Steve Jobs wanted Apple iPhone to run on unlicensed spectrum used by Wi-Fi!
Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Stanton has revealed that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs originally wanted iPhone to run on unlicensed spectrum used by wireless internet networks.
He said: “He and I spent a lot of time talking about whether synthetically you could create a carrier using Wi-Fi spectrum. That was part of his vision.”
However, it was not logistically possible at that time and Jobs had to end up collaborating with AT&T to launch the iPhone in the US market.
The phone continues to run on traditional cellular networks but it is pretty clear that the time is not far away when we would end up using other networks to make most of our calls.
Republic Wireless is a brand new mobile operator in the US market that allows users to make calls over wireless networks in addition to cellular networks.
AllThingsD.com has reported that Amazon has signed up a deal with Time Inc. to bring five of their popular magazines in digital format to their Kindle Fire Tablet PC.
Time was missing from the launch event as the company had not signed up an agreement with Amazon.
Apparently they were not happy with the clause that gave Amazon the power to discount the magazines in future (including giving them away for free).
Time Inc. is however offering their content through the rival product from Barnes and Noble. Barnes and Noble Nook Tablet has also just arrived in the market and offer similar magazine subscriptions.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that Google has signed up deals with three of the four music labels (Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and EMI Music) for the launch of their Google Music store later today.
Warner Music Group is the only major label remaining and they are unlikely to take long before joining their rivals in the market.
Google Music is expected to be a hybrid music store which would feature deep integration with Google Android devices.
However, the service is likely to be limited to the US market at least in the initial phase.
Google already has a Google Music Beta service in offering but it only provide cloud based storage to users to upload and stream their own music files.
Gmail Community Manager Sarah Price has just revealed that Google has added some new elements to the Plus Creative Kit to celebrate the spirit of Autumn and Thanksgiving.
Google Plus Creative Kit is like a mini image editor that lets you enhance or modify your images with custom elements.
Google had provided similar features for Halloween and now we have fresh elements targeted at the holiday season.
This is a good feature update from Google which is something missing from Facebook at the moment!
Google has added a new Drawing Library to their custom Maps creation toolkit.
This would allow users to create free flowing drawing elements like circles, boxes, lines, shapes and markets on their customized maps.
The company said that users can use these tools to get feedback from other people in creative formats.
Google added:
The Drawing Library provides a toolbox which enables users to draw markers, lines, and shapes on the map, much as they would in any drawing application. The tools can be used for collecting annotations from users, or for selecting regions to search or highlight. Applications can listen for events when overlays are added and respond accordingly, such as issuing the search query or saving the annotations to a database.
Sony is said to be in talks with several media companies to launch a television service that would work through the internet.
This could be used to deliver television programming directly to owners of their PlayStation 3 gaming console and other compatible devices.
The company has already hinted that they are working on a new generation televisions that would be have a differentiating factor.
They are not alone however trying to accomplish something like this. Microsoft and Google along with other players like Netflix are already offering or trying to offer something similar.
It would be hard for Sony to get media companies to cooperate as they would not be sure about the revenues generated through this new service platform.
Facebook has confirmed that hackers were able to lure users into running malicious JavaScript on their Facebook profiles that resulted in them sharing porn imagery with their contacts unintentionally.
The social networking giant said that they are working on containing the attack and prevent a similar attack in the future by enhancing the security features on the service.
Security experts are suggesting that users need to be careful with what they run in their browser while logged in on the Facebook network. They are also recommending that users lock their account settings as tightly as they can to prevent mischief from malware code.
It remains to be seen how many users are affected by this disaster on Facebook which is used by more than 500 million web users on a daily basis.
Google announced the launch of a new programming language cutely named Go around two years ago.
The company is now preparing to release the first stable edition of Go early next year.
Google spoke about the developments in the last two years:
Today is the second anniversary of Go’s release, and Go is faster and more stable than ever. Careful tuning of Go’s code generators, concurrency primitives, garbage collector, and core libraries have increased the performance of Go programs, and native support for profiling and debugging makes it easier to detect and remove performance issues in user code.