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Posts Tagged ‘Handset Makers’

Week in Apple: iPad day looms, Mac gamers rejoice, and more

As St. Patrick’s Day draws near, Apple fans are counting themselves among the lucky. After all, Steam is finally coming to the Mac, the iPad finally has a ship date, and the iPad developer program now has a much lower barrier to entry. Read on for the top Apple news from the last week:

HTC lawsuit came after warning by Apple to handset makers: Apple supposedly contacted executives at “tier-1″ handset makers in January saying it was ready to go to the mat over its iPhone-related IP. Those warnings, coupled with Apple’s complaints against HTC, may have a chilling effect on smartphone makers for the indefinite future.

Valve: full “Steam” ahead on Mac OS X with free syncing: Valve is bringing its online service to the Mac in April and plans to make its Source engine cross-platform. Along with the new cross-platform strategy, Portal 2 will be the first simultaneous release for Mac and Windows.

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PocketGear snatches up smartphone app maker Handango

Mobile app store PocketGear is announcing today that it has acquired Handango, a big maker of smartphone apps. The combination will create the world’s largest cross-platform, open app store and content market with more than 140,000 paid and free titles.

The apps can be downloaded by consumers using phones with the Android, Symbian, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Linux, Java, and Palm mobile phone platforms. The PocketGear App Store will now support more than 2,000 mobile phones in 175 countries. To date, the app stores of PocketGear and Handango have generated more than $400 million in mobile app revenues.

Durham, N.C.-based PocketGear will now boast more than 32,000 developers in its developer program and 40 storefront and distribution partners. That includes four of the top five handset makers, four of the top five mobile operators in the U.S., and three of the top 10 mobile operators globally.

Jud Bowman, chief executive and president of PocketGear, will retain his titles, and Alex Bloom, CEO of Handango, will become chief operating officer of PocketGear. Bowman said the move will create more scale and value for everyone in the open app store ecosystem. Of course, unspoken is the fact that this kind of combination is necessary to keep up with rivals such as GetJar, Google, and Apple.

PocketGear was founded in June, 2008, as a spinout from Motricity. It has 40 employees. Investors include Noro-Moseley Partners and the Wakefield Group.

Companies: Handango, PocketGear

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Week in review: Nokia’s faces US challenges, plane crash kills three Tesla employees

Here’s our rundown of the week’s business and tech news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:

Why can’t Nokia sell phones to Americans? — Nokia is the biggest mobile gadget maker in the world. But none of the company’s best models are available in phone stores in the rich-geek neighborhoods of downtown San Francisco. Paul Boutin investigates why that is.

Macworld iPad panelists defy Steve Jobs’ snub of show — This year’s annual Macworld conference was missing a key component: Apple. But that didn’t stop attendees from packing into an auditorium last Saturday to hear four serious Mac geeks talk about the iPad tablet computer, even though there were no iPads in the room, nor anywhere else at Macworld.

The best way to beat the iPhone? Don’t try to copy it — Designer Christian Lindholm looks at past attempts to imitate the look and feel of the iPhone. He concludes that other handset makers need to stop copying the form factor of Apple’s device and instead differentiate themselves in other ways.

Mobile World Congress 2010: Nokia out, Google in, Apple in your pocket — Last week’s Mobile World Congress 2010 was a time of great excitement and trepidation for all connected with the mobile industry. Before the conference, Lindholm looked at some of the important trends.

Incredible shrinking pico projectors will infiltrate more phones and gadgets — Texas Instruments announced a new chip set that will allow pico projectors to be built into smaller devices across a wider range of products. To date, these small projectors have been built into more expensive cell phones and chunky projectors. But with the nHD chip set from TI, the devices can be built into small phones and handheld gadgets.

And here are five more stories we thought were important, thought-provoking, or fun:

Three Tesla employees dead in plane crash: CEO Musk, execs not involved — A small passenger plane piloted by a top executive at Tesla Motors crashed into a house in East Palo Alto, Calif. before 8 a.m. on Wednesday, killing the pilot and two other passengers — all employees at the electric car company.

