Michelle Maisto

Smartphone users are increasingly turning to mobile apps for the information they want—in 2013, 80 percent of the time users spent on their smartphones was in apps, according to Super Monitoring. Software maker Opera, in tune to this preference, has created a mobile browser that’s unlike anything from Google or Microsoft, as it presents Websites […]

AT&T’s April announcement that it has eyes on 100 candidate cities and municipalities where it would like to expand its fiber network that’s capable of 1 Gbps speeds brought out a few calls of “astroturfing”—the practice of masking the moneyed or influential backers of an effort while pretending grassroots support is driving it. DSL Reports, […]

Amazon has introduced #AmazonCart, a Twitter-entwined solution that makes it still simpler for consumers to make purchases from its site, while potentially also lassoing in fleetingly desired items that otherwise may be forgotten. AmazonCart is connected to a user’s Twitter account and lets users put millions of Amazon-sold items into their Amazon shopping carts without […]

Nokia, no longer a smartphone maker, has created a $100 million Connected Car fund that will identify and invest in innovations that will be “important for a world of connected and intelligent vehicles,” the company said in a May 5 statement. The fund will be managed by Nokia Growth Partners (NGP) and will closely align […]

Consumer health and fitness features are expected to be a new area of focus for Samsung and Apple, as each works to find a foothold it can use to advance itself past the other. But it’s the health of the workers producing the components for these rivals’ devices that’s begun to gain some attention. Samsung […]

Snapchat, in keeping with the great tradition of social-networking applications, continues expanding its capabilities. The app that initially gave users the ability to share silly photos that would automatically be deleted, has expanded into chat. Those chats are, of course, also quickly deleted. Snapchat told users in a May 1 blog post that one lesson […]

Research firm IDC has confirmed what Apple’s most recent earnings report suggested: that worldwide tablet sales are slowing. During the first quarter of the year, worldwide tablet shipments fell nearly 36 percent from the earlier, holiday-benefiting quarter, and grew just 4 percent over the same period a year ago. The slowdown was felt across screen […]

AT&T has approached satellite-TV company DirecTV about the possibility of an acquisition, the Wall Street Journal reported May 1. Such a deal would put the combined company—AT&T’s nearly 6 million television customers and DirecTV’s 20 million—in a position to compete against a combined Comcast and Time Warner Cable (TWC), which would have nearly 30 million […]

Sprint earlier this year took a break from considering an acquisition of rival T-Mobile, amidst negative public reaction to the deal. The response surprised Sprint CEO Dan Hesse and Chairman Masayoshi Son, a source told the Wall Street Journal in February, adding that they had decided to let the feedback “sink in” and take some […]

T-Mobile hinted at a killer first quarter and on May 1 it delivered, announcing the addition of 2.4 million customers. More than 1.3 million of the new customers were branded, postpaid subscribers, and 1.2 million of those were phone customers. To new and existing customers, T-Mobile sold 6.9 million smartphones during the quarter. Not only […]