Tech — GigaOM

Tech

European antitrust regulators have announced the launch of a formal investigation into the relationship between Apple and five of the world’s largest publishers, in a move that could reshape the digital book market. Read More »

Amazon has been busy disrupting the traditional publishing market by encouraging self-publishing and signing authors to its own in-house imprint, but author Charles Stross argues that publishers themselves handed Amazon its biggest weapon in this fight: namely, the widespread use of digital-rights management locks for books. Read More »

 
 

The tough times for Nokia even stretch to its home territory in Finland — where the company’s traditional dominance of the smartphone market has been massively eroded in the past year, according to new figures from IDC. Read More »

Google, Apple, Twitter and Facebook have all been in the news recently because of their control over our access to certain information, and the ways in which they could potentially restrict it. How much does that affect the way we perceive the world around us? Read More »

Rural mobile operator Viaero Wireless is preloading YouMail’s visual voicemail application into all Android phones, giving customers a compelling alternative to its standard network mailbox services. This could be the beginning of a trend that sees the mobile carriers abandoning voicemail to independent cloud providers. Read More »

When will we stop talking about the cloud? If history is any guide, eventually the idea of the cloud as something that is separate from the web will disappear as more people get used to it — although when that will happen is anyone’s guess. Read More »

A Nielsen study found among smartphone users who downloaded an app in the last 30 days, 83 percent used an iPhone or Android devices. That app advantage will help keep those two at the top ahead of other smartphone challengers. Read More »

The Entertainment Software Ratings Board intends to apply its familiar game-rating stamps to mobile apps, providing a way for parents to monitor and restrict the games and content their kids download. Five mobile operators and Microsoft have signed on but Apple and Google are missing. Read More »

Whether it’s mobile devices like Square’s payment system or products that monitor our health and wellness, one of the threads running through the recent GigaOM RoadMap conference was the idea that successful technology involves making the computer disappear, even as it becomes more powerful. Read More »

Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet, widely viewed as the only real challenger to Apple’s iPad is out in the wild. Those who got the device have been putting it through the paces. Online video platform, Ooyala has taken data from its platform. Here is what Fire owners … Read More »

Apple and Microsoft are reportedly poised to support NFC next year in their handsets, according to a report from Digitimes. Apple’s support of NFC could be especially helpful for the nascent technology, helping expose it to a mainstream audience. Read More »

Tablets still tend to be early adopter devices, but they’re quickly becoming mainstream tools. By the end of 2014, one in every three Americans or 90 million users is expected to have a tablet, according to a new estimate by eMarketer. Read More »

More Must Reads

With Google Music, Amazon Cloud Player and iCloud, there has never been an easier — or more confusing — time to buy music. Avowed music geek Dan Kantor of exfm tells you everything you need to know about how (and where) you should buy your music … Read More »

Arguments over the compensation that artists get from streaming services like Spotify and Rdio just won’t go away — because everyone has wildly different experiences. So who’s got it wrong? Perhaps the real problem is that everybody is right in their own way. Read More »

Last night I was schooled at playing Jeopardy by Watson in an exhibition match and discovered that despite our fear of the robot overlords, humans are much smarter than we think. Case in point: Watson could never use Apple’s personal assistant Siri. Read More »

More evidence, if it were needed, that Europe is increasingly becoming a mobile-centric culture, with figures showing that France’s smartphone market has grown 34 percent in the last year. Read More »

We may not ever get another Steve Jobs, but when it comes to tech visionaries with the potential to disrupt the way we look at the world in significant ways, Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey is as strong a contender for the mantle as any. Read More »

The usual third-quarter subscriber boom failed to happen as operators had no new iPhone to lure in new customers. But UBS predicts that the fourth quarter will more than make up for any slumps, as it combines the traditional holiday surge with a delayed new-iPhone bump. Read More »

The Nest burst onto the scene recently, making waves unlike any seen for a product you’d never guess anyone would care about: the home thermostat. Fadell talked about how his team is rethinking a 50-year-old industry with lessons from his days at Apple. Read More »

Inkling, the startup that develops iPad versions of college textbooks, made its first foray into the general consumer market last month with the launch of The Professional Chef, a textbook for pro chefs. Smart move: The title just became the third highest-grossing iPad app worldwide. Read More »

Computers — the boxes that we consult — are wonderful, but they take away from what it is to be human and to really connect with one another, so the challenge and opportunity that lies ahead is how to get the computers out of computing. Read More »

It appears that the debate over whether supporting the Adobe Flash plug-in on mobile devices is a feature or not is over. Last night ZDNet got ahold of an announcement Adobe is set to make soon: that it is abandoning its work on Flash for mobile. Read More »

A new ChangeWave survey of 2,600 early adopters found that 5 percent had pre-ordered or were very likely to buy a Kindle Fire. And of those consumers, 26 percent said they were planning on delaying or holding off on the purchase of an iPad. Read More »

