Mobile virtual network operators are sprouting up like crazy all over the U.S. after becoming nearly extinct a few years ago. Why the renaissance? According to two of those new virtual operators, GSM Nation and TIng, the big carriers are finally letting MVNOs spread their wings. Read more »
The folks over at iFood.tv are no longer just proffering up cooking videos and recipes. IFood.tv’s founders have launched a nutrition search engine and database called NutritionRank with the rather ambitious goal of making it the web’s top repository of dietary health information. Read more »
We knew international roaming was coming to Verizon’s LTE phones, but on Friday Verizon is finally turning it on two of its devices, the Motorola Razr and the Razr Maxx, as part of the same update that upgrades those handsets to Ice Cream Sandwich. Read more »
AT&T has started sending out small cell feelers to its vendors,which could be the first sign of big changes to come on AT&T’s networks. LightReading reports that an AT&T RFI indicates that Ma Bell is looking to procure as many as 100,000 pint-sized base stations. Read more »
BlackBerry development may be on steep decline, but the platform still remains a profitable one for the developers that have stuck with it. According to a new study, average monthly revenue from a BlackBerry app is $3,853, compared to $3,693 for iOS and $2,735 for Android. Read more »
The stage was set for a lively debate between public cloud rivals at GigaOM’s Structure conference. OpenStack co-founder Chris Kemp challenged his Citrix and Eucalyptus on their “closed” cloud implementations and embrace of Amazon Web Services’ API, which he compared to the Walmart of infrastructure. Read more »
SpiderCloud Wireless just closed a big $35 million funding round, but it’s about to reveal a deal arguably of much bigger importance. On Thursday, SpiderCloud will announce a new contract with NEC to supply its enterprise small cell technology to carriers around the world. Read more »
As datasets get fatter and cumbersome, it’s becoming harder to move them around. Even the fattest pipes look like cocktail straws when you’re talking about petabyte databases. It’s getting more and more difficult to move these massive troves of data to the applications that use them. Read more »
If you ever wanted to take a stroll through the computing industry’s past, it’s not necessary to go all the way to Mountain View, Calif., to visit the Computer History Museum. Just step inside a data center. Read more »
Swype just got a whole lot smarter. Nuance is updating Swype with the same sophisticated contextual-anguage technologies it uses in its speech-recognition products. The result is what Nuance is calling a “living keyboard” — one that can learn both its user’s vocabulary and his habits. Read more »
MightyText has taken the beta wraps off of its over-the-top messaging service, which extends an Android phone’s SMS capabilities to PCs and tablets. Using the same phone number, a MightyText user can send and receive text messages from a PC or tablet browser. Read more »
A wireless band that the mobile industry has practically written off may get a new life as 4G spectrum if a new proposal from AT&T and Sirius XM gets regulatory approval. The two strange bedfellows have submitted a joint filing to the FCC requesting permission to […] Read more »
Greplin is getting a facelift and a new name, Cue, a moniker reflecting its new shift away from personal data search toward personal data organization. Rather than merely searching your linked accounts, Cue is now proactively organizing that data into an intelligent snapshot of your day. Read more »
Sprint wants its Nextel customers to move to its CDMA network so it can hasten the inevitable retirement its old iDEN systems. To coax customers over, Sprint is offering them three times the coverage they currently get with their Nextel phones. Read more »
The increasing complexity of today’s radio technologies and mounting demands of larger screens and more powerful processors have all conspired to make new smartphones much bigger power hogs. But Qualcomm just bought a chip company that will help it solve that problem. Read more »
InterDigital has been shopping its patent portfolio around for while, and on Monday it revealed it had a taker. Intel has scooped up 1700 of its patents for $375 million, bulking up the chipmaker’s intellectual property holdings in the increasingly critical mobile networking sector. Read more »
Cooks are increasingly using services like Evernote, Facebook and Pinterest to store their culinary ideas, storing recipes as notes, likes and pins for later viewing. The problem is none of the three is designed to be a culinary tool, but Say Mmm plans to change that. Read more »
T-Mobile USA has a well-deserved reputation for having the hungriest smartphone users in mobile, but now it’s offering proof. The typical smartphone user on its network consumes an impressive 760 MB per month. For HSPA+ 42 smartphones that number increases to an astonishing 1.3 GB. Read more »
Exclusive: This fall unlocked smartphone retailer GSM Nation will launch a virtual operator service, pairing T-Mobile’s HSPA+ speeds with the 200-plus smartphones it sells online. The company is breaking the link between operator and device and dispelling the notion that phone subsidies actually save consumers money. Read more »
T-Mobile iPhone users can start rejoicing this summer – at least a few of them. T-Mobile will complete its planned conversion from GSM to HSPA+ on 2,500 of its cell sites this July. The upgrade will make the carrier iPhone compatible on 7 percent of its network. Read more »
