Miscellaneous

Mobile broadband provider Clearwire has a new president and CEO.

Chief Operating Officer Erik Prusch has been promoted and will take over the reins as president and CEO, effectively immediately, the company announced today. Interim CEO and chairman John Stanton will become executive chairman of the board of directors.

Clearwire, which has been working on an ambitious nationwide 4G push, had seen a management shakeup this past March when CEO William Morrow resigned, prompting the board to put Stanton in charge for the interim. At the time, Chief Commercial Officer Mike Sievert and Chief Information Officer Kevin Hart also left … Read more

As a teenager, Curtiss Pope worked as a clerk at Food 4 Less in east San Jose, Calif., gathering up shopping carts and helping customers find grocery items. He got the job to help his single mother of nine pay the bills, but it also seeded the idea for a start-up he's launched while helping to buck a well-documented Silicon Valley trend.

Pope, an 29-year-old African-American, goes up against some tough stats as he seeks funding for his company, AisleFinder, which aims to help people find items in grocery stores.

According to a recent CB Insights report, which tracked … Read more

Here's the latest update from the world of Windows Phone 7: upshot? Uh oh...where are the apps?

Also, as a post-script, I should say that although I liked the integrated social networking at first, I'm finding it slightly less useful as the day wears on. It seems slow to update; the list of Twitter mentions only says I was mentioned, but doesn't show me the actual text until I click through to another screen; and it's kind of weird to have one live tile for monitoring Facebook posts, and another for monitoring my own Facebook … Read more

Everything was fine in Android-land until the Gingerbread update. Well, then again, "fine" might be a little strong.

I'd been through an original Motorola Droid, which was a nice little keyboard wrapped in a seriously slow-performing phone with a terrible camera and no end of software update woes.

I went from that to the Samsung Fascinate, wooed by its sleek looks, great camera, and big, beautiful screen. Sadly, the Fascinate was loaded down with carrier crapware, including the staggering inclusion of Bing instead of Google as the default system search. It was so crippled you couldn't … Read more

When the stock market tanks in a short period of time, technology spending often goes with it.

Simply put, there will be a round of downward revisions for technology spending in the next few weeks barring some miraculous rebound in the economy. Is it too early to call a soft patch for technology? Not really.

For starters, technology spending often tracks gross domestic product and economists are already scurrying to cut their second-half forecasts. Meanwhile, other reports indicate that inventory levels in the tech supply chain are creeping higher. And the final reason why tech spending can be expected to take its lumps: psychology.

… Read more

Welcome to the inaugural edition of Apple Talk Weekly, where we take a step back and bring together some of the big news, along with rumors big and small from the past week.

This week was a busy one on the road to Apple's big cloud revamp, and if you weren't paying close attention it was easy to miss. Ahead of the official launch of iCloud, Apple's new Web site for it went live, but only to developers. The company also unearthed how much it would be charging for extra iCloud storage.

And with the rumor mill … Read more

The FBI has released the FBI Child ID app, the first mobile app created by the bureau. The app is designed to help parents notify authorities in the unlikely event that their child goes missing.

It is currently available only for the iPhone but also works on the iPad and iPod Touch. (A device with a camera is required to use the app to take a photo of the child.)

Parents can use the app to record information about each of their kids and take a photo of each kid from directly within the app. There are also fields for … Read more

A widespread cyber-espionage campaign stole government secrets, sensitive corporate documents, and other intellectual property for five years from more than 70 public and private organizations in 14 countries, according to a McAfee researcher who uncovered the effort.

The campaign, dubbed "Operation Shady RAT" (RAT stands for "remote access tool"), was discovered by Dmitri Alperovitch, vice president of threat research at the cyber-security firm McAfee. The targets cut across industries, including government, defense, energy, electronics, media, real estate, agriculture, and construction. The governments hit include the U.S., Canada, South Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, and India.

Meanwhile, a … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Facebook's online privacy woes are well-known. But here's an offline one: its massive database of profile photos can be used to identify you as you're walking down the street.

A Carnegie Mellon University researcher today described how he assembled a database of about 25,000 photographs taken from students' Facebook profiles. Then he set up a desk in one of the campus buildings and asked willing volunteers to peer into Webcams.

The results: facial recognition software put a name to the face of 31 percent of the students after, on average, less than three seconds of … Read more