A complete reversal of its earlier policy restricting Internet telephone services to Wi-Fi only, AT&T’s decision to allow iPhone owners to use such services on its 3G network has gone over well with consumers and with Apple. But it hasn’t gone over well with AT&T investors. Shares in the company slipped on news of the decision yesterday and they’re falling still further today.
When it launched on July 10, 2008, Apple’s iTunes App Store included 552 apps. Today, the App Store boasts more than 65,000. And in a celebratory press release issued this morning, Apple tells us they’ve been downloaded more than 1.5 billion times in its first year of business.
What does Apple have in store for its army of third-party Mac OS X and iPhone developers at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco today? Click through for a liveblog of the keynote and full coverage of the event, happening now.
Windows Mobile 6.5 might be a necessary stopgap on the path to 7.0, if not exactly an elegant one. But what can you expect from an OS with such a hurried path to launch? Not much, according to Microsoft developers who admit that the incremental update was a rush job that suffers from all of the problems attendant thereto.
Tough break for Google. An Illinois software developer has sued the company, along with some four dozen others, alleging that they infringed on his trademark on the word “android.” Seems Erich Specht, who runs Android Data Corporation, holds the mark on the term “Android Data.”
Nokia, the world’s largest maker of mobile phones, will soon be just a tad smaller. This morning the company said it will sack a further 450 employees in its mobile services business, a division charged with developing and delivering the Ovi-branded Internet services tied to Nokia devices. Seems the still souring economy has undermined Nokia’s ambitions in that area, and Apple’s success with the iPhone App Store has inspired it to look to third-party developers to bring new applications to its devices.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is going to turn the social network’s “stream” of user experiences and information into a revenue stream one way or another. And if that means allowing others to pan its waters for gold, then so be it.
And so, at an event in Palo Alto later today, Facebook will reportedly announce plans to open its stream to third-party developers, offering them the chance to build new services and applications outside the site that access the status updates, photos and videos uploaded by users.
It has not yet been given a price or a release date, but Palm’s forthcoming Pre handset continues to have a remarkably restorative effect on the company’s share price. It wasn’t so long ago that Palm shares were trading just above a dollar. Today, they’re hovering around $8.67, bouyed up by little more than the device’s Consumer Electronics Show debut, an uneventful media Webcast, some hyperbolic remarks from one of the company’s investors and the enthusiasm of a few bullish analysts.
Research in Motion’s effort to emulate Apple’s phenomenally successful App Store has a new name: BlackBerry App World. Not much of an improvement over “BlackBerry Application Center,” but an improvement nonetheless.
With the release of the first device to support Google’s Android mobile operating system less than a day away and a second already in development at Motorola, Google is making good on a promise it made when Android debuted: to make the platform available under a progressive, developer-friendly open-source license.
Apple has finally realized that blocking open collaboration among iPhone developers may not be the best approach to iPhone application development. And so this morning it dropped the nondisclosure agreement with which it had hamstrung developers by prohibiting them from discussing iPhone programming and caused no end of consternation in the iPhone dev community.
Flash content on the Web may be slow-loading and occasionally nonintuitive, but at least now it’s searchable. Adobe has conceived of a way for search engines to index Flash content, even pre-existing Flash content, without the need for developer intervention.
The Googlefication of the mobile industry will begin a bit later than expected. When the search giant announced its Android mobile platform last November, it said devices running it would arrive at market by the second half of this year. Well, turns out that deadline was a bit aggressive. Android-based handsets may not be available until the fourth quarter of this year–if Google’s lucky.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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