Security remains a big concern for businesses considering cloud storage, but Dropbox hopes to further calm their fears by integrating its service with enterprise mobile management products.Dropbox for Business users will get the new EMM capability via upcoming applications from partners including AirWatch and MobileIron, resulting in safer mobile device access, Dropbox said Tuesday.EMM will be enabled through the Dropbox for Business API, launched late last year to help companies integrate the cloud storage service into their core IT processes. Dropbox has since expanded the API access with features such as tools for managing groups and shared folders.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Twitter has moved well beyond its foundation of 140-character messages. The site will now host videos that play automatically in users’ feeds.Advertisers’ videos and those uploaded to Twitter natively, for example through its new video recording tool, will play automatically on the company’s desktop site and in its iOS app, with Android functionality coming soon, the company said Tuesday.The changes also apply to videos recorded with Twitter’s Vine app, and GIFs.Autoplaying videos, though possibly annoying, will help Twitter compete against Facebook, which started placing autoplaying videos, including those from advertisers, in users’ feeds in 2013. Twitter makes the bulk of its money through advertising, and more Internet companies are looking to siphon video advertising dollars away from traditional TV.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Fairphone, the Dutch company that aims to sell socially responsible smartphones, is working on a second model that be repaired with little hassle and won’t easily break. The company is also sticking with its goal of using conflict-free or fair trade minerals.One of the company’s key aims with the Fairphone 2 was to extend the longevity of the product.Making it easy to repair is part of that. For example, it will be possible to replace the display on the Fairphone 2 in less than a minute, the company promises. After removing the case and battery, the two clips that lock the display in place are slid towards each other, and then the entire unit can be taken out, CTO Olivier Hebert said in a blog post on Tuesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As if the all the controversy over LTE networks crowding out Wi-Fi isn’t enough, a new technology in the works at Qualcomm Research might allow a lot more people to set them up.LTE was designed to run on frequencies licensed by mobile operators for their exclusive use. But an emerging technology called LTE-Unlicensed allows the cellular system to supplement those frequencies with unlicensed spectrum that’s shared with systems like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. This gives the carriers additional spectrum that they don’t have to pay for in an auction.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Facebook has taken a step away from its main site to develop what it thinks is a better way to share photos privately.Moments, released Monday for iOS and Android, is a standalone app that will organize the photos on people’s smartphones, and let users share them privately with a select set of friends. The app groups photos together based on when they were taken, and, who’s in them. It uses the same facial recognition technology that powers the suggested tagging feature on Facebook’s site.Moments lets users sync photos with the people who are at a specific event, like a party or wedding.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The amount of time people in a given area spend using their cell phones shrinks when the job market begins to dry up, according to a study co-authored by researchers at MIT.The study, which tracked people living in a European town in which a plant had just closed, found that the total number of calls made by laid-off workers fell by 51%, when compared to the phone activity of the employed. Individually, each unemployed worker made 5% fewer calls.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: First Look: How will Windows 10 play on tablets + What do today's graduates expect in the workplace? +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
CEOs’ priorities are different from the rest of us when it comes to tech.
For one thing, half of U.S. CEOs worry more about new industry entrants from the technology sector disrupting their businesses, than adopting devices as a strategy, according to a recent survey from analysts PricewaterhouseCoopers, or PWC.Strategic importance
CEOs aren’t getting over-excited about devices. Investment is being made, but more CEOs thought cybersecurity was strategically more important to them that mobile, IoT and wearables, the survey found.
