Verizon Wireless appears to be having yet another wide outage of its 4G LTE data network, according to various reports on Twitter.

The network reported three data outages in the month of December. Verizon swiftly blamed the down time on “growing pains.”

Verizon said today that it is looking into the issues, which are reportedly affecting users in Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Phoenix, and parts of Pennsylvania and Ohio.

“VZW is investigating customer issues in connecting to the 4GLTE data network,” Verizon said via Twitter. “3G data, voice, and text services are operating reliably.”

While Verizon is saying its 3G network is fine, several users of 4G phones say they can’t even access 3G on their phones. Eric Gilkey said on Twitter: “Your 3g WAS out for a while. Let’s not act like it was unaffected.”

Let us know in the comments if you are having any trouble connecting to Verizon’s 4G or 3G networks and where you are located.

VentureBeat is holding its second annual Mobile Summit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

Foxconn, the Chinese manufacturer that Apple heavily relies on for its products, may have tried to clean up its act before inspectors from the Fair Labor Association descended on its factories, according to a Hong Kong non-governmental organization dedicated to workers rights.

Foxconn allegedly pushed underage employees out of sight before the FLA inspection, Debby Sze Wan Chan, a project officer from Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM), tells AppleInsider.

“All underage workers, between 16-17 years old, were not assigned any overtime work and some of them were even sent to other departments,” workers from the Foxconn factories reportedly told Chan.

Apple’s supplier code of conduct allows for factories to employ workers aged 16 to 18, but they’re also supposed to receive additional protections:

Preventing underage labor is only part of our efforts. We also monitor the treatment of workers who are old enough to work legally but are younger than 18. We don’t allow these workers to perform some types of work, even in cases where local laws allow it. Our standards also require factories to adhere to student labor laws and to ensure that schools and universities follow the laws as well, which is particularly important as factories increasingly turn to these institutions for student interns.

We’ve asked both Apple and the FLA for further comment and will update when we hear back.

Let’s be clear: SACOM isn’t alleging that Foxconn is hiding workers under 16, which would be a major child labor issue. Instead, the group says the supplier simply moved slightly older workers around to avoid scrutiny from the FLA. It makes sense for Foxconn to shape up in preparation for a highly publicized inspection, the real question is how these 16- to 18-year-old employees are treated once the spotlights disappear.

Last night’s ABC Nightline report gave us our best glimpse yet into Foxconn’s inner workings. The FLA, meanwhile, is still conducting its inspection of the factories. FLA president Auret van Heerden called Foxconn’s factories “first class” last week in an initial statement, but he also noted that there were many issues that needed to be solved.

Speaking about the overall atmosphere at the factories, Chan recounted one of her recent trips to AppleInsider, “The workers always tell us they resemble machines. Their regular day at Foxconn is waking up, queuing up for baths and work, work and go back to the dormitory and sleep. They do not have a social life and they are doing the same monotonous task in the factory for thousands of times a day. If they are not efficient enough or they make some mistakes, they will be yelled at by their supervisor or punished.”

VentureBeat is holding its second annual Mobile Summit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

With one fell swoop, Twitter has confronted privacy concerns, returned missed features to its mobile audience, and opened its information network up to even more tablet-toting folks.

Twitter for iPhone and Android received updates Tuesday. The fixes address previously identified shortcomings, and optimize Twitter to run on Android tablets.

Twitter released a version of its application for the Kindle Fire on the Amazon Appstore today. The company also promised that the Barnes & Noble Nook Store will get a Twitter app on Thursday.

Both iPhone and Android applications now alert the mobile Twitterer before accessing her address book to find friends. Should the Twitter user navigate to the “Find Friends” feature in the Discover portion of the app, she will find a message that reads, “We will securely upload your contacts to help you find friends and suggest users to follow on Twitter.” The user must then click “OK” before proceeding.

The addition of the alert comes just a week after VentureBeat uncovered evidence showing that a slew of iPhone applications, Twitter included, access the user’s mobile address book without first requesting permission.

Twitter’s mobile apps also now include a much-loved shortcut feature of yore that allows a person to swipe a tweet to interact with it. The swiping action brings up a shortcut screen that includes reply, retweet, favorite, share, and user profile-viewing options. The feature should (again) appeal to the power Twitterer.

iPhone application users may appreciate the returned abilities to copy and paste the text of tweets and mark all direct messages as read.

The PlayStation Vita launch is happening right now. For all those looking to upgrade their gaming-on-the-go to the next level, GamesBeat is giving away a bunch of Vita launch games so that you can focus on buying memory cards, 3G data plans, or, of course, more games!

Entering is simple:

• Follow @VentureBeat and re-tweet this post on Twitter
• “Like” GamesBeat on Facebook

At 1pm PST on Monday, February 27, an equal number of random winners will be chosen from Twitter and Facebook. Each winner will get to claim the game of their choice from the list below on a first-come first-served basis until all the games are gone!

