Tech News Today 437

Tech News Today Episode 437

Tech News Today 437: You Got Your Mango In My BlackBerry

How many iPads are coming March 7? Yahoo-Alibab deal off, Why you'll pay for free TV on the Internet, 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
• Christopher Null
  • blog.intuit.com

Top Stories

• Next-gen iPads with LTE and an 8" version in testing? Magic WSJ-ball says "yes"
• iPad 3 to have LTE on Verizon and AT&T, says WSJ
• iPad 3 event slated for March 7th?
• Apple Working with Suppliers on 8-Inch iPad(Cites WSJ)
• This is not the iPad 3
  • WSJ claims next iPad will be capable of LTE from Verizon and AT&T
  • WSJ claims Apple actively testing an 8" version of the iPad. (screen resolution like iPad 2) Officials at some of Apple's suppliers say Apple has shown them screen designs for a new device with a screen size of around 8-inches, and said it is qualifying suppliers for it.
  • Taiwan-based AU Optronics Co. and LG Display Co. of South Korea to supply the test panels
  • iMore, which cites sources pegging Wednesday, March 7th as the date for Apple's announcement and The Loop agrees

• But their might be no iPads to sell: Proview calls for iPad export ban without a hint of irony
• iPad Import/Export Ban Application In China Could Hurt Or Cost Apple
  • Apple and Proview Shenzen (computer display maker) have been in a trademark battle for 2 years over the iPad name. Apple sez it bought Proview's worldwide rights to the iPad trademark in 10 different countries several years ago and Proview refuses to honor their agreement in China. Proview says it's not bound by a deal made by its Taiwanese affiliate to license the name.
  • in 2010 Apple sued Proview, claiming ownership of iPad name. They were rejected last November. They appealed and lost in December in a Chinese court.
  • Proview can demand seizure and ban of iPad exports Chinese counterfeit good prevention laws that also include clothing, movies, and music. iPads are assembled in China. No exports, no iPads.
  • Proview is facing financial troubles, you could read this as the ultimate bluff to get a huge settlement. In December, Xinhua News Agency reported Proview could seek 10 billion yuan ($1.6 billion).
  • yesterday reports came in that iPads were being confiscated from a retailer in Shijiazhuang, capital of Hebei province.
  • Proview lawyer told the AP the co "has asked authorities in more than 20 cities to investigate and to destroy promotional materials that violate its trademark."
  • still no sign of iPads being pulled from Apple stores in China, but Proview has filed a trademark infringement case against Apple in Shanghai trying to halt iPad sales at Apple’s own stores in China. That case is scheduled to begin Feb. 22.

• Yahoo Asia Deal Talks Off for Now
• Yahoo-Alibaba-Softbank: Still no deal
• Graphic showing the deal
• Breaking: Activist Shareholder Dan Loeb Starts Proxy Fight at Yahoo
  • Kara Swisher at ATD reporting Yahoo-Alibaba talks have broken down
  • Sources said talks have halted for now over an arrangement with China’s Alibaba Group and Japan’s SoftBank, designed to save the Yahoo over $4 billion in U.S. taxes.
  • Now, those sources are characterizing the talks as completely stopped, blaming Yahoo negotiators for suddenly shifting course on what they want from the arrangement.
  • The rumored deal would have involved swapping Yahoo's ownership in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan back to those companies in a trade for some still-to-be-determined assets.

