Items tagged with messaging
We're constantly being reminded that our government has a great interest in our private lives, whether it's flying specially equipped planes over densely populated areas to trick tens of thousands of phones into forking over sensitive data, or snooping on Internet traffic, big brother's watching us. One of the few...
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Arguably, BlackBerry should've opened up its BBM platform to everyone years ago, as it could've leapfrogged Hangouts, iMessage, Snapchat, and some of the other chat tools ahead of where we are now. At this point, the BBM userbase is so small, that it arriving on iOS and Android a while back has had little impact on...
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T-Mobile may not have the widest coverage net of the major U.S. carriers, but boy, are they gaining mind share. And as it turns out, market share as well. After adding nearly 4.4 million subscribers in the most recent quarter, rivals such as AT&T are having to pay attention. They're also having to modify their...
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One has to wonder if Facebook is feeling any buyer’s remorse, as the messaging service the company just dropped $19 billion to acquire experienced an outage on Saturday, according to reports. WhatsApp didn’t provide much in the way of details beyond a pair of tweets that acknowledged the outage and then...
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WhatsApp is a popular cross-platform mobile messaging app, and it now belongs to Mark Zuckerberg and Co., although the acquisition is leaving Facebook quite a bit lighter in the wallet; the WhatsApp deal is for $19 billion. That’s $4 billion in cash, $12 billion in Facebook shares, and another $3 billion in...
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Snapchat's founders evidently have some big things planned for their startup, and it doesn't involve selling to Facebook for $1 billion. It takes some mighty big you-know-what to scoff at that kind of cash, especially when you're in your early twenties as co-founders Evan Spiegal (23 years old) and Bobby Murphy (25...
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WhatsApp, iMessage, Kik, Facebook -- the world is overrun with messaging apps and platforms, and we've stumbled upon a near infinite amount of ways to send short snippets of text and images to friends and colleagues around the world. But here's one you may have forgotten about: ChatON. That's Samsung's own chat app, and the company announced...
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On one hand, this is huge news for BlackBerry. But on the other, it would've been far, far more monumental if this had happened five years ago. During BlackBerry's annual developer event in Florida today, the company announced that BBM (its proprietary messaging service, similar to iMessage for Apple devices) would...
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Third-party messaging services are proving ultra-popular. Just ask Viber, the latest free messaging and VoIP app to skip past the 200 million users mark. Viber, which allows free calls, text messaging, and picture sharing, has been playing it smart by supporting a variety of platforms, including iOS, Android, Windows...
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Whoa, wait a second -- text messaging is on the decline? Well, not entirely, but it's certainly not shooting through the roof from a global perspective any longer. Once thought to be the number one killer of voice minutes, texting seems to be on the decline in a few locales around the world. According to M.G.I...
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Skype's on the acquisition trail again. Shortly after Microsoft announced their intentions to scoop up Skype for many, many billions of dollars, Skype themselves have done some shopping on the open market. GroupMe, a social startup that was gaining huge traction with their group-messaging application on Android and iOS, is now a part of the...
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Have you ever wished you could send a text, without typing anything? Texting and driving is a huge distraction, and there are lots of times where only a text will do, but actually stopping to type something out just isn't convenient. What if you could simply speak, and a text would be created and sent? That's now possible so long as you have...
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Ever heard of Swype? That's a program on Android that allows mobile users to simply leave their fingertip on the display and move it from point to point in order to input text. It's a radical change from pressing key after key, and it's clearly catching on. Nuance is a company that has been involved with touch input...
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AT&T and Pantech have teamed up to offer customers a new quick messaging phone with a touch screen handset and a sliding keyboard. The new Pursuit phone offers a 2.8-inch touchscreen display, multitasking capabilities, a full QWERTY keyboard, and apps such as Drawing Commander, Face Tag and Graffiti. The Pantech Pursuit is currently available...
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Mobile Internet use is on the rise. If you follow technology at all, that's no surprise to you, but you may be taken aback by just how quickly the technology could become a household mainstay. It didn't take too long for the television to sweep across the world, and the Internet is getting there at an even faster rate. Mobile broadband is...
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Think you thumbs are quick? Think again. LG, which has long been a supporter of finding out just who exactly can text the fastest in this zany world of thumb-friendly communicators, has just announced that Yeong-Ho Bae, 18, and Mok-Min Ha, 17, of South Korea are the (new) fastest texters on the planet. Hear that? On the planet! The duo defeated...
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For all the parents out there who can't stand to see their kids text during meals, during family reunions and during study sessions, here's a note: that obsession could land them $50,000 and fifteen solid minutes of fame. Just eight months after getting her first cell phone, Iowa's own Kate Moore managed to out-text 20 other finalists from...
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Before you say, "So What?" we are well aware that you could send an SMS from email by using an address of the form number@att.txt.net (we're also aware AIM supported this). But when you did that, you only got a temporary ID that your friend could text you back on for a limited time. This new feature will give you a permanent "number"...
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The results of a recently published study of workers' instant messaging (IM) use shows that IM can actually improve workplace productivity. This contradicts a widely held belief that IM in the workplace is a hindrance to productivity. IM is often perceived as an interruption, and as such, "it can significantly hinder productivity by disrupting...
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In a somewhat controversial move, Microsoft will be including a new feature in its messaging services which will allow users to contact police with just a few clicks of the mouse. If you're a resident of the United Kingdom, the new "Report Abuse" icon will appear on your Windows Live Messenger or...
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