A few rules:

• You need a Twitter and/or Facebook account to enter, obviously.
• The number of winners will be the same as the number of free games available.
• You will be contacted via the method you used to enter the contest (Facebook or Twitter).
• If you don’t reply after winning with 48 hours, a new winner will be selected.
• Valid for U.S. residents only. Void where prohibited.

More games will be added throughout the week! Here’s the list so far:

1. ModNation Racers: RoadTrip
2. Lumines: Electronic Symphony
3. Dungeon Hunter Alliance
4. Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack (downloadable)
5. Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack (downloadable)
6. BlazBlue: Continuum Shift EXTEND (downloadable)
7. BlazBlue: Continuum Shift EXTEND (downloadable)
8. BlazBlue: Continuum Shift EXTEND (downloadable)
9. BlazBlue: Continuum Shift EXTEND (downloadable)
10. BlazBlue: Continuum Shift EXTEND (downloadable)

This week marks the launch of the PlayStation Vita, the successor to Sony’s PlayStation Portable handheld gaming device. Launched last December in Japan, the Vita did not fare particularly well, being consistently outsold by its predecessor even during the Christmas shopping period. Part of the blame lay on a more Western-friendly lineup of launch titles, but is another portable device really what the mass public wants, or are we all satisfied with our multipurpose iPhones and tablets?

We’ve already got a ton of Vita-related content to help you decide whether the device and its games are worth the $250 point of entry, and throughout the week we’ll be releasing more reviews, more features, and giving away more free games.

That’s right, VentureBeat is giving out tons of free games for the Vita, and all you have to do to be entered is re-tweet this post on Twitter and/or share this post on Facebook.

FEATURES

Tuesday – PlayStation Vita: THE Hardware Review

Wednesday – VentureBeat Staff Impressions

Thursday – Five Things You Didn’t Know About the Vita

Friday – PlayStation Vita Launch Awards

Saturday – Top 10 PSP Games for Your New Vita

REVIEWS

Uncharted: Golden Abyss

Wipeout 2048

Lumines: Electronic Symphony

Super Stardust Delta

FIFA 2012

Reality Fighters

Little Deviants

ARTICLES

Amazon, Target, and Best Buy holding “Buy 2 Get 1 Free” sale for Vita games

Amazon reveals best-selling video games worldwide (Feb 13-18)

Report claims developers are abandoning PlayStation Vita for Nintendo 3DS

ATT unveils wireless data plans for PlayStation Vita

Icon Games: Ongoing PS Vita development “difficult” and “a little scary”

Image via CVG

There is something extravagant about the release of a new game system: the promise of new and previously unheard of software experiences … hardware that is faster, better, and more capable. It is something that will be around for years and thus promises a level of quality generally reserved for far more expensive equipment.

But the times, they are a-changin’. Consumers expect more from electronics than ever before. Over 50% of Americans own smartphones that not only make calls but run applications and play games — they are quickly replacing standalone media players. Even Sony has experimented with a smartphone game system in the Xperia Play, which has found only limited commercial success.

Even amid fierce competition from products like the iPhone, Android smartphones, and tablets, there is still a burgeoning market for portable video game consoles. The Nintendo 3DS has sold over 15 million units worldwide in less than a year, making it the fastest selling video game machine in history. Can Sony match that success with the more expensive, better connected, and higher-quality PlayStation Vita?

Hardware and design

At first glance the Vita appears almost identical to the PSP. It shares nearly all of the PSP’s dimensions, but the Vita couldn’t be more different. It’s sleek, bold, and immediately stunning, unlike the plastic frame every PSP model has shared. The eye wants to look at the Vita’s gorgeous glass front, very crisp labeling, and expertly crafted controls.

The front of the Vita is almost exclusively made of glass, a design shared by Apple’s iPhone 4. The Vita doesn’t look like a kid’s toy; it looks like a serious gadget, a futuristic piece of technology. It isn’t soft around the edges nor does it feel childish. A plastic frame is glossy but easy to grip, and on the back are two finger rests to grip the Vita.

From top to bottom the Vita looks and feels solid. I carried it around in a bag and pockets, and though the glass front did give me pause, the Vita is a stable device. It is huge (3.3″ x 7.2″ x 18.6″ h/w/d and 9.8oz), so don’t expect to carry it in tight jeans or small bag pockets. The build quality is very high, and I had no trouble or worry when holding it in a pocket.

The Vita has a very similar control layout to the PSP and DualShock controller: a D-pad and analog stick on the left, four face buttons on the right, as well as a PlayStation (home/return) button, start and select buttons, two shoulder buttons, volume controls, and power. The Vita is the first portable game system with a second analog stick, which makes traditional home-console-style titles easier to play on the Vita. Nintendo’s 3DS will receive an attachment with a second analog stick, but the Vita has two unique features over the 3DS: a 5″ OLED touchscreen display and an equally large rear touchpad.

Display

The Vita has an OLED display. Not AMOLED, not Super AMOLED, and not any of the other OLED technologies many companies are touting. This seems like a questionable design choice; although Sony first brought OLED into the home with the 11″ XEL-1 TV, OLED displays have been consistently lambasted for a lack of visibility outdoors.

