Blog Reported Online

The challenge Nokia faces in the smartphone market was grimly detailed last week. In the third quarter, according to IDC, Nokia’s worldwide smartphone sales fell 37 percent to 16.8 million phones from 26.5 million a year ago.Nokia’s retreat comes in a booming market. Smartphone shipments grew 43 percent in the third quarter.Stephen Elop, Nokia’s chief executive, is not despairing, and he has a turnaround strategy. The game plan is coherent and ambitious, but its success is not assured.The opening for Nokia, Mr. Elop explained, depends on Nokia’s ability to exploit the rapidly shifting market in smartphones, to profit from its new alliance...

OneID Aims to Unite Devices to Fight Hackers

Assume your computer, your cellphone and your iPad are all insecure, subject to hackers. All three of them working together to protect your information — would that be better?It would, according to OneID, a start-up company in San Jose, Calif., that is trying to promote a new kind of single sign-on security for the Web.Single sign-on is a kind of holy grail on the Internet, a way of avoiding having to remember separate passwords for every Web site and service a person uses. Like the original grail, lots of people have believed in it and no one has found it. In this case, Microsoft, IBM, Sun Microsystems and long-forgotten companies like...

What’s Really Next for Apple in Television

Ive finally cracked it! Steven P. Jobs, co-founder of Apple, told his biographer, Walter Isaacson.Although Mr. Jobs was referring to Apples plans to build a full-fledged television, he was not actually referring to the TV set, which is how the comment has been widely interpreted. Instead, it is becoming clear that Mr. Jobs was talking about Siri, Apples new artificial intelligent software on the iPhone 4S.Apple engineers and designers, spurred by Mr. Jobs, have been struggling for years to find a new interface for the television. One of the biggest hurdles, according to people with knowledge of the project, has been replacing the television...

Technology, Schools and a Big Black Bug

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I was on a hike in August when one of my hiking companions bent down to the dusty path to examine a thumb-size black beetle. My fellow hiker, Harry Barker-Fost, stared at the chunky insect as it crawled onto his hand and then over and around his forearm for the better part of three minutes.Could his comfort with nature and his intense focus and curiosity have something to do with the fact that Harry, age 12, rarely uses technology? Thats what Harrys parents think.Harry attends the Greenwood School in Mill Valley, which doesnt use computers of any kind in class and discourages their use at home. The idea is inspired by Waldorf teaching principals, as outlined technologyin an article we published today.Harrys father, Dan, wrote a terrific article about Waldorfs relationship with technology,...

Phishing attack drill Apple Fans

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Security vendors Trend Micro identifies phishing activity (theft of sensitive data) that target the users of Apple products and services. Still the traditional mode used, ie, via email. Fake emails purporting to come from Apple's admit it in writing to inform the update of data that must be performed by users. "Trend Micro's security research team, after investigating the email, phishing has proved the existence of action on behalf of Apple," said Trend Micro, in his statement on Friday (11/11/2011). After the message is opened, Trend Micro, and then compare it with similar email from Apple that the original shipment. And two emails almost identical at first glance, it turns out one of them is trapped by inputting a link that asks you to enter personal data via the Apple site ID made...

Teenagers Tell Researchers It’s a Cruel, Cruel Online World

State legislatures across the country have passed or proposed laws against what they call cyberbullying. But how do young people parse bullying from being mean online? And when it happens, what do they do about it?A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center and released Wednesday teases out these complex, often painful threads of teen life on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Two-thirds of the teenagers surveyed said people were â€œmostly kind to each other on these networks, even as 88 percent said they had witnessed â€œpeople being mean or cruel. One in five admitted to having joined in on the cruelty.Notably, one in five teens...

Head of Google’s Public Policy Operations Resigns

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As Google faces stepped-up interrogations from regulators and policy makers, Alan Davidson, who runs its public policy operations for North and South America, announced Â Monday that he would leave the company this month.Mr. Davidson’s departure comes as Google faces a wide ranging antitrust investigation by the Federal Trade Commission and days after Google’s chairman, Eric E. Schmidt, submitted answers to questions posed by senators on the antitrust subcommittee, before which technology Mr. Schmidt testified in September.Mistique Cano, a Google spokeswoman, said Google had not named a successor and had no imminent plans to do so. She...

