Text-only SMS is looking pretty old-school with the rise of photo and messaging apps that are replacing the more traditional services. Apps like Snapchat or Facebook Messenger have gained a good deal of attention, but Digisocial’s attempt to combine photos and audio is worth a look. Read more »
Amazon is offering consumers a free digital copy when they buy a CD. It makes perfect sense to do the same for books — alas, it’s not going to happen. Here’s why. Read more at paidContent »
The $60 unlimited talk, text and data plan is back, but MetroPCS has removed some of the perks. No more Rhapsody and unlimited video and audio downloads for MetroStudio included. But for most customers the restored plan is still a much better deal. Read more »
The debate over whether WikiLeaks should be seen as a media entity like the New York Times took on a new urgency this week after the military prosecutor in whistleblower Bradley Manning’s trial said he sees no difference between the two. Read more at paidContent »
For the PC, heavily impacted by the rise in popularity of tablets, it was the worst showing for a holiday quarter in more than five years. PC sales were down 6.4 percent from the fourth quarter of 2011. Read more »
Touring Verizon’s booth wasn’t quite what I expected, but that’s not a bad thing. Instead of focusing on new consumer devices, the company is using the venue to show off partner products from its Innovations Center, illustrating the benefits of connectivity where you’d least expect. Read more »
Ford has lots of developer programs up its sleeve. After opening up Sync to developers this week, it announced Thursday OpenXC, an open-source software and hardware program that exposes the internal workings of the vehicle to a future generation of apps and devices. Read more »
Natural disaster can be devastating to data centers and the companies that rely on them. Unfortunately, many data centers are located in areas that tend to get hit with storms, tornadoes, floods, fires and other natural calamities. Read more »
Rhapsody is taking the fight for music subscribers to Spotify’s home turf: The U.S.-based service is going to launch in 16 European countries this spring. Read more »
Still waiting on that FreedomPop iPhone sleeve you ordered last summer? Well, you’ll have to wait at least a few more weeks. The devices are delayed at customs while the FCC goes through its certification process. Read more »
As TV viewing has gone online, the delivery of content has become fractured. With more players, there are more things to break, and it’s often the consumer that gets stuck in the middle when ISPs and the content giants like Netflix and amazon fight. Read more »
If Apple decides to make and sell an iPhone whose full, unsubsidized cost is less expensive than previous models, it’s going to sell it as a different iPhone that’s “more affordable for users,” not “the cheaper iPhone.” Read more »
What do telcos stand to gain from the cloud? Deutsche Telekom’s IT services wing is spelling it out, forecasting that a seventh of its revenues will come from cloud services in a couple years’ time. However, it’s worth examining what T-Systems actually means by ‘cloud’. Read more »
LED lighting is becoming popular for warehouses and factories. Not just because the lights save the building owners money, but because they are digitally networked and controlled. Startup Digital Lumen’s LED systems now cover 50 million square feet of industrial space. Read more »
Henry Blodget of Business Insider has opened up about his site’s growth and other metrics, but for someone who is promoting transparency, he hasn’t told us the most important things we need to know in order to tell whether BI is successful or not. Read more at paidContent »
Nuance is buying online virtual sales and support assistant developer VirtuOz for an undisclosed price, our sources tell us. VirtuOz gives Nuance a stake in the enterprise virtual assistant market to match its presence in the enterprise mobile apps. Read more »
Chegg, best known as a textbook rental site, is set to launch its first paid app, for Windows 8, on Thursday. As the company expands into a broader “student hub,” the app will help students answer problem sets in the most popular textbooks. Read more »
IBM proudly retained its usual top slot in the annual patent count. Other winners included rivals Google and Apple, which both saw big growth in the number of patents issued but did not crack the top ten. Read more »
Good news for anyone who owns CDs — Amazon is now selling music on a two-for-one basis that gives every customer a digital and a physical version of an album. The company just raised the stakes in its fight with Google and Apple over “music lockers.” Read more at paidContent »
By multicasting popular content over cellular networks, carriers figure they can conserve valuable 4G capacity. But as consumers use their smartphones and tablets to personalize their multimedia consumption, the ship may have already sailed on multicast’s potential. Read more »