Solutions used by LG and Samsung address that problem in recent smartphones but don’t solve it entirely. At CES Sony engineers I spoke with said that OLED technology is inferior to LCD panels for several reasons: the lack of brightness, inaccurate colors due to over-saturation, and a blue hue to the screen. That’s why the upcoming Xperia S and Xperia Ion will both come equipped with LCD displays. The Vita, by comparison, seems to have a plain old OLED. Sony isn’t marketing it in any other way.

It certainly isn’t plain.

The 960×544 display is one of the most beautiful and vibrant I’ve ever seen and is certainly the best in its size. It isn’t dense at 220ppi (the iPhone’s Retina Display is 326ppi, the HTC Rezound is 342ppi), but for gaming and video it is dense enough. Nearly every problem with OLED displays is gone, eliminated in some way that Sony has not discussed publicly. I’ve tested the display indoors and out and am extremely impressed with both color accuracy and brightness. The only trouble is in direct sunlight, not because the pictures on-screen aren’t visible, but because fingerprints and smudges block the screen. The display doesn’t appear to have an oleophobic coating, so cleaning the screen to better see in direct sunlight is difficult.

It’s an absolute pleasure to view anything on the Vita’s display. Pictures and video are crisp and very clear — more so than on any smartphone or tablet. Games are reproduced on the display in the best possible light, likely better than most TVs can muster. I can’t recommend using the Vita instead of an iPad or Android tablet for watching videos — bigger is better, of course — but if the choice is gaming and watching movies on one or the other, the Vita wins hands down. The 5″ panel on the Vita is extraordinary.

Continue reading for internal components…

Updated at 11:59 a.m. PT with an official response from Microsoft.

Microsoft’s long-anticipated Office software suite for the Apple iPad will likely launch in the next few weeks, according to a report by The Daily. However, Microsoft has denied the story.

The iPad has become a surprisingly hot device for the enterprise since its launch in April 2010. While businesses typically deploy new technology slowly, the iPad has been different as CEOs override the IT department to make the iPad a fixture. Although many developers have come to offer apps and support for the iPad, the most notable missing piece of software is Microsoft Office, the gold standard for document, spreadsheet, and presentation creation.

The Daily first reported that Office for iPad was on the way back in late November, but now its sources say the app will soon be submitted to the App Store for approval. According to the usual release schedule, the Office Suite for iPad could easily launch within a few weeks.

A Microsoft spokesperson denied the report, telling VentureBeat via e-mail: “The Daily story is based on inaccurate rumors and speculation. We have no further comment.”

The Daily claims to have had some brief hands-on time with Office for iPad and noted that “Word, Excel and PowerPoint files can be created and edited locally and online. But it’s unclear if Microsoft will support other Office apps at launch or at all.”

Because of the gaping hole left by Office not being readily available, OnLive recently launched its Desktop application that runs Office on the iPad. On top of running Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, OnLive Desktop can run many other Windows 7 apps like Paint, Media Player, and Notepad.

But the difference here will be that an Office suite designed specifically for the iPad will likely be optimized in new ways for touch and built differently. ZDNet’s astute Mary Jo Foley points out that Office for iPad sounds quite a bit like the Office for Windows 8 on ARM. It’s certainly possible that Microsoft is building the iPad app and the Windows 8 similarly to offer the best possible touch interactions with Office.

If Office launches on the iPad in the next few weeks, will you be adding it to your iPad?

Crummy Office for iPad photo: The Daily

Almost all of New York City’s iconic yellow cabs now have a TV in the back seat playing a loop of local news and entertainment. But if innovator Jack Dorsey has his way, those taxi TVs could be replaced with tablet computers that use his company Square’s technology to accept credit card payments.

Square recently met with the Taxi and Limousine Comission, according to CBS, to discuss a pilot program that would put tablet computers into 50 cabs in place of the current Taxi TV system. The company will have an official meeting with the TLC on March 1 to hash out the idea.

As an interesting historical sidenote, Dorsey has been fascinated by urban transportation and dispatch systems since he was a kid. The open source software he designed in high school is still used by many cab companies, and the kernel of his idea for Twitter came from his work on dispatch software for taxis and couriers.

Putting tablets into taxis would allow riders to make purchases during the ride, for example buying movie tickets while driving to the cinema. Square would process the credit card purchase and take a cut. The city hopes introducing Square into the mix will increase competition and drive down processing fees, benefiting both drivers and riders.

Another New York service, Foursquare, has also been mentioned in the press coverage of this initiative. It’s not clear if Foursquare is getting in on the ground floor or is just a relevant hometown example of an app that riders might use while in a taxi.

Having a tablet connected to the web in a taxi does have a lot of risks. How do you keep people from surfing to adult only sites and installing spyware onto the device. What happens when a rider logs into their Gmail and forgets to log out before leaving the cab. These are important details. Still, a tablet is clearly a much more flexible (in the software sense) and interesting platform for creating new and interesting apps that add value to a trip, when compared to a traditional TV.

