Technology Analysis

The mobile check-in app Foursquare will now recognize Zagat-rated restaurants in a new deal - - but I suspect it won’t be enough to fend off its biggest rival, Yelp. Foursquare allows users to check-in at different urban locations so friends can know where they are at the moment. According to the New York Times, when checking into Zagat-rated restaurants, Foursquare will give special...

More...

Google (GOOG) has just announced its entry in the world of its social networking product, Buzz , meant to compete with Facebook and Twitter. However, apparently not all Gmail users are getting access to it at this point, making the service seem to emulate the Twitter fail whale rather than a status update. How do I know? I just tried it. According to the video on Google’s Buzz site,...

More...

One of the amazing aspects of the Internet is how companies can often leverage extensive resources that they don’t own to make money. Google (GOOG) has been the critics’ poster child over the last few years, with content producers railing about how the company can make money essentially by pointing people to material on the web. Now there’s a new worry for Google and other...

More...

Apple just released a thorough survey to current app developers, showing it now actually cares about its relationships - - and considers the app-enabled Kindle an actual threat. Let’s do a quick history recap. Last February, dozens of Apple app developers took to the forums to complain about several app development issues: Apple only had one communication channel: A single email address...

More...

Encryption technology is one of those things that technologists can’t seem to live without. (At least until we get a better type of human roaming the planet.) You can find it in a broad swatch of technologies, including cell phones, web services, and accounting software. So there may be a lot of technology vendors getting nervous when they see that a company called TecSec has filed a...

More...

Smartphones seem all the rages in press coverage and advertising. Maybe that’s because they are a rapidly growing category. According to figures from IDC, 2009 worldwide shipments of smartphones represented 15.4 percent of all handset shipments, up from 12.7 percent in 2008. To put it differently, one out of every seven handsets sold in the world is a smartphone, according to these...

More...

While competitors like Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG) are cranking out revolutionary (if disputed) personal computing products, Microsoft’s (MSFT) flagship, the Windows OS, appears stodgier every year. But the company’s dedicated devices — Xbox Live, the Zune media player — verge on brilliant. What’s with the disparity, and what will it mean for Redmond?...

More...

I will admit to finding myself going back and forth on the Apple (AAPL) iPad in terms of its potential today. But I noticed another “study” making the rounds of blogs. This one comes from Retrevo, an online electronics marketplace. Unfortunately, the details suggest that there’s nothing you can really extrapolate from them, meaning that this particular effort of trying to...

More...

The news that SAP (SAP) jettisoned Leo Apotheker (though the company is positioning it as a resignation, probably as a face-saving last favor to Apotheker) less than a year after promoting him from co-CEO to solo chief executive isn’t a sign of righting the ship. It’s evidence that the board is looking to blame someone when the company’s long-term strategy isn’t going to...

More...

The weekend saw a minor flurry of excitement over the Super Bowl ad that Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt hinted at on Saturday via Twitter. And an ad there was, only by television standards, let alone Internet, it was too late, doing too little, offering exactly the wrong message, ineptly using social media, and ultimately insulting the intelligence of the audience. Not that the insult to the...

More...