AT&T, Telstra, BT and Vodafone talk transformation ? and what it will mean in a tightening economy

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese private broadcaster TV Asahi Corp aims to ally with an information technology and telecoms firm by the end of the year and is open to a capital tie-up, its president said.

Samsung Renown (SCH-U810) More Photos - View Specs

Verizon Wireless today unveiled the Samsung Renown, a fashionable clamshell with a 2.0-megapixel camera.

The Renown comes with a 2.0-megapixel camera with NightShot, a camcorder, and video, picture, text and mobile IM messaging options. It also supports Verizon Wireless' VCAST Music with Rhapsody and VCAST Video services in the U.S. VCAST Music with Rhapsody lets users transform their handheld into an MP3 player.

Customers to access more than 5 million songs and purchase full songs over-the-air. They can download a master copy of songs to their PCs, and sync favorite tracks, albums and playlists from their PCs to their phones via USB cable.

With VCAST Video, users can download or stream video clips from news, sports and entertainment.

The Samsung Renown is available will be available in business sales channels, online on Nov. 19 and in stores on Dec. 1.

- Samsung Renown Specs

Related News Articles

• Samsung Saga Touch Screen Smartphone Announced for Verizon
• Samsung Eternity Touch Screen Phone with AT&T Mobile TV
• Verizon Begins Selling BlackBerry Storm on Nov. 21 for $200
• Samsung Gravity Messaging Phone Unveiled for T-Mobile
• Samsung Behold Touch-Screen Phone Announced for T-Mobile

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A

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

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A community cyberinfrastructure would enable a new era of multidisciplinary research and collaboration in science and engineering. With such an infrastructure, researchers could share knowledge and results along with computing cycles, storage, and bandwidth. A generic, transparent cyberinfrastructure would also foster more meaningful analyses of data and visualization, modeling, and simulation of real-world phenomena.

Recently the Windows Mobile team blogged a few bits about the upcoming Internet Explorer engine on Windows Mobile devices that will give you close to the full desktop experience on your device, sort of like the iPhone users have had since mid-2007. Microsoft has decided to only make this available on new devices, a factoid only revealed way down in the comments. There will be no upgrades, direct from MS or an OEM, to put this on your fancy new Windows Mobile device. It apparently can't handle it.

"Regarding making IE Mobile available as a separate download or update, the rich media experiences that IE Mobile 6 enables require more powerful, advanced devices. That is why it will not be available as an upgrade or direct download for current phones, but rather will be made available on new phones."

On the one hand, this stinks. On the other, I figured it would be this way anyway. MS rarely ever provides updates to the user directly, instead relying on the OEM partner to dole them out, and the OEM partners tend to offer updates such as this as often as my son picks up his clothes off of the floor voluntarily. At least this way, the OEMs won't take the heat for not providing it, which is I suspect part of the motivation behind it. OEMs are likely to be sick and tired of us users wanting cool new things on the device and calling asking for the updates, either free or for a nominal fee. This way, the OEM can now say MS isn't offering it. Pure speculation on my part of course, but I suspect there is merit to it. Wouldn't have posted it if I didn't think so.

Some new plugins have been made available...

Did something different for Halloween -- Obama pumpkins, since I was never able to get an Obama sign. Want to do your own? Stencil here, more pics below:

Click to continue reading...

Recently I was introduced to an exciting new mobile startup based in Bellingham, Washington called Tatango ( http://tatango.com). I had the opportunity to chat with their CEO and Founder, Derek Johnson, last week to learn more about the company and hear about their future plans.

The company was started just over a year ago under the name NetworkText, and recently re-branded under the name Tatango. (According to a video on their website there is no meaning behind the company name.)

What exactly does Tatango do?

Tatango provides a simple to use service that allows you to send a text or voice message directly from your computer or mobile phone to a group, keeping them connected anytime, anywhere. For example, lets say you had a group of people you wanted to communicate with in a more time sensitive, mobile way than through email. You could certainly grind your way through sending individual text messages or, by signing up to Tatango, you can message everyone with a single effort. Tatango allows any group to collect, manage and mobile message all of their group members both from a computer and mobile phone. And the great thing is that it doesn?t require any special phone and users don?t need to download any software to use the service. As long as you have text messaging, you can use Tatango.