What better way to come off the long weekend than with a bunch of Apple rumors? It looks like the iPad 3 may be getting a bit of junk in the trunk, while the iPhone 5 could be another fall release for Apple.

The Chinese tech blog M.I.C. Gadget received an early production version of the iPad 3′s rear case from “reliable sources,” which shows that the new tablet will have even more tapered edges than the iPad 2 and will also be around 1-1.5mm thicker.

Apple was likely forced to increase the iPad 3′s thickness to fit in some new hardware, like the higher resolution Retina Display (which was semi-confirmed by counting pixels on an early production display), improved camera, and possible inclusion of LTE 4G technology. The iPad 3 is rumored to sport a new quad-core A6 processor from Apple, though a recent posting on a Chinese forum says otherwise, thanks to a picture of a purported iPad 3 logic board with an “A5X” chip. Judging by Apple’s naming conventions, the A5X (if it exists) is most likely a slightly faster version of the dual-core A5 on the iPad 2.

According to the most recent rumors, the iPad 3 is expected to launch on March 7.

As for the iPhone 5, it seems that Apple may be settling on fall as its new season for iPhone releases, according to the Japanese tech blog Macotakara. The site, which has been accurate in the past about Apple rumors, also cites “reliable sources” for its information. I wouldn’t be too surprised if the iPhone 5 does land during the fall, because it wouldn’t make much sense for Apple to cut into the iPhone 4S’ life cycle. People are still hot for the iPhone 4S, and Apple will want to milk that demand for all it’s worth.

Via ZDNet; Image via M.I.C. Gadget

Barnes & Noble is launching a new $199 8GB Nook Tablet to better compete against Amazon’s popular Kindle Fire Tablet, the company confirmed today.

Since the Kindle Fire’s November launch at a mere $199, the $249 Nook Tablet has had a hard time attracting customers who were in the market to buy the cheapest tablet, as my colleague Sean Ludwig previously pointed out. The Nook Color is also dropping to $169, which makes it the cheapest available tablet option for most people.

Unlike the current 16GB Nook Tablet model, the new $199 Nook Tablet will have only 8GB storage, which makes sense since plenty of digital media (e-books, e-magazines, games, music, and other media) is increasingly moving to the cloud. The new Nook Tablet still has a microSD slot for expanding its storage (it can take up a 32GB microSD card).

I’m guessing that since Barnes & Noble is reporting fourth quarter revenue increases for both digital and physical sides of the business, the company is seeking to continue its strategy of making the Nook a loss leader to boost sales everywhere else.

Nook Tablet photo: Barnes & Noble

Kiip is announcing today that it has hired Zynga’s ad boss Manny Anekal as chief operating officer.

San Francisco-based Kiip is a fast-growing startup that offers real-world prizes as rewards in mobile games. Hiring Anekal from recently-public Zynga will add some cachet and some executive firepower for the company, which is headed by 20-year-old entrepreneur Brian Wong.

I can imagine that a lot of business people might not take a company with a 20-year-old CEO seriously. But Wong has built a track record for his company, launched numerous products, created several key partnerships, and has raised money. If the company needs some extra cred because Wong isn’t old enough or lacks experience, then Anekal can bring that to the company as its global chief operating officer.

“Kiip is undeniably one of the world’s most innovative companies with a great story to tell — they’re also sitting at the epicenter of three burgeoning markets: mobile, gaming, and advertising,” Anekal (pictured) said. “They’ve taken an angle that I’ve never seen any company tackle with such prowess, and the growth opportunity they sit on is absolutely massive. I’m excited to help them take this to the next level.”

San Francisco-based Kiip was founded in September 2010 by Wong, Courtney Guertin, and Amadeus Demarzi.

Kiip offers rewards at the moment when you achieve something in a mobile game, such as getting past a level or a boss. Wong calls this “moments based” advertising, or catching a consumer when he or she is having a great time with a game. It recently also started offering Swarms, or mobile game tournaments with big-ticket rewards.

Anekal will be responsible for managing the growth and operations of the rewards network. Anekal led the brand integration and ad efforts with top-tier consumer brands in titles such as FarmVille and CityVille. Anekal has a decade of experience with the development of games and online advertising products. He was global director of brand advertising at Zynga, the social game giant, and he led global ad operations at Electronic Arts. He also had a similar position at in-game ad startup Massive, which was acquired by Microsoft.

Regarding the age question, Wong said in an email to VentureBeat, “I’ve been very fortunate and I’m able to have conversations with the right people who I can respect and they reciprocate. I think the amount of progress we’ve made and the partnerships and brands we’ve struck deals with are indicative of that. I think brands and agencies are looking for the younger generation to propel them to areas they would have never considered. Manny will certainly help, but he’s joked that he’s always felt like the young one too. This industry is also very young.”

Kiip is backed by Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, True Ventures, Verizon Ventures, and Crosslink Capital.

[Photo credit: Kiip]

Remember the BlackBerry PlayBook? Research in Motion’s tablet stirred up quite a bit of hype last year, only to land with a thud. Now it’s getting a new breath of life, though at this point I can’t imagine anyone cares.

