Michelle Maisto

Actor John Cusack, a board member of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, has joined representatives from the Free Press, Mozilla, ColorofChange.org, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Restore the Fourth movement in demanding accountability from the National Security Agency (NSA), in light of revealed information about its PRISM surveillance program. A StopWatching.Us campaign launched […]

Mozilla has been promising smartphones running on its Web-based Firefox OS, and on July 1 it showed off the Alcatel One Touch Fire and the ZTE Open. Telefonica will begin selling the ZTE Open July 2, for about $90, with approximately $39 of data included—a “very, very cheap price point,” said Telefonica’s director of open […]

Nokia has announced plans to acquire Siemens AG’s 50 percent share of Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), the joint venture the pair established in 2007 and the strongest asset on Nokia’s balance sheet. Nokia plans to pay Siemens the U.S. equivalent of $2.2 billion, and the deal is scheduled to close during the third quarter. “Nokia […]

Apple has filed to trademark “iWatch” in Japan, pushing a product that rumors and unnamed sources have insisted is coming a step closer to being tangible. According to Reuters and the Wall Street Journal, Japan’s patent office made information about Apple’s June 3 patent application public on June 27. An official with the patent office […]

PKThinks, the think tank of consumer-advocacy group Public Knowledge, has released the first of what’s to be a series of white papers on “cutting-edge legal issues.” As more of what we own becomes intangible, and app downloads, online music purchases and streaming video rentals become ever-greater parts of our lives, “Copies, Rights & Copyrights” is […]

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) intends to approve Sprint’s purchase of 4G provider Clearwire, and allow Sprint to keep all the spectrum that Clearwire will bring with it, Reuters reported June 27, citing two sources familiar with the matter. Crest Financial, one of Clearwire’s largest minority stakeholders, asked the FCC to require Sprint to sell […]

T-Mobile has purchased 10MHz of Advanced Wireless Spectrum (AWS) from U.S. Cellular for $308 million. T-Mobile CEO John Legere put the purchase in succinct terms. “In today’s marketplace,” he said in a June 28 statement, “spectrum is gold.” T-Mobile’s new spectrum covers 32 million people in the Mississippi Valley region—specifically, St. Louis, Nashville, Kansas City, […]

BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins repeated that his company is running a marathon, not a sprint, during a June 28 conference call to discuss the results of BlackBerry’s fiscal 2014 first quarter. Following last quarter’s surprise profits, BlackBerry surprised again, this time with a loss of $84 million. While an improvement on the $518 million loss […]

CrowdFlik Ushers In the ‘Gamification of Video’ by Michelle Maisto Introducing CrowdFlik CrowdFlick, a new app for the iPhone arriving just as Instagram has added video capabilities, was designed for a generation of users that views life events through a smartphone screen. Follow Users and Trends Users can sign in to CrowdFlik to see what […]

Big data is a good thing. But it needs to do a better job of co-existing with people’s rights to privacy and to knowing what businesses know about them, Julie Brill, a commissioner with the Federal Trade Commission, said during a keynote address at the 23rd Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference in Washington, D.C., June […]

China became the world’s leading smartphone market in early 2012, and last week IDC reported that smartphone shipments there have since grown by 117 percent year-over-year. By the end of 2013—thanks in part to Samsung, which also leads in device sales in China—the market share of smartphones with screens measuring 5 inches or larger is […]

iPhone users, meet CrowdFlik, a new application for creating crowd-sourced, event-driven videos. Put another way, it’s a seriously super-fast way to edit video footage (that might otherwise sit around unwatched, taking up space on a phone) into a two-minute, highly shareable video. Also, CrowdFlik users can access other people’s, possibly better, footage. It works like […]