Chris Velazco is a mobile enthusiast and writer who studied English and Marketing at Rutgers University. Once upon a time, he was the news intern for MobileCrunch, and in between posts, he worked in wireless sales at Best Buy.
After graduating, he returned to the new TechCrunch to as a full-time mobile writer. He counts advertising, running, musical theater, and soup among his myriad interests.
Verizon CFO Fran Shammo ruffled a few feathers yesterday when he mentioned at an investor conference that every one of their customers would be on one of the carrier’s new data share plans.
In an effort to clarify his meaning, Verizon sent a statement to a handful of news outlets today that shines a bit more light on how they plan to make this situation work. → Read More
T-Mobile CEO Philipp Humm noted during their last earning call that their prepaid users helped make up for the loss of 510,000 postpaid subscribers, and now it seems that they’ve got another bone to throw to the their legions of contract-averse customers.
Starting on May 20, T-Mobile will be rolling out a slew of new, no-contract data plans to go with their line of mobile broadband modems, hotspots, and tablets.
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Carefully cultivating your Facebook presence can be tough enough when you only have your personal profile to deal with, but it’s a completely different story when you’ve got a full-blown Page (or three) to manage on top of it.
To help those particular users stay on top of things, Facebook has begun to roll out a new app (called, imaginatively enough, Pages Manager) in a small handful of markets, though we in the U.S. can’t play with it just yet. → Read More
Verizon Wireless has been working on bringing shared data plans to market for months now, but it turns out not everyone will enjoy making that transition.
Verizon CFO Fran Shammo said at an investor conference earlier today that users on those wonderful old grandfathered unlimited data plans will soon have to give them up if they want to move into a 4G device. → Read More
Here’s hoping that you already managed to get your hands on an HTC One X, because it may be a while before they appear on store shelves again.
According to a release put out by HTC last night, U.S. Customs has blocked shipments of AT&T’s HTC One X and Sprint’s Evo 4G LTE thanks to an ITC ruling handed down last year.
The news may come as an especially large bummer for Sprint customers looking to upgrade to the new EVO, as a new report from the Wall Street Journal indicates that device will miss its original May 18 launch date. Sprint has since scrubbed their website of references to the device’s forthcoming launch, and there’s still no word on a revised launch window. → Read More
Over the past six months, the folks at OpenSignalMaps have been keeping tabs on the devices that have been downloading their network monitoring app, and so far they’ve recorded downloads onto 681,900 separate Android devices in 195 countries.
Now they’ve taken all that data and splayed it out for all to see, and it highlights rather nicely how big a headache fragmentation can be for developers.
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When it comes to digital magazines, why should tablet owners have all the fun? That’s the sentiment Adobe was espousing earlier today at an event held in New York where they officially pulled back the curtains on their updated Digital Publishing Suite.
You’d be forgiven if you haven’t stumbled across Adobe’s DPS before — as the name sort of implies, it’s meant for publishers to prepare digital editions of their print content for consumption on all sorts of gadgetry. Given their size, tablets have been the obvious focus for content creators, but Adobe’s new update brings (among other things) the ability for them to whip up digital magazines that work well on the iPhone too. → Read More
MoboTap‘s popular Dolphin Browser has racked up over 16 million downloads worldwide, but that hasn’t stopped them from taking steps to expand internationally.
The company announced earlier this morning that they have entered into a new agreement with Japanese wireless carrier KDDI that will see their browser pre-loaded on a number of new Android handsets going forward.
KDDI is Japan’s second-largest wireless carrier with nearly 35 million subscribers under their belts, with just about 20% of those users owning smartphones. All things considered, it’s a big chance for MoboTap to bolster their brand outside the confines of the United States. → Read More
Smule has been churning out scores of popular music-making iOS apps for years now, but they’ve been notoriously gun-shy about bringing those apps to other platforms.
As of today though, that streak has finally come to an end — the company has just released their auto-tuning Songify app into the Google Play Store. → Read More
Thing have looked grim for upstart wireless service provider LightSquared ever since the FCC officially withdrew their conditional approval to build out the terrestrial part of their LTE network, and now it seems like it may all come to an end.
After the demise of their partnership with Sprint, the resignation of CEO Sanjiv Ahuja, and the laying off of nearly 45% of their employees, Bloomberg reports that the Virginia-based company has just filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy today.
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With Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference just weeks away, expect plenty of reports of new features to come crawling out of the woodwork. In fact, here’s one from the Wall Street Journal — they claim that Apple has been doing some major tinkering with their iCloud storage service, the fruits of which will be unveiled on June 11.
