Verizon readying new VCast Apps store
Verizon Wireless will introduce a new version of its VCast Apps store to developers at its Verizon Developer Conference in September, improving the experience for both app creators and consumers, an executive said Wednesday.
VCast Apps is Verizon's own app storefront on handsets. The carrier populates the store with apps that have been tested for security, usability and power and bandwidth efficiency. It works with developers to help them meet those standards and create better apps, said Kyle Malady, Verizon's vice president of network and technology. He described the new app-store effort in an interview at the opening of Verizon's Application Innovation Center (AIC) in San Francisco, where the carrier plans to work with developers and connect them with potential hardware and software partners. Read more...
Sprint to launch cloud services this fall
Sprint will offer cloud services to all sizes of businesses in the fourth quarter, a Sprint executive said on Wednesday.
A Sprint spokeswoman said more details would be announced at a later date, but confirmed the executive's comments in an interview published Wednesday.
Paget Alves, head of Sprint business markets, said in the interview that Sprint's offerings to businesses will include selling its network infrastructure as a service available on-demand. Read more...
Citrix buys VDI personalization vendor
Citrix has acquired RingCube, a vendor of software for personalizing desktops within VDIs (virtual desktop infrastructures), the companies announced Wednesday. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
RingCube's software "will make it easier for IT to give each and every user a personalized desktop," said John Fanelli, Citrix vice president of enterprise desktop and applications. Citrix plans to pair RingCube's technology with its own VDI offering, XenDesktop.
RingCube's software will allow users to choose wallpapers, define their printers, install department applications and create their own areas for storing data. Read more...
Apple security under attack: The view from Windows
The blogosphere is abuzz over the latest Black Hat presentation exposing the security holes of Apple's Mac OS X. The upshot is that Microsoft Windows, in comparison, does a better job of protecting its users, especially against network protocol attacks. A proof-of-concept hack shown at the Black Hat security conference involved plugging one rogue Mac computer into an enterprise network, where it was soon able to gather the authentication credentials of all the other Macs in the environment.
In my world (I'm a principal security architect for Microsoft), this is no big surprise. Macs have always been far more vulnerable to hacker assaults than Windows computers, by almost every metric that means anything. Yes, Macs do have far more software vulnerabilities than Windows computers. If you don't believe me, go to any vulnerability database (I like Secunia's advisory database) and compare any operating system or application from Apple and Microsoft, head to head, over the same time period during the last five years. Most people are absolutely shocked to see that Microsoft software in general, and Windows in particular, has suffered far fewer vulnerabilities than Apple software and Mac OS X. Read more...
Apple’s device dominance drives e-book price-fixing lawsuit
A Seattle law firm has targeted Apple in an e-book price-fixing lawsuit partly because of the company's dominance in smartphone and tablet sales, the firm's managing director said.
Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, a Seattle law firm, has filed a nationwide class-action lawsuit accusing Apple of conspiring with five top publishers to illegally fix the prices of e-books. The publishers named in the lawsuit, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, are HarperCollins Publishers, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Group and Simon & Schuster.
Apple's strong market share in the smartphone and tablet businesses gave it the power to drive up e-book prices across the industry, including at rival seller Amazon.com, said Steve Berman, managing director at Hagens Berman. "Apple was the catalyst to all of this," he said Wednesday. Read more...
Mobile video chat code seen in new Facebook Messenger app
Shortly after Facebook launched a Messenger app for smartphones on Tuesday, early users found partial code for a video chat component tucked away inside it.
Facebook Messenger was announced in a Facebook blog as a "faster way to message on mobile" for iPhone and Android smartphones.
Shortly after the app appeared, 9-to-5 Mac reported on the video component, noting it was "very rudimentary" code.
A Facebook spokeswoman would not add much information about when or even whether the mobile video chat capability might be launched, saying in an email: "We're always working on new features, but we don't have anything to announce at this time." Read more...
Apple also filed suit against Motorola Xoom in Europe
Apple isn't just going after the Samsung Galaxy Tab in Europe, it's also attacking the Motorola Xoom.
Apple's lawsuit, which was filed in Germany and led to Tuesday's injunction barring sales of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Europe, makes reference to a separate complaint against the Motorola Xoom.
Patent expert Florian Mueller found the original lawsuit, filed in Dusseldorf, Germany, and pointed out the Motorola action.
The reference in the suit says that Apple has also filed a complaint over the design of the Motorola Xoom, which runs the Android operating system. But it's unclear if Apple is seeking an injunction that would immediately prevent Motorola from importing the tablets into Europe. Read more...
Mozilla shrinks Firefox’s memory appetite
Mozilla's Firefox 7, slated to ship in late September, will be significantly faster because of work done plugging the browser's memory leaks, a company developer says.
Mozilla developer Nicholas Nethercote credited the "MemShrink" project for closing memory bugs in the browser and producing a faster Firefox.
"Firefox 7 uses less memory than Firefox 6 (and 5 and 4): often 20 percent to 30 percent less, and sometimes as much as 50 percent less," Nethercote said in a blog post Tuesday. "This means that Firefox 7 is faster (sometimes drastically so) and less likely to crash, particularly if you have many websites open at once and/or keep Firefox running for a long time between restarts." Read more...
Google leaves Android App Inventor to the open source community
Last month's surprising closure of Google Labs may have its first significant casualty: Google has announced it is ending support for App Inventor for Android, but the company is ultimately leaving the fate of the project to the open source community.
Released in July of last year, App Inventor for Android was designed to enable nontechnical users to easily create Android smartphone apps, albeit ones that are relatively limited in functionality. The project hasn't enjoyed much in the way of broad success that could equate to future profits, which is why Google is cutting support for it along with the other slacker projects in the shuttered Labs.
However, Google recognizes that App Inventor has garnered success in the educational space, so the company plans to make the code open source and to "[explore] opportunities to support the educational use of App Inventor on an open source platform," according to the official Google App Inventor blog. Read more...
IBM says PC going way of vacuum tube and typewriter
Thirty years ago, IBM created the first personal computer running Microsoft's MS-DOS. Today, IBM and Microsoft seem to have very different views on the future of the PC.
IBM CTO Mark Dean of the company's Middle East and Africa division, one of a dozen IBM engineers who designed that first machine unveiled Aug. 12, 1981, says PCs are "going the way of the vacuum tube, typewriter, vinyl records, CRT, and incandescent light bulbs."
IBM, of course, sold its PC division to Lenovo in 2005. Dean, in a blog post, writes that "I, personally, have moved beyond the PC as well. My primary computer now is a tablet. When I helped design the PC, I didn't think I'd live long enough to witness its decline. But, while PCs will continue to be much-used devices, they're no longer at the leading edge of computing." Read more...