Tuesday, March 16, 2010 4:22PM - By Chris Weiss
After a year of preparation, the Federal Communications Commission presented its National Broadband Plan to Congress today. The $20-billion plan, rolled up into a 360-page document, aims at ending the broadband disparity that exists across the country and boosting the availablity and speeds of the U.S.’s br0adband network.
The plan’s goals include making broadband available to all U.S. residents, boosting broadband adoption from 65 percent to better than 90 percent, getting affordable, 100 Mbps broadband into 100 million homes by 2020, increasing the available spectrum for mobile broadband by 500 MHz within 10 years, and offering access of speeds of 1 Gbps in all American communities for hospitals and other institutions within 10 years.
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Tuesday, March 16, 2010 3:20PM - By Chris Weiss
Well, Apple failed to do it. We don’t even have enough information from Dell and HP to know if they’ll accomplish it. The CrunchPad/JooJoo? You must be joking. It looks as though Samsung could be the first to offer something interesting enough in the tablet space to really whet our appetites for the class of devices that will play a bigger and bigger role in the market.
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Tuesday, March 16, 2010 2:41PM - By Chris Weiss
Perhaps AT&T 3G compatibility was all that’s been holding the Nexus One back from soaring, iPhone/Droid-like sales. That’s unlikely beyond a doubt, but the Nexus One is now compatible with AT&T 3G anyway. Google announced today that it has begun selling a new version of the Nexus One that will work with AT&T’s 3G network. Up over our northern border, you’ll also be able to access hockey stats on Rogers Wireless with the newly updated Nexus One. As such, Canadians can now get Nexus Ones shipped to their home country.
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Tuesday, March 16, 2010 1:45PM - By Chris Weiss
Back in January, Flurry provided a first week Nexus One sales number of 20,000. Not very impressive. Not very impressive at all. So how has the handset done since then? Not very impressive. Not very impressive at all.
According to new numbers from the analytics firm, the Nexus One sold 135,000 in its first 74 days. While 75 days or 90 days would seem like more fitting numbers to use for tracking, Flurry chose 74 because that’s how long it took the iPhone to sell one million units. The Nexus One isn’t even in the same city, let alone ballpark.
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Tuesday, March 16, 2010 1:31PM - By Chris Weiss
The moments are ticking (ha!) toward Baselword, the world watch and jewelry show taking place in Switzerland beginning on the 18th. In addition to all of the great watches that the show will undoubtedly feature–including a TAG Heuer concept watch to be fitted to a one-of-a-kind Tesla Roadster–an upcoming cell phone has us counting the seconds to the show.
We know very little about the phone at the moment. It comes from a company called Celsius X VI II (very dramatic). Continuing the drama, the company uses vague but exhaustively emotional imagery in its descriptions, giving us a whole lot of words without a whole lot of concrete meaning.
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Tuesday, March 16, 2010 10:00AM - By Chris Weiss
Your favorite online payment vendor has reworked its iPhone app and offered some significant improvements to simplify sending and receiving payments via mobile. The biggest change of the redesign is that Bump technology is now integrated. Bump is a start-up that offers an app that allows users to make payments simply by bumping iPhones and entering a transaction amount. Other changes include an added feature allowing you to send payment ‘requests’ to contacts and a withdrawal feature for transferring your money to a bank account. The app also benefits from a new look and feel.
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Tuesday, March 16, 2010 9:00AM - By Chris Weiss
Microsoft had a real opportunity to offer consumers a different (and hopefully equally satisfying) experience from the Apple iPhone, continuing with the open policy of WinMo phones, while encouraging expanding app development. Instead, it’s chosen to mimic Apple and take a unilateral role in app approval and sales. The company revealed yesterday at Mix 10 that the cleverly-named Windows Phone Marketplace will be the only place that consumers will be able to buy Phone 7 apps. Apps will be approved or rejected at the sole discretion of Microsoft. How original.
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Monday, March 15, 2010 4:36PM - By Chris Weiss
It seems like Twitter is pretty much everywhere these days: Internet searches, in the news, on every website ever, etc. However, Twitter isn’t content to just sit back and revel in its popularity; the micro-blogging giant unveiled a new service today at SXSW called @ Anywhere. The service will allow website owners to drop in a few lines of javascript and provide a new level of Twitter functionality within the website.
Twitter users on participating third-party sites will get that Twitter functionality without ever having to leave the website and open a new window for Twitter.com. At Anywhere sites will display a hyperlink on users with Twitter accounts, and visitors can place the pointer over top to get instant information about their Twitter profiles and most recent tweets.
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Monday, March 15, 2010 3:27PM - By Chris Weiss
The FCC will present its National Broadband Plan to Congress tomorrow, and today, the agency offered an executive summary of its plan. The overarching goal of the plan is to extend fast, affordable broadband access to the entire country, providing Internet speeds of 100 Mbps in at least 100 million homes by 2020, and giving the U.S. the “the fastest and most extensive wireless networks of any nation.”
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