Blog

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has confirmed that his company is developing a tablet device based on the Android operating system, according to friends that spoke to the executive at a recent event in Los Angeles. The New York Times reports that Google has “been working with several hardware manufacturers,” and “hopes to make its own apps marketplace available for new slate-like devices.” Although Google is yet to publicly announce such a device, many signs point to its likely launch. For starters, Google has been rumored to be developing a slate device with HTC – the same company it brought Nexus One to market with – since January. Moreover, the company has already announced plans for an e-book store expected to launch within the next few months. ...

Barnes & Noble confirmed that its Nook e-reader is coming to Best Buy retail stores beginning April 18. Last week we reported on rumors that both the Nook and Amazon’s Kindle would be hitting retail stores, but it looks like the Barnes & Noble device has secured a presence at the large electronics retailer first. Released last December, the Nook has already been available for purchase in Barnes & Noble retail and online stores. The move to a major consumer electronics retailer like Best Buy, however, potentially opens the device up to a whole new market. ...

In an e-mail to a German customer, Steve Jobs confirmed what most of us surmised last week: There will be no iPhone OS 4.0 support for original 2G iPhone owners. At last week’s iPhone OS 4.0 announcement, Apple let iPhone 3G and second-generation iPod touch owners know that those devices will not support multitasking, although they will support other new features. For owners of the nearly three-year-old original iPhone, it looks like iPhone OS 3.1.x will be the end of the line in terms of official OS updates. Jobs didn’t explain why Apple is no longer going to offer software updates for the original iPhone, though we suspect it’s part of a plan to phase out the product line. ...

Twitter has just announced that it has acquired Atebits, the company behind the popular Tweetie iPhone app and Mac desktop application. Tweetie’s creator, Loren Brichter, will be joining the Twitter team as well. The app will be renamed “Twitter for iPhone” and be made free in the next few weeks. Twitter CEO Evan Williams explained the move in a blog post: “We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve entered into an agreement with Atebits (aka Loren Brichter) to acquire Tweetie, a leading iPhone Twitter client. Tweetie will be renamed Twitter for iPhone and made free (currently $2.99) in the iTunes AppStore in the coming weeks. Loren will become a key member of our mobile team that is already having huge impact with device makers and service providers around the world.” ...

…and some of it masquerades as “marketing” and “newsletter” emails. In March 2010, spam continued to account for a high percentage of all email traffic, peaking at 93.6% of all messages. The majority of this spam email was sent using certain tactics that were deployed to hijack unsecured computers and hide the senders’ identity. Recently, however, there has been an uptick in spam “marketing” and “newsletter” emails. These spam marketing and newsletter emails share one significant commonality with “regular” spam emails, which is that they are unwanted email messages sent to individuals who have no formal relationship with the message sender. ...

Aiming for one billion Twitterers by 2013? Twitter’s International Team Lead Engineer Matt Sanford has blogged on the company’s site that Twitter is seeing growth of over 60 percent in registrations outside the U.S. After setting up a Spanish language capability in November, the microblogging service saw a huge surge in registrations in Latin America, Sanford said. Sign-ups in India also spiked early in the year after several politicians and Bollywood movie stars began Tweeting. ...

European telecommunication giants are preparing to fight Google over the data traffic and bandwidth that is consumed due to YouTube videos, according to a new report from the Financial Times. Their goal: to have Google pay them for the bandwidth YouTube and its other websites consume. Telefónica, S.A., France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom are all cited in the report as being part of a new coalition looking to change the current state of affairs, where users are charged for Internet access, rather than websites that provide the content they consume. These telecoms believe that Google should share its online ad revenue with network operators for carrying its content. YouTube is their biggest complaint: by far, it is the most data-intensive service that the search giant offers. ...

Apple has been challenging Google on many fronts this week — first with its mobile platform, then with its advertising platform. Earlier today, its developers launched the first volley in the battle’s third front, releasing the first public code for the next WebKit rendering and processing kernel that will likely drive the Safari 5 browser. With Google Chrome using a reworked form of WebKit, the Apple team did something that perhaps any other free and open source developer would be publicly stoned for doing, but which Apple might just have the savvy to get away with: It openly one-upped another developer’s open contribution. ...

One week ago, we heard that popular BitTorrent search engine Isohunt had been ordered by a U.S. judge to remove copyright-infringing content from their website. Following the court decision, Isohunt owner Gary Fung announced his resolution to replace Isohunt with a lite version that would turn the site into a very simple search engine, intentionally similar to Google, but specializing in torrents. This is now the case for visitors from the US, who are redirected to the new, lite version of the site. Fung explains the move to the site’s visitors: ...