A Canadian police force is outfitting cop cars with Research In Motion's BlackBerry PlayBooks.
Mobile Innovations is the company behind the integration, which will see Canadian police use RIM tablets from their vehicle dashboard to control their car's lights and sirens, as well as receive traffic alerts and access GPS maps, plus be alerted of 911 emergencies.
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A Vancouver startup has built and launched an official Avengers app, based on the Marvel Comics franchise. Being touted as "the first fully interactive comic book," the 16-page comic book slash mobile app is called "Marvel’s The Avengers: Iron Man — Mark VII."
Developed by Loud Crow Interactive, the free iOS and Android app has been downloaded nearly two million times in less than one month. Loud Crow is a 10-man startup that was founded in 2010 and was behind the award-winning A Charlie Brown Christmas.
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Despite early adopters heralding the end of the laptop, new study indicates that tablets are still a long way from replacing them.
According to ABI Research, 16% of consumers surveyed in an ongoing tracking study plan to buy a media tablet in the first half of this year, while 33% plan to buy a notebook.
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Samsung has unveiled the specs and details for the Galaxy S III, its much-anticipated smartphone. "Inspired by nature," the 4G-compatible S III has a 4.8-inch HD Super Amoled display, an 8MP camera, a quad-core processor, and runs on Google's Android 4.0 platform. Samsung says the device is "packed with intuitive technology" and delivers a "uniquely personalized mobile experience that refuses to be compromised."
“With the S III, Samsung has maximized the consumer benefits by integrating superior hardware with enhanced smartphone usability,” said JK Shin, President and Head of IT & Mobile Communications Division at Samsung. “Designed to be both effortlessly smart and intuitively simple, the S III has been created with our human needs and capabilities in mind. What makes me most proud is that it enables one of the most seamless, natural and human-centric mobile experiences, opening up a new horizon that allows you to live a life extraordinary.”
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Research In Motion lost its chief marketing officer right when the PlayBook launched in March 2011. Now more than one year later, the beleaguered company may finally be close to filling that void.
RIM CEO Thorsten Heins says the company is close to hiring a new CMO that will bring some unity to a currently scattered marketing team. Recent RIM ads have been embarrassing, while bizarre viral marketing attempts have backfired.
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For the past year and change, one big story in tech has been how competing tablets finally started to eat into Apple's iPad marketshare. From a dominant peak of 95% in 2010, the iPad slowly lost ground: dozens of competitor devices gradually eroded the iPad's marketshare to a low of 55%. It was still impressive that a single tablet could own over half the market, but Amazon's Kindle Fire led a formidable charge and made Apple look suddenly mortal.
However, the tides have reversed.
read moreIn 2008, RIM shares broke $140. In 2011, they lost 75%. Now, they're down more than 90% from that 2008 high. We thought the stock had bottomed out at $14, where the debt-free company had a crazy-low price to earnings ratio of just three. Maybe not.
Twitter is considering acquiring Camera+, a mobile iPhone app that was co-founded by Vancouverite Lisa Bettany (Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore's girlfriend) and owned by development firm Tap Tap Tap, according to "two people with knowledge of the negotiations," Bloomberg reports.
Twitter was also interested in Instragram, a similar but more popular and social app, before Facebook acquired it for $1 billion. While Instagram was likely too rich for Twitter's bold (although Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey was an investor in the app), competitor Camera+ would be much more affordable.
read moreYesterday, we wrote about how Apple and Samsung combined for a remarkable 99% of the world's smartphone profits—with Apple leagues ahead of even Samsung, owning more than 70% of all profits. But we didn't include this chart from Asymco. Shown below, the visualization of just what Apple is doing is absolutely jaw-dropping.
Bell managed a 14% increase in net earnings and a 23% growth in free cash clow in the first quarter of 2012. But not everything is quite so rosy.
Will revenue managed to grow nearly 12%, investors are wary of the impact that the startup discount carriers—Wind Mobile, Public Mobile, etc.—are having. Bell postpaid and prepaid activations were down on the quarter, and the telecom admitted that it was in part due to "competitive acquisition offers from the newer wireless entrants"—meaning the startups are indeed managing to siphon consumers from the Big Three to their lower-priced offerings and Bell knows it.
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