I gave the service a test drive and it is dead simple to use. They have done a great job with the User Interface and even a non-technical Hockey-Mom could figure it out. You set up a group, invite your members and once they join your group, you are able to message them. (This prevents against the dreaded mobile-spam issue.)

It is free to sign up and the basic service is free to use. Tatango makes money by placing 30 character text ads at the bottom of group text messages and 7 second advertisements within voice messages. They also offer a premium version that is $4.95 per month which provides additional features such as the ability to add keywords. Today the service works across all major US wireless carriers (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile) and Derek tells me that they will be adding International support early next year as well.

The company is doing great ? they raised an undisclosed amount of funding from The Bellingham Angel Group earlier this year which allowed them to beef up their technology infrastructure, move into some office space, re-design the website and hire a few folks. They now have 6 employees and have had over 5000 groups sign up to use the service. The average group size is 40 and Tatango is now sending about 4 million messages per month across these 5000 groups.

Talking to Derek was very refreshing. He is a young guy (23) and although he admitted some people (guys with $$) have expressed concern about his lack of experience, he is passionate about his company and loves what he is doing. As Derek explained, he didn?t start the company with any grand vision ? he was simply trying to create a more efficient way to communicate with his friends through text messages. Derek and a few buddies spent about 4 months building a prototype and guess what, next thing they knew they had lots of other folks who wanted to use the service as well.

I asked Derek what the next 6 months had in store for him and along with looking for additional capital to stay ahead of the growth, his focus is pretty simple:

1. Get more groups signed up to use the service.
2. Fine-tune his business model so he can get profitable.
3. Continue to add features and functionality to make Tatango even better to use.

Personally I would have loved to use this service lat spring when I was coaching my 6 year old's Tee-Ball team. We had one game during the week and one game every Saturday. If you?re at all familiar with Seattle weather in April and May, you know that it is completely unpredictable. There were at least 4 games when I had to make last minute decisions on whether or not the games were on, and then figure out how I communicate that to 11 other parents. Tatango would have been a perfect solution and I?m sure I?ll find other uses for it as time goes on.

I encourage you to check it out at tatango.com. It will be fun watching these guys grow.

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Gaming, Odds and ends, Freeware, iPhone

TUAWAdventure released for the iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 19 Nov 2008 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Today I’m unboxing two gadgets, first of all a really big box featuring LG’s latest top notch 42 inch LCD TV, the LG7000 (42LG70 in the US). A review will follow in the next couple of weeks but until then you can check out this small unboxing gallery.

We have seen a lot of new studios that started developing mobile games for the App Store. The most recent studio to join the ever growing group is good old National Geographic. With their new game...

The big brain over in the google mobile garage is chuckling right now as Apple amuses the crowd…

gps, 3G, 3rd party apps - voip, ebay, sling, etc… yadda yadda… my phone could do all that 2 years ago”, mutters the brain. “But yes, the iPhone is much prettier and shiny and I thank you from the bottom of my heart”, the brain goes on…

“Apple you are creating my market for me. That is really nice of you. Oh, and an extra special thank you for reducing the price, that just validates and solidifes my thinking (but I’ll keep that to myself). Thanks again and keep up the good work.” she continues.

-the google big mobile brain

PS oh, and the brains over at RIM and MSFT are chuckling… or maybe they are shaking - not sure on that just yet

Electronic Arts, together with internal studio EA Maxis, have announced the system requirements to run Spore, though we haven't found any indication of what the bare minimums would translate to in gameplay.

