Tech News Today 352

Tech News Today Episode 352

Tech News Today 352: Scrolling Stalker

RIM tries to fire up developers, Motorola tries scoop ice cream sandwich and Apple disappoints by setting records, and more.

Submit and vote on story coverage at technewstoday.reddit.com

Hosts

• Tom Merritt (@acedtect)
  • TomMerritt.com
• Sarah Lane (@sarahlane)
  • SarahLane.com
• Iyaz Akhtar (@Iyaz)
  • thisoldnerd.finitecomedy.com
• Jason Howell (@raygun01)
  • JasonHowell.net

Top Stories

• Motorola Droid RAZR unveiled
• Motorola Droid RAZR first hands-on!
• Motorola announces Motoactv, 'the ultimate fitness device'
• Motorola’s Lapdock 500 Pro bumps WebTop to 14-inches
• Motorola Lapdock 500 Pro and Lapdock 100 hands-on
  • Motorola Droid RAZR LTE, Gorilla glass 4.3-inch qHD Super AMOLED display, dual core 1.2 GHz TI OMAP 4430, 7.1 MM thick, 8 megapixel rear camera capable of 1080p HD video, 1GB RAM, 16GB of onboard storage available November for $299
  • Droid RAZR has 'SmartActions' to save battery life, MotoCast to stream files from laptop, Citrix Receiver. Pre-orders October 27th, arrives 'November'
  • Motoactv, 35 grams, 600 MHz, Android, GPS, heart rate monitor, waterproof, FM radio, $249 or $299 for 8GB and 16GB. Pre-orders start today, Available November 6
  • Your workout data automatically syncs to training tools at MOTOACTV.com
  • Lapdock 500, 14 inches. Huge trackpad. Also Lapdock 100 10.1-inch model.
  • The 500 also has a VGA out and an Ethernet port that supports power-over-Ethernet, so you can plug into the network and charge up your batteries. with a single cable.

• Research in Motion announces BBX, 'combines the best of BlackBerry and QNX'
• RIM Demos Future Software,But Mum On Next-Gen Handset Details
• BlackBerry Jam: Developers told they can be cool too
  • BBX new BlackBerry OS for smart phones and tablets
  • Dan Dodge of QNX says "single, unified platform for the whole world,"
  • BBX will offer over 100 open source libraries and is certified for POSIX
  • It'll support HTML5, NativeSDK and Adobe AIR / Flash,
  • a new advanced graphics framework called Cascade UI, enabling Super Apps that provide smooth 3D animations and deep integration with BBM and Push services
  • announced the developer beta of BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0, also a new developer initiative called BlackBerry JAM

• Apple posts record Q4 2011 earnings: $6.62b profit on $28.27b revenue, 11.1m iPads and 17m iPhones sold
• The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple stores will close for at least an hour on Wednesday so employees can watch a live stream of Apple's memorial for Steve Jobs. The stores would close at 10AM Pacific according to 9to5Mac. Apple has yet to confirm the store closings.
• Apple Hasn’t Sold So Few iPods Since 2005
• Apple full year profits rise 85%
• iPhone 4S users seeing yellow screen tint
• iPhone 4S battery complaints flood in
• Apple Misses on Earnings, Revenue, iPhone Sales, Stock Tanks
  • Expected $7.22 a share on revenue of $29.5 billion.
  • Earned $7.05 a share on rev of $28.3B
  • Apple has not missed earnings forecasts since the second quarter of 2002, according to FactSet data. Apple beat their OWN guidance just not analysts expectations.
  • iPhone sales came in at 17.07 million, compared with forecasts of 20 million (21 percent increase)
  • iPad sales came in at 11.1 million units, topping estimates by a little bit. (166 percent increase, quarterly sales record) Mac sales up 26% to 4.89 million another record.
  • iPhone 4S complaints begin normal battery life and yellow screen complaints started, no antennae complaints yet!"

Discussion Stories

• Dropbox scores $250 million in funding
• Apple tried to buy Dropbox
• Dropbox CEO: We’ll integrate with everything
  • Dropbox just received $250 million in funding
  • plans to rapidly build up its operations, increase internal staffing, make some acquisitions, and look for new business partners.
  • 2 gigabytes of storage for free, a 50GB plan for $9.99 a month, and a 100GB plan for $19.99 a month.
  • Dropbox has been dubbed "tech's hottest startup" by Forbes, which is offering an inside look at the company in its latest issue.
  • Houston recalled how he had met with Steve Jobs in December 2009 to demo his product for the late Apple leader. But in a turnabout, Jobs told Houston that Dropbox was a feature, not a product, and that he was going after their market. Less than two years later, Apple unveiled iCloud.

