MobileCrunch |  |
- Swype, The Maker Of Speedy Virtual Keyboards, To Be Acquired By Nuance For $100 Million+
- Google’s Own YouTube Channel Confirms Ice Cream Sandwich’s Oct. 11th Debut
- Dear Sony: Just Buy Out Ericsson’s Stake Already
- Samsung And Visa Partner To Launch NFC-Equipped “Olympics Phone”
- HTC Sensation XL Makes London Debut, Complete With Beats Audio
- Alien Dalvik 2.0 Launches, Adds Support For Running Android Apps on iPad
- Nexus Prime Details Leaked: New Name, Verizon Exclusive?
- T-Mobile Introduces A Pair Of myTouch Handsets By LG
- Sprint Opens Up Pre-Orders For The iPhone 4
| Swype, The Maker Of Speedy Virtual Keyboards, To Be Acquired By Nuance For $100 Million+ Posted: 06 Oct 2011 09:35 PM PDT  Swype has been blowing minds since it first launched at TechCrunch 50 back in September of 2008. For those unfamiliar, Swype is the maker of an awesome app that allows users of touchscreen mobile devices to type messages with one swipe of the finger or stylus motion across the screen keyboard. The alternative (and patented) input method has proven to be super speedy, allowing data entry at over 40 words per minute, and has swept across Android devices. Today, thanks to the reporting of one Michael Arrington via Uncrunched, we’ve learned that Swype has been acquired by Nuance (the makers of voice recognition technology) for over $100 million. The deal was confirmed by the Wall Street Journal, which pegged the numbers to be between $100 and $150 million. The official announcement is expected to be made tomorrow. Nuance, which has a market cap of about $6.7 billion, has been on an acquisition roll of late, snatching up speech recognition software company SVOX in June, at the same time announcing the close of its $157 million acquisition of software developer Equitrac. The speech recognition giant has also been in the news of late, as it is has been in negotiations with Apple over licensing for Lion OSX. What’s more, while Apple did not confirm, MG held that Nuance is also a large part of the technology behind Siri, which will be native on all iPhone 4Ses. As MG wrote yesterday, “even if Apple wanted and tried to come up with their own voice technology backend for Siri, they would have a hard time doing so without infringing on some of Nuance's patents. Patents which Nuance CEO Paul Ricci is very well known to enforce to their maximum extent”. What’s more, it will be interesting to see how Nuance resolves the fact that it now owns both Swype and T9, another predictive text app. And, as Mike wrote, it just so happens that T9 “competes directly with Swype” and was also founded by Cliff Kushler, the very same guy who co-founded Swype. Will the two products join forces, or is T9 headed for the trash heap? I’m sure Nuance will have more information on that tomorrow, or in the coming weeks. Swype had raised just under $14 million in outside investment since 2008 and just closed its series C back in July. The acquisition is a big win for the startup, its investors (Samsung Ventures, Nokia Growth Partners, Benaroya Capital, DoCoMo Capital, Ignition Partners, and more), and for Nuance. With Swype’s app appearing on (what will soon be) 100 million devices, and smartphone and touchscreen adoption skyrocketing, these technologies will no doubt be a big part of our mobile future. Swype creates text input technology for screens. The patented interface enables users to create words with one continuous finger motion across an on-screen keyboard. This approach provides a faster and easier way to write. Swype delivers single-tap, multi-tap, predictive and “swype” motions for both stylus and finger based input. In addition, the application is designed to work across a variety of devices such as phones, tablets, game consoles, kiosks, televisions, virtual screens and more. Seattle based Swype... Nuance Communications, Inc. provides speech, imaging and keypad solutions for businesses, organizations and consumers worldwide. The company’s solutions are used every day by people and businesses for tasks and services, such as requesting account information from a phone-based self-service solution, dictating records, searching the mobile Web by voice, entering a destination into a navigation system, or working with PDF documents. The company, through the acquisition of Philips Speech Recognition Systems GMBH (PSRS), provides speech recognition solutions for the European...
