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Apparently Uber has big plans that extend beyond simply being an alternative taxi service for smartphone users. The startup wants to grow into something more: enter the logistics game and deliver both people and goods in short time frames. In order to do that, the company is willing spend several billion dollars acquiring Nokia's mapping service. According to a report in The New York Times, Uber is one of several companies caught up in a bidding war for Here, the primary competitor to Google Maps. Citing multiple people speaking on the condition of anonymity, NYT says Uber's offered as much as $3 billion to acquire the mapping service owned by Nokia, though it's going up against auto makers with...
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On Android, given that it's built by Google, consumers already have access to what is arguably the best routing/navigational app in the known universe: Google Maps. But if for some reason that doesn't appeal to you, there's another major player coming to Android at long last. The HERE team is announcing this week that a beta of its mapping app is now ready for Android users, so long as you're using a Samsung device. Thanks to a licensing agreement with Samsung, it'll be available for free, exclusively for Samsung Galaxy smartphones like the Galaxy S5. What makes HERE special is that it'll work without an Internet connection. If you have a solid GPS signal, you're in business, even when it comes...
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No matter how advanced tools like Google Maps have gotten, this is the question we all still have whenever we map a route: How long will it take me to get there--no, really? Maps always give you an estimate, and they try to take into account factors such as traffic, but they’re not ideal. Further, if you want to see multiple options for getting around a crowded city and want to compare routes, it’s slow and arduous to do so. Enter Isoscope, a new mapping that can tell you how long it will take you to get anywhere in a city; at any time of day; on any day of the week; given 2, 4, 6, 8, or 10 minutes. New York City (Credit: Fast Company) “We wanted our project to shed light on...
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Apple iPhone and iPad users can no longer download Nokia's HERE mapping application from the App Store. The Finnish phone maker voluntarily removed the app because of compatibility issues with the iOS 7 update that could ultimately "harm the user experience." Nokia said it's not blaming Apple or iOS 7, but this is a case where the app simply wasn't optimized for the updated mobile OS, so the decision was made to remove it. Nokia launched HERE on iOS back in November of last year. It was around the same time Apple was taking heat for its decision to remove Google Maps as the default mapping application in iOS. HERE might have become a fan favorite after Google Maps left (temporarily) the App Store,...
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While Google Maps has a huge amount of mind share amongst smartphone-equipped road warriors, Nokia has an ace in the hole: amazing maps for Windows Phone. Arguably the best pure offline navigation solution on a phone, Nokia Drive is getting a new edition: HERE Drive+ and HERE Transit. The two apps will soon launch worldwide to all Windows Phone 8 smartphones, not just Lumia devices. That means that HTC, Huawei, and Samsung WP8 products will soon be able to ride along with a Nokia mapping product. "With the global release of HERE Drive+ for all Windows Phone 8 devices we will further extend our HERE business and deliver on our promise of making HERE experiences available for as many people as...
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One could easily argue that the company who manages to perfect human-to-computer voice communications will have the future at their fingertips. While talking to a computer (or your car, or Siri) isn't new, it's not exactly ironed-out. Many folks won't even use Siri because the results are so spotty. Not even Google has managed to nail it; if you've ever looked at a Google Voice transcription, you'll know that things aren't always accurate. But Nokia is looking to gain where others have faltered. The company's mapping services are already amongst the most robust, and this week it's updating the HERE platform with a different kind of human-to-computer link: sight recognition. HERE uses sight navigation...
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Nokia's mapping system is right up there with Google's system in terms of depth, range, and reliability. But the company's hampered status in the U.S. has prevented many people from giving it a whirl. As it stands, the best offline mobile mapping solution on the market today resides on Lumia phones, but Nokia understands that not everyone is going to ditch their iPhone or Android handset for a Lumia. So, there's Here. The company launched its Here mapping platform a few weeks back, and now the Here iOS app is available for iPad and iPhone. Here gives iOS users access to Nokia's mapping system, complete with points of interest, contact sheets, and the ability to make certain segments available...
