Get ready to say goodbye to another another batch of Yahoo products at the end of this month. As the company continues to streamline and focus its services, March 31st will be the last day of stand-alone existence for Upcoming, Yahoo Deals, Yahoo Kids, Yahoo SMS Alerts, Yahoo Mail and Messages for feature phones. Noting an aim to slim down to roughly 15 offerings from 75, as The Register points out, this follows a few weeks after the company nixed other services like its BlackBerry app. Additionally, if you’ve been hanging onto the old version of Yahoo! mail, you’ll have no choice but to switch to the new version by June 3rd. Yahoo! There’s not word on what we can expect next, although EVP of Platforms Jay Rossiter notes that cuts like these are needed so it can focus on the likes of its new Mail and Weather apps. You’ll find the details for each cut at the source link.
Filed under: Internet
Via: The Register
Source: Yahoo
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When you run as many services as Google does, every once in a while you’re going to have to do some pruning. Evidently Mountain View’s got the secateurs out, having just announced the next batch of its projects that will be getting axed wound down. For the chop are: AdSense for Feeds, Classic Plus, Spreadsheet Gadgets, Places for Android, and +1 Reports in Webmaster Tools. Other services are being merged into existing properties to prevent overlap, such as Google Storage for Picasa and Drive — which are now consolidated — and Insights for Search is now part of Google Trends. Naturally, the search giant claims this is all about streamlining, and improving other core products. If the retired service involves a paid subscription, or legacy data, then you’ll need to check the specifics on the official blog to find out how this will affect you, which fortunately for you, is just a tap of the source link away.
[Image Credit: Shutterstock]
Google retires more services, consolidates others in continued efficiency bid originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 30 Sep 2012 07:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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A quintet of researchers funded by the National Science Foundation have envisioned a new internet architecture, one where features could be purchased à la carte. The proposed framework would allow users to fine tune their experience by choosing from a variety of connection services. Let’s say, for example, that a customer’s connection is fine for browsing the web, but it doesn’t pass muster for streaming content — a service dedicated to video delivery could be added to close the gap. “Ultimately, this should make the internet more flexible and efficient, and will drive innovation among service providers to cater to user needs,” report co-author Rudra Dutta told The Abstract. A piecemeal next-gen web is no easy feat, however, as it would require revamping the web’s infrastructure with new protocols for choosing particular features, completing payments and monitoring network performance. The group’s rough blueprint will be presented at a conference next week, but you can thumb through their short paper at the source.
Filed under: Internet
Researchers propose à la carte internet services, overhaul for web infrastructure originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 11 Aug 2012 07:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The Abstract, North Carolina State University | 
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I’ve had a love affair with Neat scanners for a while now and the company has just updated their roster with two new cloud offerings, the aptly-named NeatCloud and a mobile scanning system called NeatMobile.
For those not in the know, Neat is essentially a scanner for receipts, documents, and business cards. It’s surprisingly fast and efficient and has allowed me, personally, to reduce my paper load considerably. NeatCloud is a fairly simple concept. It’s basically a cloud backup service for Neat documents. The service is a lot like Evernote in that it allows you to save documents via email and grab information on the fly.
NeatMobile is a bit more interesting. Like the Neat scanner, NeatMobile lets you take photos of documents and upload them for instantaneous OCR. If you’re handling a lot of receipts, for example, you can grab shots and send them to the cloud as soon as you get them, rather than running a batch when you get back to the office. Both services offer improved search and filing thanks to server-side algorithms.
Pricing plans range from $ 5.99 to $ 24.99 a month. $ 6 gets you NeatCloud while the other two plans give you access to NeatMobile.
While it will never beat the sound of a few hundred business cards thunking through a Neat scanner, these improvements put Neat in a more interesting position vis a vis the cloud.
News barely just hit the airwaves about Google snapping up social platform Meebo, and already it’s being dismantled. As from Monday (June 11th,) Meebo Messenger, Sharing on Meebo, MeeboMe and all the mobile apps will be shutting down. In the meantime you’ll still be able to download chat logs, sharing history and so on, but you’ll need to hop on quick, before the final curtain. Meebo does confirm, however, that its Bar product will continue to be available, and receive support, for the at least the coming months.
PSA: Some Meebo services shutting down starting next week originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 09 Jun 2012 15:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The FCC first outlined its intention to allow texting to emergency services back in 2010, and since then despite more talk of accepting photo and video messages, nothing official came to be. This week, however, Verzion has taken the initiative, and announced its own plans to enable text to 911 for its customers. Working with TeleCommunication Systems, the big red hopes that it can facilitate the sending of SMS messages to emergency call-centers as soon as early 2013. Texting isn’t just about adding communication options, it also provides a valuable tool to the deaf, hard of hearing and situations where talking is dangerous, or not possible. The service will use existing CDMA and SMS networks, and therefore should be available to all customers once finally rolled out.
