NAUGHTY, NAUGHTY, NAUGHTY’It’s not like most of the big carriers and tech companies can’t afford a fine or two from the FCC, Justice Department or Federal Trade Commission here and there, but it’s still not the best publicity. Here’s a rundown of the year in tech industry fines to date:VERIZON 911The FCC in March fined Verizon $3.4 million for failing to notify police and fire departments last year during a six-hour 911 service outage affecting 750,000 California residents. The outage stemmed from a coding error at a big 911 routing center. Other carriers were also involved.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I thought I very well might need a new iPhone after spending this past week in Delaware at the crazy Firefly music festival during which we had to be evacuated one night because of a tornado warning. But everything turned out well, my iPhone 5 is intact, and now I can take my time awaiting iPhone 6S and iPhone 7 rumors to morph into reality. No more ugly antenna lines on the iPhone?
Speculation swirled over the past week about Apple possibly ditching those homely plastic lines across the back of your iPhone…that you probably never noticed in the first place. But the plastic is practical: It allows the phone’s antenna to work by not blocking radio waves.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Bob Brown/NetworkWorld
Heading from outside Boston to Dover, Del., last week for the 4-day Firefly musical festival with another adult and four teenagers, I had lots more to think about than iPhone charging. But I did have iPhone charging needs on my mind.So before I went, I arranged to have Kensington send me a couple of their gadgets to help me weather the festival and some pretty serious storms.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
One thing that's cool about my job as a tech business publication editor is getting to meet industry pioneers, as I did by phone this past week with Mohit Aron, widely considered to be the Father of Hyperconvergence as a co-founder of Nutanix and now the founder and CEO of startup Cohesity (you can read my Q&A with Aron here). Over the years I've met a bunch of industry Fathers, including Bob Metcalfe of Ethernet fame and Vint Cerf of Internet fame, as well as industry Mothers, like Radia Perlman of Spanning Tree fame.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Mohit Aron has a tough act to follow: His previous startup, Nutanix, may be on the cusp of filing for an IPO that values the hyperconverged infrastructure company at $2.5 billion. But Aron is off to a good start with his new venture, Cohesity, which this week emerges from stealth mode with $70 million in venture funding, reference-able customers such as Tribune Media, and a focus on a potentially big market in converging the secondary storage that houses so much DevOps, data protection, analytics and other unstructured data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Humor alert! Humor alert! Yes, as it relates to Apple.And I’m not talking about the standard eye-rolling stuff of corporate dog-and-pony shows such as last week’s Apple Worldwide Developers’ Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco. Nope, here we have Apple enlisting the aid of former SNL comic Bill Hader, who shares a humorous behind-the-scenes peek at what could have been at WWDC…
Alas, there were no iPhone 6S or iPhone 7 rumors in there, just a goat and some larger-than-life fingers. But the actual WWDC’s introduction of iOS 9 did spark speculation about the next flagship iPhones.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amidst all the venture investments this year in startups that generate gobs of data -- from those focused on everything from apps to drones to the Internet of Things to Big Data -- are a batch of newcomers aiming to help organizations store and access all that information. Yes, storage companies are pulling in big bucks in 2015, as they did in 2014, and a couple have even double-dipped this year and announced two rounds of funding.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amidst all the venture investments this year in startups that generate gobs of data -- from those focused on everything from apps to drones to the Internet of Things to Big Data -- are a batch of newcomers aiming to help organizations store and access all that information. Yes, storage companies are pulling in big bucks in 2015, as they did in 2014, and a couple have even double-dipped this year and announced two rounds of funding.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Group shotImage by FacebookOutgoing and incoming Cisco CEOs John Chambers and Chuck Robbins weren’t the only attractions at the annual Cisco event in San Diego this week, though they did seem to be everywhere (Chambers in center, with blazer).RELATED: Cisco boosts cloud software, lines up ISVs to write Internet of Everything servicesTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple
Apple brought out the big guns, from CEO Tim Cook to musical performer Drake, but perhaps the loudest reaction at the company's Worldwide Developers' Conference Monday in San Francisco resulted from news that the Swift programming language is being open sourced."We think Swift is the next big programming language, the one that we'll all be doing application and system programming on for 20 years to come," said Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering who in addition to discussing Swift introduced Apple's iOS 9 developments. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The world of Apple prognosticators expect a Beats-infused streaming music service, support for native Apple Watch apps and a first look at iOS 9 at this week’s Worldwide Developers’ Conference. But iPhone 6S or iPhone 7 are expected to gain nary a mention by Apple big shots at the annual San Francisco confab.Sure, iOS advances in Version 9 will be directly applicable to iPhone users, but who knows, Apple might be on to iOS 10 by the time its next iPhone surfaces. Enter the iPhone concept designs
Deviant Art
iPhone 7 design concept: Home button is nowhere to be seenTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In case you were wondering what it is exactly that Yahoo does these days, the company says its focus is on "search, communications and digital content." The rest must go, and as such, Yahoo today has announced some things it is getting rid of.For starters, the company is doing away with maps.yahoo.com (a.k.a. Yahoo Maps) at the end of June. Though maps will live on within Yahoo search and Flickr in some fashion. "We made this decision to better align resources to Yahoo's priorities as our business has evolved since we first launched Yahoo Maps eight years ago."RELATED: 7 Things Microsoft Killed Off in 2014To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IDG Enterprise (which includes NetworkWorld, Computerworld and other news websites for IT pros) is in the process of fielding a survey with the objective of gauging strategy, challenges and drivers with regard to mobile technologies. You can expect to see articles across our publications based on the results in late summer.
