Samsung Electronics Co. is planning to launch a new eight-inch tablet and a new smartphone built to withstand harsh environments this summer, boosting the company’s large roster of products with several devices designed to appeal to business and government clients. Samsung is planning to launch the new Galaxy-line tablet in June, according to a person familiar with the matter, adding to the seven-inch and 10.1-inch versions on the market. Read the rest of this post on the original site »
Read MoreOf course the CEO of a mobile mapping company is going to say maps are super important. But Waze CEO Noam Bardin has an interesting way of putting it. “What search is for the Web, maps are for mobile,” Bardin said at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference last week. The latitude and longitude of a location, he argued, are the equivalent of the URL for a Web page. Doing maps well is quite hard, as demonstrated by Apple’s troubled iOS mapping app launch last year. People really, really don’t like it when their maps are wrong — and rightly so
Read MoreAfter months of talking in broad strokes about its intent to get into the home security business , AT&T is ready with the full details. The company says its “Digital Life” service is now available in 15 cities — Atlanta, Austin, Texas, Boulder, Colo., Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Philadelphia, Riverside, Calif., San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis and parts of the New York and New Jersey metropolitan area. The company plans to expand to more than 50 cities by the end of this year. As for pricing, the basic service will start at $30 a month (plus $150 upfront for equipment). For $10 more per month (and an additional $100 in equipment fees), users can add three additional services, including sensors for motion, glass breakage, smoke or carbon monoxide. For even more, customers can add cameras, water-leak sensors, remote-controlled door locks and other features. The service is designed to work regardless of which provider a customer has for their home phone or wireless service
Read MoreA federal court in Seattle issued a ruling Thursday that could help settle the question of just how much a company can expect to reap from standard-essential patent. Source: Microsoft In the highly-anticipated court ruling, a court said Google’s Motorola Mobility unit is entitled to about $1.8 million a year from Microsoft for certain patents. Motorola had been seeking in excess of $4 billion in the case, which centered around patents related to the the H.264 video standard and the 802.11 wireless standard. “This decision is good for consumers because it ensures patented technology committed to standards remains affordable for everyone, Microsoft Deputy General Counsel David Howard said in a statement. Microsoft-Google-FRAND –
Read MoreAVG built a name for itself by offering free security software at a time when most others were charging. The company is trying to do the same in mobile, where it has managed to get some 70 million downloads for its free Android security product and is growing its active user base by about two million people each month. “That’s very much the heritage of where we came from,” COO John Giamatteo said in an interview. Things are a little different in mobile, of course. First of all, AVG faces competition not only from traditional security players but from mobile-centric companies such as Lookout and NQ Mobile . The other big question is how to make money in mobile. Traditionally, security vendors offer a basic free product and then try to upsell consumers on a paid or subscription product with added features.
Read MoreSamsung said Wednesday that broad global demand is behind delays in U.S. availability for its new Galaxy S 4 . “Due to overwhelming global demand of Galaxy S 4, the initial supply may be limited,” a Samsung representative told AllThingsD . “We expect to fulfill inventory to meet demands in the coming weeks.” Earlier on Wednesday, T-Mobile and Sprint both said that full retail availability of the Samsung flagship device would come later than expected . “We had planned to launch this next generation of the award-winning Samsung Galaxy line-up on Saturday, April 27,” Sprint said in a statement. “Unfortunately, due to unexpected inventory challenges from Samsung, we will be slightly delayed with our full product launch.” AT&T, meanwhile, said it plans to start selling the S 4 on Saturday as expected.
