Google may own Motorola, but it will think of it as just another handset company. That’s the word from Android chief Andy Rubin who told AllThingsD, “This is going to be an arm’s-length thing…Motorola isn’t going to get any special treatment.” READ MORE
When shoppers at a fashionable clothing store in Tokyo pull an item off the rack, an image of the item on a model appears right above their heads. That’s thanks to a new use of RFID technology that uses a tag to trigger the ad when the hanger is removed from the rack. The images tell shoppers what the clothes look like on (or at least on a model) and also what other items might go with them to make up an outfit. READ MORE
Coming soon: a new BlackBerry operating system, BBX. It’s a combination of the existing smartphone OS and QNX, the system for Research in Motion‘s tablet. The new OS will be optimized for smartphones, tablets, and other mobile goods. “The whole company is aligning behind a single platform,” said RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis. READ MORE
You find a song you love. You buy the MP3. You want to share it with your friends to see if they love it too. In the past your only option was to send out a link to the 30-second samples offered by Amazon and other online music stores, but it looks like Google is planning to change that. READ MORE
One of the criticisms leveled at the Windows Phone 7 platform is that its announcement wasn’t much of an announcement. We in the tech press may have heard about it to death, but the general phone-buying public didn’t get the message. READ MORE
Ever notice how hard it is to get oil off of plastic containers when washing the dishes? It turns out that oil is attracted to plastic while water is not. So when Wendy Schmidt, wife of Eric Schmidt, offered a $1 million X prize to any company that could substantially improve oil-skimming technology for removing oil from ocean water after an oil spill, Elastec/American Marine, a tiny company in Illinois, met the challenge by using plastic to attract the oil in water. READ MORE
A company issues its quarterly report. Its earnings are solid, but lower than what analysts expected. So a bunch of people sell the stock and its price takes a beating. It’s a familiar story and one that was played out today: Apple announced earnings of $7.02 per share yesterday. That looks great compared to last year’s $4.64 per share, but not so great compared to the average $7.29 analysts had predicted. It was the first time since 2004 that Apple failed to meet analysts expectations. READ MORE
Gilt Groupe has added a new website under its fast-growing brand, Gilt Home. Selling high-end home products through flash sales and traditional methods puts it in direct competition with One Kings Lane, a flash-sales site that sells similar goods. READ MORE
Google’s and Apple’s plans to increase mobile ad revenues could have Facebook singing the blues. Larry Page’s recent announcement that Google expects to generate $2.5 billion annually, likely has Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg steaming, says BNET’s Jim Edwards. Could this be part of a larger plan to lock Facebook out of the mobile game? READ MORE
Herman Cain might be singing “Imagine there’s no pizza,” but in the next 40 years, we might be singing “Imagine there’s no CEO,” says Nigel Rayner an analyst at Gartner. In a “maverick” presentation he argues that machines are better able to perform analytic tasks than humans and will eclipse human decision-making in the near future. READ MORE
