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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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