Fans of HBO's unique selection of premium content will be thrilled to learn that the channel's mobile app, HBO GO, will now be available to even more subscribers. Well, they'll be thrilled as long as they already subscribe to HBO via their cable or satellite provider.
Customers of Time Warner Cable and Cablevision will soon join most other cable subscribers in being able to view HBO's massive library of original content from their smartphones and tablets. So far, the response among those subscribers to the year-old HBO Go app has been rather positive. For many of those who don't pay for a cable subscription, the response has been, "Hey, can I get your HBO Go login info?"
The $300 million secondary investment Twitter confirmed Monday morning comes from a key figure in a region where Twitter is experiencing some of its fastest growth.
Never mind that Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the Saudi investor whose Kingdom Holding investment firm has stakes in Apple, Citigroup, and now, 3% ownership of Twitter, isn't a big user of the service himself (Prince Alwaleed follows just 25 users with his account - including Fox News and Barack Obama - and he hasn't tweeted since Oct. 6 when he sent out RIP condolences to Steve Jobs).
Arabic is the fastest growing language used on Twitter and the company has gotten credit for playing a role in the Arab Spring uprisings in Northern Africa and the Middle East earlier this year, and that makes Prince Alwaleed's investment significant.
For a service that only exists on one platform, Instagram has been wildly successfully. The photo-sharing app for iOS is now on track to hit 15 million users, which as a post SocialFresh points out, is how many people are using Foursquare today.
Among mobile-first social services, Foursquare is arguably the biggest right now, but the geolocation check-in app is on track to be surpassed soon, despite being a year older than Instagram and being available on every major mobile platform and having a highly functional Web-based UI.
Apple isn't exactly known for letting consumers and developers tinker with its products. While the Apple II had expansion slots and a relatively open design, later hardware shipped by the company would become harder to modify. What they sold was what consumers got, with very little room for customization.
Today, developers are having a field day jailbreaking each subsequent version of iOS and even hacking Siri to put its voice control technology to use in unique and interesting ways. Officially, Apple discourages jailbreaking, even though the practice has been a source of good ideas, some of which the company has borrowed.
It's not even three years old yet, but Microsoft's Bing search engine now has about the same share of the market as Yahoo, which has been around since 1995. Bing hit 15% of the search engine market in November, according to ComScore. Yahoo had 15.1%.
Both sites trail far behind Google, which holds onto more than 65% of the market. While that position isn't threatened by any other search engine, it's interesting to note how quickly Bing has risen in the last few years.
Things are not looking good for Grooveshark. The controversial music streaming site has been banned from the major mobile app stores and is in the process of being sued by Universal Music Group for copyright infringement. Yes, that's the same UMG that apparently thinks its right to remove content from the Internet goes beyond what it actually owns.
But this week, the label was joined by a few of its industry allies in its fight against Grooveshark. Sony and Warner Music Group are piling on and joining the lawsuit against the service. Since UMG's lawsuit was filed, leaked emails and blog comments from purported Grooveshark employees have shined new light on the extent of the alleged infringement.
It hasn't even been five years since Apple unveiled the first iPhone. The device wasn't the world's first smartphone, but was arguably the most capable and well-designed and Apple's marketing prowess it made it the first must-have gadget of its kind. Soon after came Android, which has powered increasingly impressive devices by a range of manufacturers.
The growth of smartphone adoption and associated mobile technologies has been staggering. As of the end of 2011, the majority of U.S. adults under the age of 35 now own a smartphone. Sixty-two percent of them have downloaded apps (mostly games), and mobile Web usage among these consumers has grown 45% since last year.
Today Facebook launched the much anticipated Timeline and Timeline mobile for Android and its HTML5 mobile site m.facebook.com. But Timeline mobile for the Facebook iOS app is nowhere to be found. Timeline on the iPhone will be available in a future update of the Facebook iOS app, a Facebook spokesperson tells us. For now, iPhone and iPad users will have to use Facebook Timeline through the mobile site.
There's no doubt that Facebook Timeline will eventually go live for iOS apps. But for now, Facebook seems to be mostly focused on its HTML5 web app project. The fact that Timeline mobile isn't going live for iOS anytime soon is proof of that.
Dear Web developers: Microsoft knows how many hours of your life have been wasted trying to troubleshoot designs and functionality for Internet Explorer 6, and they're sorry. They promise they're never going to do that to you again.
To ensure such nightmares are never relived, the company will start rolling out automatic upgrades to Internet Explorer across Windows 7, Vista and XP, the company announced in a blog post today. Rather than relying on users to update the browser themselves or requiring you to trick your parents into updating theirs around the holidays, Windows will update to the latest compatible version of IE on its own.
Hello, ReadWriteWeb readers! As Richard noted earlier, I am joining ReadWriteWeb as its new Editor-at-Large, and I am very excited about it. I'll start writing for the site in January, but in the meantime, I have some planning to do. And I'd love your help.
First, a brief introduction: For the past six years, I've been writing about the tech industry every day. Most recently, I launched SplatF, a one-man tech analysis and commentary site, which I'll continue to write. Prior to that, I helped create Business Insider in 2007, when it was a small tech blog. And before that, I was a tech reporter at Forbes.