In a Quest for Focus, Google Purges Small Projects

.Since he has taken the helm at Google, Larry Page has aggressively pushed to make new acquisitions and jettison projects that he does not think are working. One day, the Google engineers developing a new photo-sharing app, Photovine, were dreaming that their app could be Google’s next household name and basking in the glow of the $200 million that Google had paid to buy their start-up, Slide. The next day, Google announced that their whole operation was shut down, just one of more than 25 projects that Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, has stopped since taking over in April. Google has said it has cut projects that weren’t popular...

Apple Doles Out Stock to Keep Top Executives

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One of the biggest questions about Apple’s future has been whether its top executives would head for the exits after the death of the company’s chief executive and cofounder Steve Jobs. Apple just gave them a big incentive to stay put.In a series of filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday evening, Apple disclosed a series of huge stock grants to nearly all of the company’s senior executives. Peter Oppenheimer, Bruce Sewell, Philip Schiller, Jeffrey Williams, Scott Forstall and Robert Mansfield all received 150,000 restricted stock units from Apple — worth approximately $60 million each at Apple’s current stock price.Each of those executive need to stay at Apple for nearly five years to collect the full amount of the grants. Half of the shares in their stock grants vest...

Tim Cook Is Thinking Different

For people who are curious about how Appleâ€™s new chief executive, Tim Cook, will compare to the companyâ€™s previous C.E.O., Steve Jobs, thereâ€™s not a lot to go on yet. AppleTim Cook, chief executive of Apple.Mr. Cook took the helm of Apple from Mr. Jobs only in late August. Even then, Mr. Jobs was still chairman of Apple until his death last week at the age of 56. There was, however, one tantalizing clue about how the two men differ at an Apple event to introduce the new iPhone last Tuesday, the day before Mr. Jobs’s death was announced:Mr. Cook didnt demonstrate any new Apple products.Instead, he left all of the demonstrations of new...

Snubbed by Apple, T-Mobile Looks Beyond the iPhone

T-Mobile must feel like the only kid in the class who didnt get invited to the party of the year. Its the only one of the nation’s four major wireless carriers that wont be selling the iPhone 4S, the new Apple device that officially goes on sale Friday and has already generated record numbers of pre-orders. The other big domestic carrier that was previously left out of the iPhone party, Sprint Nextel, finally struck a deal with Apple to carry the iPhone, joining AT&T and Verizon Wireless.The T-Mobile model won’t be pitching an iPhone.T-Mobile is performing a balancing act in responding to the snub. The carrier is clearly disappointed it doesnt have the iPhone. Its chief marketing officer, Cole Brodman, wrote a blog post addressed to its customers last month that said the iPhone is a...

The Big Business of Big Data

GE Appliances & Lighting, via Business WireA GE data center.Is Big Data a Bubble?In case youre in a hurry: Of course it is. And that is good.Longer version: Last week there were several events that convinced me that one of the great tech bubbles inflating right now is around what people have agreed to call Big Data. Basically the term reflects the fact that its now so easy to digitize and put on the Internet all kinds of information — things as diverse as the measurements of passive sensors,Â most or all the worlds books, 200 million tweets a day and most of the worlds significant financial transactions — that the data is growing enormously.Big Data is really about, however, the benefits we will gain by cleverly sifting through it to find and exploit new patterns and relationships....

Tech Talk Podcast: Big Data

Just what is Big Data and why is it such a big business? Quentin Hardy, a deputy technology editor at The Times, discusses his recent Bits blog post on the topic and why it might be a good idea for future college students to consider a major in statistics.Iomega has long been known for making colorful external hard drives (including models bound in leather or sporting a camouflage pattern), and recently the company has taken some design cues from Apple. Team Tech Talk takes a look at two new Iomega external drives, the Helium portable and the Mac Companion, which visually complement Apples MacBook Pro laptops and iMac desktop machines.Andrea Electronics has been producing radio and audio gear since 1934 and is still around today making among other things noise-canceling...

