Clearwire Corp. has long been the U.S. wireless industry’s most embattled carrier. In recent months, the money-losing company has also emerged as its crown jewel. The company, which covers less than half the U.S. population with high-speed mobile Internet service, has teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. Now, both Dish Network Corp. and SoftBank Corp. are showing keen interest in Clearwire’s huge stockpile of spectrum even as they battle for control of Sprint Nextel Corp., a majority owner of Clearwire
Read MoreHuawei Technologies Co. seems to be taking a page out of Samsung Electronics Co.’s playbook. Three months after Samsung debuted its Galaxy S4 smartphone at a flashy event in New York with a Broadway-style show, the Chinese company is trying to build up a similar hype for its smartphone launch event in London Tuesday. Read the rest of this post on the original site »
Read MoreThe April robbery at the Cartier store in Chevy Chase, Md., was brazen and quick. After grabbing 13 watches valued at $131,000, the suspects fled in a waiting car and melted into traffic. It was one of more than a dozen similar capers that had stumped police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Read the rest of this post on the original site »
Read MoreFive years ago it would have been unimaginable for a government agency such as the National Security Agency to efficiently parse millions of phone, text and online conversations for keywords that could have warned of an impending terrorist attack. Today, a set of new technologies make it relatively affordable and manageable for it do so. These technologies can store vastly different types of data in a single database, and can be processed rapidly using inexpensive hardware, without an analyst having to formulate a hypothesis. “They’ve substantially reduced the cost and greatly increased the [government's] ability to analyze this type of data,” says Tom Davenport, an expert on analytics and a visiting professor at Harvard Business School. The technology needed to outfit data centers to perform these tasks has become “orders of magnitude” less expensive than in the past, he said. Read the rest of this post on the original site »
Read MoreAmazon.com Inc.’s original content arm on Friday unveiled a new tool that will help writers and film makers create and distribute their work online, while also strengthening the company’s pool of ideas for potential features or TV shows. Called Amazon Storyteller, the free online tool turns scripts into storyboards, complete with characters and dialogue that can then be shared with others for feedback. The tool is currently in beta. Read the rest of this post on the original site »
Read MoreTechnical question: How much computing power does it take to store and analyze data on every call in the U.S.? Answer: A lot. The National Security Agency maintains several data center facilities around the U.S. and is about to build another — a $1.2 billion facility in Utah that will be called Bumblehive and open this fall, where, according to one expert, it will analyze voice traffic from Verizon’s telephone network. Read the rest of this post on the original site »
Read MoreHewlett-Packard is looking to sell its stake Indian software company MphasiS in a deal it hopes will fetch at least $1 billion, a person familiar with the matter said. H-P’s advisers have approached several Indian outsourcing companies as well as private-equity firms to buy its stake but none have indicated interest, the person said. The talks are at an early stage, the person added. Read the rest of this post on the original site »
Read MoreYou can tell how much Google cares about its Android “partners” by the price Motorola plans to charge for its smartphones. The head of the mobile-phone company now owned by the search heavyweight laid out an aggressive pricing strategy for the firm’s future devices when speaking at the All Things D conference this week . Dennis Woodside said that, thanks to Motorola’s small smartphone market share, he can “attack” the market in ways that giant companies with giant gross profit margins can’t. “Every product in technology…the price has gone [down] because component costs have fallen.” Read the rest of this post on the original site »
Read MoreDish Network Corp.’s last-minute bid for Clearwire Corp. complicates an already dizzying set of telecom deals and creates a variety of scenarios that are sending stocks in varying directions. After the fourth bid in the battle for Clearwire, a mobile broadband provider that is majority owned by Sprint Nextel Corp., investors in the involved companies are weighing how all the offers could play out as the wireless industry consolidates. Read the rest of this post on the original site »
Read More