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Mobile payments -- or, at least the idea of mobile payments -- aren't new. In fact, America is one of the last nations to get onboard, despite having millions of smartphone owners. Square was first to jump on this bandwagon three or so years ago, providing smartphone owners with a free, small dongle that enabled a credit card swipe to be registered into a phone or iPad and processed; it made small business easy again. PayPal has been handling online payments, and obviously, it feels that there is room for one more player in the mobile payment industry. Thus, the company launched Here. PayPal Here is a new triangular dongle that effectively does the same thing as Square, but with slightly fewer...
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What is the most important thing to you that you can do on the Internet? Forget communicating and gathering information; according to results from a just-released study, for ten percent of all U.S. online households, entertainment is the single-most important thing that the Internet offers. In fact, the study indicates that nearly 20 percent of all U.S. households are now watching TV broadcasts online. This matches the results that came out of a similar study about a month ago that said that 20 percent of primetime TV is watched online."Most consumers are pressed for time and require flexibility in their daily schedules and TV viewing habits," says Lynn Franco, Director of The Conference Board...
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On Thursday Comcast announced a 250 GB cap for their broadband service. We applauded the fact that they finally gave some transparency to their "hidden" cap, which had always snagged a few users, without telling them exactly how much their use should be, but then we realized: where's the meter? Time-Warner Cable is currently trying out metered service in Beaumont, TX. Their caps are lower, but they do provide one thing: a page you can go to in order to check your usage. And what's interesting is the response you get if you ask Comcast about any plans for a meter: Charlie Douglas, who is Director of Corporate Communications for Comcast's Online & Voice Services, and who wrote us back...
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David Perlmutter (Intel Senior Vice President and General Manager, Mobility Group) delivered the final keynote of the first day of IDF. Perlmutter started out by declaring that notebook shipments are about to surpass desktop shipments. He predicts that within the next 10 years, Intel will be shipping over one billion Intel Architecture-based (IA) mobile devices per year. As to the growth of the mobile platform, Intel had only 35 notebook design offerings in 2002. In 2008, there are 244. Perlmutter stated that the first notebooks were heavy, slow performers, and had poor battery life. Today's notebooks have good battery life, are high performers, are light weight, and...
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October might officially be National Cyber Security Awareness Month, but based on the online security reports that have come out this July, it appears that Cyber Security Awareness is actually being promoted a few months early this year. First McAfee released its report on the lack of security measures being taken by small and medium businesses in the U.S. and Canada, and now security company, Sophos has just released its extensive snapshot of the state of worldwide, online security for the first half of 2008 with its Security Threat Report. Based on the information collected by SophosLabs--which included receiving "approximately 20,000 new samples of suspect software every single day"--Sophos...
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McAfee has finally released the results of its S.P.A.M. (Spammed Persistently All Month) experiment, which began in March. The project: take 50 people from ten countries to defy common sense and for 30 days surf the Web on a computer with no anti-spam software. Not just that, they were to take risks, and respond to spam, to make matters worse. The results were unsurprising. Of course, being the security company that it is, and having its own anti-spam product, McAfee has a vested interest in the results. It took less than 24 hours for the first spam message to reach an inbox. Over the 30 day project, the volunteers received 104,000 spam e-mails, or about 70 spam messages per day per participant....
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The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign is a hotbed of high-tech research these days. They've recently demonstrated a process for "growing" upright copper nanowires on surfaces made from a wide array of materials. These nanowires could be used to make Field-Emission Displays, brighter and sharper than existing flat panel displays, by using the nanowires to shoot electrons at phosphor particles on a screen. The copper nanowires are suitable for use in FEDs because they are uniform and have a very pointed tip. "The smaller the tip size the stronger the electric field," Kim says. "That is why even with a very small voltage...they will become very efficient electron emitters."...
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Some say Microsoft chose poorly when they backed Toshiba's HD DVD standard, and that had Microsoft backed Blu-ray instead, there wouldn't have been much of a format war. There's another group, including Michael Bay, that thinks Microsoft intentionally chose a standard that they didn't think would win in an attempt to undermine consumer confidence in disc formats altogether. Why?So they could build up their HD content on their digital distribution service:"Microsoft has been expanding the HD video capabilities of both Vista Media Center and Xbox Live Marketplace. The Marketplace's HD content library is modest today, but the software giant clearly has plans to change that.So, let's put everything...
