Cellphone

With all that oil gushing out of the hole in the Earth, we have to ask ourselves this question. And if this happens, what then? Well, flying cars and pedal powered Porsches, obviously. Even Eli, our special guest, knows that!

Rocket car blasts off on Coke and Mentos

Personal electric mini-plane could fly by 2013 (thanks Frontline!)

Audi ‘travolution’ syncs cars to traffic lights, saves fuel

Pedal-powered Porsche is world’s lightest, slowest

Firefox plug-in blacks out BP across the Web

BP Global PR

If It Was My Home

Nuking the oil spill: a crazy idea that’s building steam… Read more

T-Mobile USA gained ground in signing up new subscribers during the fourth quarter, but much of the surge came from its prepaid business.

T-Mobile USA parent company Deutsche Telekom reported earnings on Thursday. The U.S. carrier, the smallest of the big four nationwide carriers, said it added a total of 371,000 new subscribers in the fourth quarter. This is an improvement over customer losses from the third quarter. But it's still lower than customer gains the company saw in the fourth quarter of 2008.

In total, T-Mobile USA now has 33.8 million subscribers, up from 33.… Read more

Matt Howard, a software entrepreneur, developed ZoomSafer following an incident when he almost killed a 9-year-old boy because he was texting while driving. He knew that if it happened to him, it could happen to anyone.

Howard, along with co-founders Mike Costello and Mike Riemer, gathered $1 million in venture capital to launch preventative mobile software, called ZoomSafer. When the car has passed 10 mph, ZoomSafer disables the keyboard on the phone and replies to calls or texts with a message letting them know the driver is on the road.

Big deal; why not switch the phone to airplane mode … Read more

After 19 months of consulting--in Silicon Valley, we prefer that term to "unemployment"--I've accepted a job.

Once I start, I'll have to stop blogging. But while I'm still independent, I'd like to wrap up here by offering a short series of articles addressing several key topics in the area of personal computing.

Today, the topic is energy efficiency.

Energy efficiency has become a major selling point of today's personal computers, especially laptops, because power consumption determines battery life.

Unfortunately, laptops are being optimized for energy efficiency in a way that isn't … Read more

Verizon Communications is getting ready to launch a new feature that allows its Fios TV customers to interact with their sets using their Verizon Wireless cell phones, according to a story published by Dow Jones News service.

The company has been talking about the capability for months, and it recently demonstrated an application that will turn Verizon phones into a remote controls for the Fios TV service. The application is expected to be commercially available in the next three months.

The handset remote control application will only work with Wi-Fi enabled handsets and will use a Wi-Fi network instead of … Read more

Panasonic and NEC announced nine new cell phone on Tuesday that use the open-source, Linux-based mobile operating system called LiMo.

As the mobile phone market evolves, software is becoming more crucial to handset development.

Apple set the bar high with its iPhone, which uses a form of Apple's own proprietary operating system used in its computers. Other companies have followed suit with advanced software of their own, namely Google with its Android mobile software. Like LiMo, Android is based on open source Linux. So far only two devices have been introduced running the Android software, but several handset makers … Read more

Updated 8:57 a.m. PDT with information from the conference call.

Despite improvements in its network reliability and customer service, Sprint Nextel is still losing high-value customers as the company reported a wider-than-expected loss for the second quarter of 2009.

The company reported a loss of $384 million, or 13 cents a share, compared with a loss of $344 million, or 12 cents a share, during the same quarter a year ago.

Revenue also fell about 10 percent to $8.14 billion. Analysts had expected a loss of 2 cents a share on revenue of $8.13 billion, according … Read more

Sprint Nextel is doubling down on the growing prepaid cell phone market in an effort to better compete with rivals, AT&T, T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless.

On Tuesday morning, Sprint, the No. 3 nationwide U.S. wireless operator, announced plans to buy Virgin Mobile USA in a deal that is valued at around $483 million. At first it might seem strange for Sprint, which went into a tailspin after its last big acquisition of wireless competitor Nextel in 2005, to buy another wireless operator. But with a strong cash position and a management team determined to turn the … Read more

Sprint Nextel said Tuesday that it will buy Virgin Mobile USA for $5.50 per share in a stock deal valued at $483 million.

Sprint already owns 13.1 percent of the prepaid mobile operator. Virgin Mobile is a mobile virtual network operator, or MVNO, which means it uses another carrier's network to offer its service. The company uses Sprint's CDMA network.

The transaction, which is expected to be finalized in the fourth quarter of 2009 or in early 2010, represents a 31 percent premium over Virgin Mobile's Monday closing share price of $4.21.

Sprint also … Read more