The company has confirmed that the Xpress Browser used on its Asha and Lumia handsets does route HTTPS traffic via its servers, temporarily decrypting it as it does so. However, Nokia maintains that it wouldn’t access complete unencrypted information. Read more »
The bestselling 50 Shades of Grey trilogy is set to rake in even more cash: The books will be released in hardcover in time for Valentine’s Day. With their availability in that format, the trilogy will have completed a traditional publishing cycle almost entirely in reverse. Read more at paidContent »
ScaleArc’s technology sits between applications and their SQL databases, claiming to provide better performance and better operational insights than running MySQL, Oracle Database or Microsoft SQL Server alone. With a $12.3 million Series C round, ScaleArc will try to withstand a glut of competition. Read more »
China Mobile is the world’s largest carrier with 650 million subscribers. China is one of the fastest-growing markets for Apple devices. As Apple looks to expand its customer base, this one carrier alone could help it make faster inroads into China. Read more »
The Finnish firm’s preliminary results for the fourth quarter of last year show a surprise return to profitability for its Devices & Services division, partly thanks to unexpectedly high Lumia sales. Read more »
NetSuite says retailers want to run their businesses on the same backend technology whether they are online or on Main Street so it’s buying Retail Anywhere to build one system for both. Read more »
Thousands of enterprise customers use Splunk to help solve challenging big data problems across their infrastructure and beyond. Read this analyst report and discover how Cars.com, a leading website for vehicle shopping, used Splunk to find new revenue and cost containment opportunities within its machine-generated data. Read more »
GigaOM Research and our sponsor Eucalyptus talk about the advantages of using the dev/test cloud as an initial use case in “2013: the year that dev/test goes hybrid,” a free analyst roundtable webinar on Wednesday, Jan. 16, 2013, at 10 a.m. PT. Read more »
Mirantis CEO Adrian Ionel says the fact that it’s getting financing from Dell and Intel, along with WestSummit Capital, does not negate it’s ability to deliver vendor-agnostic OpenStack clouds. Read more »
Streaming-data specialist Guavus has raised $30 million to help its business of helping telcos make more sense of their streams of network data. By analyzing that data on the fly, they can see in real time who how their networks are being used, and by whom. Read more »
Streaming music from your iPad to your connected TV just got a whole lot easier: Skifta, a popular DLNA media shifting app for Android, released an iOS version on Wednesday. Read more »
A new iPad magazine called Paragraph Shorts curates the “best short stories” from across the web and presents them in a Flipboard-like interface. The free app aims to add value through curation, introducing readers to authors and publications they might not have known about otherwise. Read more at paidContent »
The new, new thing to do these days is to launch a new streaming video service to compete with Netflix and Amazon. Intel, Walmart, AT&T, Sony, Verizon… the list of me-too offerings is getting longer. The problem is that they aren’t really better than the incumbents. Read more »
Looking for a Windows 8 slate on the cheap? Dell removed the active digitizer and swappable battery from its Latitude 10 tablet for an Essentials model that starts at $499. Aimed at educators and students, the tablet is much less than Microsoft’s $899 Surface Pro. Read more »
FCC chairman Julius Genachowski is opening a proceeding to clear 195 MHz of new 5 GHz spectrum for Wi-Fi use. The allocation would be the biggest bonanza of new unlicensed airwaves since 2003 and would help bring about new gigabit wireless technologies. Read more »
China’s big four internet companies are big — huge, in fact — but they’re not yet technological innovators like their American counterparts. However, scalability is an an issue that knows no borders, which has spurred some cross-continental cooperation. Will it also inspire a Chinese tech awakening? Read more »
It was a long time coming, but the Pebble e-paper watch is finally shipping after a few months of delays. The e-paper watch works with phones running iOS and Android, lasting a week per charge. Two new sensors are inside the Pebble to provide extra functions. Read more »
Jewish groups in France are invoking hate speech laws to demand that Twitter hand over the identities of users who tweeted anti-Semitic messages. This puts Twitter in a hard place because the company is committed to free speech. Read more »
Google has now invested in a Hoover Dam’s worth — or 2 GW — of clean power. The latest investment, announced on Wednesday is a $200 million equity stake into a wind farm in Texas. Read more »
Amazon may have discontinued the Kindle Touch last October in favor of the front-lit Paperwhite, but on Wednesday the Touch still got several nice new features through a software update that makes it more similar to the Paperwhite. Read more at paidContent »