RIM announced today that it has released the first major update for the tablet, BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0, which adds some very basic features it should have had from the beginning, including a built-in e-mail client, calendar, and contacts.

Seriously, the BlackBerry PlayBook launched without a freaking e-mail client. It’s no surprise the tablet flopped so badly. The PlayBook is a tablet built for the BlackBerry faithful, and yet it was missing one of the most-used features by Crackberry addicts.

In the last quarter of 2011, RIM announced that it shipped only 150,000 of the tablets and that it had to take a $485 million hit for the quarter due to lowering the PlayBook’s price. As far as the major tablet flops of 2011 go, the PlayBook sits directly behind HP’s disastrous webOS TouchPad.

Other new features in BlackBerry OS 2.0 include social integration in the calendar, which will pull in your friends from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, as well as updates to BlackBerry Bridge that will let your BlackBerry Phone serve as a remote control for the PlayBook. There’s also a new “Open On” feature that makes it easy to open documents you’re viewing on your BlackBerry Phone on the PlayBook with a single click.

The update’s new features don’t come as much of a surprise, as RIM has been discussing many of them for months. They deliver tight integration between the tablet and BlackBerry phones that will be welcome to the handful of PlayBook owners out there, though there’s still no excuse for why it took RIM almost a full year to release the features. Even worse, the update was originally supposed to land last fall, but RIM delayed it to this month.

BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 won’t likely win the tablet many new converts, especially with the iPad 3 only a few weeks away, but it represents a glimmer of hope for those who have bet on RIM.

For a startup, a lot is riding on the home page. You might be surprised, then, to learn that startups vary wildly in how quickly and reliably their website home pages load.

That’s especially true when you look at load times on mobile devices. An increasing number of people use smartphones and tablets to browse the web, and yet — for some reason — the mobile versions of many startups’ sites lag far behind their desktop equivalents.

Keynote Systems‘ new Startup Shootout Index provides some insight into the three-screen challenge now facing anyone with a web presence. It’s the first website performance index to measure load times and completion percentages on desktops, smartphones, and tablets simultaneously.

If a home page doesn’t load quickly and reliably, it risks driving away valuable new customers. If you’re lucky enough to get someone visiting your site, you don’t want them disappearing before you’ve had a chance to make your pitch.

To do the test, Keynote used its network of PCs to simulate desktop web traffic to selected startup websites from a variety of locations around the U.S. Additionally, Keynote simulated traffic from iPhone 4 and iPad 2 users in four locations: Chicago, Dallas, New York, and San Francisco. (We’re using Apple’s mobile devices as proxies for all mobile gear, which is not a complete representation of the mobile universe, obviously, but it does represent a wide swath of mobile users.) Tests were done over a period of weeks and the results averaged into scores for each website. In addition, Keynote created an index score for each category, which represents the average of all the websites in that category.

Note that the test measures home page response times, not the time to complete a transaction or do other activities on these sites.

The 34 startup websites measured by Keynote are grouped into six categories: Collaboration (including sites like Box, Dropbox, and Huddle), Travel, Mobile and Social Gaming, Social Retail (Gilt Groupe, Fab.com, and the like), Social Networking, Digital Entertainment (Spotify, Rdio, and Turntable.fm). To view this month’s full data set, check out the spreadsheet embedded below.

VentureBeat is proud to be Keynote’s exclusive media partner for this index, which means we’ll be publishing the results every month. We’ll focus on a different segment of the index each month. And yes, we know that those who live in glass houses should not throw stones, which is why we’ve asked Keynote to measure VentureBeat’s website performance as well, and we’ll report that data as soon as we have it. We’ll keep lobbing those stones, but at least you’ll know that we’re smashing our own windows, too.

This month, we’ll zero in on digital entertainment startups, whose response times are shown in the graph above.

Spotify has been in the news a lot lately, thanks to its arrival in the U.S. and its recent partnership with Facebook. The company has done a good job of keeping its performance consistent between desktop, smartphone, and tablet versions of its site, as has Rdio.

However, other sites don’t show the same consistency. Facebook has the top-ranking response time for its desktop and smartphone websites, but its tablet site ranks fifth overall.

“We’re seeing that tablets are often a distant third when it comes to performance,” said Tim Murphy, senior mobile marketing manager at Keynote Systems. On Facebook’s performance, Murphy noted that the site’s iPad response time is nearly eight times slower than the desktop on the same 3G network. “The iPad is 2X slower than the iPhone largely because they’re sending about 265KB of data to the tablet user versus 142KB to the smartphone user,” Murphy added.

As for the other categories, Murphy noted that mobile and social gaming sites seem to lag behind the rest of the startup categories. But retail sites need to improve too. “Retailers need to pay more attention to the mobile web, to meet the needs of the growing number of mobile retail consumers,” Murphy said, citing recent data from eMarketer on the growing number of mobile consumers.

You can see the full set of this month’s Startup Shootout Index data in a Google spreadsheet, or view it in the embedded spreadsheet below.

The Axon Flex camera on a pair of Oakley sunglasses.

