Can’t find a socket to charge your phone? IDT’s got a solution.
(Updates with cost details)
Ted Tewksbury wants to get rid your iPhone cable.
The chief executive of San Jose, California-based Integrated Device Technology is pushing a set of microchips he hopes will eventually render “contactless charging” — charging your smartphone by simply placing it on a specific spot — commonplace and eventually make phone-charging cables a thing of the past.
On a recent visit to IDT’s offices, Tewksbury showed me the chips he’s just started selling. They’re IDT”s twist on existing technology, using inductive coupling, which has yet to reach critical mass.
The idea is, instead of plugging your smartphone into the wall when its battery runs low, you toss it onto a wireless charging surface that could be built into your desk, a cup holder in your car, or even the armrest of an airplane seat. And there it would juice up.
If Tewksbury has his way, that sort of inbuilt design will become de rigeur in cars, homes, airports and elsewhere, so people may not even notice when their devices are charging. Competing ”wireless” charging products on the market now require the user to tote around a charging pad that itself must be plugged into a socket, making them less-than-truly mobile and defeating the purpose of going “wireless”.
IDT hopes to grab a slice of a small but potentially sizeable market for wireless smartphone charging chips that he reckons could reach $800 million by 2014.
Cash, credit or a big smile?
We do everything with our smartphones now: reading, writing, photography, music. And, to paraphrase that old American Express commercial, we never leave home without it. But the one smartphone function that hasn’t exactly exploded yet — and really should have already — is paying for things.
The idea of an e-wallet isn’t especially new, but it did take the advent of the iPhone four years ago to bubble up the sort of possibilities that didn’t depend on storing information in a SIM card (which isn’t the prevalent wireless technology in the United States anyway). PayPal pioneered the notion that you could use a pocket electronic device you always carried to pay a restaurant bill or for a latte from Starbucks. (Sure, the device was a Palm Pilot, which means nothing to most 20-somethings. And yes, PayPal in its infinite wisdom stopped the person-to-person payment functionality very early in their history.)
That’s how far we’ve come — and haven’t.
One of the problems about dumping payment and loyalty cards is that the established credit card players are very well entrenched. Part is a visceral reluctance to believe that using your phone to store and convey payment and bank account information is much safer than brandishing plastic cards with an electronic strip.
This year has seen lots of movement in the credit card disruption space and next year significant numbers of people might finally be emptying their wallets and purses of all sorts of payment and loyalty cards.
Google has made a big bet on mobile payments, backing a technology called “Near Field Communication” which, in a nutshell, allows you to pay for something if you (and your phone) are near an NFC reader — no need to fumble for your card. But NFC requires special hardware, and so far there is exactly one Google Wallet phone. But Google purchased Motorola Mobility this year, so look for every Motorola mobile phone to be NFC-enabled.
With the market share for Android-powered mobile devices now exceeding 50 percent, Google is well on its way to creating a perfect storm to collaborate with those entrenched credit card companies — so far, just MasterCard — and make NFC mainstream.
The 1% are fiddling with their smart phones while America collapses.
Autonomy CEO’s terrifying prediction: the rise of the surveillance society
As a general rule, senior executives at technology companies tend to try to make the public feel excited about the future and about technology’s role to improve it.
Mike Lynch, the CEO of Autonomy, must not have gotten that memo; or he decided to ignore it.
During a talk at the Techonomy conference on Monday, Lynch described a dark world in which today’s celebrated technologies, such as social networking and smartphones, become the nefarious tools of a surveillance society.
This vision, Lynch explained, is not some dystopian, parallel universe, but rather the inevitable end-product of era in which technology becomes ever-cheaper, smarter and ubiquitous.
“There are going to be sensors everywhere. We’re all carrying the most incredibly sophisticated devices that can see and hear and learn where they are,” he said. While governments have long had the resources to build an Orwellian state, Lynch said the real danger lies in what “any arbitrary group of people” will soon be able to do with the technology.
Imagine a smartphone app that automatically reads every car license plate that appears in front of it, Lynch hypothesized. Use social networking to connect a group of people wielding the same app, he posited, and suddenly that group has the ability to track almost anyone in a city.
“I can’t conceive of how privacy is going to survive the ability of the machines to actually understand the data they’re getting,” he said.
Verizon throws weight behind Motorola’s Droid Razr for the holidays
(Correction: The name “Droid” was originally misspelled in the headline.)
