Virgin America flight attendant on landing: “If your mobile device is within reach, you can stop pretending it’s turned off now.” – Andy Baio (@waxpancake) Jvia Twitter
Read MoreESPN is hoping marketers will take a swing at two new pitches in its digital-advertising repertoire, which the sports cabler is set to introduce at its upfront Tuesday in New York. In addition to redoubling its pact with Twitter to sell ads for video highlight tweets, ESPN is introducing: Gamebreak, a video ad unit built... Read more
Read MoreFor BlackBerry, this past year has been a very different beast from the one that preceded it. This time last year, on the eve of the company’s BlackBerry Live conference (formerly BlackBerry World), the company was making headlines for its dismal financial results, its ongoing search for an adviser to help evaluate its strategic options , and its perennially coming-real-soon-now next-generation operating system, BlackBerry 10. Today, BlackBerry is in far less precarious position. It has finally managed to ship BlackBerry 10 — along with a couple of handsets on which to run it — and all have been generally well received. The company’s touchscreen smartphone, the Z10, set launch-day sales records in Canada and the U.K. ; its Qwerty sibling, the Q10, has been garnering positive reviews ; takeover rumors have gone quiet; the company reported a surprise profit in its most recent quarter, and its shares are up some 25 percent since the beginning of the year. While BlackBerry hasn’t yet escaped the skepticism that mercilessly dogged it last year, it has provided investors and developers — and really anyone with an interest in the company — some reason for cautious optimism, despite the still daunting challenges ahead of it . So there’s still a lot riding on BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins’s keynote address at BlackBerry Live tomorrow morning, but the company is in a far better place to deliver. So what can we expect from Heins when he takes the stage tomorrow
Read MoreGoogle announced Monday that publishers hooked into Google+ can use the social network to offer customized story recommendations via the mobile Web. The new product suggests stories to readers based on what’s relevant on a publisher’s site, or if a user is signed in to their Google account, a story on the site that’s currently popular on Google+. The idea, Google said, is to surface the most relevant content for users, while recirculating more traffic for publishers.
Read MoreIt has been a month since Facebook released Home, the company’s take on a socialized operating system built atop Android. And at a press event this week, Facebook talked about how the app has done in its first weeks on the market. The verdict thus far? Not exactly a home run. Consider this: Home’s project leads Cory Ondrejka and Adam Mosseri said the app was nearing a million downloads as of this week. Sound impressive? Look at it this way: One million downloads of Facebook Home is less than .1 percent of Facebook’s entire monthly active user base, now topping 1.1 billion people every month. And as the company disclosed in its last earnings call, more than 750 million of those people visit Facebook regularly via mobile device. Put simply, one million downloads is a drop in the social ocean. Not that that matters to Facebook, which insists that it’s not that concerned with low numbers, even if some think they should be. “[The number of downloads is] not really important to us,” Mosseri told reporters . “What’s important to us is if people are liking the apps a lot.” Update 3:15 p.m. PT, with further release context: User satisfaction, in this case, is the thrust of Facebook’s rollout strategy for Home, according to the company. Though Home is available for download globally, right now only five Android devices are capable of installing the software — a small amount compared to the hundreds of available Android handsets on the market. Facebook frames this as intentional; release slowly to select devices, and you can listen and fine-tune the product in future software updates, ultimately making the users happy. (That’s the goal, at least.) While it might be unusual for Facebook to dismiss download numbers — particularly in the long term — it’s fair for the company to put user experience and uptake first. The problem is that Facebook didn’t break out how many of those downloads actually resulted in installs and prolonged use of the application. Downloads, after all, do not imply continued or even occasional usage.
Read MoreSure, everyone hears the announcements to turn off all electronics before takeoff. But not everyone listens. And it’s not just the one guy you see blatantly ignoring the flight attendent’s request. A new survey from the Consumer Electronics Association finds that 30 percent of people admit to at least occasionally forgetting to turn off a device, most often a smartphone. What’s more, lots more folks admit that when they do turn off their device they are really only putting it in “airplane mode,” which turns off the cellular radio but leaves the device on. And, of course, that’s what people will admit to in a survey. The poll comes as the Federal Aviation Administration is pondering whether to change its electronics policies .
Read MoreStartup BlueStacks, best known for software that lets Android apps run on Windows, has its eye on the game console business. On Thursday, the company is announcing an Android-powered set-top box called the GamePop console. The unit, which takes aim at the Kickstarter-backed Ouya as well as traditional gaming consoles, is built around the Jelly Bean version of Android (4.2), but BlueStacks isn’t disclosing other hardware details, such as what chip will power the device. The timing of the announcement is a bit unfortunate for BlueStacks, coming the same day that Ouya is announcing that it has raised $15 million in funding from a variety of blue-chip venture backers, including Kleiner Perkins. Rather than charge for its console, BlueStacks plans to give away the device — at least initially — and will charge a $6.99-per-month subscription fee, which includes game titles such as Fruit Ninja, as well as titles from Glu Mobile, Halfbrick, and OutFit7, the maker of the Talking Tom series. It’s a bit of a departure for BlueStacks, which has been beta testing software that lets Android software run on a desktop computer. That program just passed 10 million downloads . “Mobile gaming has been taking off the past few years,” BlueStacks CEO Rosen Sharma said in a statement. “BlueStacks’ vision is to bring that same experience to bigger screens.” Beyond bringing mobile games to the big screen, Sharma also hopes to change the economics that have traditionally supported console gaming – -namely expensive high-end hardware subsidized by expensive games.
Read MoreHaving grabbed a big chunk of the profitable smartphone business from Apple Inc. and others, Samsung Electronics Co. now faces a new, enviable Apple-like challenge: a mammoth pile of unspent, accumulated cash. After a first quarter marked by a 42 percent rise in net profit, Samsung said its cash and cash equivalents grew to nearly $40 billion at the end of March. After stripping out debt, Samsung’s net cash position is 31.2 trillion won, or $28.5 billion. Already one of the biggest in Asia, Samsung’s cash pile is building at an eye-popping rate. Its net cash has nearly tripled over the past year alone. Read the rest of this post on the original site »
Read MoreT-Mobile released full first quarter financials late Tuesday evening, adding that it has also sold more than 500,000 iPhones since it began selling the iPhone on April 12. For the quarter ending March 31, T-Mobile reported a 7 percent dip in revenue from a year earlier. Adjusted earnings, excluding interest, tax, depreciation and amortization of $1.2 billion was also down 7.5 percent from a year earlier, though that figure was up from the fourth quarter. However, T-Mobile has been pretty darn busy since the quarter ended–adding the iPhone, doing away with phone subsidies and closing its deal to acquire MetroPCS . The company is also spending billions to build an LTE network as it tries to catch up to its larger rivals. T-Mobile had announced some quarterly metrics back in April, when it noted that it added 579,000 subscribers in the three-month period, with contract subscriber losses for the quarter had narrowing to 199,000. “Our first quarter operating metrics and financial results are showing positive impact from the changes we began making in the fourth quarter. CEO John Legere said in a statement, adding that the company added T-Mobile branded customers for the first time since early 2009. “Things only get more exciting from here, having brought T-Mobile USA and MetroPCS together to create the wireless industry’s value leader and premier challenger.”
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