Discussion Stories

• Aereo launching streaming broadcast TV service in NYC on March 14th
• New Service Will Stream Local TV Stations in New York
• Aereo Official Site
  • Aereo [Air-reo] is launching on March 14th
  • Formerly known as Bamboom labs, the service will stream NYC-based television to NYC-based users on an HTML5 compatible browser
  • $12/ month Beginning March 14, members will be entitled to a 30-day free trial
  • The technology is simple - lots of miniature antennas and each are dedicated to one user.
  • You would get ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and a cloud DVR
  • How it knows where you are: You must have a NYC billing address for your credit card and it looks at your IP address to determine your location. If that IP address is outside of the NYC area, it allows you to geolocate your position via GPS to confirm that you are in fact in NYC. - Aereo spokesperson via email
  • The CEO also showed a demo sending a video from his iPhone to the Apple TV
  • Roku will be supported as well
  • Legal stuff: Aereo cites as precedent a 2008 ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The ruling upheld the right of Cablevision, a cable distributor, to deploy thousands of DVRs at a remote location. Cablevision then essentially rented one DVR to each subscriber who wanted one.
  • Chet Kanojia, CEO and founder of Aereo said "technically, we're actually providing a use license for the antenna and the cloud DVR," so customers aren't paying for the content itself
  • Barry DIller is also financing the venture. He's one of the guys who created the Fox broadcast network and USA broadcasting - so he's definitely familiar with television networks and how they handle content. He's on the board of Aereo.
  • Aereo TV is backed by Diller’s IAC digital media company, which also owns College Humor, Vimeo, Ask.com, and other notable web properties.

• Exclusive: New pre-release BlackBerry 10 OS images surface - homescreen widgets make their BB debut!
  • Crackberry.com showing BB OS 10 images
  • The document was clearly prepared by one of RIM's external ad agency partners as a BB10 briefing document
  • Addition of widgets to the home screen, updated icon tray with new icons, option for video chat

• Cisco predicts mobile data traffic to increase 18-fold over next five years
• Cisco: mobile connections will hit 10 billion by 2016, helped by tablet boom
• Mobile Internet devices will outnumber humans this year, Cisco predicts
• Don't expect ultrabooks to transform the PC market, says analyst
• Smartphones may sell in larger numbers but PCs still make all the money
  • Cisco released a report on future mobile data usage over the next 5 years
  • total global mobile data traffic will increase 18-fold by 2016 when it will reach 130 exabytes. 18 times larger than last years. Streaming from the cloud will account for 71% of all mobile traffic
  • 4G will account for only six percent of mobile connections by 2016, but is expected to generate 36 percent of mobile data traffic
  • ten billion mobile internet-connected devices in 2016 average speed of mobile connections set to increase by 56 percent per year over the next five years.
  • "By the end of 2012, the number of mobile-connected devices will exceed the number of people on Earth, and by 2016 there will be 1.4 mobile devices per capita,"
  • J.P Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz.says Ultrabooks will not take off until they sink to the $600-$800 price point in 2013 -- PCs are the biggest moneymakers around, bringing in about 19 percent (or $28 billion) of the reported $144 billion in hardware sales last year.

News Fuse

• Congratulations Facebook - you've hit the big time. Angry Birds has finally made its debut on Facebook as an app. This version of the game has exclusive levels and you can share your scores and send gifts to friends. Free power-ups are available now through the 16th.
• MIT set up a new prototype electronics course where you can study and be graded completely online. Starting in March, anyone from anywhere in the world will have access to the MITx project. This is an accredited course and an MIT spokesperson said this is a real course - not some "watered down version." Expect at least 10 hours of work per week until June.
• Pocketnow has pictures (or renders) of Motorola's first Ice Cream Powered phone. From the outside, the design looks like a departure from the current look of Moto phones, but the real story is on the inside. The unnamed device would be powered by an Intel Medfield chip. Intel and Motorola announced a partnership at CES.
• It's Zynga earnings day! The company reported revenue was $307 million (up 59% compared to the fourth quarter of 2010) and beat expectations by 2 cents a share. That didn't please Wall Street though because in after-hours trading Zyna's stock price is taking a small hit.