Verizon Wireless is bringing its considerable marketing and promotional resources to bear on the Droid Razr from Motorola Mobility, kicking off an advertising blitz this week for a gadget that the once-mighty cellphone maker hopes will make a splash this feastive season.
The campaign launched ironically just a few hours after Verizon’s executives were honored guests at a splashy event to launch ReZound, a rival phone from HTC (pictured on the left). “Today we’re focused predominantly focused on Rezound“, Verizon Wireless spokesman Howard Waterman said.
But he went on to describe how Verizon Wireless will kick off sci-fi style teaser television ads for the latest Motorola phone that same evening. While Verizon is offering several new phones for the holidays, it plans to promote Motorola’s ahead of rivals Apple Inc’s iPhone, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus – and HTC’s Rezound.
Razr “is clearly going to be the phone we’ll focus on and have tremendous adertising weight on in the fourth quarter,” said Waterman.
The Razr is the first Motorola smartphone to be launched after Google announced its intention to buy the storied technology icon.
If past campaigns are any indicator, operator advertising can prove crucial to a phone’s success. Heavy promotion of Motorola’s first Droid in 2009 was the key to helping the embattled phone maker back on its feet after years of market share losses.
OMG Sprint has put 5g limit on there data plans for the past month without telling anyone! I just got a $300.00 over 4g data bill even though my statement still says unlimited 4g. I called Sprint they said they have not updated the paper statements with the 5g limit. Why is this story out of date already. Sprint does not have unlimited data plans anymore!!! I would like to show my statement that says you went over your 5g on 4g service $300.00 then in the very next page shows 4g data limit (unlimited) Sprint is doing something wrong here. The service rep even said bill was misleading.
Does Sony Ericsson fate provide Googorola clues?
While Google made no secret of the fact that it is buying Motorola Mobility for its patents, the remaining unanswered question is what it does with the handset business. Now that Sony is planning to take full ownership of its mobile joint venture with Ericsson, its behavior may provide some clues as to what “Googorola” should do.
The idea seems to be that Sony will make its smartphones work more closely with other devices such as game consoles, tablets, computers and TVs. Imagine watching a movie on the train home and then transferring it seamlessly to the big TV when you reach the living room? It’s a nice idea and coming closer to reality with the Sony Ericsson deal according to Evercore analyst Alkesh Shah
“I think there’s a major change happening in terms of how media and communications will be delivered to and from smartphones and to other devices in your home including your set-top boxes and TVs” said Shah.
If it follows Sony’s lead, it would make a lot of sense for Google to keep the mobile phone business and make Motorola phones work more tightly with Motorola set-top boxes, and of course tablets based on Google’s Android software, Shah said. “It may happen,” he said.
On the other hand Avian Securities analyst Matthew Thornton ‘s interpretation of the Sony news went in the opposite direction. The argument is that Google might want to sell Motorola’s handset business, which already depends on Android, in order to placate other Android phone hardware makers and convince them Motorola won’t get preferential treatment.
One potential buyer? Sony, reckons Thornton. Since Sony will have full control of the handset business for the first time, it might be in a good position to merge it with Motorola’s phone business, Thornton said.
“Having a JV acquire is very complex” he said. “If Sony really wants a presence in the Americas and in China (buying) Motorola makes sense rather than trying to do it organically. It comes down to what Google wants to do with the business.”
Motorola bets on recycled Razr brand
Razr is back. After being criticized for depending on the four letter brand for too long, Motorola is hoping to draw some more blood from the stone with the new Droid Razr in the U.S. market. It will be called plain old Razr in the rest of the world.
Analysts are already predicting that the new phones won’t reach the 130 million unit sales that Motorola boasts for Razr over several years. But the jury is still out on whether using the old brand that came to symbolize the company’s downfall will help sales of the latest phone, which it is touting as the world’s thinnest smartphone.
“We tend to see it more in the auto industry where Dodge brought back the Charger and Volkswagen brought back the Beetle. Volkswagen did well,” said NPD analyst Ross Rubin. But the modern Beetle is an updated model that is recognizable as a descendent of an old car that dates back to pre-war Germany. The Droid Razr is a tablet-like device with a 4.3 inch display that looks nothing like the original flip-phone Razr.
“It probably creates a weaker association than if the product had been a flip-phone,” said Rubin, adding that while the retro-branding was “not a bad idea”, it would be unlikely to make a huge difference to Motorola’s sales of the gadget.