We invite you to take the survey and enter a drawing to win a $500 cash prize.* Tell us about your organization’s top mobile priorities, and how emerging technology is changing roles and responsibilities within your organization.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Researchers at Dartmouth College and the University of Texas at Austin have developed an Android app that they say can predict students’ grade point averages without prior knowledge of data such as SAT scores, IQ or school track records. What’s more, the technology could have future applications for predicting employee performance.SmartGPA is a cloud-backed app that relies on embedded passive sensors as well as special algorithms that can determine behaviors by the phone user, from studying to partying to face-to-face-communications to sleep. That information can then be crunched to predict students’ GPA within 17 hundreds of a point, according to Andrew T. Campbell, who co-authored paper on the research with colleagues from Dartmouth and the University of Texas at Austin.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
So many of the iPhone 6S or iPhone 7 design concepts we see are wildly futuristic: They boast holograms and shape-shifting and increasing thinness.But Pierre, Cerveau, a Bangkok business development manager with engineering chops, has put forth a throwback iPhone design concept that goes all the way back to 1984, when Apple introduced its second Macintosh computer, the 512K. Gotta love that rotary dial.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft's 2015 acquisition spree shows no sign of abating: The latest scuttlebutt is that the company has snapped up Germany's 6Wunderkinder to-do list app maker.As I documented in April ("What's behind Microsoft's not-so-crazy acquisition spree?"), Microsoft was off to its fastest acquisition pace ever this year with 4 deals confirmed and 1 widely rumored to have been signed (and in fact, Microsoft recently confirmed the buyout of that 5th company, Surface pen maker N-trig).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
You know it’s a slow week for iPhone 6s and iPhone 7 rumors when most of the scuttlebutt centers around who’s going to be making the next great Apple smartphone’s processors.But that’s what we’ve largely been reduced to, in nanometer detail, this past week.Apple in recent years has used rival Samsung as well as Taiwan’s TSMC as chip suppliers, with speculation about the future of Samsung’s contributions to the iPhone and iPad fluctuating in sync with just how nasty or nice Apple and the Korean company are being to each other at the time.GforGames, which has been increasingly making a name for itself as a source of early news on mobile devices, reported this week on the battle for the next iPhone processor – the A9 – and the one after that, presumably the A10. The thinking goes that the iPhone 6S/6S Plus would get the A9 later this year and the iPhone 7 next year would be powered by the A10.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Not that Baby Boomers or Gen X homeowners are clueless about technology, but startup HelloTech is banking on people of a certain age needing a bit of assistance to live the Internet of Things dream.The West Los Angeles startup this week announced it has added $2 million in venture funding to the $2.5 million it attracted last fall to expand the on-demand, in-home tech support service that it officially rolled out this week in LA.CEO Richard Wolpert, a 4-time startup founder whose background includes stints as president of Disney Online and chief strategy officer at RealNetworks, says the need for HelloTech has been borne out of the explosion of new and useful home technologies and the decline in retail tech outlets (aside from Best Buy and its Geek Squad) that offer tech installation/support.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
GamesAs we head toward summer 2015, it’s time to check in and see how the mobile gaming industry has fared for Apple iOS platforms, the iPhone and iPad. Here’s a look at top rated games issued so far this year, based on App Store user reviews and professional reviewers on Metacritic. We hope you’ll discover a few hidden gems in here.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
GamesAs we head toward summer 2015, it’s time to check in and see how the mobile gaming industry has fared for Apple iOS platforms, the iPhone and iPad. Here’s a look at top rated games issued so far this year, based on App Store user reviews and professional reviewers on Metacritic. We hope you’ll discover a few hidden gems in here.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Bob Brown