Getting close to the iPhone: how it will go down
Apple Computer (AAPL) is more determined than any other company in Silicon Valley to use secrecy to its advantage – and the result is that product announcements from its CEO awaken a glee in the tech press that can be compared only to a kid under the tree on Christmas morning.
Continue reading "One month to the iPhone: how it will go down" »
Location-Based Services Heading in the Right Direction
Turn-by-turn directions on mobile are hot. Hotter than stand-alone GPS-enabled devices, and definitely hotter than rolling down the window to ask for directions. Just look at the flurry of recent announcements — from Cingular to Sprint, everyone's launching location-based services (LBS). And, actually, I'm not talking just turn-by-turn directions. GPS chipsets, an increasingly common component of cell phones, are enabling a host of other features, like family finder services for kids and seniors (haven't seen granny in a week? Buy her a cell phone, and you'll never again have to worry about her whereabouts).
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Does Microsoft Own RSS?
If you've added headlines from a news site to My Yahoo, or subscribe to blogs on a site like Bloglines, you've used RSS, a technology that's growing increasingly popular for distributing headlines and articles from blogs, news websites, and more. But now, two recently published patent applications reveal, Microsoft (MSFT) is claiming it invented RSS.
The applications, filed last June but just made public yesterday, cover subscribing and discovering what Microsoft calls "Web feeds." That comes as a bit of a shock to anyone who's been working on RSS, which has its origins in a format developed seven years ago at Netscape Communications.
