Roy Mark

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 […]

Motorola wasted no time at the CTIA Wireless 2008 show in Las Vegas, using the forum March 31 to announce its latest WiMax and femtocell releases: the first a common wireless platform that supports both WiMax and LTE, as well as the company’s first 3G femtocell. Physically smaller than Motorola’s first-generation WiMax release, the new […]

LOS ANGELES-No conference on technology policy would be complete without a debate on where America stands in the global competition race. Is the pipe half full or half empty? Not surprisingly, the talk at the second annual Tech Policy Summit was decidedly mixed. “The U.S. is still the most dynamic broadband economy in the world,” […]

LOS ANGELES-The agreement between Comcast and BitTorrent to resolve issues involving the throttling of P2P traffic may end a government investigation into the matter, FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell said March 27. Comcast is facing a complaint filed with the Federal Communications Commission that claims the company’s network management practices violate the FCC’s Internet Policy Statement […]

LOS ANGELES-The scene was all Hollywood but the talk was pure Washington as the Tech Policy Summit-the annual confab of Capitol Hill policy wonks and the Silicon Valley-opened March 26. It didn’t take long for this year’s elections to warm up the crowd. Meeting in the heart of a Hooray for Hollywood tourist center at […]

Verizon Wireless walked off with the top prizes in the FCC’s recently concluded 700MHz auction, capturing prime swaths of spectrum for the nation’s No. 2 carrier’s next-generation wireless broadband service. The FCC concluded the auction March 18 with winning bids of nearly $20 billion. Verizon Wireless paid more than $6.5 billion for six large regional […]

It should come as no surprise to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin that Comcast is contending that the agency has no legal authority to stop it from throttling P2P applications like BitTorrent during peak network hours. After all, Martin said so himself three years ago. Comcast is facing a complaint filed at the Federal Communications Commission, […]