The Razr Maxx has surpassed the iPhone as Verizon’s best-selling smartphone, according to reports. While this could be a sign that Motorola has a long-sought-after hit on its hand and is set to revive the storied Razr brand, be careful not read to much into it. Read more »
Sony has been on a quest to climb back into the U.S. handset market, and this month it’s introducing an imaging powerhouse that may help it accomplish that goal. AT&T will start selling Sony’s first U.S. LTE smartphone, the Xperia Ion, on June 24 for $100. Read more »
Tandem Entrepreneurs has closed its second fund, raising $32 million, which it will use to further its core mission: investing in early-stage mobile startups. Tandem began in 2007 as a capital fund for mobile startups, but has since expanded to become a small mobile-only accelerator. Read more »
T-Mobile will soon have nearly 1 million new wireless connections on its network, but they won’t be smartphones. T-Mobile is linking its 2G network to hundreds of thousands of ice machines – that’s right, those refrigerated boxes outside of grocery stores and gas stations containing bagged ice. Read more »
Openet has bagged $21 million in new funding. The vendor makes a mobile network element that most people have never heard of, the policy control and charging manager, but the policy manager is already having a huge impact on the way we consume mobile data. Read more »
T-Mobile USA is shutting down 75 percent of its GSM capacity in order to clear its airwaves for mobile broadband. You would think that such a large-scale retirement of 2G would wreck havoc on its M2M communications business. But the opposite appears to be case. Read more »
LTE will have an enormous impact on mobile data’s future. But if Apple, the maker of the world’s most popular smartphone, isn’t on board, that progress could be impeded, and, worse, the industry could actually start regressing. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
A lot of automakers are lining up to support Apple’s new Siri Eyes Free technology, but Ford, the most aggressive company in the connected-car space, isn’t joining the queue. A platform war over the connected-car interface might be in the making. Read more »
At WWDC Apple unleashed FaceTime on the 3G network. While you would think a high-quality video chat service would be poison to consumers’ restricted data plans, there’s another way to look at it: Compared to what mobile operators charge for voice, FaceTime is really a bargain. Read more »
Sprint gave up its voting majority on the Clearwire board last year, but now it has given up its majority ownership in the 4G provider as well. By letting its stake fall below 50 percent, Sprint protects itself if Clearwire defaults on its debt. Read more »
France’s Bouygues Telecom is working with virtual hotspot network Devicescape to give its smartphone customers seamless access to 8 million open Wi-Fi access points globally, replicating – at least fractionally – one of the key differentiators Iliad’s Free Mobile has on the competition: a 4 million-node offload network. Read more »
As promised, hactivist group Anonymous organized demonstrations on Saturday in 16 cities throughout India, protesting the governments Internet laws and the ISPs’ blocking of popular file-sharing sites. Protesters donned Guy Fawkes masks and amassed at cricket grounds and other outdoor landmarks from Chennai to Delhi. Read more »
There are an awful lot of active iPhones in the market, and according to a new report from Ericsson, those devices are having an outsized impact on the world’s 3G networks. Traffic from the iPhone is nearing 50 percent of all data traversing carriers’ HSPA networks. Read more »
Sierra Wireless believes that laptop PCs too thin even to support an Ethernet port would be ideal candidates for an embedded LTE connectivity. On Thursday it unveiled its latest LTE module, which, at 2.5 mm in thickness, Sierra claims is the world’s thinnest 4G wireless module. Read more »
Desktop virtualization and cloud computing vendor Citrix Systems is expanding into the mobile infrastructure market, announcing on Thursday it plans to acquire mobile traffic optimization company Bytemobile. The companies didn’t disclose the terms of the deal, but they expect it to close in the third quarter. Read more »
Verizon recently has aggressively pursued its LTE-connected-car strategy, buying up Hughes Telematics and on Wednesday launching a new initiative with foreign car manufacturers. But not all automakers are necessarily on board with Verizon’s dream of embedding 4G into every car. Read more »
Trying to give the still nascent mHealth sector a motivational kick in the pants, the Federal Communications Commission has begun working directly with startups and universities to help bring new wireless telemedicine and healthcare technologies to market faster. Read more »
You can already access music subscription service MOG on your smartphone, tablet, PC, and many home entertainment appliances. Now it’s moving onto the biggest gadget of them all, the car. MOG is launching on Ford’s Sync connected car platform. Read more »
Clearwire may be preparing to transform itself into an LTE operator, but that hasn’t stopped it from selling its WiMAX service to other carriers. The latest to jump on Clearwire’s bandwagon is MVNO Jolt Mobile, which is making the odd pairing of GSM with WiMAX. Read more »
It took 12 years for 3G technologies to touch half of the world’s population, but getting to 85 percent coverage will only take another five, according to wireless infrastructure vendor Ericsson. In addition, Ericsson projects LTE networks will cover half the globe’s population. Read more »