On Tuesday, police-tech company Taser, maker of the eponymous electroshock guns, announced its latest on-officer camera system for law enforcement. The cameras mount on Oakley sunglasses and have companion Android and iOS mobile apps. The first people to get the new technology are none other than the 150 patrol officers on the troubled Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) force.

On-dashboard car cameras were considered advanced when they first came out. But the technology has evolved and shrunk over the years, and while law enforcement isn’t known for being ahead of the technological curve (the San Francisco Police Department still takes statements on carbon paper), Taser thinks the time for on-officer cameras and digital video has arrived.

The new wearable-camera system, Axon Flex, is Taser’s second try at wearable cameras and will work with the company’s companion cloud storage system for managing the resulting videos, Evidence.com.

Changing course, quickly

The people at Taser are fast learners. After rolling out its first foray into the wearable-camera market just last year (an earlier on-Taser camera didn’t take off), the 19-year-old company quickly realized drastic changes were needed to how it was designing and producing the still-new gear.

“Everyone we talk to gets it, that we want the camera on the officer,” Taser CEO Patrick Smith told VentureBeat. “People can see it coming, and we think we’re at the inflection point right now.”

Taser's first, bulky camera system.

The first iteration, called the Taser Axon, was bulky, uncomfortable, a bit dorky looking, and made almost entirely by Taser. To a generation of iPhone users, the large handheld viewer immediately jumped out as unnecessary and dated. “It was too clunky, too early,” said Smith.

The company went back to the drawing board and decided to focus on only the things it did best, and to outsource the rest to partners that were already the best in their fields. (Smith said the book “Good to Great” by Tim Collins was his inspiration.)

First there was the cool factor. “Our headgear was slightly more comfortable than braces,” admitted Smith. Officers were unhappy with the way Taser’s custom head-mount looked and felt, so Taser surveyed various members of law-enforcement to find out what brands they really wanted. Ninety percent of officers said they liked sunglasses-maker Oakley. The new system Flex camera mounts via magnet directly onto a custom pair of Oakley Flack Jacket glasses.

For the camera, Taser went to a company called Looxcie that was already making compact, wearable cameras with Bluetooth streaming technology. A few custom modifications were made, including maximizing the cameras for low-light shooting. The cameras shoot 30 frames per second of video at 640-by-480 resolution.

The hulking custom viewer is out, and instead the company has created mobile apps for Android and iOS smartphones and tablets. The video files are stored on the camera itself (up to 8GB) and can only be downloaded using a special mount at the station for chain-of-custody reason. However, the officer can use the Flex Mobile app preview, name, and add notes to the video on any compatible mobile device. The app can also show the camera’s battery and memory status, and Smith says GPS is coming soon.

Taser is working on another Android and iOS mobile app, called Evidence Mobile, that collects digital evidence from a crime scene, including photos, audio notes, and GPS tags.

Cloud storage for the Evidence.com system is now run by Amazon Web Services. Evidence.com is Taser’s ambitious online management solution for all the videos police record. Unlike the DVDs or VHS tapes many precincts still use, digital video stored on a remote server is available to multiple people at any given time.

In the beginning, Taser tried building its own web servers for Evidence.com, but Amazon had already jumped through the hoops and invested time and money to make its service FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) compliant. The act outlines tricky government-required procedures for handling electronic surveillance.

Finally, Taser adjusted how it priced and sold the system. Each camera system comes out to about $1000 per officer, but a set pricing structure turned out to a hard sell. Some agencies have an annual budget, others just a one-time chunk of money. Some want to lease equipment, other need to buy it outright. Taser is giving its sales force the flexibility to work with each agency and nail down whatever unique payment structure works for them.

The drastic change in direction was something Taser was lucky enough to be able to fund. The public company has taken all of its profits from the last three years and sunk it into the on-officer camera technology and the Evidence.com digital-asset management system. Though almost two decades old, the company has some fresh, startup blood on its board helping it navigate the new, rapidly changing gadget-waters; Hadi Partovi, former Facebook and Dropbox advisor is a board member.

A history of violence

A BART police officer declaring a protest unlawful.

BART officers will start using the new Flex camera systems at the end of the month. The transit system’s police force has had several unfortunate run-ins in recent years. Officers fatally shot the unarmed Oscar Grant in 2009, an event that was thoroughly documented by nearby passengers with camera-phones. In 2011, BART officers shot a man named Charles Hill, whom officers say was armed with a knife.

Both incidents resulted in public outcry and protests, but the Hill drama took an unexpected turn when BART shut down cell phone service along the train lines to prevent protesters from coordinating locations. Impinging on riders’ civil liberties did what a mere shooting and death couldn’t: it led to much larger protests, international condemnation, and the involvement of Hacker-activist group Anonymous.

If police had captured the Hill shooting on video, and if what the video showed exonerated the two officers, would the incident have still snowballed into a public relations nightmare? If the incident wasn’t on the up-and-up, would the officers have even turned on their cameras?

