Amazon Fire has been out for a month and already is receiving a makeover. A major software update rollout will boost the tablet’s credentials among it critics and empower its users with new features that could boost its popularity.
Although Fire has received much praise from market experts for releasing the first Android tablet priced lower than the Apple iPad, it has been grilled for its perceived sluggishness, a criticism that could be slowing sales. Many critics continue comparing the Fire to the iPad, not exactly an apples-to-apples match up, handing Amazon a serious challenge.
Yahoo! reported a $627 million win in a court settlement over an online lottery scam. The scam, propelled by a bogus Internet company, aimed to trick online users into believing they had won money prizes in a fake lottery sponsored by Yahoo!, the search engine giant.
RIM hastily renamed its latest BlackBerry platform after a U.S. company won a temporary court injunction against it. Originally dubbed BBX, the platform is set to combine the best features of RIM’s BlackBerry and QNX platforms. At the Asian DevCon conference, RIM announced that the platform will now be called BlackBerry 10 to to protect itself against trademark litigation. A federal court forbade RIM from using the BBX name at the trade event.
In an era where personal data can spread throughout the world at rapid pace and unauthorized access to it has never been quicker and easier, the settlement between the FTC and Facebook underscores the FTC’s willingness to soothe anxiety felt by Internet users over this issue.
For a website selling any number of goods or service, the days leading up to Cyber Monday are the perfect time of year to play around with some new online marketing techniques and capitalize on the millions of shoppers looking to find a great deal on their Christmas shopping. There are several effective techniques that you can try to help raise sales and turn a profit, all before the month of December ever starts. Here are some of the most popular and effective suggestions:
Facebook and HTC have declined to comment, no surprise of course. For now then, we can say these will be rumors to be proven factual at a later date. The latest news seems to be that Facebook is indeed taking another attempt at establishing a stronger presence in the mobile industry. Facebook has allegedly narrowed its choice to be HTC, eliminating Samsung as a potential manufacture for the new device. The new smart phone is referred to as Buffy, the second attempt at a cellphone by Facebook. The first was known as the Social Layer, eventually shortened the name to the Slayer and then Buffy. New executives, new intel staff and new opportunities in an ever growing market may be driving Facebook to use Buffy to drive a stronger stake into the market.
Google, the top name in internet search functionality, and Samsung, the world’s number one television manufacturer, have combined forces to produce and release a line of Google TVs. Although Samsung has publicly announced that the final signatures on the deal with Google have not yet been added to the contract, all signs indicate that everything is a go and consumers can expect to be introduced to this new line of televisions at some point in 2012. These television sets will harness the power of the Google brand by enabling consumers to watch online videos and play video games via their TV. Although some televisions are already equipped with internet functionality, the addition of the Google brand name is certain to make this product seem more viable to a wider variety of consumers.
In another disappointing announcement from Adobe this year, it seems as though the company will be ending their flash mobile player and instead shifting support behind the Adobe AIR and HTML5 technology. This marks the end of an era, as Flash has served up video and games for more than 10 years on desktop devices. Whether or not the company will abandon the platform entirely remains to be seen.
The new Nook Tablet announced by Barnes & Noble has all the bells and whistles you would expect from a device costing $250. Barnes & Noble plans for the device to compete directly with the Kindle Fire, and have made much noise in proclaiming just that. While some people’s decision of which to get will likely boil down to loyalty and how invested they are in either ecosystem, for most buyers there is quite a bit to consider. The following is a general breakdown of the differences between the two devices.
Yahoo Gets New CEO!
PayPal, under Thompson’s watch, experienced spectacular growth, more than doubling the number of users from 50 million to 104 million and growing revenues from $1.8 billion to more than $4 billion. In fact, PayPal grew at a faster rate than its parent company, eBay. For the last quarter of reported income, PayPal’s revenues grew more than twice as fast as eBay’s, compared to revenues from a year before.