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Showing posts with label latest technology news. Show all posts
Thursday, September 19, 2013
Official: Samsung Confirms Blackberry Messenger on it's Galaxy Smartphones with release date
Samsung has today 19th September, confirmed that when Blackberry Messenger, the mobile social network, for Android smartphones launches on the 21st September 2013, it will be available as a free download for Samsung Galaxy smartphones across Africa from the Google Play store.
In their statement: “We are pleased to officially announce that BBM will be available for Samsung Galaxy smartphones across Africa,” said EmmanouilRevmatas, Director of Hand Held Products, Samsung Electronics West Africa. “We are focused on driving consumer experiences based on customisation to suit every lifestyle. By offering an additional messaging service through our Samsung Messaging Hub, it has never been easier to stay connected.
This is another way that we are providing our customers with a more integrated lifestyle experience and a powerful new way of communicating and sharing. It’s really about giving the African market what they want – and what they want is choice.”
Samsung users will join a vibrant community of 60 million BlackBerry® smartphones customers who rely on BBM to stay in touch with friends, family and colleagues every day. Samsung GALAXY smartphone users will have access to an extensive range of BBM features, including BBM chats and multi-person chats with BBM Groups, as well as the ability to share photos and voice notes.
BBM will form part of Samsung’s Messaging Hub as a complementary addition to the current slate of propriety and third party messaging services that Samsung customers enjoy.
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
First of its kind : Apple unveils two new iPhones
For the first time ever, Apple unveiled two brand new iPhones today, a traditional upgrade of its iPhone 5 as well as a very basic, cheaper version.
Apple CEO Tim Cook says the iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C are a reaction to a dynamic smartphone market.
"Business has become so large that this year we are going to replace the iPhone 5 and we're going to replace it with not one, but two new latest designs," Cook said. "This allows us to serve even more customers."
The iPhone 5C was the first phone demoed at Tuesday's event at Apple's Cupertino, California, headquarters.
"It has an incredible all new design, one that's more fun, more colorful than any iPhone we've made yet," said Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president for marketing." In a video, Apple design guru Jonny Ive described the 5C as "beautifully, unapologetically plastic."
The phone is going to be sold as little as $99, for a 16GB version, and $199 for one with 32GB of storage (each with a two-year mobile contract).
In a departure, Apple will also be making its very own cases for the 5C, selling in a variety of colors for $29.
Early in the event, details on the 5S had not yet been discussed.
Cook also announced the latest version of Apple's mobile operating system, iOS 7, will be released to the public on September 18.
It will contain over 200 new features, according to Apple, including the ability to switch voice-activated digital assistant Siri to a male voice.
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Facebook To Launch Phone
Facebook fueled fresh talk Friday about its own mobile phone after the leading social network scheduled a press announcement for next week.
Shortly after the Facebook invitation went out for the April 4 event, the technology news site TechCrunch reported the announcement would be a modified version of the Google Android operating system with “deep native Facebook functionality.”
Another report on “9 to 5 Google” said Facebook designing the software for the new smartphone, which would be made by Taiwan’s HTC.
Facebook’s invitation said only “Come See Our New Home On Android.”
The reports, if accurate, could explain the long speculation about a “Facebook phone” to help the social network better monetize its mobile platform by featuring Facebook prominently on the phone.
Facebook has long held firm it has no intention of building its own smartphone, saying instead it would rather weave access to the social network into software running the gamut of handsets.
News of the April 4 event at social network’s main campus in the Silicon Valley city of Menlo Park came as the research firm IDC released a Facebook-backed study showing that smartphones have become people’s close friends in the US.
US smartphone owners tend to be connected from the instant they rise until they fall sleep and revel in every minute of it, according to the study.
A weeklong IDC survey of more than 7,000 people ranging in age from 18 to 44 years old with iPhones or Android-powered smartphones showed that four out of five check their handsets within 15 minutes of waking.
The top three applications used were for messaging; Web browsing, and Facebook, in that order, according to IDC.
“People have a universal need to connect with others, especially those they care deeply about,” IDC researchers said.
“This coupled with mass market adoption of smartphones means that social engagement via phones has become mainstream.”
At a TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco in September, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg said the social network giant is focused on mobile devices.
“It is really clear from the stats and my own personal intuition that a lot of energy in the ecosystem is going to mobile, not desktop (computers),” Zuckerberg said during an on-stage interview.
“That is the future,” he continued. “We are going to be doing killer stuff there.”