Cynics, loopholes, and the psychology of being watched

There are still open questions about how the system will work in the field, especially from wary city-dwellers who may think some police are corrupt. Each law-enforcement agency will have to develop its own policies and punishments for officers to ensure they use the new equipment properly and responsibly. The recorded video itself is tamper-proof — a user cannot access, delete, or alter the original file in any way — but the camera still requires an officer to hit the big Record button, and to refrain from turning it off if things are getting out of control.

Studies conducted by law-enforcement organizations point to video-evidence having a positive impact on reducing complaints. A U.S. study of over 3000 officers using in-car cameras found that 93 percent of civilian complaints were dropped or immediately resolved when video evidence was available. Another study, this time of a UK pilot program in which 300 officers used on-person cameras, found complaints dropped 14 percent.

It’s unknown if complaints drop because civilians see recorded evidence and realize they can’t get away with a false complaint, or if officers behave differently when they know they are being recorded. That knowledge may be the difference between an event being “caught” on video, like the Oscar Grant shooting, and by-the-book events being willingly filmed by the police.

Young or old, if you’re loaded, you’re far more likely to own a smartphone.

The finding comes from analytics firm Nielsen. The company surveyed more than 20,000 mobile consumers in the U.S. and found a strong correlation between age, income, and smartphone ownership.

Adults aged 24 to 34 showed the highest proportion of smartphone ownership: 66 percent indicated they owned a smartphone. Overall smartphone penetration in the U.S., according to Nielsen, was at 48 percent in January.

Nielsen also found that, in general, for all age groups, the more money people make, the more likely they are to own a smartphone. Youngsters 18 to 24, however, skew higher for smartphone ownership even at lower salaries.

“Older subscribers with higher incomes are more likely to have a smartphone,” Nielsen said in a blog post on the survey. “For example, those 55-64 making over 100K a year are almost as likely to have a smartphone as those in the 35-44 age bracket making 35-75K per year.”

Clearly, parents and grandparents with extra cash on hand are happy to get hip with the smartphone-toting times. After all, it’s what the kids are doing.

On the whole, consumers are opting to upgrade to smartphones over feature phones. In the past three months, more than 50 percent of people in search of a new device, under the age of 65, chose to purchase a smartphone. And if you look at the 25 to 34 age group specifically, the percentage of smartphone choosers is a whopping 80 percent.

Photo credit: Ed Yourdon, Flickr

Forkly, an app that helps you find popular dishes at restaurants around you, has released version 2.0 with bigger photos and personalized recommendations.

Forkly launched in September 2011 from Britekite founders Brady Becker and Martin May. The app originally helped you photograph, rate, and share dishes you’ve eaten and loved. With the second version of the app, you can share and find dishes more easily. The app now delivers personalized recommendations of dishes and the ability to browse restaurants anywhere.

Perhaps the most noticeable update in the new version is the larger images, which help you browse dishes more quickly. The app also gives you influence points for using the app and rating dishes, and the update has improved how points are handled.

Forkly competes with Foodspotting, another app that rates specific dishes. Both apps have very similar features and are fighting for the same users. Forkly’s influence point system is absent in Foodspotting, but Foodspotting includes “Guides” of popular and noteworthy dishes curated by foodie celebrities. Other Forkly competitors include Spoondate and Ness.

Forkly 2.0 is available for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

The company, which makes online ticketing and registration software, has released a mobile app that does away with paper tickets and processes payments at the door of an event.

Event Farm’s newly released iOS and Android app can sell tickets, check guests into an event, and process credit and cash payments. The payment system works with a card swiper from ROAM Data, the same company that makes Intuit’s mobile payment system. The software is fully electronic and eliminates the need for barcodes or paper tickets.

“What is groundbreaking about what we are doing is that our app is fully integrated into our ticketing platform,” said co-founder and CEO of Event Farm Ryan Costello in a statement.

“We are not just independently charging credit cards on a mobile device. Ticket inventories on the app are synced with sales happening in real time online and vice versa.”

Event Farm’s new app competes with Evenbrite’s Entry Manager app for Android and iPhone. Eventbrite has a slightly different system; the general public can use Eventbrite’s website and general mobile app to purchase tickets and then go to the event and check in with their phones. Event Farm is used by event organizers to check people in at events and sell tickets at the door. Unlike Event Farm’s new app, Eventbrite’s Entry Manager app can’t process credit and cash payments at the event.

Event Farm was founded in 2003 for event producers to making registration and ticketing at events easier.

Barnes & Noble will soon launch a cheaper 8GB model of its Nook Tablet to help the company compete with Amazon’s blazing Kindle Fire sales, according to a document obtained by The Verge.

The current Nook Tablet runs $249, but it has had a hard time attracting cost-conscious consumers who prefer the $199 Kindle Fire. While I personally prefer the Tablet over the Fire because of its smoother processing, the average consumer likely sees the units as too similar to justify paying $50 more for one.

To bring down the price point of the Tablet, B&N will lower the storage capacity to 8GB from its currently available 16GB. That will lower the amount of room for storing e-books, e-magazines, games, and other media. Thankfully there is a microSD slot on the Nook Tablet that lets you bump up storage if you feel the need.

