Roy Mark

The Maryland House of Delegates April 8 waited just one day to join the Maryland Senate in repealing a controversial 6 percent tax on computer services. Gov. Martin O’Malley quickly signed the new legislation. As originally approved in 2007, the Maryland legislature raised the state sales tax by 1 percent to 6 percent and added […]

With or without its mobile phone division, Motorola marches on with its WiMax rollout, introducing a new version of its 802.16e WAP 450 base station that features a smaller common equipment cabinet and a more powerful tower-top RF module to improve coverage and capacity. According to Motorola, the WAP 450, announced April 8, delivers up […]

Take away Microsoft’s $42 billion bid for Yahoo and the merger and acquisition market took a significant dive in the first quarter, a trend that likely portends more bad news ahead, according to a new report by The 451 Group. Even with Microsoft’s mammoth bid included, M&As (mergers and acquisitions) in the first quarter hit […]

No one does official outrage like Morgan O’Brien. The Nextel co-founder who sold the company to Sprint for $35 billion in 2004, on April 4 strongly denied allegations that the public safety community effectively squelched Frontline Wireless’ bid in the recently concluded 700MHz auction. Frontline made a big splash last year with its proposal to […]

Motorola avoided a potentially embarrassing showdown with billionaire investor Carl Icahn on April 7, agreeing to seat two of his associates on the company’s board and to seek input from Icahn about the future of the Motorola’s mobile phone division. The agreement also dismisses all litigation between Icahn and Motorola. Motorola said Icahn supporter Keith […]

Qualcomm plans to use its newly acquired airwaves from the 700MHz spectrum auction to expand the company’s mobile TV offerings. In the recently concluded auction, Qualcomm paid $554.6 million for five new licenses. While Qualcomm already owns enough spectrum for a national footprint, the auction allowed the company to acquire large, contiguous areas on the […]

The Maryland Senate voted April 4 to repeal a controversial 6 percent tax on computer services. If also approved by the Maryland House of Delegates, the vote would reverse a November decision to tax computer and data support services, custom programming, consulting and disaster recovery services. The Maryland upper House’s vote replaces the tax with […]

LAS VEGAS – The failed presidential candidates’ afterlife tour landed in Nevada April 3 with former candidates John Edwards and Fred Thompson keynoting the final day of CTIA Wireless 2008. As Thompson said, “I need … to make a living.” While their comments were long on style and charm and exceedingly brief on substance, Edwards […]

LAS VEGAS-Yahoo stepped up its mobile search war with Google on April 2 with the addition of voice-enabled search. Besides adding voice to its OneSearch service, Yahoo also said it was opening up its mobile search platform to other developers. Available April 2 for select BlackBerry devices, voice-enabled OneSearch was developed by Yahoo and vlingo, […]

Mobile operating system developer Symbian is adding SQL and location-based services to its smart-phone OS. Symbian officials said the new OS technologies, announced March 31, would provide enhancements to mass data handling and LBS to next-generation smart phones. Mobile phones loaded with Symbian’s LBS were recently launched in Japan. Symbian said the LBS architecture would […]