Mobile gets barely half of CEOs’ attention. Only 55 percent of those polled reckoned mobile tech for engagement with customers is strategically “very important” to their enterprise.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There's a lot of confusion, disruption and even turbulence in the market for enterprise mobility management (EMM) software, which is used to manage smartphones and tablets and the data and apps running on them."BlackBerry deserves to be considered a leader in EMM today," Beard concluded.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
A Japanese climate information company that wants to track just about every cloud in the sky in its own data cloud is handing out atmospheric sensors for smartphones that could improve forecasting.Weathernews is distributing the sensors to users of its Weathernews Touch, a crowdsourced weather info app that has been downloaded more than 13 million times.The hexagonal, palm-sized WxBeacon sensors can detect changes in temperature, barometric pressure and humidity and automatically upload them to the Weathernews cloud.The aim is to improve weather forecasting with more granular, local information and to encourage more people to contribute to crowdsourced weather data, a Weathernews spokeswoman said. The company, which calls itself the world’s largest private weather data firm, believes the data gathered by the beacons could be particularly useful when typhoons strike Japan.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
A software update to the Apple Watch’s OS gave third-party developers access to the device’s sensors this week, fulfilling a request they’ve had since Apple unveiled the wearable.With watchOS 2, which Apple showed on Monday at its annual developer’s conference, developers can create more-capable apps that directly tap into the watch’s components, like its microphone and heart rate sensor, instead of relying on an accompanying iPhone to handle app processing.While developers welcomed this news, some think Apple could go even further in making the watch a better platform for their apps.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Beleaguered smartphone manufacturer Blackberry could go Android with its next device, abandoning development of its own platform in the interest of getting a more robust ecosystem of apps into the hands of its few remaining users, according to a report from Reuters.Citing anonymous sources, the news agency said that the idea is to transform Blackberry into a software and services company, centered on BES 12, a mobility management system designed to work across Android, iOS, and Windows Phone devices, in addition to Blackberry’s own. (Read the full Reuters report here.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The number of LTE subscriptions will pass 1 billion before the end of the year, prompting operators to invest in technologies such as small cells to keep up.There will be nearly 1.37 billion 4G LTE subscribers around the world by year-end, up from nearly 650 million in 2014, according to market research company ABI Research. LTE’s growing popularity is helped by a number of things: mobile operators including the technology in more of their plans, cheaper LTE smartphones and aggressive network expansions in countries like China.LTE is being rapidly embraced in North America, Japan and South Korea where it’ll be included in a majority of subscriptions this year, according to telecommunications equipment maker Ericsson, which last week published a report on its expectations for future mobile growth.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A deal for Taiwanese PC maker Asustek Computer to buy struggling phone-maker HTC makes sense to some, and on Friday Asus’s chairman said he wouldn’t rule it out.An acquisition of HTC would certainly help the PC maker boost its presence in the smartphone market. Asus has only recently begun selling handsets, but it’s aiming at shipping 17 million units this year.At the Asus shareholders’ meeting on Friday, Chairman Jonney Shih said in response to a question that Asus wouldn’t dismiss the possibility of buying HTC, but that no formal evaluation had been made, according to company spokesman Nick Wu.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s been two years since Google first disclosed Project Loon, and while the company continues to keep most details of the project secret, the technology and challenges behind it are slowly coming into focus.Loon is an ambitious attempt to bring the Internet to the roughly 5 billion people on the planet who are out of range of existing networks. The project involves suspending cellular access points under high-altitude balloons to provide Internet access to those on the ground, an idea that sounds elegantly simple but was anything but.A series of recent presentations and talks by Google X employees have revealed some of the technical and commercial challenges the company faced in realizing Loon, and in nearing its target cost of $10,000 per balloon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As the use of smaller satellites in larger constellations increases, the need for faster communications between spacecraft will be needed for improved availability for intelligence, surveillance, telecommunications and reconnaissance applications.The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency this week announced a program called “Inter-Satellite Communication Links (ISCL)” it hopes will see the development of lightweight, low-power, and low-cost inter-satellite communications technology that could be used in a wide range of small Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites. Specifically, this program seeks to develop ISCLs with the highest practical data rates while having a per-link average weight of less than 2 pounds and an orbit-average power dissipation of less than 3 watts, DARPA stated.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Mobility is marching forward in the enterprise in all sorts of ways, say some 430 companies at MobileIron's user conference in San Francisco this week. Yet they're facing the same stiff hurdle -- namely, security. These were the key highlights of the keynote session, which included a special guest appearance by an Uber executive.On the upside, mobility in the enterprise has room to grow. MobileIron asked attendees to give inspirational mobile ideas that will benefit customers, employees and shareholders alike, as well as rate these ideas. The most popular ones concerned security, such as having a security application that's available anytime, anywhere across a range of devices, thus allowing employees to work from home or while traveling.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It's become de rigeur to protect wireless networks with Wi-Fi Protected Access II (WPA2) security, but many small and even midsize businesses default to using the personal or pre-shared key (PSK) mode of WPA2, rather than its enterprise mode. Despite its name, however, the enterprise mode isn't only for large networks; it has a place in all businesses. Though you might think the simple personal mode is easier to use, the exact opposite can be true if you factor in the ongoing effort required to properly secure the business's network.Connecting devices that support enterprise modeTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Google wants in on this “smart cities” thing tooGoogle has launched Sidewalk Labs, a New York-based company that will develop technology to make urban transportation and government more efficient, as well as lower the cost of living and cut energy use. The search giant is a little late to the party: Cisco, IBM and Microsoft are already heavily invested in this space, and the European Union has a major Smart Cities initiative as part of its Digital Agenda.Ebay, PayPal scrutinized for claiming robocall rights in user agreementsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft has taken its big data analysis to China, with computing models that can forecast the air quality across 41 cities in the country.Pollution continues to be a major problem in China, with hazardous air quality levels a common occurrence in cities including Beijing. To bring some clarity to the situation, Microsoft has come up with a mobile app that can predict the air quality two days in advance.The Your Weather app works by first taking official data from government air quality monitoring stations across a 300 kilometer distance, and then using weather data to predict the pollution levels. The weather data used includes forecasts, along with current information on humidity, temperature and wind direction in a selected city.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here