|
| Google’s Own YouTube Channel Confirms Ice Cream Sandwich’s Oct. 11th Debut Posted: 06 Oct 2011 03:56 PM PDT  If you had any lingering doubts that Samsung’s upcoming Unpacked event would serve as a launching pad for Ice Cream Sandwich (the next major build of Android), let them be cast away: Google has just gone and confirmed it themselves. Early this morning, the Android Developer YouTube channel (which serves as the official video repository for Google’s Android Dev group) put up a placeholder page for the livestream of the October 11th event. Nothing too unusual there. What is unusual, though, is the name of the placeholder. Rather than “Samsung Unpacked!”, or “A Special Event From Samsung And Google”, or anything else even somewhat vague, they just come right out and say it: it’s the Android ICS Launch. Between Ice Cream Sandwich and the unveiling of the Galaxy Nexus (the device formerly known as the Nexus Prime), this event is absolutely shaping up to be one to watch. We’ll be there bringin’ back all the details as they break, so be sure to tune in next week. Update: It’s been pulled! Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps and YouTube. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing them with a rich source of information.... Android is a software platform for mobile devices based on the Linux operating system and developed by Google and the Open Handset Alliance. It allows developers to write managed code in Java that utilizes Google-developed software libraries, but does not support programs developed in native code. The unveiling of the Android platform on 5 November 2007 was announced with the founding of the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of 34 hardware, software and telecom companies devoted to advancing open standards...
|
| Dear Sony: Just Buy Out Ericsson’s Stake Already Posted: 06 Oct 2011 03:00 PM PDT  As it stands, Sony Ericsson is the 6th largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world, but Sony may be looking into going it alone. According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal, Sony is close to finalizing a buyout of Ericsson’s stake in their joint venture. According to the usual unnamed sources, current talks are tenuous at best. That doesn’t seem to have dampened Sony CEO Howard Stringer’s mood: he reportedly wants the deal finalized as soon as possible. Sony’s big issue seems to stem from control, and specifically the lack thereof when it came to Sony Ericsson’s phone lineup. By bringing phone design and production in-house, the Wall Street Journal believes that Sony could leverage their “technology strengths to develop new innovative handsets more quickly.” I don’t know how much I agree with that sentiment, but I will say this: it’s worth a shot. It could be that the Sony Ericsson experiment has run its course. Together, the pair managed to snatch up a considerable portion of the market back when it all took to make a popular phone was to jam multimedia functionality into it. Times have changed, to say nothing of people’s expectations, and now Sony Ericsson finds itself as the perennial also-ran of the smartphone industry. Let me ask an honest question: when was the last time you looked at a Sony Ericsson phone and felt something stir inside you? Your answers will almost certainly vary from mine, but I’d wager it’s been a while. Mine was the original Xperia X1 — a phone that pushed enough of my buttons that I could overlook the fact that it ran Windows Mobile. That phone came out three years ago — none of the people I posed the question to named a phone newer than that. The joint venture made all kinds of sense back in 2001, and even for some years after that, but these days it seems like Sony Ericsson has become listless. They slowly churn out smartphone after smartphone to an audience that wants them less and less each year. I’m trying hard not to throw Ericsson under the bus, because they haven’t really done anything wrong. Still, their main business is developing and rolling out telecommunications networks. It’s not that Ericsson is screwing anything up so much as the fact that the two companies may not share the same priorities or vision. Their 2009 agreement to join up with STMicroelectronics doesn’t really help things, as companies like HTC have recently been making use of their products. In short, Ericsson doesn’t need the mobile phone business as much as Sony does. Sony Ericsson CEO Bert Nordberg seems to get it. In an interview from last week, Nordberg mentioned that the company was closer to Sony than it was to Ericsson. Under his guidance, Sony Ericsson is aiming to be a 100% smartphone-focused company by the middle of next year. If a Sony buyout took place, and Nordberg ran Sony Mobile with the full backing of a parent company that would like to control the consumer electronics market end to end, we could be looking at a brand new beast.
|
| Samsung And Visa Partner To Launch NFC-Equipped “Olympics Phone” Posted: 06 Oct 2011 12:08 PM PDT  Rumors have been floating around for a while now that Visa and Samsung had something special planned for the Olympic Games next year. With about ten months left before the games kick off in London, Visa has formally confirmed that they are building a special phone for the Olympics and that it will, in fact, have an NFC chip. Pocket Lint confirmed the phone with Sandra Alzetta, Visa Europe’s head of innovation and new product development, at the Visa Europe Security Summit in Frankfurt, Germany. She added that the phone will be “iconic,” and packed full of special Olympics content. As far as availability goes, the phone should be on shelves globally before, during, and after the Olympic games. Visa also confirmed that there will be "almost 160,000 terminals in Europe, including the 70,000 shops, bars, and restaurants in the UK," all of which will work with this special new “Olympics phone.” And it gets better — there’s also been talk of NFC-equipped microSD cards, which could theoretically turn any phone (save for the iPhone, of course) into an NFC-capable device. However, it hasn’t been specified whether or not those microSDs will be available for the Olympics or are just another cool thing coming down the pipeline. Sounds good, yes? And if the rest of its specs are anything close to what we’re (hopefully) seeing on the Samsung Galaxy Prime, the “Olympics phone” certainly looks like a winner. Visa Inc. operates the world’s largest retail electronic payments network and is one of the most recognized global financial services brands. Visa facilitates global commerce through the transfer of value and information among financial institutions, merchants, consumers, businesses and government entities. We offer a range of branded payment product platforms, which our financial institution clients use to deliver credit, debit, prepaid and commercial programs to their customers. Visa’s global network, VisaNet, delivers value-added processing services, including fraud and risk...