Facebook has made a priority of following its more than one billion members onto smartphones and tablet computers, tailoring services and money-making ads for mobile devices.
“Now, we are a mobile company,” Zuckerberg said at the conference.
Zuckerberg rejected suggestions that Facebook would make its own smartphone, adamant that the company had no intention of stepping into the fiercely competitive handset hardware arena.
“Apple, Google, everyone builds phones — we are going in the opposite direction,” Zuckerberg said at the time.
“We want to build a system deeply integrated in every device people want to use.”
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Most Stolen iPhones Are In Africa
Ever since cell phone carriers created a national registry of stolen phones on Nov. 1, it’s become much harder, if not impossible, to reactivate one in the U.S. That’s the good news. Here’s the bad: The database isn’t likely to rob thieves of the desire to steal your phone.
All major U.S. cell phone companies, including Verizon (VZ), AT&T (T), T-Mobile, and Sprint (S), are now sharing the serial numbers of stolen phones through the registry. Like VIN numbers on cars, these unique IDs are branded onto the hardware of the device and are hard to tamper with. If a thief tries to pop out a SIM card and use a phone purchased from one U.S. company to sign up for service with another, the serial number will automatically show up as belonging to a stolen phone.Courtesy ecoATM
But wireless providers in other countries aren’t part of the registry. And savvy iPhone thieves have realized that the way to get around it is by selling smartphones overseas, according to Washington, D.C., Police Chief Cathy Lanier.
Secondhand dealers buy used phones for cash, then pool and sell them to middlemen who resell them to retailers in Africa or China, says Lanier, who led the effort to establish the U.S. registry. A stolen phone can go for $400 abroad, she says. “That completely voids the blacklist we worked a year and half to put in place,” Lanier told me. “The new entrepreneurs … have created new challenges for us.”
Lanier has recently begun to point fingers at companies she says are facilitating the black market. One is the large video-game retailer, Gamestop, in Grapevine, Tex., which buys used smartphones. “We’ve found stolen phones in their possession,” Lanier said on Feb. 19 on a D.C. local news program, NewsTalk with Bruce DePuyt. Lanier said on the show that Gamestop has started to provide Washington police with serial numbers of the used phones it buys and is considering ending the practice of paying cash for phones. “We are working with police,” Gamestop spokeswoman Wendy Dominguez writes in an e-mail.
The Federal Communications Commission is in the early stages of an effort to crack down on the black market overseas. The agency recently signed a data-sharing agreement with Mexico; wireless companies in Mexico and the U.S. are now sharing serial numbers of stolen phones. The FCC is looking to sign more agreements with other countries, says FCC spokesman Neil Grace. Hopefully that will happen soon. It might be the only way to stop some guy on the streets of Lagos, Nigeria, from listening to your playlists, checking out your vacation pictures, or worse–stealing your identity.
Saturday, December 15, 2012
The big news from Mars is...
Here's the short version of today's Mars news: Curiosity has, in fact, detected simple organics in Martian soil, but that detection is not definitive evidence of Mars-native organic compounds. Scientists first need to make sure that the compounds detected by the Mars Science Laboratory aren't actually stowaways from Earth.
At the American Geophysical Union's Fall Meeting, a panel of Curiosity scientists shed some light on all the recent hype about a Big Deal Discovery on Mars. According to Paul Mahaffy, the principal investigator for the SAM instrument aboard Curiosity, "SAM has no definitive detection to report of organic compounds," which actually isn't unexpected. Part of the reason Curiosity was sampling the soil at Rock Nest, a pit stop on the way to Mount Sharp, is that it was expected to be very ordinary, which is helpful for cleaning out the rover's instruments of Earth contaminants.
This declaration may seem to conflict with a statement made later in the conference, where Mahaffy stated that SAM detected "very simple chlorinated hydrocarbons" - organic compounds. The panelists qualified this statement by saying that they're proceeding methodically and scientifically, to ensure that the hydrocarbons they've found didn't hitch a ride aboard Curiosity from Earth. Even if it turns out that they didn't, there's another step before declaring the organics to be of Martian origin: The science team has ensure that the compounds didn't arrive on Mars from space.
If that sounds like bad news or no news to you, think again. Curiosity's team is very satisfied with the rover, which is four months in to a planned two-year mission. "We landed on an ancient riverbed," said Dr. Michael Meyer, one of the lead scientists for NASA's Mars Exploration Program. "I think that's just spectacular."
