Michelle Maisto

The automotive industry is the next natural extension of the smartphone market. Automakers will soon have their own app stores, mobile developers are designing apps with drivers and passengers in mind, and as smartphone sales begin to slow, market segments from the wireless carriers to the mobile chip makers have a new revenue driver to […]

Software solutions provider Harmon.ie now offers a native Office experience for iOS, Android and BlackBerry devices, including the BlackBerry 10-running Z10 and Q10. It’s the first native mobile app to bundle Office Web Apps for editing, collaborating and sharing documents with colleagues on iPads and other mobile devices, the company wrote in a May 13 […]

Tom Wheeler, President Obama’s nominee to chair the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), has fingers in pies throughout the mobile communications industry, which he’s said he’s willing to remove if the Senate confirms him for the position. Wheeler said he would sell stocks in 78 companies—including Google, Apple, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Sprint, Clearwire, Time Warner Cable, […]

The difference between Android, iOS and QNX, the BlackBerry-owned software on which the BlackBerry 10 operating system is built, could be a matter of life and death. That was a key message at a health care panel at the BlackBerry Live conference in Orlando, Fla., May 15 that, in explaining how the OSes differ, made […]

BlackBerry Gives Q5 Mid-Tier QWERTY a Center-Stage Introduction by Michelle Maisto Thorsten Heins Introduces the BlackBerry Q5 Heins, toward the beginning of his two-hour keynote, introduced the Q5, saying it would head to emerging markets in July. In a statement, the company calls the Q5 “youthful and fun,” suggesting the more specific market it’s after. […]

BlackBerry Live Jammed With News, Giddy With Potential by Michelle Maisto BlackBerry CEO Celebrates an ‘Incredible Year’ “I remember being right here one year ago … and this feels very, very different,” said Heins, who since last year’s event has launched a new platform and two smartphones, delivered a profitable quarter and enjoyed the most […]

ORLANDO, Fla.—The 2013 BlackBerry Live developer conference, formerly known as BlackBerry World, might be less-than-perfectly summed up in six words: What a difference a year makes. “It has been an incredible year for BlackBerry,” a somewhat more relaxed-looking CEO Thorsten Heins told the audience. “We have been on a tremendous journey, the last 12 to […]

ItsOn’s Zact: A Contract-Free Wireless Carrier With Custom Plans by Michelle Maisto ‘Zact Was Created to Give People What They Want’ The minimum Zact plan costs $4.99 a month. From there, a user can add apps, minutes, texts and data, which can be dialed up or back throughout a month. Based on what Nielsen says […]

ItsOn is both a taunt to the wireless industry and a new brand to take note of. The company has created cloud-based software that enables mobile service providers to extend some fascinating new features to subscribers. But while it’s working to strike deals with major carriers in the United States and abroad, it’s gone ahead […]

In one of the more interesting uses of wearable technology—and likely the only one to outright refer to urine—Huggies is trialing a product in Brazil called the TweetPee. As shown in a commercial created by ad agency Ogilvy Brazil, and reported by Digital Trends, the product consists of a little (plastic?) sensor with a Twitter-ish-looking […]

Philip Falcone, the hedge fund billionaire who ran into trouble after failing to get a green light for his LightSquared 4G network from the Federal Communications Commission, is being fined $18 million by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC began investigating Falcone last summer, accusing him of engaging “in a fraudulent scheme” to use […]

The HTC First is now just 99 cents on the AT&T network, when purchased with a new two-year contract. The deep discount on a phone released less than a month ago—AT&T exclusively began selling it April 12 for $99.99 with a new service contract—suggests not great traction for the first phone to put Facebook front […]