Internet telephony giant Skype plans to raise as much as $100 million in an initial public offering.
The company said Monday that it has filed an S-1 statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission. After the IPO, Skype will trade on the Nasdaq Global Market. Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and Morgan Stanley are among the banks handling the IPO. Neither a price range nor a date for the IPO have yet been set.
The potential for a Skype public offering has been talked about for a long time. In late 2009, movement in that direction came when online auction … Read more
Last week, governments in several countries including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and India threatened to shut down BlackBerry e-mail and Web browsing services in their countries. Regulators in these countries said that RIM's stringent encryption and security network pose security concerns since authorities are unable to monitor and read e-mails and Web browsing activity.
"Menlo is a prototype mobile device with a capacitive touch screen (4.1" diagonal, 800x480) running Microsoft Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R2 which incorporates a Bosch BMA150 3-axis accelerometer and Bosch BMP085 digital pressure sensor (barometer)."
In a preliminary agreement, BlackBerry maker Research In Motion has decided to allow the government of Saudi Arabia access to BlackBerry users' messages, in order to avoid a ban on the device in the country, the Associated Press reported Saturday.
The AP quoted an official at the Saudi Communications and Information Technology Commission as saying that the deal between RIM and the government would likely involve placing a BlackBerry server inside the country to enable the Saudis to monitor data.
RIM did not respond to a call from CNET for comment by publication time.
BlackBerry maker Research In Motion is supposedly working with officials in Saudi Arabia to make sure that BlackBerry users don't lose access to mobile e-mail, several news agencies reported Friday.
Government officials in Saudi Arabia announced earlier this week that they were ordering the country's three wireless operators to block BlackBerry messenger service. Officials said RIM's stringent security does not comply with policies of Saudi Arabia and presented a security risk.
BlackBerry Messenger service was expected to stop on Friday. So far, the Saudi telecommunications regulator, known as the Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC), has not … Read more
The U.S. and Canadian governments are getting involved with a dispute between some foreign governments and Research In Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry smartphone, over those countries' restrictions of the device.
On Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she would try to help broker a resolution between the two sides.
"We are taking time to consult and analyze the full range of interests and issues at stake because we know that there is a legitimate security concern, but there's also a legitimate right of free use and access," The Wall Street Journal reported … Read more
Kids, of course, come in all varieties, and their interests run the gamut. But when it comes to 10-year-old girls, I dare say, there are two ubiquitous desires: getting one's ears pierced and getting a cell phone.
And you may as well let go of that ol' school stereotype of a preteen--phone glued to ear, gabbing on and on with friends about inanities--the phone is not really for talking. It's for texting.
This is why my own 10-year-old daughter--too young in her stodgy mom's eyes for piercings or a cell phone--was ecstatic to have found a work-around for the latter. Earlier this summer, a friend told her about an app for her iPod Touch called Textfree, which assigns her a real phone number, and lets her send and receive texts for free.
In other words, "She's in," said Pinger CEO and co-founder Greg Woock, whose company makes the Textfree app and who, too, has a 10-year-old daughter. "If you have a phone number, now you're cool, even if you don't have a phone. No one knows you don't have a phone."
And the trade-offs are minor, especially by the standards of a 10-year-old. To text, she needs to be connected to Wi-Fi (which she says "is basically everywhere"), and she needs to deal with ads bannered across the bottom of the app. (She says she doesn't "even notice.")
So my now-cool daughter, at the very least, is helping illustrate a trend among tweens who are turning their iPods into texting devices. Unbeknownst to her, however, she might also be helping shake up traditional wireless-carrier models as we know them.
In the roughly two months since users of Pinger's Textfree app started getting assigned actual phone numbers, Pinger has handed out 1.6 million. That's as many wireless numbers as AT&T gave out to net new subscribers in April, May, and June, according to the company's second-quarter filing. Pinger is now sending out about 630 million text messages per month; 70 percent of those are sent from iPod Touches, and 30 percent are sent from iPhones. The median age of the app's users is 18.
Textfree is one of a handful of mobile-texting apps that you can find in Apple's App Store, Gogii's TextPlus among the higher-ranked ones. But only Textfree (for now, anyway) hands out an actual phone number, which can later be ported, as required by law. Other apps send texts from an e-mail or short code.
The handing out of phone numbers was part of Pinger's preannounced plan to start offering voice-calling options--"Textfree with Voice"--slated for a beta launch at the end of September. Users will have the option to pay for voice minutes, or they can earn minutes by doing things like downloading free apps, filling out surveys, or performing other tasks that don't seem to bother youth already accustomed to having their consumer habits tracked.
In other words, using Wi-Fi on her iPod Touch (along with microphone-equipped earbuds), my daughter will be able to actually call and talk to me.… Read more
While Google and Verizon, partners in wireless service for Android telephones, acknowledge long-standing discussions, both are also denying any specifics of those talks, or of the existence of … Read more
Lost in the hubbub of whether Google and Verizon are nearing a secret deal to tier the Internet is the truth that few will say out loud: Net neutrality is dead on wireless networks.
A war of words erupted this week after a New York Times article that flatly stated that Google and Verizon Communications would soon enact the very definition of Internet tiering: charging content providers more to prioritize delivery to consumers. Cue Internet freakout.
Google and Verizon rushed to deny the story, with Google saying, "we have not had any conversations with Verizon about paying for carriage … Read more
"If they can't deal with the Internet, they should shut it off."
That was just one of the comments that RIM co-CEO Michael Lazaridis made in an interview published Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal. In the interview, Lazaridis repeatedly took aim at the countries looking to ban the BlackBerry over what they are labeling national security issues. The governments want the ability to access and monitor customer communications.
"This is about the Internet," Lazaridis told the Journal. "Everything on the Internet is encrypted. This is not a BlackBerry-only issue. If they can't … Read more
What's the #1 music streaming-app for iOS? Who wins in an iPhone v. S4 faceoff? We've got it covered with iPhone news, rumors, app recommendations, and more.
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