After months of media speculation and rumors, Apple officially unveiled the latest version of the iPhone at a media event in Cupertino today.
The iPhone 4S will come equipped with a faster, dual-core A5 processor, better graphics processor and an 8 megapixel camera. Unlike previous iterations, the new device will work on both GSM and CDMA networks. The device will also come with hardware improvements that improve the quality of phone calls and the speed of data usage.
The market is hungry for today's iPhone launch. Existing iPhone customers are ready to upgrade. Nearly a third of Android users are would consider switching to iPhone, but only 11% of iPhone users would give it up. Sprint is making a big bet to become the third major U.S. carrier.
Apple just announced the iPhone 4S, a significant update to the iPhone's existing design. The iPhone 4 far outshone its predecessors, and a bump to that phone will surely prove popular. More importantly, the iPhone 4S is now a "worldphone." It contains both GSM and CDMA radios, so all carriers can now support the same hardware. Furthermore, the old iPhone 3GS is now free with a contract. But several Android phone manufacturers are neck and neck with Apple, and most of the mobile world doesn't even have a smartphone yet. Amidst the world's many phones, smart and dumb, where does the iPhone stand?
The next version of Apple's mobile operating system, iOS 5, will be available for download in just over one week, Apple announced today.
Apple's Senior Vice President of iOS Software told the crowd at the company's "Let's Talk iPhone" media event today that iOS 5, a significant upgrade that was first unveiled at the WWDC in June, will go live on October 12.
There's no doubt that Apple's iPad sales are growing faster than the iPhone. At Apple's event on Tuesday, newly minted CEO Tim Cook announced that 92% of Fortune 500 are testing or deploying iPad in the course of less than 18 months.
Meanwhile, Cook also announced that, in schools, iPads are "helping kids learn," and "pilots replace 40 pound flight bags with iPads." In medicine, 80% of the top hospitals in the US are testing or piloting the iPad.
Dropbox, the online file sync and sharing service, was recently named 5th in a list of the The World's Most Valuable Startups by Business Insider. To put that in context, the only 4 companies ranked above Dropbox were (in order of valuation): Facebook, Zynga, Groupon and Twitter. Dropbox was listed above the likes of Wikipedia, Craigslist, Hulu and Tumblr. Business Insider estimated the value of Dropbox at $4 billion, based on its latest funding round at the end of August.
But let's face it, this valuation of Dropbox cannot be relied on. That $4 billion is mostly derived from fat cat VCs competing for a hot deal. It's far more important to ask: who is using Dropbox currently and is there anything in the use cases that justifies such a high valuation? So I asked the tech-savvy RWW community just that.
Google recently rolled out version 2.5 of its tweaks to the search ranking algorithm - codenamed Panda - to improve the quality of search results for users. Panda suppresses the impact of content farms and other low-quality sites that game the system.
New data from Searchmetrics show that consumeraffairs.com, savings.com and prnewswire.com were among the biggest losers. Consumer sites like Motor Trend and technology blogs The Next Web and Technorati also lost significant ground since the update. The biggest winner in Google's Panda update? YouTube, Google's own Web property.
Yahoo and ABC News have joined their online news efforts to leverage Yahoo's large audience and ABC's worldwide news production. The two media giants estimate they will serve over 100 million U.S. users per month.
ABC's morning show Good Morning America has relaunched as a Yahoo site, and George Stephanopoulos will webcast an interview with President Obama on Yahoo and ABCNews.com today at 2:35 p.m. ET.
Google announced this morning that it has begun tests of a new service, Google Trusted Stores. The program will monitor and verify that an online store's performance, trustworthiness and customer satisfaction all meet certain standards. The company will even offer free insurance for up to $1000 in online purchases from stores deemed Trusted by Google.
People have long said that it's in Google's best interest to support performance improvements to the Web, because the better surfing works, the more ads users will see. So too, though, does Google have an interest in improving the reliability of the purchasing experiences that users have when they click through any ads online. The more people trust online stores, the more they will click on online ads. That makes me think that this experimental new service could prove very big for Google and for the rest of the Internet.
As Netflix begins the process of spinning out its streaming business from its traditional DVD rentals, I wanted to examine the alternative streaming services that are currently available. I looked at Amazon Prime, Hulu Plus, Vudu.com and Justin.tv. Added to this mix is what is available on Comcast's Xfinity service to just show what can be found from a typical cable TV company. (Of course, if you don't live in a Comcast service area, you can't subscribe to their streaming service online.) I choose five random movies and five TV series to see what was available on each service.
For East Coast fans of Radiohead, the news could hardly have been more exciting. The band, multiple news outlets confirmed, would be playing a surprise show in downtown Manhattan on Friday afternoon. The show would coincide with the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests that had been organized online and with which the band would likely be sympathetic.
Once a few prominent blogs began reporting on it, the news spread like wildfire across Twitter and Facebook, where eager fans posted updates about the show and began making plans to attend.