The evolution, strategy simulator has been designed to execute on specific system specifications depending on the choice of your operating system and graphics system implementation. The requirements for Windows XP are as follows:

• 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 processor or AMD equivalent
• 512 MB RAM
• A 128 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 2.0
• ATI Radeon:
• 9500, 9600, 9800 and variants
• X300, X600, X700, X800, X850
• X1300, X1600, X1800, X1900, X1950 and discrete variants
• 2400, 2600, 2900 and variants
• 3650, 3850 and variants
• NVIDIA GeForce:
• FX 5900, FX 5950 (FX supported only in Windows XP)
• 6200, 6500, 6600, 6800 and variants
• 7200, 7300, 7600, 7800, 7900, 7950 and variants
• 8400, 8500, 8600, 8800 and variants
• Intel Extreme Graphics
• GMA 950, GMA X3000, GMA X3100
• At least 6 GB of hard drive space

For Windows Vista, players will have to beef up their computer's memory banks to 768 MB of RAM, with all other specifications consistent to those required for running in Windows XP. Gamers on the Mac will have to make sure that their system's algorithm crunching muscle must be on par with the following:

• Mac OS X 10.5.3 Leopard or higher
• Intel Core Duo Processor (unknown speed rating, possibly 1.8 GHz per core)
• 1024 MB RAM
• ATI X1600 (X1900, HD 2400, HD 2600 supported) or NVidia 7300 GT (7600, 8600, 8800 and variants supported) with 128 MB of Video RAM, or Intel Integrated GMA X3100
• At least 4.7GB of hard drive space for installation, plus additional space for custom content (storage space requirement subject to change)

Laptop users and gamers planning on running Spore on ITX machines (those with integrated graphics chipsets) may attempt designing creatures while in transit when installed on a mobile, lightweight rig with these specifications:

Windows portion:

• Intel Pentium D 2.6 GHz per core, Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8 GHz per core, or AMD equivalent
• Intel integrated graphics chipset 945GM and above (965 )
• 768 MB RAM

Mac portion:

• Dual 2.0 GHz CPUs or Intel Core 2 Duo 1.7 GHz per core minimum (may not run if below these specs)
• Integrated Intel GMA X3100 minimum (any lower will present very poor performance)

The hard drive storage space requirements on Apple's side is subject to certain changes, so we'll be updating you sometime soon. Until then, it's time to prep our machines for  Will Wright's major, 10-year spanning global gaming phenomenon which launches on September 7.

Japan's NTT DoCoMo Inc and South Korean partner KTF Co will jointly develop a smartphone using Google Inc software for launch next year, the Nikkei business daily reported on Wednesday.

Thanks to inflation, low confidence in the economy, and unemployment, almost 71 percent of online shoppers plan to cut back their spending this holiday season. Things are not looking so rosy in Whoville, it seems.

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Inspired by Emmett Williams, a practitioner of concrete poetry, Rob Giampietro has written three poems: Wastebasket, Snowflakes, and Spraypaint.

Giampietro has put out a call for someone to develop a Williams Word Generator. Drop him a line if you can help out...shouldn't be too much different than the many "words within words" generators scattered around the web.

(link)

This one is just pure awesomeness. Never mind those high-priced Guitar Hero peripherals. This guy played it with his bike.

That's right, we found this video up on YouTube, posted by madflux, and in it, he rides a bike to the music of Activision's Guitar Hero: World Tour's (Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Wii) Prisoner of Society by The Living End set on the Difficulty mode of Hard.

Easy? Not. See, madflux and his friends recreated the whole song level, complete with notes and riffs a-flare, throughout their neighborhood. Probably inspired by Dorothy's "follow the yellow brick road" mantra, these guys put stickers on the road to replicate the notes in-game.
He also put in LED lights on the handlebar of his bike that light up along with the notes as well. Methinks this is to help him pace his ride.

It obviously took a whole lot of work to make it work, but we're glad it did. Although some would say that this is just a fake viral ad for Guitar Hero, we'd still say it was darned cool. If that's not the case, and these bunch of guys really just had a whole lot of free time in their hands, then even more props to them!

Here, have a look at it and see for yourselves (and keep a look out for that guy in the KISS costume sometime around the 3:35 mark. Coolness!) .