Android tablets resurface at the Mobile World Congress — Apple is getting all the attention right now for its shiny new tablet device the iPad, but Google and its partners may be about to steal the spotlight. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, VentureBeat’s Matthaus Krzykowski had the chance to play with a tablet device using Google’s Android operating system and running a Wired magazine application. Matthaus was super-impressed, and when Adobe and Wired later released a video of the app, I could see why.

Richard Garriott comes down to earth with Facebook game startup Portalarium — The last we heard from video game designer Richard Garriott, he was in outer space. Taking time off from game design, he dished out $30 million to take a private space flight to the International Space Station. Now he has come down to earth, coming out as one of the founders of Facebook game company Portalarium.

Buchheit’s lucky streak as an angel (and a founder) — Gmail creator, FriendFeed co-founder, and now Facebook employee Paul Buchheit has not only has had a stellar career as an entrepreneur and engineer. He’s also proving to be a savvy angel investor with four acquisitions of his portfolio companies in six months.

Yahoo-Microsoft search deal cleared by both U.S. and Euro bureaucrats — “We’ve received clearance from both the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission for our search agreement with Microsoft,” Yahoo senior vice president for search products Shashi Seth announced this week. Microsoft will provide Yahoo’s search results once the two companies complete their planned integration.

[bottom image via LALate News]

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Sony Ericsson closing four facilities, laying off 2,000 employees worldwide

Sony Ericsson has yet to make this public, but we’ve learned that the flagging handset maker has caved once more to the pressures of the modern phone market place. If you’ll recall, 450 employees were nixed from the company’s payrolls in September of last year, and now the entire Research Triangle Park facility is being shuttered. In an internal announcement made this morning, SE is fixing to close four total sites: RTP in North Carolina, a smaller Miami facility and operations in Kista (Sweden) and Chennai. All told, 2,000 employees will be trimmed, with severance packages being offered to those who qualify. As of now, the departing individuals have yet to be chosen, with employees in RTP given the opportunity to apply for jobs elsewhere (likely in Atlanta or California). We’re told that the cuts will happen “in stages,” with project teams being assembled as we speak to work out the logistics. Frankly, we aren’t as shocked as we are saddened to hear the news — SE has refused to keep pace with the other handset makers, and its decision to wait until next year to ship an Android device is indicative of the choices that have kept it in the shadows these past few years. Here’s hoping this restructuring effort actually gets things headed in the right direction.

Filed under: Cellphones

Sony Ericsson closing four facilities, laying off 2,000 employees worldwide originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Dear iPhone Users: Your Apps are Spying on You

Recently, Palm came under fire when programmer Joey Hess discovered the Pre’s smartphone OS was sending users’ GPS locations back to Palm on a daily basis. Although this information was disclosed in the company’s privacy policy, the majority of the phone’s owners were unaware. The incident raised questions about consumer privacy and the extent to which both handset makers and developers were gathering data on mobile users.

If you think you aren’t affected by these types of troubles because you don’t own a Pre, think again. Multiple iPhone applications – yes, even the ones approved by Apple – are also busy tracking your personal data and “phoning home.” Which applications? What data? As an end user, determining this information is difficult. But some iPhone developers have been digging into this issue and the results of their findings may surprise you.

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Is Pinch Media Spyware? One Developer Says “Yes”

As far as we know right now, Apple itself is not performing any user tracking via its pre-installed applications. However that doesn’t mean that you’re not being tracked by someone, somewhere. There are a number of applications available now in the iTunes App Store which track your user data, including things like location, your iPhone’s unique ID, the phone’s model, whether it’s “jailbroken,” and possibly even your gender, birth month and year, if the application is Facebook-enabled.

Specifically, a mobile analytics company called Pinch Media is being singled out for being more intrusive than others when it comes to this sort of tracking. Mobile analytics firms like Pinch allow developers to insert code into their application for the purpose of tracking and analyzing how their users interact with applications. In general, this type of tracking is relatively harmless for the end user and helpful for the developer. It reveals stats like: how long did the user play the game or use the app? Do users access this feature more than that one? What time of day are users launching the app? How long do they use the app? And so on. The results of this type of tracking allows developers to make their apps more usable and helps them redesign or tweak aspects of the apps that may not be working.