|
| HTC Sensation XL Makes London Debut, Complete With Beats Audio Posted: 06 Oct 2011 10:38 AM PDT  The device once known as the Runnymede has officially received a new name and a bit of spotlight today. HTC has just unveiled the newly-dubbed Sensation XL at their London Beats event, and the package is just as slick as expected. As far as its specs are concerned, the Sensation XL matches up nicely with the leaked feature listing first spotted last month. It still packs that monstrous, Gorilla Glass-covered 4.7-inch WVGA display, as well as a single-core 1.5 GHz Qualcomm processor and 768 MB of RAM. The 8-megapixel rear camera has been fleshed out a bit more, as we now know that it packs a respectable F/2.2 lens and a dual-LED flash. It wouldn’t be a high-end HTC device without a little touch of Sense, and fans of HTC’s UI tweaks will be glad to know that Sense 3.5 is there to gussy up the show. Of course, the big draw (at least for some people) will be the Beats goodies that are packed in with each unit. The included urBeats headphones have a line-in remote and microphone, and are designed to play nicely with the special Beats audio profile loaded onto each device. Whenever the urBeats are plugged in, the Beats profile leaps into action and tweaks the sound quality specifically for those headphones. Really, the only bummer about the Sensation XL is that there’s no word on US availability. Luckily, the wait for customers in the UK will be significantly shorter: they’ll soon be able to snag one from carriers 3 and O2.
|
| Alien Dalvik 2.0 Launches, Adds Support For Running Android Apps on iPad Posted: 06 Oct 2011 09:11 AM PDT  Today, the Myriad Group is announcing the launch of Alien Dalvik 2.0, its port of the Dalvik virtual machine found in Google’s Android operating system. This new release will allow Android applications to run on non-Android devices, including TVs, e-book readers, and even on tablet computers, like Apple’s iPad. The company says it will demonstrate the technology in action at next week’s CTIA Enterprise & Applications 2011 conference in San Diego. With Alien Dalvik 2.0, the majority of Android apps can run unmodified using Android Package (APK) files, says Myriad. That means app developers could, in theory, write apps using in a single standard and run them across all platforms. In theory, of course. Something tells us that Apple won’t allow Android applications running on its iOS devices anytime soon. (RIM, however, might be interested.) What may be more relevant than the technical (but not likely) iPad compatibility is that Alien Dalvik 2.0 will support a range of platforms, including e-readers, TVs, set-top boxes, in-vehicle digital displays and avionics. In addition to apps, it’s also capable of mobilizing content that includes live and recorded TV and on-demand movies. OEMs interested in allowing Android apps to run on their non-Android devices may find the technology useful, which began supporting MeeGo in February of this year. Myriad is also well-versed in Java and other embedded systems. The fact that Alien Dalvik 2.0 supports iOS is a nifty party trick, but not one that will have much impact…expect in the jailbreaking community, perhaps.