• The Wall Street Journal reports Nortel Networks was hacked for about 10 years by a group in China. Company documents like emails, R&D reports and more were stolen after the hackers obtained passwords fro Nortel executives in 2000. According to former Nortel security adviser Brian Shields, the company did not adequately defend itself. The company subsequently went bankrupt - the sale of the sale of its patents to a consortium including Apple and Microsoft was approved by the DOJ yesterday.
• US approves sale of Nortel patents to Microsoft, RIM, and Apple
• PocketLint reports HTC will be "one of the first companies outside Sony to get PlayStation certification" and says the announcement wil come later this year. The PS certification program for Android devices was announced back at the introduction of the Vita. The first HTC device could launch as soon as the second half of this year.
• PlayStation Certified HTC devices rumored for second half of 2012

• There's a new Facebook app for Windows Phone by Microsoft. It now supports groups ad pages, but doesn't add an easy way to check-in or tag people. It also doesn't fully support the Facebook Timeline, but it has a better panorama mode (at least Microsoft says so).
• Netflix To Announce Second Original Series, “Orange Is The New Black”
• Scalado plans to show off a new iOS and Android photoediting app at Mobile World Congress. The app allows you to remove items from the background in a photo. So if you wanted to take a picture of someone but there's someone else in the background you want to eliminate, you'd only have to tap the offending person and the app is supposed to take care of the rest for you.

Randomizer

• Students create Jennifer, the world’s first autonomous humanoid robot hockey player

Calendar

• The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 3.5. Calc gets a big upgrade, Microsoft Visio files can be imported, automatic updates, and more. Free and open source, bitches.
• RIM's extending their offer of free Playbooks for developers that submits apps to Blackberry's App World. You have until February 15th to register, and until March 2nd to submit an app. RIM says as of last week 6600 devs signed up and 1,500 apps were submitted.
• Have you preordered a PS Vita? midnight launch events are being held at Sony's flagship store in Manhattan and various Gamestop locations. You can only buy the First Edition Bundle, which is the wifi/3G console, a special edition hard case, a 4GB memory card, and a copy of Little Deviants for $350. The rest of you have to wait till the 22nd when the unbundled console goes on sale.
• T-Mobile's holding an event to show off what it calls its "latest and greatest" on March 15th in Washington, DC. The invitation clearly displays the BlackBerry OS 7 logo so don't expect any BB10 goodies. The Verge is guessing it's a T-Mobile Curve 9380, and/or some new BB7 features.

Twisted Metal hits the USA today, exclusively for the PS3.. $60 http://www.slashgear.com/twisted-metal-ps3-drops-in-usa-today-14213423/

INCOMING Voicemail Ekello calls about myspace and Timberlake https://www.google.com/voice/fm/17687141177613138328/AHwOX_A9DKHQ-rdgSCYR7Ezy8e1FAo3sZEv890eI20MUUspQaoyWfyGgp3IW-ZDhYIxXqxaPDn6saqf4ncIVRv4vmg5-QqdzrvXvlKQcOUjtT9A5MRgya23oqGl00Cb9RQMYz_MuJm6vcx5zTbJNfTXQv8tECo9TyQ

Email "Tom and Sarah,

I make licensed collegiate apparel and all collegiate licensee must be members of the FLA, so I have a little knowledge about how membership in the FLA works.

Membership in the FLA entails an entire organization and all its suppliers throughout its supply chain.

It is not a pick and choose which factories you want covered. If you have a vendor, their labor conditions must meet FLA standards. It requires full disclosure of manufacturing sites and suppliers. FLA is about transparency.

Membership IS voluntary but compliance is not.

As a collegiate licensee, membership is not voluntary. If you want to make officially licensed collegiate merchandise you must be a member and be compliant.

That said, my own person view is that Apple's membership in the FLA is a move to get the thumbs up from institutions of higher learning to entering into deeper hardware relationships with them.

Not being a member of the FLA would not fly.

I do not know this for a fact but I would bet that all existing textbook manufacturers have good labor conditions (they are probably domestic) even if they are not members of the FLA.

I wrote about that on my own website if you have any interest in reading just a little more http://demiandellinger.com/content/apples-joins-fair-labor-association-power-us-universities

Love the show, keep up the good work (and spend an hour on the FLA website ( http://www.fairlabor.org/fla/ ) to better understand how important it is AND the huge positive impact Apple membership will have for tech labor worldwide.

- Demian Dellinger"

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Production Information

• Edited by: Jeff
• Notes:

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