• Frequent Facebook Users Not As Worried About Privacy
• Teens Weigh-In On Facebook Changes
• Facebook Is Building Shadow Profiles of Non-Users
  • poll by USA Today and Gallup of more than 2,000 adults
  • 26 percent of respondents who use Facebook daily are ""very concerned"" about privacy, compared with 35 percent for weekly Facebook users and 39 percent for people who use Facebook less often.
  • 56 percent of respondents saying they dislike the new features, and 36 percent approving.
  • According to a survey from GrownUpThinking (marketing agency) teens are openly and seriously considering spending less time on Facebook as a direct result of the recent changes. Only 4% of teens plan to spend more time on Facebook.
  • 25% of teens will be using Facebook less and Google+ more
  • Max Schrems of Europe Versus Facebook has filed complaint about 'shadow profiles' -- 'This is done by different functions that encourage users to hand personal data of other users and non-users to Facebook"

• It's official: to protect baby's brain, turn off the TV
  • Until children turn 2 TV is just a glowy light
  • TV can lull infants to sleep, but at cost of sleep irregularities
  • Replaces talk time with adults, retarding development
  • link between increased TV time and developmental delays
  • distracts babies from play, an activity that is known to have deep developmental benefits. ----Too early to tell on iPads and interactive screens

News Fuse

• Symantec blogged on Tuesday that companies involved in oil pipelines and critical energy infrastructure have been infected with malware derived fromt he Stuxnet worm. The remote access trojan, called Duqu installed components that logged keystrokes and system information. The variants range from last December to as recent as a month ago. Researchers have not determined Duqu's purpose.

• Finally some good news for Yahoo. The beleaguered company reported earnings of 21 cents a share, topping forecasts of 17 cents a share. Net revenue came in at $1.07 billion, matching forecasts. INtel also beat estimates in their earnings report with revenue of $14.2 billion beating forecasts of $13.9 billion.

• Viacom and Google are back in court today - Viacom is appealing an earlier decision that found YouTube didn't infringe on Viacom's copyrights. The lower court dismissed the case and found YouTube was within a safe harbor, so even though infringing clips were uploaded to YouTube, YouTube was not liable for infringement. Viacom's appeal will be an uphill battle and it will argue that YouTube wasn't within the safe harbor.

• Speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit yesterday, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said that the site is handling about 250 million tweets a day. The amount of Twitter sign-ups via iOS has tripled since iOS 5 launched. Costolo also mentioned that the amount of active daily users is now up to 50% - back in January of this year it was only at 30%.

• Skype co-founder Janus Friis is working on a new video streaming service called Vdio. The service has been under construction for two years and GigaOm thinks Vdio will be similar to Rdio (also co-founded by Friis). Vdio will launch in the UK, but there aren't any details as to pricing or content partners yet.

• Markus "Notch" Persson tweeted about a legal victory over the maker of Elder Scrolls, ZeniMax. ZeniMax sued in Sweeden to stop Minecraft maker Mojang from using "Scrolls" in its ads and promotions. The court denied the request for the temporary injunction, so Mojang can still call its game "Scrolls" for now.

• If you've got an HP TouchPad, you have not been abandoned! HP released an over the air webOS upgrade today that tweaks the camera app, improves performance, and delivers general UI improvements. Once again, webOS proves that it's the best dead operating system ever.

• Google is tweaking its search engine. Soon, if you're signed into your Google account, navigating to Google.com will bring you to an SSL-enabled version of the site. If you're not signed in, you'll be able to encrypt your searches via https://www.google.com. The change will happen over the next few weeks. Google's blog post on the matter says the change is to protect its users' privacy.

• A few days ago, ITU Study Group on Broadcasting Service agreed on the specs for Ultra high-definition TV. Trial versions of UHDTV had a resolution of 33 million pixels. Compare that to HDTV's max of 2 million pixels, and UHDTV will make HD look like SD. And don't forget 3D - UHDTV may help to bring glass-free 3D because of the increase of pixels.

Randomizer

• "World's Most Relaxing Music" Composed

Calendar

• Nintendo's got a birthday, more specifically the North American birthday - it was this day in 1985 that the NES was released in NY's FAO Schwarz
• Tonight, Samsung and Google have their big Ice Cream Sandwich event. JASON Howell, EILEEN Rivera RON Richards and special guest GINA Trapani cover it live bringing you the story behind the story BEHIND even those two stories with incisive cutting edge coverage. Join them 7 PM Pacific right here on TWIT.
• The AsiaD Conference starts tomorrow and runs until the 21st

INCOMING

Email

"I have feedback on the caller complaining about the iPad music app on iOS 5. There are a number of podcast applications in the App Store, I recommend using a universal app called "iCatcher". Sarah mentioned the "downcast" application but in my opinion (I own both apps), iCatcher is a better application in my opinion, I use it to listen to the majority of the TWIT shows.

Thank you for reading love the show - Tom"

"Dear TNT,

I was very interested to hear this story about Amazon's mailbox lockers because I've been in a long battle with Amazon about my PO Box. I say "battle" but I'm sure it's not hardly on Amazon's radar, so it's a one-sided battle.

Here's the problem. I have a PO Box. That's where my postal mail is delivered. The mailman does not come to my house. The UPS man and FedEx DO come to my house.

Some items "can't be delivered to PO Boxes." Their website software will NOT let you put a PO box in the address, even if a street address is also present. But that's not the end of the story. A healthy majority of the items that "cannot be delivered to a PO Box" are then sent via the postal service.

I live almost a 4 hour drive from NY city, so hopefully these Amazon boxes will spring up across the country soon.

Beelissa"

"Hey news team,

My wife is a product manager for OPOWER and Tom is exactly right. Their research found that people don't care about how much money they save by being energy efficient, but when you show them how much their neighbors use (or in this case, their Facebook friends) it actually motivates them to lower their energy usage.

And it's called "Oh" "Power" not "Op" "Ower" or whatever you guys said. :-D Cheers!

Tye"

Sponsors

Ford Sync

• ad times: :34 - :46 and 16:22 - 17:29

Production Information

• Edited by: Jeff
• Notes:

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