Flash On Android Fails To Impress 436

Posted by timothy on Thursday April 14, 2011 @03:07PM from the because-you-have-failed-to-achieve dept.

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Neil McAllister test-drives Flash Player 10.2 for Android 3.0 and finds its shortcomings too sweeping to be chalked up to beta status. 'The worst part is the player's inconsistent behavior. This gets really frustrating when there's lots of HTML and Flash content mixed on a Web page. The UI turns into a tug-of-war between the browser and the Flash Player, where each touch produces varying effects, seemingly at random,' McAllister writes. 'As far as I could tell, there was one thing and one thing only that the Flash Player for Android 3.0 accomplished successfully. On the stock Android browser, Flash content is invisible, so you don't notice Flash-based advertising. With the Flash Player installed, however, all those ads suddenly appear where once there were none, their animated graphics leaping and scuttling under your fingertips like cockroaches on a dinner tray — some achievement.'"

Google Rolling Out Live Streaming For YouTube 60

Posted by Soulskill on Friday April 08, 2011 @02:24PM from the have-fun-watching-this-while-comcast-throttles-it dept.

An anonymous reader writes "YouTube has already live-streamed a number of popular concerts, sporting events, and interviews, but most were one-time deals. Now Google wants to crank it up a notch, and has announced YouTube Live. YouTube Live integrates live streaming capabilities and discovery tools directly into the YouTube platform. From the announcement: 'Today, we'll also start gradually rolling out our live streaming beta platform, which will allow certain YouTube partners with accounts in good standing to stream live content on YouTube. The goal is to provide thousands of partners with the capability to live stream from their channels in the months ahead. In order to ensure a great live stream viewing experience, we'll roll this offering out incrementally over time.'"

Google Ties Employee Bonuses To +1 Success 167

Posted by Unknown Lamer on Friday April 08, 2011 @03:15AM from the negativity-is-impolite-mmkay dept.

jfruhlinger writes "Last week Google introduced the +1 button, its attempt to tie its search offerings more closely with users' social networks. Now, a leaked memo reveals that every Google employee will have a stake in the outcome, with bonuses tied to the success or failure of the initiative."

Mono Comes To Android 257

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday April 06, 2011 @06:00PM from the here-have-some dept.

A reader writes "After releasing Monotouch for iPhone which allows c# development on iOS, Novell has announced the availability of Mono for Android. Will this give us the 'one language to rule them all' that Java failed to bring, or will the bad blood between the F/OSS groups and Microsoft make this a dead end?"

Submission + - Amazon Crowned The Most Reputable Company (techspot.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 05, 2011 @03:10PM

An anonymous reader writes: Amazon has been named the most reputable company in the US this year (up from 21st place last year), according to the sixth annual list of the 150 Most Reputable Companies from advisory firm Reputation Institute (RI), in partnership with Forbes Media. The list is based on RI's US RepTrak Pulse Study, which measures trust, esteem, admiration, and good feelings consumers have towards the largest 150 companies based on revenue in the US. The ratings are analyzed from nearly 33,000 online consumer responses taken in January and February.

Submission + - Trumpet Winsock creator made little money (ycombinator.com) 1

Submitted by omast on Tuesday March 08, 2011 @08:53PM

omast writes: It appears that Peter Tattam, creator of Trumpet Winsock, got very little for this piece of software. For those of you who do not remember — or did not need it because were already outside the MS Windows world — Trumpet Winsock was a shareware program that provided TCP/IP functionality to Windows machines back in 1994-1995. It allowed millions to connect to the Internet back then; I was one of them.
According to the article, Tattam made very little money from the program as it was widely distributed but rarely paid for.

Comment The racket (Score 1) 3

by slashTera on Monday March 07, 2011 @08:25PM (#35413722) Attached to: Facebook may bust up the SMS profit cartel

Just today, I told a potential client that SMS isn't free and that to build a web application that uses SMS for notification requires a startup cost, a monthly and a per message charge.

Submission + - Facebook may bust up the SMS profit cartel (cnn.com) 3

Submitted by

AndyAndyAndyAndy

on Monday March 07, 2011 @02:36PM

AndyAndyAndyAndy writes: " Fortune has a very interesting article today about wireless providers and their exorbitant profit margins for SMS handling, especially when looking at modern data plans.

'Under the cell phone industry's peculiar pricing system, downloading data to your smartphone is amazingly cheap — unless the data in question happens to be a text message. In that case the price of a download jumps roughly 50,000-fold, from just a few pennies per megabyte of data to a whopping $1000 or so per megabyte.'

A young little application called Beluga caught the attention of Facebook, which purchased the company yesterday.

The app aims to bring messaging under the umbrella of data plans, and features group messaging, picture and video messaging, and integration with other apps.

The author argues that, if successful, Beluga (or whatever Facebook ends up calling it) could potentially be the Skype/Vonage or Netflix-type competitor to the old-school cellular carriers and their steep pricing plans."