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Location is a core element in mobile applications and smartphones. We take our mobile devices with us everywhere we go. Their location, and the context in which we use them, changes constantly. In the next two years, location will become central to user experience and performance on hundreds of millions of handsets and applications.

We most commonly think of location within traditional mobile appl...

Nimbuzz, a Netherlands based VoIP & Messaging start-up is introducing a premium calling service called NimbuzzOut. This premium calling service is available via an upgrade of their mobile client, which is currently available from the iPhone’s iTunes Apps Store, the Ovi store and Getjar. So far Nimbuzz has offered a meta-client that works on PC, Mac, Symbian, Android and the iPhone and allows you ...

Of all the dot-com superstars that appeared in the ’90s, shone brightly and then disappeared from sight, few have been granted a second act. One exception is Priceline, which 11 years after it was founded — and 10 years after its stock price collapsed — is quietly thriving. It’s no superstar now, but it’s an interesting case study of how an online company once written off for dead can in fact age ...

Verizon has been all over the Android news this week, with two of the hottest phones finally arriving on the scene. The Motorola Droid, a stylish phone almost as thin as the iPhone but with a sliding QWERTY keyboard, debuted Friday. Early reviews are not finding the keyboard to be much of a bonus, but it’s amazing to find one at all in a thin handset. Verizon is also offering the HTC Droid Eris f...

Even though less than 1 percent of the population uses Google Voice, David Erickson, president of the Free Conferencing Corp., a conference call company whose numbers are blocked by the service, is pretty aggrieved. So he met with the FCC and filed a letter urging the regulatory agency to get Google to play fair. He also offered to help Google find lower rates for its rural call termination fees....

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Open-source software has been on the rise at many businesses during the extended economic downturn, and one of the areas where it is starting to offer companies a lot of flexibility and cost savings is in cloud computing. Cloud deployments can save money, free businesses from vendor lock-ins that could really sting over time, and offer flexible ways to combine public and private applications. Th...

The rich mobile carriers got a little richer in the third quarter, as the nation’s top two operators increased their leads over the rest of the field. Verizon Wireless added a million subscribers and posted revenue of $15.8 billion, up 24.4 percent year-over-year, while AT&T reported 2 million net adds — thanks largely to the iPhone — and $13.65 in revenue, up 8 percent over the year-ago period. ...

Google evangelist Vint Cerf, who many people think of as one of the fathers of the Internet, has his eyes on some interesting Earth-based applications that can work with his long-standing interplanetary extensions of the Net. He announced at the Open Mobile Summit this morning a software stack that sits on top of the open-source Android operating system that could strengthen wireless network commu...

The final results are in: eBay and private investors led by Silver Lake Partners have struck a deal with Skype founders and JoltID, the technology company controlled by Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. They are also transferring the ownership of intellectual property needed to make sure that Skype works as an Internet telephony service. More than 500 million Skype subscribers can b...

Earlier this decade, when cable companies started their foray into the phone business, not many gave them much of a chance to succeed. Sure they could sell a lot of broadband connections but no one thought they would be players in telecom services such as voice. Fast forward to today and the situation is entirely different. During the first half of 2009, cable companies across the globe generated ...

We’re only a few hours into the official Droid era, but already it appears that Motorola’s bet on Google’s mobile OS was a good move. The first Android 2.0 device is conjuring memories of the iPhone’s debut, prompting techies to line up by the dozen in Manhattan, inspiring a tweeting frenzy on Twitter and helping to boost shares of the Schaumburg, Ill.-based phone manufacturer. But to fully levera...

“Remember the scene in the movie “Minority Report” where Tom Cruise uses hand gestures instead of a mouse to interact with a computer screen displayed on the wall? The idea isn’t really that far-fetched, and software developer Pranav Mistry has been working on making it a reality.”

Mistry has created SixthSense, writes Lisa Hoover on OStatic today, a wearable gesture interface that uses a camera a...

Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on a bit of a Microsoft offensive. Earlier this week, while talking to press in Boston when Schmidt was asked to comment on a statement by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, he said, “I’ve learned not to respond to quotes by Steve Ballmer.” Oh Snap!

Today when FOX Business Network’s Neil Cavuto asked him about recent comparisons with Microsoft, Schmidt zinged back: “Hopefully...

A large group of carriers and equipment makers yesterday came out in support of a standard called One Voice to provide voice over the next-generation Long Term Evolution mobile networks. For those adopting the standard, LTE mobile calls would become VoIP calls. The standard is necessary to ensure you can call people on 3G networks from a 4G network and across different providers, and reduces the ...

With only a week left until our NewTeeVee Live conference, we’re raring to go. Some of the sessions I’m most excited about for next week’s conference are the startups and the stars, so I wanted to call them out for you. We are getting close to a sell-out crowd, so you’re highly encouraged to snag your ticket ASAP.

Presenting startups at NewTeeVee Live include:

• Hotshot box maker Roku
• Parallel ...

The instant messaging world should prepare for a major quake – thanks to Facebook that seems to be all set to launch a new connection interface that would allow Facebook chat to work with any kind of XMPP clients.

The news of this development was first reported by Mickaël Rémond on the company blog of Process One, a Paris-based messaging start-up. “It now seems the launch is close as the XMPP so...

In an interview with FOX Business Network’s Liz Claman, Mario Queiroz, VP Production Management for Google Android talked about Android and its competition the iPhone. Queiroz touts the company approach to form partnership & alliances with carriers and handset makers as a better way of doing business compared with iPhone. You can watch the video, which does come across as an Android advertorial.

We’re all familiar with the stereotype of the tech cave dweller, perusing a list of arcane Linux commands on a lonely Saturday night, no friends in sight. In the age of ubiquitous — and social — technology, though, can we conclude that the Internet, smartphones and new technologies isolate us and encourage cocooning, or the opposite?

The Pew Internet & American Life Project sought answers to such ...

French startup Deezer, a venture-backed streaming music provider that competes directly with much-discussed Spotify in Europe, today announced a two-tiered premium service model intended to extract revenue from power users. The site claims 16 million visitors and 11 million registered users, some of whom will now be expected to pay €4.99 ($7.42) each month to remove advertising and hear higher-qua...

Startups may have a high failure rate, but they also are a leading driver of job creation in the U.S., according to a report put out by The Kauffman Foundation this morning. As part of a deeper look at what small business means for the U.S. economy, the study found that 1- to 5-year-old companies create the highest average number of jobs, at roughly four jobs per year. From the report:

The dynami...

T-Mobile USA lost 77,000 customers and saw revenue continue to slide in the third quarter even as its operating profit margin increased two percentage points. But the nation’s fourth-largest carrier continued to enjoy a surge in mobile data uptake and said it will continue to aggressively — if belatedly — roll out its 3G network next year.

T-Mobile USA is fighting heated battles on both ends of th...

Amid the slew of exciting, new phone announcements (the HTC Hero turned Droid Eris!!!) Verizon Wireless said it would offer prepaid data plans, something we’ve been saying the industry should do for a while. The company is offering folks the chance to pick up data on an as-needed basis, instead of having to buy it as part of a monthly contract. That’s mighty fine of them, and should net the carrie...

Google is getting ready to make its Wave technology more widely available, CEO Eric Schmidt told a gathering of reporters in its Boston offices.

“[Google's Wave team is] getting ready for a much broader distribution. Ready means very soon. Very soon is like weeks not years,” Schmidt said. “The experiment has yielded a very, very innovative model and a lot of buzz. We want to see if it will scale.”

Maybe when more people...

The great Skype legal mess is about to come to an end, thanks to a settlement between eBay — and private investors led by Silver Lake Partners — and Skype co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. As part of the deal, the two Skype founders will get 10 percent of the company in exchange for allowing it to use the Global Index technology from their IP company, JoltID. They have an option to pa...