Michelle Maisto

Among the rumors surrounding Sprint’s anticipated merger with T-Mobile was news that the latter’s boisterous ringleader and CEO, John Legere, would head the new combined company. Last week, amid news that the merger plans had fallen apart, Sprint majority shareholder Softbank seemed to decide to stay true to its plan for a new CEO and […]

T-Mobile continues to emphasize the wireless industry’s need for simpler, more affordable wireless service plans. Its latest effort to address this need is a flat-rate Pay as You Go plan. Pay-as-you-go plans have historically been tricky to keep up with, since varying per-minute and per-text pricing made it unclear whether it was time to “reload” […]

Nokia has invested $8 million in Zubie, a connected car start-up with a service that claims to connect “cars and drivers like never before.” The investment is the first to come out a $100 million Connected Car fund that Nokia announced in May and entrusted to Nokia Growth Partners (NGP), its investment arm. NGP has […]

Sunday’s New York Times article on Apple University added a few new details to what’s already been reported: Apple offers classes for employees that are related to their positions and school them on the thinking of Apple. For example, in its headline, The Times grabbed onto a detail about how one Apple instructor uses Picasso […]

Chromebook sales this year will outperform 2013 sales by 79 percent, according to an Aug. 11 report from research firm Gartner. The primary demand for Chromebooks—inexpensive notebooks with operating systems based in the cloud, for easy updating and provisioning—has come from the education sector, which accounted for 85 percent of the 2.9 million units sold […]

Apple has filed a patent suggesting Siri may soon make the leap from iPhones to desktops. First reported by Apple Insider, the 92-page patent was filed Feb. 5 and titled an “intelligent digital assistant in a desktop environment.” A user can interact with the assistant via dictation or command modes, or by dragging objects onto […]

SAP has expanded its Mobile Secure mobility management portfolio with the addition of Mobile Place, a mobile application management (MAM) tool. Mobile Place gives SAP enterprise customers the option to offer a branded, location-specific and secure app store that can be filled with their own apps, as well as sanctioned third-party apps. While previously there […]

Rows of journalists with laptops teetering on their knees and meetings in which eye contact is sacrificed for the efficiency of typing while we listen and talk are commonplace. And for good reason. The information our lives are organized around is largely housed in machines and apps and clouds. Writing on paper is slower and […]

A first release of BBM for Windows Phone is now available for download, BlackBerry announced July 31. The version, which follows a limited Beta release, is compatible with devices running Windows Phone 8 and 8.1. A longtime favorite of BlackBerry users, the messaging app includes all the expected features—the ability to chat with up to […]

Advancing the connected car market a necessary step, Ford has announced it will host the auto industry’s first app developer conference. Planned for Sept. 8, the event will overlap with the CTIA’s Super Mobility Week in Las Vegas, Sept. 8-11. While the connected car market has been said to be more opportunity-rich than tablets were […]

BlackBerry Says Voice Is Security’s Final Frontier by Michelle Maisto BlackBerry Security At a security event in New York City July 30, BlackBerry CEO John Chen said the company is focused on four regulated markets: government, health care, finance and energy. BlackBerry has no intention of turning its back on the consumer space, Chen clarified, […]

French telecom Iliad days ago made an offer to buy T-Mobile, an effort to get in the way of a Sprint-T-Mobile merger that neither U.S. carrier will admit is being negotiated. The Wall Street Journal reported the offer July 31, citing people familiar with the matter and who said that Iliad views the deal as […]