or for whatever you would use a server farm.
There are three different sizes of EC2 instances you can summon and they’re all probably more powerful than the server currently running your blog. Unless you’re offloading video processing or something intense to EC2, the default small instance with its 1.7GB of RAM and 160GB disk should be more than fine. It’s just nice to know that if for any reason I need a farm of machines each with 15GB of RAM, I can get that easily. -
The Obama administration is set to announce today two proposals that would empower shareholders and the Securities and Exchange Commission to have more oversight over executive compensation at all publicly traded firms, government sources said.
The measures would require legislation, which is expected to be sent to Capitol Hill soon, one of the sources said.
Under a so-called "say-on-pay" plan, shareholders would have a greater voice over what top earners at firms are paid.
A second proposal aims to provide company compensation committees more independence as they determine what executives should make.
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Here it is, kiddies: the latest iPhone. Just one year after Apple announced the iPhone 3G, the iPhone 3G S has been announced. There is much to love in this update including larger storage options, a faster CPU, HSDPA support and a better camera all for the same price as the current set.
The OS should now run faster thanks to a 50% bump in CPU speed; it now runs at 600MHz. The system memory has doubled to 256MB as well.
Apple didn’t forget about the camera – well, sortof. The iPhone 3G S did get an upgrade in that department too, but it’s only with a 3MP camera. It does finally support auto-focus, but it’s still not up to par with other flagship smartphones. Plus, this iPhone can now shoot video at 30 FPS with auto lighting and auto focus.
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It sucks to receive complaints. I mean, it is a blow to the ego for sure. But there is a silver lining (or perhaps its platinum)… a complaining customer is an opportunity to improve your service not only for them, but for all future customers. And, if you do it right, you can turn that unhappy customer into your biggest, most vocal fan. Here are 55 tips, donated by TPErs, on exactly how to turn that raging customer into a raving fan:
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How big is the U.S. venture industry?
The National Venture Capital Association says that in 2008 there were 882 firms that had raised at least one fund in the last eight years, a substantial drop from 2007 when there were 1,019 fitting that definition.
Another measure is to look at the number of venture firms that made a U.S. investment in 2008. While that methodology yields a number of active firms – 848 – that is in the same ballpark, it shows a less dramatic decline. But all bets are off this year and next as many funds raised during the tech bubble hit the end of their natural lives.
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Tense negotiations over the value of warrants held by the Treasury Department could prevent some of the biggest U.S. banks from fully shaking off government ownership after they repay billions of dollars in bailout funds in coming days.
Some big banks, including JPMorgan Chase & Co are wrangling with officials over the warrants they want to buy back from Treasury, which the government owns in addition to the banks' preferred stock. The banks argue they should get a discount on the warrants because they did not want the money in the first place.