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Smartphones and Social Media Used to Clean Up After Riots
by Chris Pollette | August 10, 2011
The media have been talking about how some rioters in London have been using smartphones and social media sites to coordinate their movements to avoid being caught by the authorities. Zack Whittaker at ZDNet wrote that while some people are using Facebook and Twitter, one of the tools of choice is the BlackBerry Messenger, which encrypts messages so they can’t be read by third parties.
For its part, Research in Motion (RIM), BlackBerry’s parent company, said it would cooperate with the authorities to identify people alleged to have participated in the riots, though according to the BBC the police have to prove they know the identities of the phones’ owners under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act before they can acquire the records, rather than searching messages for people using riot-related keywords in text messages, e-mail and social media posts.
Welcome to the first of what I hope will be many news roundups of what’s going on in the tech world today. Below are some of the interesting stories developing in technology, accompanied by a little unbiased, objective and mature commentary from yours truly. Let’s get to it!
PlayBook Gets a Launch Date, BlackBerry Says Game On
by Jonathan Strickland | March 22, 2011
Today is the first official day of the CTIA 2011 conference in Orlando, Florida. CTIA is the International Association for the Wireless Telecommunications Industry. The day has already started off with a bang as RIM announced the official launch date for the anticipated BlackBerry tablet called the PlayBook. The device hits store shelves on April 19 and you can preorder a device today.
Saturday tends to be a quieter day for CES compared to Thursday and Friday. There were fewer people on the show floors, making it much easier to maneuver through and get a close look at tech. This morning, I set out to take a look at the North Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center. I don’t have much to report — the North Hall is filled with cars and sound systems as well as gadget accessories like smartphone cases and skins. There were some fun, innovative products in the Mommy Tech section that I liked.
Today’s my last day at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show. That’s both bad and good. It’s bad because, while I spotted hundreds of cool gadgets and gizmos, I missed at least twice as many due to the sheer size of the show. The good part is that I’ll soon be back home with my wife, dogs and gaming systems to comfort me. Plus I think I’m coming down with a cold. At any rate, yesterday I tackled the Las Vegas Convention Center’s South Hall to see what it had to offer.
Today in New York City, Research in Motion (RIM) announced the newest member of its smartphone family, the BlackBerry Torch. CNET was on hand for the event, and I was following along with the live blog. Many people were anticipating this new device, partly because it’s running a new version of RIM’s operating system, BlackBerry 6. RIM Vice President of User Experience Don Lindsay said despite having a new look and feel, the interface shouldn’t be unfamiliar to BlackBerry veterans.
Information Week reports that Adobe has plans to release Flash Player 10.1 for major smartphone operating systems with one very notable exception: the Apple iPhone. You may remember I blogged about this very development way back in June. Not that I’m some sort of clairvoyant soothsayer (though I’ve said some sooths in my time) — I got my information from CNET’s Bonnie Cha. It appears Ms. Cha was right on the money.
One of the biggest challenges Adobe faced when developing a Flash player for smartphones is the drain on resources. Running Flash on a device tends to drain the battery. Adobe had to create an application designed to run on a mobile device without turning it into a brick after five minutes. Adobe has tweaked the Flash player to run more efficiently with lower memory requirements.
Developers can expect a beta version of the player available for Palm’s WebOS and Windows Mobile later this year. Other smartphone operating systems like Google’s Android, Blackberry’s RIM and the Symbian OS will get a beta build in early 2010. By mid 2010, Flash should be available on some of the most popular smartphones on the market. And then there’s Apple.
Sprint has a brand-new sales leader, and it’s the Palm Pre. According to an article by Marguerite Reardon at CNET, the launch of Palm’s new smartphone surpassed expectations and drove the highest one-day sales of any phone in Sprint’s history. In fact, Sprint Vice President of Business Marketing Tim Donahue said…
The CTIA Wireless trade show is underway in Las Vegas, Nev. If you’re not sure what CTIA is, you’re not alone, but there’s a decent chance that the cell phone you carry with you now was once on display at the show. CTIA is the wireless phone industry association.
So what’s up at this year’s show? Big surprise: smartphones. Oh, wait, that’s no surprise. CNET’s Kent German said that Samsung is going to release a new version of the Instinct, the S30. There aren’t many changes for the Sprint touch screen phone, but it appears that Samsung will make it more possible for developers to write software for the machine, which may make it more appealing to customers who want something more like the Apple iPhone or HTC G1 (based on the Google Android operating system)*.
Speaking of HTC, they have a pretty nifty-looking machine on exhibit as well. Theirs is called the Snap.
You can generally tell how involved people are in a meeting by how focused they are on their BlackBerrys. At least, that’s been my experience. But this trend isn’t limited to corporate management. Igor Kossov wrote a post in the Political Hotsheet blog on CBSNews.com in which he revealed how many members of Congress were using Twitter during President Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress Tuesday night.
Of course, there was all kinds of tweeting going on — some of it practical messaging, pointing out where the tweeter was in the room, but of course others wrote about their thoughts on the president’s message.
It wasn’t that long ago that members of Congress weren’t allowed to use Twitter, or other social online media. NPR reported last summer that some, like Rep. John Culberson (R.-Texas), enjoyed using Twitter to allow their voting base some access to their daily activities.
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