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Rumors flew yesterday about today's YouTube announcement. Some thought it would be high-definition videos (long desired); others thought it would be a deal with Hulu (which would have been cool). The real announcement was an opening up of YouTube, turning it into a service that could power your own application, site, whatever, via new APIs.We try really hard to make YouTube as open as possible. Anyone can upload and view videos, which can be embedded anywhere and viewed on all kinds of different devices. And, of course, anyone can participate in our community by commenting on videos, rating them, and sharing them with friends. Nevertheless, we worried that we weren't open enough. So, we pulled...
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Google has cleared the final hurdle, the OK of anti-trust regulators in the EU, and will take over DoubleClick. DoubleClick is well-positioned to help Google consolidate its position in Internet marketing, advertising, and tracking customer surfing habits; and they specialize in multimedia ads that could possibly draw advertising revenue away from television. So the good news at DoubleClick is you're soon to be part of the most successful search company ever. For a lot of people, the bad news will be: you're fired. Besides opening up new opportunities, Google's takeover of DoubleClick will create more challenges for a management team already grappling with concerns about how the slowing...
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I don't know which I dread accidentally clicking on more: A PDF link (Adobe) or a Quicktime video (Apple). But unless you live under a rock, you're looking at Flash video every day on the Internet. Steve Jobs doesn't seem to be; he's publicly announced that Flash is unsuitable for the iPhone in any of its current iterations. Adobe countered that if your smartphone doesn't play Flash video, it's a pretty dumb smartphone. Rather than support Flash, Apple requires that video be delivered in a particular file format. As a result, even though Google's YouTube has agreed to go along with Apple, only a fraction of Web video is playable on the iPhone. Flash is used to display the majority of online...
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Word has reached us that Dell is cutting back some of their AMD-powered offerings, at least on their web site:“The big computer company said it still plans to keep selling the AMD-based machines in retail stores and over the phone and is still using its Web site to sell AMD-powered machines for business users. But Dell's shift is nevertheless seen as negative for AMD, which took years to convince Dell to modify its longtime strategy of using ...”It took Dell a very long time to agree to sell AMD machines, and sadly by the time they finally agreed to do so Intel was readying the Core CPUs. Considering that the performance (and demand amongst some high-end crowds) change every few CPU generations,...
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Yahoo's board of directors is reportedly meeting today to consider what to do about Microsoft's unsolicited $44.6 billion buyout offer. There's been quite a bit of advice, unsolicited and otherwise, offered to Yahoo to avoid being taken over. The offer so far exceeds the value of the stock involved that the board would likely be blamed for malfeasance if they did nothing, and it's very unlikely anyone else is going to offer more. Why is Yahoo's management balking at the takeover? "They have to be public about it," Ward [publisher of Boardroom Insider] said. "They have to leave a strong record of who said what and who and when....You document and then you re- document...You have to show...
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We've been hearing that SP1 has been nearly ready for release for quite a while now, so when can we expect to see it? Perhaps in a few weeks.“Through its public relations agency today, Microsoft declined to comment on the Feb. 15 date beyond reiterating the software would be available in the first quarter. Still, several sources who work closely with Microsoft said a mid-February release is not unlikely, and they expect the software to be out before the end of March.”Microsoft might end up with a lot of returning corporate and government customers if Vista SP1 ends up being extremely stable and secure....
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CPU sales continue to break new records, with an overall growth of 8.5% in the fourth quarter of 2007. That's great news by itself, but there's an interesting breakdown on growth that shows some interesting facts:“Shipments of processors designed for PC servers stood out in the quarter, growing 17% sequentially. Shipments of processors for mobile PCs grew 10.3%, while processors for desktop PCs grew 6.5%. IDC analysis also reveals that, within each form factor, the percentage of high-end and mainstream processors grew at the expense of low-end processors. For example, in the desktop processor segment, high-end and mainstream processors represented 87.1% of processors shipped in the fourth...
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