Windows Phone is No. 3 in the smartphone market, thanks largely to Nokia.
(Credit: CNET/ Andrew Hoyle)Microsoft's Windows Phone grabbed third place from BlackBerry in global smartphone shipments in the first quarter, market researcher IDC said Thursday.
Windows Phone accounted for shipments of 7 million smartphones, earning itself a market share of 3.2 percent last quarter. That was a gain from the first quarter of 2012, which saw shipments of 3 million and a market share of 2 percent.
Groupon CEO Andrew Mason
(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET)Groupon is not racing to find a new CEO, say the interim leaders who've been running the show since the company's founder resigned earlier this year.
Speaking to The Wall Street Journal in an interview published on Tuesday, Groupon's interim CEOs Ted Leonsis and Eric Lefkosky said that "are not in a rush" to name a new, permanent chief executive, adding that they have only just kicked off the process of finding a replacement.
AirWatch, the startup that helps businesses manage security and more on employees’ mobile devices, is today announcing that it has raised another $25 million, led by Accel with participation also from Insight Venture Partners. The funds come as part of an expanded Series A round, originally for $200 million, which the company announced with a splash in February during Mobile World Congress. This Series A is the first outside money raised by AirWatch, and values the company at just over $1 billion, according to sources.
Both AirWatch’s CEO, John Marshall, and Ryan Sweeney, the partner who led the round at Accel, tell TechCrunch that this latest expansion of the round was made at the same valuation. It comes just weeks after rival Good Technology raised a $50 million round and is preparing for an IPO.
As with the earlier $200 million, this latest injection will be used to help AirWatch build out its business, add more services, and quite possibly make some acquisitions along the way.
Microsoft Surface RT. It's still around but products from other PC vendors are fading fast. RT does not offer the Windows compatibility that Windows 8 does.
(Credit: Microsoft)Wondering whether to buy a Windows RT tablet? The status of RT at retail may be a good guide.
As of Wednesday evening, the Microsoft store listed no Windows RT tablets aside from Microsoft's own Surface RT. Tablets like the Asus VivoTab RT are no longer listed (though the Intel-based VivoTab is on the site). Even Dell's XPS 10 -- reduced this week to $299.99 -- is absent.
Google’s stock price came close to its 52-week high on the first day of Google I/O today, hitting $915 per share at close. In comparison, Apple today dropped 15 points to close at $428 per share, 277 points off its 52-week high.
This morning, Google stock jumped to $909 per share from its opening price of $895 when Co-Founder Larry Page hit the stage at around 11:45. It is now trading at $916.50 in after-hours trading. One analyst I talked to attributed the increase to Google’s announcement of its “all access” streaming service and the rotation out of hardware makers such as Apple and HP.
The difference between Google and Apple’s share price is a barometer of the tech landscape. Google is a data company. Apple is more about design, creating beautiful devices.
VP9 engineer Ronald Bultje speaks at Google I/O 2013.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)SAN FRANCISCO -- Google is nearly done with its VP9 video technology, and it wants the world to use it.
At its Google I/O conference Wednesday, company employees made the case for the royalty-free, open-source technology as a higher-quality alternative to today's dominant video codec, H.264. Moving to VP9 -- available now in testing on Chrome and YouTube -- will save bandwidth costs.
Time for a back-up plan for your Twitter back-up plan. Backupify — the cloud-based backup, search and restore provider for online services — is shutting down its TweetBackup service for Twitter users. The company has posted a note about the closure on its site, as well as — yes — on its Twitter account, noting that new signups are stopping as of today, and that existing users will have 30 days, until June 28, to keep logging into their accounts and back up their data.
After 45 days, it notes, “we will begin purging the data from our Amazon servers.”
On one of the two FAQ pages that Backupify has created to answer some questions about the service, it suggests a couple of alternatives to TweetBackup’s subscribers: for business users, they can opt for Backupify’s own-branded service; for consumers, it suggests going somewhere else altogether, Ditto from Norton Labs, owned by one of Backupify’s strategic investors, Symantec.
Microsoft's new YouTube app for Windows Phone 8.
(Credit: Microsoft)Google has sent Microsoft a cease-and-desist letter demanding Microsoft withdraw its redesigned YouTube app for Windows Phone 8 because it violates Google's Terms of Service.
The Verge first reported news of the letter, dated May 15, and included a copy of it on its Web site.
Google announced today at I/O that it made Google Cloud Platform generally available, marking a milestone for the cloud community and the real arrival of a giant to contend with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its pay-as-you-go pricing.
The service, now with 3 million users, is now open to any developer or business. In its post announcing the news, Google revealed a bit about new pricing, instance types and other features:
Sub-hour billing charges for instances in one-minute increments with a 10-minute minimum, so developers don’t pay for compute minutes that you don’t use. Shared-core instances provide smaller instance shapes for low-intensity workloads. Advanced Routing features help create gateways and VPN servers and enables developers to build applications that span local network and Google’s cloud Large persistent disks support up to 10 terabytes per volume, which Google says translates to 10X the industry standardGoogle also announced a new data store for non-relational data and availability of a PHP runtime.