Read MoreAnd while we’re on the subject of hacking and malware , if you’re the user of Android phone, and if you happen to speak or send messages in Russian you might want to have a close look at some of the applications you’ve been running. Lookout Mobile Security said yesterday that it has detected a significant outbreak of malware lurking inside 32 different apps that it says have been downloaded a combined 2 million to 9 million times. (It’s unclear why that range is so large.) Google was notified and removed the affected apps and killed the developer accounts associated with them. And Lookout’s product, the company says, gives its customers protection against it. It’s called BadNews, and Lookout says it masquerades as “an innocent, if somewhat aggressive advertising network.” The network would initially serve up only ads, but later on, after having passed security scrutiny, would start pushing malware to affected devices. Among other things, the servers controlling the apps were caught pushing AlphaSMS, a well-known app that creates fraudulent text messages. One key takeaway is that apps need to be vetted and re-vetted more than once. “Enterprise security managers must assume that even very well designed app-vetting processes will not be able to detect malicious behavior that hasn’t happened yet.,” Lookout says. The delay in the bad behavior allowed it to be distributed pretty widely before the problems were detected. About half of the naughty apps are in Russian, and AlphaSMS is intended to commit SMS fraud in Russia and neighboring countries including Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia and Kazakhstan, LookOut says. The folks at Lookout do happen to know a thing or two about hacking phones. In fact its CEO, John Herring appeared on stage at D: Dive Into Mobile earlier this week to show AllThingsD’s Liz Gannes just how easy it can be to hack a phone . It certainly doesn’t seem to be getting any harder.
Read MoreVideo cameras played a critical role in helping authorities track suspects in this week’s Boston bombings. Now calls for increased camera surveillance in the U.S. are putting a spotlight on the technology and the debate about its use. Read the rest of this post on the original site »
Read MoreCareful what you click on via Twitter for the next few hours, especially if the link comes with a provocative headline and is from an affiliate of CBS or one of its network news programs. CBS News confirmed via its primary Twitter account that various accounts operated by its high-profile news magazine shows “60 Minutes” and “48 Hours” have been compromised. The links are said to be serving up malware, so, again, don’t click on them. Also confirmed to have been hacked is @CBSDenver, the Twitter account associated with the news division of the local affiliate in Denver, Colo. We have experienced problems on Twitter accounts of #60Minutes & @ 48Hours ; We apologize for the inconvenience; Twitter is resolving issues about 1 hour ago via Seesmic twhirl Reply Retweet Favorite @CBSNews CBS News PLEASE NOTE: Our Twitter account was compromised earlier today. We are working with Twitter to resolve. about 1 hour ago via web Reply Retweet Favorite @60Minutes 60 Minutes PLEASE NOTE: A message that was posted earlier to this account was not written or sent by @ 60Minutes or its staff. 45 minutes ago via web Reply Retweet Favorite @60Minutes 60 Minutes Since the offending tweets will probably disappear within the hour, here are some screen grabs. ( Update: They already vanished.)
Read MoreThe events in Boston — starting Monday with a pair of explosions that killed three and injured 176 near the finish line of the Boston Marathon — came to a dramatic close Friday night with the capture of 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of two brothers suspected of carrying out the attacks. He had been hiding out in a boat parked in the backyard of a house in Watertown, Mass. A furious citywide manhunt brought Boston and surrounding towns to a standstill, and there was little else to do all day but watch the live TV coverage. All day, reporters repeated what they knew, which was precious little beyond the bare facts. One suspect was dead, the other on the run after an intense gunfight with police. The “Breaking News” banners became meaningless, because throughout the day there was not much actual news breaking other than that the search continued. Not 30 minutes after a news conference during which local officials told Boston residents they could probably go outside again, police engaged in a firefight with the suspect hiding in the boat. It was at this point that a quarter of a million people, including me, tuned in to the streaming video image of Uniden Bearcat scanner radio picking up publicly available police communications traffic in Boston. As anyone who’s ever worked at a local newspaper can tell you, the real “breaking news” is often heard on police scanners. And, with right kind of radio, it is perfectly legal to listen in on how cops on the beat and firefighters conduct their business. Listening to the scanner is often how reporters and camera crews know where to go when there’s a story breaking. The scanner in question was set up in an anonymous home in Framingham, Mass. The owner had inexplicably placed his radio in the bathroom at the base of the toilet, trained a live Webcam on it, and streamed it to Ustream .
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