December, 2011 — Tech News and Analysis

Archive for December 2011

Reports say Apple is buying a maker of flash memory technology for up to $500 million. Apple hasn’t confirmed or commented on the deal, but it does seem to fit with Apple’s M.O. when it comes to acquisitions and its overarching strategy. Read More »

Long-haul networks aren’t the only pipes getting 100 gigabit upgrades these days. On Tuesday Verizon said it is upgrading the metro networks in at least seven U.S. cities to meet the demand for broadband at the edge. Looks like we’re closing in on the terabit age. Read More »

 
 

In documents released late Monday, Carrier IQ revealed its phone monitoring software isn’t just sending same generic performance and network metrics from every device. Operators could use Carrier IQ’s platform to perform research on their unwitting customers, recruiting their phones into virtual focus groups. Read More »

The first round of 200 tickets to the Crunchies, the annual tech innovation awards, go on sale today at 10 a.m. The award show will be held January 31, 2012, at Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. Read More »

Can BuzzFeed turn itself from a silly meme-generator into a serious media outlet by hiring journalists like Politico writer Ben Smith? If the meteoric rise of the Huffington Post has shown us anything, it’s that new media entities can spring from the most unlikely of sources. Read More »

Despite the confident words of Google chairman Eric Schmidt, who predicted that Android would be the primary platform for developers, the current trends are still decidedly leaning toward iOS. Mobile analytics firm Flurry found that developers are picking iOS over Android by a 3-1 ratio. Read More »

How about this for localization: Hulu announced a number of new deals for Spanish-language content Tuesday morning, but it’s not about to embark on any Latin American expansion like Netflix. Instead, the site is now targeting Latinos in the U.S. with a dedicated site section. Read More »

Up-and-coming Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider Tier3 has made a significant contribution to the Platform-as-a-Service world by releasing a .NET implementation of the Cloud Foundry PaaS project. A fork project called Iron Foundry will serve as the primary source of .NET development within Cloud Foundry. Read More »

Goal setting is traditionally one of the most top-down aspects of business, with executives setting the agenda and employees often unclear on how their daily work fits into that vision. Now Rypple is teaming up with Spotify to reimagine goal setting with Social Goals 2.0. Read More »

Life360, a mobile family safety app, has been on a tear and is now up to 10 million users. That growth has helped the San Francisco start-up pull in a $3.5 million Series A round from a host of investors. Read More »

Imagine you want to use your cell phone to, say, order take-out food but you don’t want to pay for making the call, or a text message. The answer to that ultra-low cost question is India’s fascinating growth of the “missed call” ecosystem. Read More »

Playing off the interest in creating software defined networks for virtualized environments, startup ConteXtream has launched a product that allows a data center operator to separate network services such as firewalls and load balancers from the physical hardware. It joins several startups pushing virtualized networks. Read More »

More Must Reads

A new survey from Intuit QuickBase shows an increasing number of tech-savvy employees are building their own solutions without going through official IT channels – some even despite official IT opposition. Is this good news or bad for IT? For workers? Read More »

Gogii, the maker of popular messaging app TextPlus, is launching a service called TextPlus Free Calls that enables a host of devices, even Wi-Fi-only devices, to make and receive phone calls for free or very cheaply. Free Calls joins a growing number of IP-based communications competitors.… Read More »

Fiksu, a Boston-based start-up that helps developers obtain loyal app users, is training its sights on helping drive paid downloads with a new product called FreeMyApps. The service incentivizes iOS users to try traditional paid apps that have been made free. Read More »

While 2011 will be remember as a troubling year for solar manufacturers, it also is a year when major U.S. power companies such as Duke, MidAmerican and Exelon took a plunge into investing and owning solar power plants. Read More »

In the latest salvo in the ever-hotter cloud storage battle, YouSendIt added iPad and Android client apps to its cloud-based document sync, transfer and storage service, as well as updated iPhone and Windows desktop apps. A new Mac desktop version is in beta. Read More »

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