Be careful, the Kindle Fire is hot. Burning up you might say. Get it? Because it’s the Fire? Never mind…
Amazon’s first foray into the tablet world seems to be a runaway success. The Fire has occupied the top spot on Amazon’s best sellers list for weeks even prior to the device shipping. Now, at Best Buy, the $199 Fire sits higher the 16GB iPad as the top selling tablet on the retailer’s website. Yep, it’s safe to say that Amazon is well on its way to officially winning the Android tablet wars.
Amazon’s first color tablet had a banner Black Friday weekend. The retail previously stated that it moved four times more Kindles this year than last (although hard numbers were not given). Consumers are seemingly eating up the Fire. → Read More
You may be aware of the growing controversy surrounding Carrier IQ, a piece of software found pre-installed on Sprint phones that, according to developers who have investigated, is capable of detecting, recording, and transmitting various user actions and inputs. Among the data CIQ potentially has access to are location, SMS, apps, and key presses.
News of the software has been percolating for months on development forums, but when Trevor Eckhart recently summarized his findings, he found himself facing a cease and desist while Sprint vigorously denied the charges, saying “We do not and cannot look at the contents of messages, photos, videos, etc., using this tool.”
The C&D was quickly retracted, but Eckhart has now released a video that seems to give the lie to both Sprint and Carrier IQ’s assurances. → Read More
Short Version
The Galaxy Tab 8.9 is a nearly perfect size and weight and, thanks to a few user experience updates, is an excellent vehicle for Android Honeycomb 3.1. In many cases the dreaded Android lag is gone and 8.9 screen size is, like the baby bear’s porridge, just right. → Read More
I’ve spent what seems like months obsessing over every little bit of Galaxy Nexus minutiae that’s crossed the wire, and what better to celebrate its (hopefully) impending launch than to watch one get torn apart? That’s right folks — iFixit is at it yet again, and this time it’s the GSM Galaxy Nexus that’s going under the knife. → Read More
Articles about natural disasters and parenting advice from CNN, Yahoo! News, the New York Times, and Huffington Post topped Facebook’s new list of the most shared articles of 2011. Facebook measured which articles were Liked, Shared, or copy and pasted into the social network and found that subjects such as “Parents, don’t dress your girls like tramps” and “What teachers really want to tell parents” were the most popular, along with news about the Japan tsunami and rumored changes to zodiac sign arrangements. The list provides insight into Facebook’s user base, which skews more towards middle-aged parents than most expect. Unfortunately, it also illuminates our attraction to tragedy and aversion to real issues — only one article in the top 20 dealt with the financial crisis. → Read More
Jilion, the makers of the cloud-based HTML5 video player SublimeVideo, are today making the product more accessible through the introduction of a freemium offering. When the service launched earlier this spring, commercial plans were available, starting at the relatively affordable rate of under $10 per month. But when it comes to user adoption, nothing beats “free.”
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Over the last year, Foursquare has been actively buddying up with the daily deal players. Groupon, LivingSocial, Gilt City, AT&T Interactive, BuyWithMe and Zozi all provide their daily deals to Foursquare. And today, Atlanta-based Scoutmob joins the ranks of deal sites partnering with the check-in champion, as Foursquare will today begin offering Scoutmob’s 50 percent-plus discounted deals in 13 U.S. cities from the within Foursquare’s mobile apps.
Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley has said before that he thinks daily deal companies are version 1.0 of the tools merchants will eventually use to drive foot traffic to their stores. But, while daily deals are hot and companies are adopting them, there’s obviously no use in resisting. The more daily deal sites that Foursquare partners with, the more localized and nearby deals it can display to its mobile users. → Read More
Top social game developer Zynga has been widely expected to go public anytime… for months. But now we have a date range — mid-December, according to DealBook. That follows up on an earlier report today by Fortune that Zynga is starting a “road show” to prospective public investors on Monday to stir up interest ahead of the offering. An amended S-1 is also expected that day detailing the number and price of shares, as Inside Mobile Apps also hears.
Finally, after months of media scrutiny about Zynga’s business and traffic (that the company has been legally prevented from responding to), and many a cancelled conference appearance by Zynga executives, public investors will get to decide what they really think.
If Zynga is going to go public as it had said it intended to in its original S-1 filing this past June, the time is now. Macroeconomic conditions are especially uncertain due to big questions around how Europe is going to get out of its ongoing financial crisis. If the eurozone falls apart within the next few weeks or months (or days), investors are likely to have even less interest in a new-fangled type of tech company. Larger fears could be contributing to the poor recent performance of other recent tech IPOs, like Groupon, and Zynga now has to convince the world that it’s different in a good way. And obviously, how Zynga does could shape the perception around the forthcoming IPO of its main platform provider, Facebook. → Read More
Our collective trajectory these days seems to be a migration from print to digital. Books, calendars, to-do lists, and newspapers are all victims of the digital revolution, at least in paper form. But not everyone’s down with the death of paper.