However, in the Pinch Media’s case, the user tracking goes a bit further according to one iPhone developer. He says applications using Pinch Media track the following information:

• iPhone’s unique ID
• iPhone Model
• OS Version
• Application version (in this case, camera zoom 1.x)
• If the application is cracked/pirated
• If your iPhone is jailbroken
• Time & date you start the application
• Time & date you close the application
• Your current latitude & longitude
• Your gender (if Facebook enabled)
• Your birth month (if Facebook enabled)
• Your birth year (if Facebook enabled)

What’s worse is that you’re often never told that the app will be performing this level of detailed tracking and you’re often never given the opportunity to opt-out. The data recorded is continuously tracked every time you use the application. This violation of user privacy is so egregious that the developer even goes so far as to call Pinch Media “iPhone spyware.”

In addition, a recent post on the iPhone Dev Team blog, the site hosted by the developers who release the jailbreaking and unlocking applications for the iPhone, also calls out Pinch Media for tracking your location even when it’s unnecessary to do so. In the example they cited, an tip calculator app was identified as tracking your geographical location through time and uploading that data to Pinch Media.

It’s Not Pinch Media That’s to Blame, It’s Developers

However, in the comments of the blog post, one developer using Pinch Media analytics fights back, claiming that his applications do request permission before gathering statistics. He bristles at the suggestion that they should be called “spyware.”

Pinch Media is also frustrated by these accusations. They argue that “no location can be sent back without the user’s explicit opt-in…Since you have to press a button that explicitly allows the application to access your location, how could this possibly be without the user’s consent?” The company also claims that the blog posts by this 0th3lo person are “full of factual inaccuracies.” (Although they didn’t detail specifically which parts are inaccurate). They even hint that the blogger’s motivations are less about exposing user privacy violations and more about retaliating against the company because Pinch Media recently launched tools which allow developers to identify pirated (aka stolen) applications. That would be something that this particular developer, an active member of he hackulo.us forums (a forum for pirated apps), would not be fond of.

The company assures us that their product complies with all major privacy laws, saying that no personally-identifying information is stored and the user opts in through the Licensed Application EULA, which specifically permits the gathering of information and sending it to third parties. In fact, says a company spokesperson, the tracking done by their company is even less intrusive than web analytics, where information is gathered without anyone’s consent or opt-in, pointing to ads on this very website as an example of that.

Is This Really an Issue?

At the end of the day, is this sort of tracking all that invasive? Well, tracking a unique identifier such as the iPhone’s UUID is not exactly comparable to the type of tracking you see on the web today. It’s not anonymous data – it’s an exact ID that’s unique to each physical device Apple manufactures. And Pinch Media is not the only analytics company to track this information. Also, when tracking your location data on the iPhone (0th3lo says Pinch Media calculates this to 8 decimal points), that can be far more exact and accurate than any sort of geographically-based IP address lookup on the web. Instead of getting a general location, location data on a GPS-enabled mobile can identify your precise latitude and longitude.

But should you be concerned? Perhaps. Although Apple requires applications ask if they can use your location upon launch, there aren’t necessarily requirements for app developers to disclose what data they’re tracking beyond location data, how often it’s tracked, and what they’re doing with that data when it’s received. They also don’t require that developers ask for your consent before this sort of detailed monitoring tacks place.

Still, not all applications using analytics on the back-end are to be feared. For the most part, the data being recorded is anonymous and helps the developers make better apps. The problem is that, as of today, there’s no way to know which apps are the safe ones.

Want more? Thanks to @0th3lo, here’s an ongoing list of applications that “phone-home” and what data is being tracked. Some examples on this list include: AroundMe, Aussie Rules LIVE, Camera Zoom, Discover, Flick Fishing, iiQuota, Mummy’s Revenge, Police Scanner, Stickwars, The Moron Test, TouchGrind, Touch KO, TwiterFon, FaceFighter, Grunts, SmackTalk, Postman, vDrummer, Wobble, iFarty, iAppUSA, Lonely Planet Guide

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