First up is the ability for users to share and comment on each other’s photos, a pretty dramatic shift away from iCloud’s current approach to photo storage. As it stands, each user has a single Photo Stream meant mostly to make sure images are on the devices they need to be on. This shift in sharing actually sounds a little reminiscent of Apple’s recently-killed MobileMe service, though how exactly the sharing process would play out within iCloud is still up in the air. → Read More
When former Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn resigned after announcing a dramatic restructuring of the company’s retail operations, it looked like a reaction to the company’s recent financial woes.
The timing of Dunn’s resignation provided him with ample cover — his announcement coming just days after Best Buy posted disappointing earnings, and revealed that they would soon be shuttering 50 of their big-box locations.
Still, that didn’t stop the press from digging around, and it wasn’t long before Best Buy revealed that Dunn left just prior to the completion of an independent investigation of his “extremely close personal relationship” with a female employee. The results of that investigation were revealed today, and they have prompted company founder Richard Schulze to give up his role as company chairman.
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Samsung confirmed well in advance of the Galaxy S III’s official announcement that their new flagship Android handset would sport the company’s new Exynos 4 Quad chipset, but it seems even clearer now that we Stateside phone geeks may have to live without it.
Droid-Life reported over the weekend that a benchmark entry for the Verizon-bound Samsung SCH-i535 appeared on Nenamark, and it seems to confirm rumors that Big Red’s Galaxy S III will indeed sport a dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor. → Read More
Google’s map data has been baked into the iOS Maps app since the days of the first, thick, aluminum-backed iPhone, but that may no longer be the case once iOS 6 hits the streets. Unnamed sources told 9to5Mac that the Cupertino company would instead take that opportunity to reveal their own Maps application, and those early reports paint a pretty impressive picture.
Astute readers may recall that Apple has been on something of a mapping company shopping spree these past few years — what began with the purchase of Placebase in 2009, continued with Poly9 in 2010, and culminated with Apple snapping up C3 Technologies late last year. → Read More
Here’s a little something to file away for when your weekend gets dull — the Australian devs at Halfbrick have brought their premier flying-around-and-dodging-things game to its new home away from iOS.
Starting today, users looking to waste a few minutes playing Jetpack Joyride don’t need to look any further than Facebook for their fix.
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For just about a week now, GE and product development network Quirky have been running an interesting contest — they’ve challenged people to come up with ways to improve everyday objects by making them “smarter with software”. Unlike the traditional Quirky production and development process though, the winning concept will be fashioned into an actual working device by the end of the month.
The problem with so many thoughtful, potentially useful entries is that only one of them will actually make the transition from pitch to product. Now with the selection process closed, TechCrunch has learned that Quirky’s design and engineering team will be developing a smarter… milk jug? → Read More
Tell me if this sounds familiar — you’re sitting on a couch watching television, and the commercial breaks seem way longer than the snippets of the show you’re actually trying to watch.
As it turns out, some Dish Network customers have been granted a bit of respite from that advertising onslaught. Users who have their living rooms tricked out with the company’s Hopper DVRs can now automatically skip every commercial break with a single touch thanks to their newly-launched Auto Hop feature.
They’ll never have to sit (or 30-second skip) through another promo for America’s Got Talent ever again… unless they’re the kind of people who like their television live. → Read More
Samsung has been teasing Galaxy Note users with the promise of Ice Cream Sandwich for months, but now it seems like the consumer electronics giant has finally come through for their phablet fans.
Multiple reports from European Note owners confirm that the long-awaited software update is hitting devices, though how users actually install it seems to depend on their locale.
Dutch Galaxy Note owner Devin Balentina reported that his device received the update over-the-air for instance, while a report from SammyHub points out that German users can nab the update from Samsung’s Kies updater. → Read More
Most people probably don’t stick around social music service SoundCloud’s site to ogle its design, but apparently the team felt there was plenty of room for improvement.
To that end SoundCloud, who not long ago raised a $50 million funding round led by Kleiner Perkins, officially pulled back the curtains on their handsome new interface in San Francisco earlier today. → Read More
The last time TechCrunch heard from the internet-for-everyone proponents at FreedomPop, they revealed to us that they were working on an iPhone 4/4S case with a built-in WiMax radio running on Clear’s network that would give their users monthly access to free mobile broadband.
Now, according to my high-level source, the company is very close to bringing these things into the real world. Ahead of their beta launch slated for the summer, the company has just quietly begun to take pre-orders for the nifty iPhone accessory, though some of their plans for the product have changed over the past few months. → Read More
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