Meet the Little Printer, the latest gizmo out of Berg Cloud. Cute, right?
When it’s not smiling up at you from your desk, the Little Printer pops out receipt-sized slips of paper loaded with your custom info, news, and friendly gossip. → Read More
The iPad hasn’t been much of a revenue stream for Microsoft, which has been focusing on developing its own competing tablet ecosystem. But as a software company, it can’t ignore the scores of millions of Apple devices out there for long. Sure, it has a few things in the App Store, but one of its biggest earners, Office, is entirely absent. The Daily reports that this is likely to change shortly, as Microsoft is planning to debut an iPad version of their productivity suite next year. → Read More
The $199 Kindle Fire just took one step closer to instant fame. XDA-Dev member, JackpotClavin, managed to flash CM7 onto the Fire using ClockworkMod. The result is a Fire running a custom build of Android and a whole lot of excited fanboys. → Read More
While the features that Windows Phone 7 can call “exclusive” are few and far between, there’s at least one aspect of it that is absolutely, undeniably original: the user interface.
Called “Metro”, the UI is so unique that it’s almost polarizing — you’ll know whether you love it or hate it within a few seconds. Microsoft is counting on finding a few more lovers in the crowd, it seems: they’ve just launched a browser-based WP7 simulator, seemingly tailored solely to sing Metro’s siren song to the wandering iPhone/Android user. → Read More
In a blog post regarding today’s FTC settlement, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg also announced that the company has officially split the Chief Privacy Officer role into two parts, to be filled by existing Facebook employees Erin Egan and Michael Richter.
Richter, who will be taking the CPO — Product role, was Facebook’s Chief Privacy Counsel on its legal team and now will be focused on the product side of Facebook’s privacy policy, serving as a key figure in Facebook’s internal privacy review program.
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Our very own Greg Kumparak and Jason Kincaid have both reviewed one — both giving it positive reviews. It’s the first time Greg has been excited about Android from a software standpoint in a while, and Jason thinks it is going to be really big. With special thanks to Appitalism, we have one Samsung Galaxy Nexus to give away.
First off, not only is the winner of this giveaway receiving a brand new Samsung Galaxy Nexus as soon as it’s released, but the winner will also receive a $500 app download card from Appitalism and Beats headphones by Dr. Dre Headphones. Obviously, in light of the holiday spirit, we wanted this giveaway to be big. → Read More
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg just issued a statement on the Facebook Blog confirming that his company has settled with the FTC over charges that it has violated user privacy over the years. Facebook is now “required to obtain consumers’ affirmative express consent before enacting changes that override their privacy preferences”, effectively making opt in all future privacy control changes to the audience of previously shared data or content. Facebook must also submit to privacy audits every 2 years for the next 20 years, bar access to content on deactivated accounts, and avoid misrepresenting the privacy or security of user data. → Read More
Erly, a Kleiner Perkins-backed startup in the social ‘experience’ space that co-founded by Hulu CTO and former Kleiner partner Eric Feng, is renaming its first product Collections (which was similar to an ‘About.me for events’) to Events.
As we explained in our initial coverage of Collections, the application is a place to house all the content around a given experience. It’s sort of like a next generation photo album, but with more than just photos. → Read More
Google Maps for Android is fantastic. Between its free GPS Navigation feature, speedy downloads thanks to vector-based maps, and offline caching, the app is leagues ahead of the Maps app on iOS. And it keeps getting better.
Today, Maps for Android is getting upgraded to version 6.0, and it includes a long-anticipated feature that presents a huge technical challenge: indoor maps. Yes, you’ll now be able to fire up Maps in some malls, airports, and department stores to get your bearings, complete with that ‘little blue dot’ that shows you where you are. You’ll be able to download the app from Android Market right here.
Google Maps has offered some basic indoor mapping functionality before now (as you can see in the left screenshot below). But the level of detail has always been seriously lacking, as has the accuracy of the blue dot. With this new release, Google has optimized its technology for indoor venues, so accuracy should be much improved, as are the maps themselves. It’ll even automatically detect what floor of a building you’re on and adjust the map it’s displaying accordingly. → Read More
Even though the spec is apparently dead, some of us may still want to tag numeric values to our gadgetry. The folks over at Futuremark seem to agree, and want to take their benchmark testing into new territory. According to Android.HDBlog, the company is developing its graphics benchmarking tools for the Android platform, both smartphone and tablet alike. → Read More
Though I’m fairly sure that I disagree with him, Laszlo Birinyi of Birinyi Associates had some flattering compliments to lay on RIM today, putting the Waterloo-based company at the top spot of his five investment picks for 2012.
While we don’t usually cover analyst predictions, this statement reported by Barrons was too good to resist. → Read More