John Grotzinger, the project scientist for Curiosity, said that the rover's in great shape do to more good science on top of the reams of data it's already collected, noting that all of Curiosity's instruments have checked out healthy. He compared the rover to a car getting ready for a long road trip; the "CSI lab on wheels" will begin its drive to its main target, Mount Sharp, early in 2013.
As to whether Curiosity will find evidence of life on Mars or not, Grotzinger said that such a discovery is at least months away. Right now, the team is excited about rich data that helps form a picture of what the environment on Mars might have been like in the past.
Grotzinger added, "What I've learned from this is you have to be careful about what you say and even more careful about how you say it. We're doing science at the speed of science; we live win a world that's at the pace of Instagrams."
"Curiosity's middle name is Patience, and we all have to have a healthy dose of that."
Monday, October 22, 2012
'If I wasn't at Facebook I'd be at Microsoft'
Mark Zuckerberg has revealed that if Facebook hadn't panned out, he would have probably landed at Microsoft.
The social networking mogul opened up about his startup experience and opined on the problems with entrepreneurs these days, in a talk at Startup School, the annual conference for entrepreneurs and computer hackers at Stanford University held on Saturday.
Though Facebook's lagging stock performance has been the topic du jour, the Zuck instead shared tales of his early years at Harvard, his path to becoming one of the most powerful figures in Silicon Valley and even imagined what he would have done if things had turned out differently.
Even though Facebook is one of the most visited pages on the web, employs nearly 4,000 people and boasts 1 billion users worldwide - the founder divulged that he most likely would have made his way to Seattle if his idea had flopped.
'I probably would have taken an engineering job…[and] always had a lot of respect for Microsoft,' he told Paul Graham, a co-founder of the tech venture capital fun Y Combinator, during a 45-minute interview before an audience of 1,700 at Stanford's Memorial Hall, according to CNET.
'A lot of people from Harvard went to work there,' he added.
Though his college adventures have been widely discussed after the release of The Social Network, an Aaron Sorkin film about his undergrad experience, Zuckerberg provided his account of his school days...and was the first to admit he wasn't the model student.
Two months till doomsday? Mayan Apocalypse set for Dec. 21
Today (Oct. 21) starts the two-month countdown toward doomsday, according to an interpretation of the Mayan Calendar that has taken hold in some New Age and spiritualist communities online.
Two ancient texts confirm the end date of the Mayan Long Count calendar on the winter solstice of this year, which is Dec. 21, 2012. That day is the last day of the 13th bak'tun, or 144,000-day cycle, of the calendar. Ancient Maya would have seen the end of the 13th bak'tun as the end of a full cycle of creation.
However, experts in Mayan history say the end of the Long Count calendar is the equivalent of needing to buy a new calendar every year in December - not a harbinger of doomsday.
"This new evidence suggests that the 13 bak'tun date was an important calendrical event that would have been celebrated by the ancient Maya; however, they make no apocalyptic prophecies whatsoever regarding the date," Marcello Canuto, the director of Tulane University Middle America Research Institute, told LiveScience after the discovery of an ancient text referring to the date.
Not all apocalypse believers think the Mayan Apocalypse will bring fire and brimstone, or extinguish life on Earth. According to John Hoopes, a scholar of Maya history at the University of Kansas, many believers see the day as a time of spiritual transformation.
Culled from LiveScience.com
Friday, October 5, 2012
How Apple has changed under Tim Cook
In the year since Steve Jobs' death, Apple has undergone a gradual and subtle brand makeover, shaking off some of the more unpleasant characteristics associated with Jobs and taking on bits of the personality of its new leader, Tim Cook.
For all his brilliance at product design, Jobs showed little interest in glad-handing with Apple partners or investors. By contrast, Apple from the outside has appeared more open under Cook, thanks to a number of orchestrated meetings and trips meant to appeal to the various factions -- consumers, investors and politicians -- interested in the world's leading tech company.
In May, Cook went to Washington to meet with congressional leaders to open lines of communication that were mostly blocked in previous years. Apple was no stranger to lobbying (although it spends far less than some other Silicon Valley companies, like Google), but sending Cook was a way of letting politicians know Apple was ready to grow its relationship with Capitol Hill and that the company might take a stronger interest in policy issues in the future.
Apple also has worked harder to woo Wall Street. There was a bus tour of investors that stopped at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California, where they were treated to cookies and a presentation by Apple's chief financial officer.
A more sizable act of goodwill was the cash dividend Apple paid out to investors -- the first in 17 years. On a call with investors in February, Cook answered questions, cracked jokes and was generally open and friendly.
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