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Related Guitar Hero: World Tour Articles:

• Guitar Hero: World Tour Deluxe Edition pricing and release details

HTC Fuze More Photos - View Specs

AT&T today launched the HTC Fuze, a Windows Mobile smartphone with a QWERTY keyboard and TouchFLO 3D touch screen user interface.

Powered by Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional, the Fuze is a compact, powerful smartphone with a smooth gloss black finish and unique faceted backplate. It features a sharp, 262K-color 2.8-inch (480 x 640 px) VGA touch screen. A full QWERTY keyboard slides out from the side.

TouchFLO 3D is designed for one-hand operation using gesture-based navigation. Customers simply touch, hold and slide along the screen tabs. A quick slide on the home screen activates the most used features such as email, text messaging, music player and camera. The "zoom in, zoom out" feature accesses the Internet via Opera browser for desktop-like webpage rendering.

AT&T customers can choose from popular platforms to access their corporate email. Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional offers integration with Microsoft Outlook information such as email, contacts, calendar and to-do lists.

Users can access and edit email attachments using mobile versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint.

A unique business card application lets users capture and save contact information with the built-in 3.2-megapixel camera.

Users can access AT&T Mobile Music, an integrated, on-the-go music service. Customers can browse music with accessible tabs sorted by playing lists, artists, albums, songs and genre views.

CV (Cellular Video) accesses thousands of video clips - news, sports, weather, entertainment, premium HBO Mobile content and more - via streaming video.

"The HTC Fuze, with its array of connectivity features, provides our customers with the ability to choose the manner in which they communicate using the form factor they deem most appropriate at a given moment - all in a very attractive and sleek package," said Michael Woodward, Vice President, Smart Devices for AT&T's wireless unit. "It's a fantastic addition to AT&T's industry-leading Windows Mobile smartphone portfolio."

The HTC Fuze is available for $299.99 at retail stores.

- HTC Fuze Specs

Related News Articles

• AT&T Launches BlackBerry Bold
• Samsung Propel Sliding Messaging Phone Launches for AT&T
• BlackBerry Bold Arrives to AT&T on Nov. 4th
• AT&T Quickfire Touch Screen QWERTY Keypad Smartphone
• Samsung Propel Sliding QWERTY Smartphone for AT&T

©2002-2008 Mobiledia Corp. A Cell Phone Resource Site. All Rights Reserved. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only.

T-Mobile USA, Inc. today reported third quarter 2008 results. At the end of the quarter, T-Mobile USA had 32.1 million customers, adding 670,000 net new customers during the third quarter.

"In the quarter, T-Mobile took giant steps forward in driving new innovations to meet the pressing needs of our customers," said Robert Dotson, President and CEO, T-Mobile USA. "We introduced our customers to the T-Mobile @Home(R) landline replacement service at a time when saving money is a top priority for American households. We also established our new nationwide high-speed 3G services, which will cover 120 cities by the end of November. This network introduction was accompanied by the unveiling of the T-Mobile G1 with Google, the world's first device built on the fully open Android operating platform giving consumers access to some of the most innovative mobile applications to ever come to market. These and other innovations are helping us aggressively compete as we debut new and craved-for services that truly meet customer needs and inspire greater long term loyalty to our brand."

Other highlights on the data side:

-- Data services revenue was $850 million in the third quarter of 2008, representing
17.3% of blended ARPU, or $8.90 per customer, compared with 16.6% of blended ARPU, or $8.60 per customer in the second quarter of 2008, and 15.4% of blended ARPU, or $8.10 per customer in the third quarter of 2007. Data services revenue increased 28% year over year.

-- Growth in messaging revenue continued to be the most significant driver of data ARPU, as customers continue to move towards purchasing plans that include messaging, including our unlimited voice and data plans. The total number of messages on the T-Mobile USA network increased to almost 49 billion in the third quarter of 2008, compared to 41 billion in the second quarter of 2008 and 21 billion in the third quarter of 2007.

NOTE: If you are reading this now, it could mean that you’re an early bird at the polls OR you’re still home and have not yet cast your vote. GET OUT THERE AND VOTE!

