networking

Dish launches $25B bid for Sprint

Dish Network has submitted a merger proposal for Sprint Nextel valued at $25.5 billion, putting itself into competition with Japan's Softbank to take over the wireless carrier.

Dish announced this morning that it is offering Sprint shareholders a total consideration of $25.5 billion, consisting of $17.3 billion in cash and $8.2 billion in stock. Sprint shareholders would receive $7 per share, and the cash and stock combination would represent a 13 percent premium to the value of the existing SoftBank proposal, according to Dish.

"The Dish proposal clearly presents Sprint shareholders with a superior … Read more

Flipboard: Your Social News Magazine 2.0 Review

In an age of information overload, apps like Flipboard provide the much- needed organization and curation tools to keep it all in one place. By taking your RSS subscriptions, Twitter account, Facebook account, and other online accounts and combining them into one easy-to-use interface, Flipboard simplifies the consumption of information on an iPad and makes it faster and easier than ever before to get what you need from your device.

When you first open Flipboard, you'll be prompted to create an account. This account will store all of your subscriptions, and you can choose to either create a new … Read more

Study: Anxiety and alcohol use linked to Facebook

In a quest to learn what leads some people to turn to Facebook to connect with others, doctoral student Russell Clayton of the Missouri School of Journalism found that anxiety and alcohol use seem to play a big role.

For his master's thesis, which appears in the May issue of Computers in Human Behavior, Clayton surveyed more than 225 college freshman about two emotions, anxiety and loneliness, and two behaviors, alcohol and marijuana use. He found that the students who reported both higher levels of anxiety and greater alcohol use also appeared the most emotionally connected with Facebook. Those … Read more

LED lights could become network devices, too

Today, you've got wireless networks that use radio waves and you've got optical networks that use light traveling in tiny glass fibers. Tomorrow, if Fraunhofer Institute research comes to fruition, a combination of the two could turn living-room lights into network devices.

The German applied-research lab has developed wireless networking that uses rapidly blinking LEDs to transmit data through the air. The technology can send data at speeds up to 1 gigabit per second -- and by using three colors of light, triple that data rate is possible, Fraunhofer said.

The technology could be useful in crowded, interference-prone … Read more

Trendnet ships 802.11ac USB 3.0 adapter

You now can officially upgrade your Windows computer to the 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard .

Trendnet announced today the availability of the AC1200 Dual-Band Wireless USB 3.0 Adapter (model TEW-805UB). This is the networking vendor's first AC adapter, and one of a very few on the market.

The TEW-805UB supports USB 3.0, which is a must if you really want to get the speed of 802.11ac. Although the device is compatible with USB 2.0 as well, that connection caps at just 480Mbps, while the new Wi-Fi standard peaks out as fast as 1,300Mbps. The TEW-805UB … Read more

Facebook members in U.K. must pay to hob-knob with celebs

Facebook users in the U.K. are being treated to the same premium charges their counterparts in the U.S. have been hit with when sending messages to certain high-profile members on the social network, as well as people outside their circle of friends.

According to U.K. news site The Sunday Times, Facebook users in the U.K. late last week started being charged as much as 10 British pounds (about $15) to send messages to celebrity-status Facebook members. Olympic diver Tom Daley and former Children's laureate Michael Rosen are the most expensive celebrities to contact.

Facebook last year announced what it called a "small experiment" … Read more

Google's engineers aren't the highest paid (but make more than Apple's)

It's in the nature of humanity to keep up with the Jones family.

It's in the nature of capitalist humanity to get ahead of the Jones family so that the Jones family looks askance and defeated.

With this in mind, I have accidentally landed upon a survey which purports to reveal which software engineers are the highest paid.

I thank Business Insider for poring over the figures collated by Glassdoor, figures that might surprise some.

I had imagined, along with most of the world, that Google's engineers were the very best and therefore the highest paid.

These … Read more

Facebook Home faces hurdles getting on iOS

Facebook's flashy, new phone software is Android only for now, but it might not be that way forever, the company said today.

When asked about whether the software was headed to Apple's mobile platform anytime soon, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn't count it out, but noted that such a feature would require cooperation.

"We have a great relationship with Apple," Zuckerberg told reporters in a Q&A session after the unveiling of Home. "Anything that happens with Apple is going to happen with partnership. Google's Android is open so we don't … Read more

Facebook launches Chat Heads for staying in touch with friends

Facebook today unveiled its new Chat Head feature for Android devices, giving users a way to stay in constant contact with friends, no matter what they're doing on their mobile devices.

Whenever someone messages you either through text or chat messaging, a small photo of the person will pop up at the top of your screen. It will initially show a brief preview so you know what the message is about. While the preview will go away, the Chat Head image will remain on the top of the screen, no matter what app you access or what else you … Read more