Avaian Securities analyst Matthew Thornton was more enthusiastic: “I like it. If you think about the Motorola brand and what it’s tied to, it is Razr. I think it’s a smart play. The thing the Razr stood for was thinness.”
He pointed to Sony’s success transferring the brand of the Walkman portable cassette player to a cellphone line and its use of the Cybershot camera brand for camera phones. The Sony phones were popular until consumers’ focus turned to more powerful smartphones such as the iPhone.
“The products themselves were fine. They just missed what was next,” Thornton said, speaking about both Motorola and Sony.
I hope that the engineers have redesigned the hinge between the screen and the key pad. Dealers have acknowledged that the brushes wear out and the screen becomes inoperable, rendering the phone useless.
Tech wrap: Samsung closing in on Apple?
It’s no secret that Samsung’s flagship Galaxy smartphones are leading the Android-powered pack of handsets. What may be less obvious is just how quickly the company is closing in on Apple’s title of world’s biggest smartphone vendor in unit terms. Samsung announced on Friday it expects its third-quarter profit to top even the most bullish market forecasts, driven in large part by booming smartphone sales. “The Galaxy S II probably played a key role in boosting the company’s earnings and it will continue to do so pretty much unchallenged, until Apple unveils a better new version of iPhone,” said Kyung Woo-hyun, a fund manager at Daishin Asset Management.
Sprint had a rough start to the week and an even rougher end to it. The No.3 U.S. wireless carrier signaled on Friday that it could spend more money than it brings in over the next few years, even without accounting for the high costs of selling the Apple iPhone, sending its shares down 13 percent. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Sprint would likely lose money on its deal to sell the iPhone until 2014. Sprint outlined a plan on Friday to spend $7 billion on a network upgrade, which it said it would pay for with cash from its balance sheet and by raising capital. The company refused to address the cost of selling the iPhone.
If you were one of the keeners waiting for the clock to strike 12:01 a.m. PT so you could pre-order your Apple iPhone 4S, there was a good chance you may have had a bit of trouble. CNet reports that pre-orders of Apple’s latest smartphone were beset by a slew of problems. For starters, Apple, AT&T and Sprint were late opening their digital doors to customers looking to buy the new device. On top of that, both Apple and AT&T’s sites were having trouble processing orders from customers looking to upgrade, presenting them with error messages. Perhaps it’s no surprise: both Apple and carriers ran into similar issues last year with the release of the iPhone 4.
Doubtful that Groupon remains committed to an initial public offering after the recent accounting mini-scandal, a slew of cash-outs by early founders and investors and an overall economic environment that remains uncertain? Don’t be. At least that’s the message the online daily deals firm sent when it filed an updated version of its IPO paperwork with the SEC on Friday. As GigaOm reports, the latest filing details the company’s plans to tighten up its marketing budget and shows that its revenue bookings increased slightly in the second quarter.
Microsoft secured approval of its Skype acquisition from European authorities. The European Commission said that its investigation of the takeover showed that the firms’ activities mainly overlapped for video communications, where Microsoft is active through its Windows Live Messenger.”However, the Commission considers that there are no competition concerns in this growing market where numerous players, including Google, are present,” it said in a statement.
Netflix and AMC Networks have signed a new licensing agreement that gives the popular streaming video service exclusive rights in the United States and Canada to the hit show “The Walking Dead.”
And our President goes and signs a free-trade pact with South Korea! Both parties are selling us out. Korean goods should be slapped with a 20% duty! That will crimp their style for sure.
Tech wrap: Intel and Google launch Android partnership
Intel Corp and Google Inc launched a development partnership aimed at accelerating the chipmaker’s foray into smartphones. They will work together to optimize future versions of Google’s Android mobile software for Intel’s “Atom” processors, hoping to speed the development and time-to-market of future Intel-powered smartphones.
Microsoft Corp handed out sleek new tablet computers with a test version of Windows 8 at its annual developer conference, to spark excitement over its new operating system.
Cisco Systems Inc CEO John Chambers said he remained upbeat about technology spending by customers despite an uncertain economic outlook.
Dell Inc, the world’s second-largest computer maker, is cautiously optimistic that its strong performance in Europe and Asia will continue, but is concerned about U.S. government spending, an executive said.
The forecasts will be key for BlackBerry maker Research In Motion this quarter, as investors grope for hints that the company’s long downturn is coming to an end.
Nintendo’s attempt to rescue its failed 3DS handheld games gadget failed to dispel market gloom, triggering a 5 percent share slide and stoking deep worries for an iconic brand desperate to win back users.