As reported from Bloomberg:

Texting may do for the Democratic presidential candidate what arm-twisting precinct captains did in years past: prod millions to get out and vote. The Obama campaign plans to use the millions of cell-phone numbers it has amassed over the past 22 months to blast its supporters with that message today.

The biggest concern for the Obama campaign is getting young people — who have registered in record numbers and shown unprecedented interest in surveys — to turn out. In 2004, only 45 percent of those under 30 showed up to vote, according to Census data, making them just 16 percent of the electorate that year.

… Studies show that texting is among the most effective and cheapest ways of getting supporters, particularly blacks, Hispanics and younger voters, to the voting booth.

Tags: Campaign, McCain, Obama, Presidential Election

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The new BlackBerry Storm, which goes on sale Friday, could be the first phone offered by Verizon Wireless that truly challenges Apple's iPhone offered on AT&T's network.

We noticed this on AT&T's web store in the wee hours this morning, and sure enough, they've gone ahead and announced the LG Incite in all its official glory today (normally the announcement comes before the web store stuff, but whatever). It's got WiFi, a 3-megapixel camera, a 3-inch touchscreen equipped with haptics and 400 x 240 resolution, AT&T Navigator, microSD support up to 16GB, triband HSDPA, and Windows Mobile 6.1 -- in other words, LG's produced a nice QWERTY-less foil to the Fuze here. It's available straight away in stores, too, as long as you're willing to shell out the $199.99 on contract after rebates.

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

LG Incite for AT&T, now with more official originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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More Sackboy costumes for LittleBigPlanet from Media Molecule. Apart from the Sack-in-the-Box and the LocoRoco costume set that we're getting this week, we're also getting a Turkey costume for free. Is it even a costume? It's more like headgear. It looks like they just stuffed a Turkey with Sackboy's head, but hey, it looks cool.

The Motorstorm costume is already out in Euro, and Japan is getting those as well. As for the Turkey, Japan might not get a piece of that since they don't have Thanksgiving. Next week, Sony will release a Chimera costume from Resistance as well.

The LittleBigCloset continues to expand.

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More LittleBigPlanet costumes:

• This week's LBP download haul - Sack-in-the-Box and LocoRoco Costumes
  

It's a breezy warm evening, and I reflect once again: home at last, home at last.

I've been back in Newport Beach for about four months now, and each day I think how happy I am to finally be home. At Home. It seems that for years I've been in search of home but never quite got there.

Somewhat unusual for an American kid -- families move around so much -- I stayed in the same childhood home from 3 to 18. But it wasn't a happy home. From around 13 or so, I just counted my time until I was Out.

Out to where? Out to a new place to call home? Just Out. And then I was out, at college and into a succession of places to stay. A campus apartment. Living in a trailer on the now sadly removed Irvine Meadows West campus trailer park (UCI literally paved paradise and put up a parking lot. My article on it remains trapped behind the LA Times paywall). The glory of moving to a beach apartment for the first time, of leaning out my window, looking between two other buildings and being able to see a sliver of the ocean. Good memories; but all temporary shelter. None of them home.

Then post-college, more apartments at the beach in Newport, but still none of them home. Who knew what I was going to do -- stay working in California? Go to graduate school? Would this internet thing take off? Each time I saw the beach, I savored it, knowing I'd inevitably have to say goodbye to it.

And then to Britain, where I really did finally have a home. At least in the purchased sense. I was a homeowner for the first time; I had all the trappings of a home, but somehow I never felt At Home. For me, home had to be back in California.

Trips back, there were many of them, always bittersweet. Always a return to seeing the beach and the continual goodbyes once again to it.

Now for the first time in over two decades (I am getting so old), I'm At Home again. Not renting. Not saying goodbye to the beach each day but hello. It's nice to see you. I'll see you tomorrow. And you're not going away.

Foolishness, in some ways. We never really know where we're going, where we're going to stay, what's to come. But at least I've got home for now.

Image © AT&TExactly one month ago, I published a compilation guide of all Sprint cell phone plans currently on the market and analyzed them against one other. That compilation guide,...

… for Brits to emigrate to. Amazing how many Brits move there.