Motorola has finally announced its bet-the-company Android handset. At GigaOM’s Mobilize 09 event in San Francisco this morning, Sanjay Jha, Motorola’s co-CEO and CEO of the company’s handset division, uncrated the CLIQ, a device it describes unremarkably as the “first phone with social skills.”
Sprint effectively lowered the price of the Palm Pre today to $99 for new customers only, offering a $100 service credit to those who port their numbers over from another carrier. To be eligible for the promotion, customers must purchase the Pre along with a two-year service agreement and abandon their current carriers. UPDATE: Sprint has cancelled the offer. You’ll find further details, here.
The week that took us from August to September was one for the books over at BoomTown, especially if you’re 12.
Kara spent Monday morning at Activision Blizzard, where they are pushing forward with the entire Guitar Hero line, even as the game industry faces a nearly 50 percent decline in U.S. sales this year. Kara got to play hero to several of the forthcoming releases, including previewing the much anticipated DJ Hero console.
In South Korea, the average broadband download speed is 20.4 megabits per second. In Japan, it is 15.8 mbps. In Sweden, it’s 12.8 mbps. In The Netherlands, it’s 11 mbps.
And in the United States, the country that invented the Internet? It’s 5.1.
The 3G wireless network infrastructure here in the United States may be subpar, but it keeps attracting new users. Indeed, research outfit TeleGeography reports that the number of 3G phone users in the U.S. will overtake Japan by 2011.
Microsoft’s Bing search service continues to gather momentum, albeit slowly. Bing’s share of the U.S. Internet search market grew one percent in July, rising to 9.41 percent from 8.23 percent in June, according to metrics outfit StatCounter. Meanwhile, Yahoo’s share of the market declined to 10.95 percent from 11.04 percent. So together, Microsoft and Yahoo, thanks to their new alliance, claim 20.36 percent of the search market. Which is a hell of a lot less than Google.
AT&T has replied to a Federal Communications Commission letter of inquiry into the role it played in the rejection of a number of third-party Google Voice apps and Google’s official GV client from Apple’s iTunes App Store. The gist of the reply: Don’t look at us.
How slow are government agencies at adopting new technologies? So slow that the U.S. Army is planning a major upgrade of its information systems–to Microsoft’s Windows Vista OS. Though Windows 7 is expected at market by the end of the year, the United States military has set that as a deadline for its migration from Windows XP to Windows Vista and from Office 2003 to Office 2007.
2009 may prove to be the year that Blu-ray caught on. Sales of the high-definition DVD players, sluggish throughout 2008, are surging in 2009. According to the latest metrics from the NPD Group, sales of standalone Blu-ray disc players in the United States rose 72 percent from the first quarter of 2008, driven by an increasing awareness of the technology.
In January, Wikipedia claimed nearly 97 percent of the visits that Web surfers in the United States made to online encyclopedias, according to research outfit Hitwise. MSN Encarta received 1.27 percent. Little wonder, then, that Microsoft is discontinuing it. The company announced Monday it would stop selling Encarta software by June and would shut down the encyclopedia’s MSN Web sites on Oct. 31.
Finally, some reassuring news amid all this economic woe. The United States financial system is suffering the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The Treasury is planning to buy up to $700 billion in bad debt. But things are looking up for the long-suffering employees of investment bank Lehman Brothers. They’ve got a bonus pool.
Overall CD sales are plummeting after eight years of unflagging erosion. Digital music sales now account for 15 percent of recording industry’s revenues worldwide and 30 percent in the United States, according to recent data from The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. And those numbers are climbing faster than ever. Consider: This past June, Apple said it has sold some five billion songs on its iTunes Store. Clearly, physical media are giving way to the Internet as a means of music distribution. What better time, then, to reinvent the music industry’s business model for physical media, as SanDisk hopes to do with its new microSD memory card album format?
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. Read more »
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.
12:58 AM: Breakfast: Two schools of fish from Tokyo Bay. Calories: 782,000. How I was feeling when I ate this: confused, irradiated, hating my size.
11:37 AM: Exercise: “Taxi Stomp” (alternating legs, for 30 blocks). Calories burned: 148,900,183.
1983. The Beatles announce their first tour in thirteen years, but likewise announce that Michael Jackson will be going on tour with them as a one gigantic mega-concert event.
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.
D is unlike any other executive conference. Since its debut in 2003, D has brought to life the energy and excitement of the digital revolution in an unscripted, upfront and unparalleled way. Read more »
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