Continue reading Verizon takes the lead on text to 911 services
Verizon takes the lead on text to 911 services originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 05 May 2012 19:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Following news of the first successful white space trials in Cambridge, UK, Nokia is now touting its research in the area with a demonstration of location-based services for the unlicensed spectrum. Traditionally, proponents of white space usage have positioned this unused portion of the airwaves as a viable, low-cost method of data transmission, but the Nokia folks have now demonstrated its ability to pinpoint one’s location with much greater accuracy than either WiFi or cellular networks. Think of it as a counterpoint to NFC, if you will, but in the following clip, we’re shown how an individual might move throughout a museum, and as they approach various exhibits, one’s smartphone could provide supplemental information for the nearby artifacts. Beyond its use in museums, Nokia also foresees the technology as useful in the retail space, where businesses may provide consumers with promotions as they walk by. Currently, the necessary equipment to make this all possible is much too large to fit within a typical smartphone, but Nokia hypothesizes that the necessary chipsets and industry standards may be in place by 2015. Until then, you can dream of what might be with the following video.
Continue reading Nokia experiments with location-based white space services in Cambridge, UK (video)
Nokia experiments with location-based white space services in Cambridge, UK (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 28 Apr 2012 09:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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For a country who doesn’t really do April Fools’ Day, you know China means business when it lays the smackdown on its weibo services. Here’s the background story: about a week ago there was a rumor on the Chinese web about a military coup on one of the main streets in Beijing, and coincidentally I was in town around the time (for the Windows Phone launch). Funnily enough, I wasn’t aware of this at all until my taxi driver in Hong Kong asked me about my visit, as he claimed that the passenger he picked up beforehand was actually a Chinese military officer who had several intense phone calls about said coup.
But of course, nothing actually happened. In fact, the guards at Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City were pretty relaxed when I visited on that very day. As for the rumormongers, the Chinese government announced through Xinhua that 16 websites have been shut down and six people have been detained, while local microblogging platforms Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo have been “criticized and punished accordingly,” though it didn’t elaborate on the details. All we know is that comments under each weibo post are now disabled until local time 8pm on April 3rd, during which these two companies can, in their own words, clean up the mess. Well, at least we now know where to draw the line for China’s April Fools’.
Weibo services ‘punished’ for Beijing coup rumors, comments temporarily disabled originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 31 Mar 2012 22:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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As customers of Sprint’s contract-averse MVNO have probably noticed, Virgin Mobile has been having a national outage of its text and data services for at least several hours now. While we’re hearing from some customers it’s been out all day, acknowledgement of the disruption only just became Facebook official. There’s no word yet when it will be resolved however, as we’re only getting the “engineers are working to resolve it” boilerplate for now. Until then we’d suggest enjoying the few activities that are still possible without wireless internet access, if those are even still a thing.
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Virgin Mobile USA’s text and data services are out across the USA originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 20 Mar 2012 19:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Movilway, the company pioneering prepaid mobile payments in Central and South America, recently updated their arsenal of tools to include a new custom Android tablet Point Of Sale (POS) terminal as well as a new MoviPIN system for online purchases. Both systems — available at select locations — bring digital purchasing power to those without bank accounts or credit cards.
“It’s a common problem in rural and remote areas of the world, where many people simply do not have access to bank accounts,” said Movilway strategist Daniela Morgenstern. “How do you order and pay for online goods when you don’t have a credit card or a bank card?”
To solve this problem, Movilway created their mobile wallet system last year and this year have added the tablet POS terminal so that rural shopkeepers have more tools at their fingertips. The new tablet, custom built at Foxconn, allows shop keepers to manage inventory, manage Movilway account “top ups” as well as run other Android apps that may be useful.
In addition to the tablets, the MoviPIN system for pre-paid accounts lets customers purchase items online, buy digital content or games or even make purchases at participating vending machines (see the video below).
It works like this:
If you are in a remote section of the world and do not have a bank account or credit card but want to make an online purchase, you go to a participating Movilway location, create an account, deposit your money into the account (by giving cash to the clerk).
The clerk then enters the information into their Movilway tablet (or wallet device, complete with a receipt printer) and then prints out a receipt with a customer’s MoviPIN number on it.
The customer can then enter that MoviPIN into payment screens at participating websites (along with authentication credentials) to enable purchase of goods.
There are similar systems in other parts of the world like M-Pesa or Obopay, but Movilway’s system seems to be addressing the more formal and traditional shopkeeper/customer scenario.
Check out other wrap-up posts from MWC, like Aurasma’s AR technology here and Total Immersion’s eCommerce-assisting AR concepts here.