|
| Nexus Prime Details Leaked: New Name, Verizon Exclusive? Posted: 06 Oct 2011 07:45 AM PDT  Well now. Samsung’s teaser video hinted at something big making its debut on October 11, but a new leak may have blown the whole thing wide open. BGR claims to have received the full spec sheet for Samsung’s long-awaited Galaxy Nexus (nee Nexus Prime), and if true, it's a sight to behold. Before we go forward, I should caution you to have your grains of salt at the ready. We’re about to step into some murky territory. The spec listing confirms a few things we were already expecting to see, like the inclusion of Ice Cream Sandwich and a huge 4.65-inch display. BGR’s sources go on to say that the Galaxy Nexus will sport a TI OMAP 4460 processor, which clocks in at 1.2 GHz, and 1 GB of RAM. It also packs a 5MP camera (with support for recording 1080p video), 32 GB of internal storage, an NFC chip, and an LTE or HSPA radio into a body that’s only 9mm thick. Unfortunately, the Galaxy Nexus is said to be a Verizon exclusive at least for the time being. With their data caps firmly in place, it may be a good thing that Ice Cream Sandwich is reportedly able to track data use on an app-by-app basis. It’s also worth mentioning that the Galaxy Nexus is a pure Google Experience device, so users won’t have to deal with carrier or manufacturer tweaks. Skeptic though I may be, these specs seem just average enough to be legit. It doesn’t pack a stupid fast processor, nor a crazy camera, nor anything that at first glance seems to good to be true. Even the design may be more sober than first anticipated. An enterprising Redditor named Greyhaven7 (a.k.a. Eric Hedden in real life) took a still from yesterday’s teaser video and cleaned it up substantially. The end result looks less like a phone that was bent in half, and more like a subtle evolution of the Nexus S’s design language. Either way, the official reveal is coming in less than a week.
|
| T-Mobile Introduces A Pair Of myTouch Handsets By LG Posted: 06 Oct 2011 07:16 AM PDT  T-Mobile has just announced two new myTouch devices built by LG: the T-Mobile myTouch and the myTouch Q. You may remember seeing something similar yesterday in that leaked T-Mobile roadmap, and from what we can see these are both slated for a November 2 release. The T-Mobile myTouch is your basic slab-style smartphone running Android 2.3 Gingerbread on a single-core 1GHz processor from Qualcomm. The myTouch has a 3.8-inch display, a 5-megapixel rear shooter capable of video capture in 720p, and a VGA front-facing camera for video chat. T-Mobile has slapped its myTouch skin over Android and tossed in the Swype keyboard, as well. Rounding out the duo is the myTouch Q QWERTY slider. It holds most of the same specs as its myTouch cousin, including Android 2.3 Gingerbread and that 1GHz single-core Qualcomm processor. However, the front-facing VGA camera has been ditched and the screen was reduced to 3.8 inches. No worries though, the myTouch Q still keeps that 5-megapixel rear camera with 720p video capture. The four-row slide-out keyboard comes loaded with a Genius button, which launches directly into T-Mobile’s voice control system. Again, Android may look a bit different courtesy of T-Mobile’s myTouch UI. The T-Mobile myTouch will come in both black and white flavors, and according to the roadmap it should cost $129 on-contract. Its slider counterpart, the myTouch Q, should also be available on November 2 in both grey and violet, with an on-contract price tag of $129. The LG Group is South Korea’s third largest conglomerate that produces electronics, chemicals, and telecommunications products and operates subsidiaries like LG Electronics, LG Telecom, Zenith Electronics and LG Chem in over 80 countries. T-Mobile is a mobile telephone operator headquartered in Bonn, Germany. It is a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom. T-Mobile has 101 million subscribers making it the worlds sixth largest mobile phone service provider globally.
|
| Sprint Opens Up Pre-Orders For The iPhone 4 Posted: 06 Oct 2011 06:06 AM PDT  Sprint has long been Android territory, but today everything changes. There’s still about 24 hours left until the brand new, super snappy, personal assistant-equipped iPhone 4S is available for pre-order, but the yellow carrier has put the iPhone 4 up for pre-order this morning. The 8GB iPhone 4 is running for $99 on a two-year contract with the “Now Network,” which means it’s the only iPhone 4 to offer up unlimited data. As far as shipping dates go, Sprint says that if you “order today, we’ll charge your card for your phone today and we’ll do our best to get a shiny new iPhone in your hands Friday, Oct. 14 or Saturday, Oct. 15.” So basically you’ll be getting the phone about the same time that iPhone 4S buyers receive their brand new toys. The iPhone 4S is available for pre-order beginning tomorrow, and starts at $199 on a two-year contract. If you want to experience the in-store iPhone frenzy, go ahead and get in line early (like, really early) on Friday morning, October 14. Sprint likely won’t have the iPhone 4 in stock for too much longer, so if this is what you’ve been waiting for then head over to Sprint (like right now) and get your pre-order on. [via MobileBurn] Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple, Inc. in January 2007. Among the key offerings from Apple’s product line are: Pro line laptops (MacBook Pro) and desktops (Mac Pro), consumer line laptops (MacBook) and desktops (iMac), servers (Xserve), Apple TV, the Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server operating systems, the iPod (offered with...
|
| You are subscribed to email updates from TechCrunch » Mobile To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