Tech Talk Podcast: Search Engines for Phones

How do people use search engines on mobile devices compared to those on computers? On this week’s Bits: Tech Talk podcast, Claire Cain Miller, a Times technology reporter in Silicon Valley, discusses how behavior differs. She also explains how advertisers are adapting to search-on-the-go, and how Google came to its early dominance of the mobile-search market.While its simple enough to find British dramas and comedies for sale or rent on DVD, the Acorn Media Group has started its own video-streaming service to make it even easier for Anglophiles to find their favorite shows on this side of the pond. Miguel Penella, the chief executive of the Acorn Media Group, talks about his companys Acorn TV subscription site, which streams a rotating roster of classic British TV programs to American...

Books Unbound

Is any form of traditional media under more assault than the book? For half a millennium, it was happily contained between covers: easily understood by a child, disposable, nearly indestructible, demanding minimal energy, a triumph of economy and form. The Internet has upended all that, of course. Yet the strongest impression from several of the sessions at the Books in Browsers conference in San Francisco over the last two days is that while the off-line book might be dying, the online book has yet to be born.The most basic definitions are still being worked out.“My stupidÂ question of the day is, ‘What is a book?’ ” asked Eric Hellman ofGluejar. He noted that the traditional virtues of books are permanence, independence and privacy, most of which the Internet seems designed to remove....

Questions for Amazon on Privacy and the Kindle Fire

The dream of every retailer is to know exactly what its customers are thinking. Are they comparison-shopping? Just looking? Will a discount help close the deal? Or is price no object? Amazon’s coming tablet, the Kindle Fire, is equipped with a Web browser that, thanks to the wonders of cloud computing, is partly housed on Amazon’s servers. That will give the retailer opportunities to track customer behavior all over the Web, gathering data and marketing intelligence as it goes.Representative Edward Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat who is co-chairman of the Congressional Bi-Partisan Privacy Caucus, has concerns about the Fire’s potential implications. On Friday he sent Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, a letter asking for more information about how the retailer intends to gather...

Return of the Video Game Sequel: Part 12

There may not be an entertainment category that is so predictable as video games. The latest video game sales figures came out Thursday from NPD, which measures sales of consumer products. And the list of best-selling games looks very familiar, going back many, many years. Electronic Arts has made a dozen versions of its popular football game.The war game has remained a bestseller in its third time out. The top-selling game in September was Madden NFL 12. That’s the 12th iteration. As in dozen. Next on the list was Gears of War 3. The fourth best-selling game was Fifa Soccer 12, then NHL 12, both made by Electronic Arts, king of the sequel. Others...

Google Tries Again With Google TV

Google redesigned the YouTube app so it feels more like TV.to lukewarm reviews. Its remote control was big and complicated, its software was clunky and confusing, and it didn’t live up to the promise of Internet-connected TV’s — that they would allow us to cut the cable cord and watch whatever we wanted whenever we wanted.Now Google is trying again. On Friday, it will introduce the second version of its Google TV software. The hardware, which is made by Sony and Logitech, will stay the same for now. New devices, including from Samsung and Vizio, are scheduled to arrive next year.This time, Google TV has a simpler user interface, smarter...

New iPhone Faces Battery Complaints

The introduction of a new iPhone wouldnt be complete without at least one baffling technical problem ticking off customers. The iPhone 4S hasnt disappointed in that regard.The discussions forums on Apples Web site are ablaze with comments from iPhone 4S customers about the poor battery life of the new Apple phone. Many of the people complaining say the battery on the iPhone 4S seems to drain quickly even when theyre not using the device much and even after they have shut down some of the power-hungry features that can affect battery performance.My iPhone 4s battery life is terrible, one person on the forums posted. I’m always experiencing a 10-15% drop per hour. I unplugged my phone this morning at 8:20 and it’s now 12:15 and my battery is on 53%. I have almost everything turned off that...

H.P. Builds Servers With Cellphone Chips