Tech wrap: Bad smartphone bets burn investors
Smartphones are constantly reaching new heights in sleekness and cutting-edge technology, but investors in the U.S. wireless sector seem unconvinced. Weak results and poor growth in both major and minor telecoms firms nationwide helped spark an investor exodus from the sector, and analysts say small operators like MetroPCS and Leap Wireless have indicated they’ve simply lost faith in the promise that smartphones can boost growth. Popular with consumers and heavily subsidized to encourage uptake, investors now look to be assessing whether a future of ever-increasing costs for carriers is one they’d like to take part in.
In tech company earnings, professional networking site LinkedIn reported that its quarterly revenue more than doubled as the company endeavored to prove it can fulfill the promise of its splashy IPO. Used by professionals seeking jobs or contacts and companies seeking qualified applicants, LinkedIn was the first prominent U.S. social networking site to make its public trading debut.
The massive hack attack recently revealed by security company McAfee does much to underscore the fact that governments and companies are losing the war against cyber thieves. Security experts uncovered an unprecedented five-year series of cyber attacks on 72 organizations worldwide, including the United Nations, governments and major corporations. In this analysis, Reuters’ security correspondent William Maclean argues that it’s unclear if the unsettling disclosure will actually prompt rapid global action against cyber attacks – partly due to the reluctance of stigma-conscious companies and states to report the attacks.
After lashing out at rivals and accusing them of banding together to block Google’s attempts to bid on Nortel smartphone patents in an angry blog post, Google Senior Vice-President and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond had his claims of victimhood shot down with a single tweet by Frank Shaw, Vice President of Corporate Communications for Microsoft. In a development no doubt embarrassing for the Internet search giant, Shaw replied by tweeting an image of an email that showed that Google was offered a chance to make a joint bid for the Nortel patents, but turned it down.
In more bad news, Nokia Siemens Networks announced it began cutting 1,500 jobs from the 6,900 staff it acquired with its $1.2 billion acquisition of Motorola’s telecoms network unit in April. A Nokia spokesman said the process affects staff working in the GSM and Wimax technology divisions in several countries including the U.S. and Britain.
And in the social networking world, a new system of predicting “friends” based on the actual places individuals visit has been developed by researchers at Cambridge University in the UK. The new approach to “friend suggestions” looks at users’ regular haunts and finds other people with similar connections. Combined with the “friend-of-a-friend” method, this new system can increase the efficacy of the friend prediction system, say researchers.
Tech wrap: Apple ousts Nokia as top smartphone vendor
Apple jumped to the top of the global smartphone sales rankings in the second quarter, ending Nokia’s 15-year run as the lead smartphone vendor, according to new research from Strategy Analytics. Apple sold a record 20.3 million iPhones during the quarter, which amounts to about a fifth of the global smartphone market. Impressive considering its iPhone 4 model was released more than a year ago. Samsung also surpassed Nokia to claim second spot, with 17.5 percent of market share. Nokia fell to third place as its market share tumbled to 15.2 from 38.1 percent a year ago.
As if Apple’s new royalty status isn’t enough, the gadget maker can also lay claim to being the most profitable in the smartphone business. According to a chart on Business Insider, Apple pulled in two-thirds of all profits in the mobile phone sector last quarter. That’s twice as much as Samsung, RIM and HTC combined.
Did Yahoo get a raw deal when it signed a pact with Alibaba and SofBank to resovle a dispute over online payment service Alipay? That’s the case being made by some analysts. The trio announced it had struck an agreement after months of wrangling over the lucrative asset, under which Alibaba gets up to $6 billion if the mobile payments firm goes public or gets sold. But investors are bothered by the deal, saying it reaffirms perceptions on Wall Street that Yahoo has little say in Alibaba, the e-commerce company founded by Jack Ma and which is 43 percent-owned by Yahoo.
It’s official – you can now get Groupon deals on Foursquare. Foursquare has integrated Groupon coupons into its mobile apps. Users can cash in on the deals now – which will include both daily deals and Groupon Now deals – by using the “Explore” tab on Foursquare’s app, a feature that lets users search for neat activities to do nearby.
Microsoft warned on Thursday that a government review of its U.S. tax obligations in past years could significantly affect its financial statements if not resolved in its favor.The Internal Revenue Service has looked at Microsoft’s use of transfer pricing, among other things, or methods of booking prices and sales between subsidiaries — often leading to opportunities to report earnings in lower-tax jurisdictions.