Amazon is being widely viewed as the only legitimate challenger to Apple’s iPad. And while the online giant has a huge online presence, the crucial difference for the Kindle Fire’s success is going to be the old fashioned retail stores — especially the big ones. Read More »

Republic Wireless, the division of Bandwidth.com that offers customers an Android phone with unlimited voice data and texts for $19 a month launches Tuesday. Here’s how it will work (there’s a $199 “membership” fee) and what it means for the wireless industry. Read More »

As more and more of our ‘computational’ needs that span from work to entertainment transition to the cloud, is it time to start writing the obituary for local storage? With a 100 Mbps connection, local storage is going the way of the dodo for me. Read More »

Wow! Was that week chock-full of news or what? Frankly, sometimes it was hard to remember what was happening. Nevertheless, here are some good and mind-nourishing pieces for the weekend that you can actually enjoy and learn from. Read More »

The enterprise is where the big bucks used to be, but home is where the heart and consumers are. As the web becomes more integrated in people’s lives, the home will become the battleground for the coming generation of startups and big-name companies. Read More »

Science fiction writers and futurists have long imagined a world in which we control everyday devices with our voice. That future seems a little bit closer to reality with the news that Apple’s Siri voice control technology will likely power its long-rumored iTV device. Read More »

After I wrote my recent article about Bluetooth integration with car audio, Ford contacted me about the Microsoft SYNC system. I took it for a test drive (literally). A new Ford may just be about the best (and probably most expensive) iPhone accessory out there. Read More »

Buzz around voice recognition technology is louder than ever, thanks to the debut earlier this month Apple’s iPhone 4S with Siri. But Apple isn’t alone in the space. Voice recognition startup SoundHound says it has seen impressive user growth over the past year. Read More »

A new report on tablet usage found that more than half of those surveyed use their devices to read the news, and they are reading more than they used to — but many of the sources they are using are non-traditional, and few are willing to … Read More »

With Android gobbling up market share, it was just a matter of time before it took the lead in app downloads from Apple’s iOS. That’s what happened in Q2 with Android commanding 44 percent of overall app downloads compared to 31 percent for iOS. Read More »

Reports that Google will include social features in its new music service reinforce what the rise of Spotify and other services have already made obvious — namely, that Apple and iTunes are falling behind in the social-music race, which could have significant consequences for the company. Read More »

Siri may be the hottest personal assistant since I Dream of Jeannie, but Apple’s artificial intelligence is only the tip of the iceberg as we combine ubiquitous connectivity, sensor networks, big data, new AI and programming into a truly connected network. Read More »

A new biography of Steve Jobs quotes Bill Gates as saying that the Apple co-founder “never really understood much about technology.” While the Microsoft billionaire likely saw that as a put-down, technology is arguably the least important thing about Apple’s most successful products. Read More »

Juniper Research of the U.K. released a report that shows that by 2016 nearly four-fifths of 640 million mobile VoIP users will be making calls through apps downloaded on their smartphones, while the rest of the calls could be over phone company networks. Read More »

VMware has signed deals with Verizon and Telefonica to offer virtualization on phones provided by the operators. The net result of this deal is that employees who want to combine their work phone and their personal phone will soon be able to do so. Read More »

When it comes to the phone business, there is no doubt that Apple vs Google makes a great headline. After all, who doesn’t like the battle of pachyderms. In fact it is about Apple and Google versus phones with the 12 key pads. Read More »

Twitter has only just begun to see the effects of its integration with Apple’s iOS 5 operating system. But just days after iOS 5′s debut last week, Twitter’s CEO says it has already started to see a big lift from the partnership. Read More »

Vlingo, a voice recognition start-up, isn’t sweating the introduction of Apple’s Siri voice action and AI system. In fact, the start-up saw its best week last week with five consecutive days of record usage with voice actions up 50 percent daily over the previous high. Read More »

How much wisdom can one glean from a 20-minute chat with Professor Clay Christensen? A lot. Here are notable highlights from the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma. We talk about Steve Jobs, innovation and the incorrect focus on short term thinking and trouble with IRR. Read More »

Did you hear the iPhone 4S saw pre-bookings of a million devices on day one? That’s not only good news for Apple, but also for its carrier partners: AT&T, Verizon and Sprint. And they aren’t the only ones cashing in on the iPhone 4S bonanza. Read More »

With his single-minded focus on creating great user experiences, Jobs redefined product design – and design in general – not just for Apple, but for designers like Typekit’s Jeffrey Veen, who found confidence and inspiration in Jobs’ work. Read More »

Mobile experience designer Christian Lindholm believes that great products are born out of deep, relentless dissatisfaction with the present and the status quo. Inside Apple’s walls, Jobs almost seemed to carry the burden of all humanity’s frustration with bad products. Read More »

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