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A eulogy for Steve Jobs, as spoken by his sister

By: |Oct 30th, 2011 at 04:11PM
Filed Under: Featured
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During a memorial service for Steve Jobs that took place on October 16th, his sister Mona Simpson delivered a touching eulogy that was published in today’s New York Times. Follow the link below to read it in its entirety. (more…)

Class-action suit filed against RIM after BlackBerry outage

By: |Oct 26th, 2011 at 04:40PM
Filed Under: Legal, Mobile
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BlackBerry users have filed a class-action lawsuit against Research In Motion after the company’s massive service outage earlier this month, the Financial Post reported on Wednesday. The suit was officially filed by the Consumer Law Group in the Quebec Superior Court “on behalf of individuals who have BlackBerry smartphones and who pay for a monthly data plan but were unable to access their email, BlackBerry Messenger service (BBM), and/or Internet for the period of October 11 to 14, 2011.” ...

RIM: All BlackBerry services have been restored

By: |Oct 13th, 2011 at 10:45AM
Filed Under: Mobile, Services
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Research In Motion co-CEO Mike Lazaridis confirmed on a conference call Thursday morning that all BlackBerry services have been restored globally. The co-chief had issued a video apology to customers earlier on Thursday, offering reassurances that the company was doing everything in its power to resolve service interruptions that had extended into their fourth day. A switch failure followed by a large backlog of emails is being blamed for the service outage, which affected millions of BlackBerry users across ...

T-Mobile may offer free signal boosters to stop subscribers from fleeing

By: |Aug 31st, 2011 at 09:00AM
Filed Under: Mobile, Rumors
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T-Mobile intends to offer cellular signal boosters to customers looking to switch carriers due to poor reception at home, according to T-Mobile watcher TmoNews. The move appears to be part of a new program intended to slow service quality-related cancellations, which are apparently a significant problem for the nation’s No. 4 carrier. Beginning on September 7th, T-Mobile will seemingly begin offering in-home signal boosters “when a customer triggers for cancellation of service due to poor in-home ...

Apple iCloud.com beta launches for developers, pricing revealed

By: |Aug 1st, 2011 at 06:59PM
Filed Under: Mobile, Services
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Apple’s official iCloud.com website is now live for developers as part of a new beta phase of the service. The website is complete with web applications for Calendar, Contacts, Mail, iCloud for Pages, iWork and Find My iPhone. It also currently has a look and feel very reminiscent of iOS, which we like. We already know that Apple will offer iOS users 5GB of free iCloud storage, but the Cupertino-based company also revealed the official pricing for those who want a bit more storage. Users can sign up for...

Amazon inks streaming deal with NBCUniversal

By: |Jul 29th, 2011 at 12:37AM
Filed Under: Home Entertainment, Services
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Amazon announced on Thursday that it has inked an agreement with NBCUniversal to provide its subscription customers with access to 1,000 Universal Pictures movies. The deal is in addition to the online retailer’s recent agreement with CBS to offer shows such as Star Trek and Cheers to its customers. The new content includes films such as Being John Malkovich, Jetsons, Flipper, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Billy Elliott. Amazon is largely expected to release at least one tablet in the coming months...

Skype service down for some, quick fix available now [updated]

By: |May 26th, 2011 at 09:45AM
Filed Under: Mobile, Services, Software
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Skype confirmed early Thursday morning that some users may experience connection issues signing into the service or making Skype calls. The company says it has identified the problem and has posted instructions for fixing the issue. The good news is it doesn’t look like the outage will be as massive as the one last December, which was later blamed on an overloaded cluster of support servers. If you’re experiencing issues now, hit the jump for some quick fix instructions from Skype. Just don’...

Apple inks cloud-music deal with EMI; Sony, Universal in the works

By: |May 19th, 2011 at 07:23AM
Filed Under: Services
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Apple has completed a cloud-music streaming deal with record label EMI, according to a report filed by CNET. Citing multiple industry sources, the publication notes that Apple, Sony Music Entertainment and the Universal Music Group are working on agreements as well; a previous report claims that Warner Music Group and Apple already signed a cloud service agreement sometime last month. “Apple will finish behind Google and Amazon in the race to the cloud, but Apple now has the freedom to offer a range...

Slacker intros ‘Slacker Premium Radio’ for $10 a month

By: |May 18th, 2011 at 05:59AM
Filed Under: Mobile, Services, Software
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On Tuesday Slacker introduced a new subscription service called “Slacker Premium Radio.” Slacker Premium allows you to search for artists and play songs, or even full albums, on demand. Similar to Rhapsody, you can also cache songs for offline playback on your phone where a 3G or Wi-Fi signal isn’t available. The streaming radio service said that it offers 6 times the amount of music that Pandora offers, although it remains unclear how its library stacks up against Rhapsody or Microsoft̵...

FCC launches PLAN emergency alert service for mobile devices

By: |May 13th, 2011 at 02:05PM
Filed Under: Mobile
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The city of New York has teamed up with the FCC and wireless carriers to unveil a new emergency alert system called PLAN. PLAN can notify mobile users in a specific geographic location of a hazardous or potentially life threatening situations. The new system was announced a few days ago at an event at the still-under-construction World Trade Center site, and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg commented:One of the many lessons that were reinforced on 9/11 is the importance of getting clear and accurate in...

Comcast, others blocking access to The Pirate Bay [Updated]

By: |May 12th, 2011 at 10:32AM
Filed Under: Internet
108

Reports have begun sprouting up all over the Internet claiming that Comcast, and a handful of other ISPs, are blocking access to torrent treasure trove, The Pirate Bay. Being a Comcast customer here in Boston, I thought it might be a good time to test the reports. My findings: yup, they’re definitely blocking it. Attempts to navigate to thepiratebay.org result in a timeout error — I even switched DNS servers to make sure it wasn’t a name-server record error causing the behavior. After firing ...

MobileMe replacement dubbed Castle, evidence found in Lion

By: |May 2nd, 2011 at 07:37AM
Filed Under: Rumors, Services
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French blog Consomac has discovered an interesting bit of intel inside Apple’s latest developer build of Mac OS X Lion. The information insinuates that users of the company’s MobileMe cloud service will be prompted to upgrade to an offering dubbed “Castle” at some point in the future. It is unclear if Castle will be the new name of an expanded cloud-service offering — iCloud? — or rather the name of an update to the current service. The company’s World Wide Developer Conferen...

Confirmed: Apple now owns icloud.com

By: |Apr 29th, 2011 at 07:50PM
Filed Under: Services
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Following up on a rumor from yesterday, Digital Daily‘s John Paczkowski has confirmed that Apple has purchased the domain name icloud.com — henceforth to be known as iCloud, we’re sure. “Sources in a position to know” confirmed to the publication that Swedish company Xcerion has sold the domain to Apple, although they could not confirm that the Cupertino-based company paid $4.5 million for it as was reported yesterday. Apple is widely expected to launch a cloud-based service in t...

Apple readying ‘crowd-sourced traffic’ service in ‘next couple of years’

By: |Apr 27th, 2011 at 12:10PM
Filed Under: Mobile
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Included in Apple’s “Q&A on Location Data” press release this morning was a rare and concrete statement that pointed to a future project the company is working on. “Apple is now collecting anonymous traffic data to build a crowd-sourced traffic database with the goal of providing iPhone users an improved traffic service in the next couple of years,” reads the release. Currently, iOS offers its users traffic-data through the bundled Google Maps application. It is unclear wheth...