The Verge’s document points to a release date in just a few days, with timing at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday the 22nd. The document says units of the 8GB model should be delivered to stores between Feb. 18th and 21st.

Apple is also reportedly testing out a smaller size for its mega-popular iPad tablet, a move that would help it better fight smaller Android-based tablets like the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet.

A Barnes & Noble representative did not immediately respond with confirmation or denial of the report.

Nook Tablet photo: Barnes & Noble

You know how app developers are always talking about Apple’s mysterious and allegedly thorough iTunes app approval process? Apparently it can’t be too restrictive considering the company just allowed a trio of apps onto the App Store that blatantly infringe on three big-name brands.

Daniel Burford, operating under the company name “Home of Anime” is currently selling Pokémon Yellow, Digimon+, and YuGiOh+. Perhaps you’ve heard of them? I’m fairly certain Nintendo, Bandai, and Konami have….

Thanks unnamed media outlets! Why not just attribute them all to IGN? No one would doubt it.

Despite the rave reviews the app has already somehow received, the customer reviews are not quite so positive:

• I want my money back if I don’t get it I’m going to sue the person who made this application this just a rip off lying to us of what it contains!!!!!!! (faustino angel)
• Shoulda read the bottom comments before purchasing, this is a scam. Crashes after main screen (Chewybaka 0508)

Currently there are roughly 600 reviews averaging 1.5 stars for the Pokémon app. Pokémon Yellow was released for the Game Boy in 1998. Note also that the screenshot (below) used on the App Store is from a more recent Pokémon game, not Pokémon Yellow, though none of this matters since the app only loads the title screen before crashing (confirmed).

I half expect Zynga to take this as a sign that “Pokémon with Friends” is something they should try getting away with.

LG unveiled Sunday its new 5-inch device that blurs the line between phone and tablet. It’s called the Optimus Vue.

Before Samsung released its Galaxy Note, the term “phablet” wasn’t in our vernacular. But since the Note measured in at 5.78 inches tall by 3.27 inches wide with a 5.3 inch screen, it pushed the limits of how big a smartphone could be. Especially since the Note is just two inches smaller than the seven inch tablets on the market, including the Kindle Fire and the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Now, LG is diving into the phone-tablet form factor with its Optimus Vue. The Vue is slightly smaller than the Note with a five-inch screen. The Optimus Vue also takes a hit in screen resolution, delivering 1024-by-768 pixels compared to the Note’s 1280-by-800. Both phones are come with a 1.5 Ghz dual-core processor and eight megapixel rear camera. The Optimus Vue also has 32GB internal memory and runs Android Gingerbread 2.3. And what phone-tablet hybrid would be complete without a stylus? The Optimus Vue comes with a Rubberdium pen to use when your finger just won’t do.

LG describes the phone as “the slimmest among all LTE phones currently on the market and is perfectly suited for a hand and fits comfortably in a jacket pocket.” Note that it doesn’t mention a jean pocket, because we’re sure even LG realizes this phone won’t fit into most pants pockets.

The Optimus Vue launches in March 2012 in Korea. No word yet on whether it will make its way to Europe or the United States. Maybe that’s a good thing though, I’m not sure America is ready for two Frankenstein-like phablets just yet.

LG hasn’t yet released pricing details for the device.

Several apps have popped up in the last year that have pushed the enterprise into adopting tablets. Apps such as Skype, Dropbox, Yammer, and SalesForce Mobile have paved the way for more enterprise-minded apps to be released.

MightyMeetings seeks to eliminate the need for multiple apps to communicate with your team and share work with its new application MightyTeams. While popular services DropBox, Skype, and Google Docs give companies an easy way to share documents, collaborate on projects, and communicate with entire teams, you still need at least 2-3 apps on your tablet to use these services. MightyTeams rolls several collaboration services into one app, letting you share files, work on documents between teams, message team members, and hold conference calls in one interface.

MightyMeetings previously released an app of the same name which focused on presentations via video and PowerPoint and attracted customers from the pharmaceutical, manufacturing, and financial services industries. The new application, available online and for iOS and Android devices, focuses on collaboration between employees includes features such as microblogging, group messaging, voice conferencing, and file sharing. Each service is something you’d find in a stand-alone app. For example, Yammer is a enterprise social network that includes activity streaming and microblogging, and Skype offers group messaging and video calls.

MightyMeetings isn’t the only company to release an app like this. Veeva Systems has released similar software-as-a-service applications to enable companies to work on projects together. Veeva’s Vault service, for example, facilitates file sharing and project cooperation. Veeva’s products are primarily aimed at the pharmaceutical sales industry.

MightyTeams will be available Tuesday, Feb. 21 in the Apple App Store and the Android Market. It can also be accessed with any browser. The app will cost you a subscription fee of $4.99 per month, but current MightyMeetings members can get it for free.

Credit cards are moving away from magnetic strips to more modern, no-contact technology. Now, with radio frequency identification (RFID) chips or near-field communication (NFC) cards, you can just wave your credit card in front of a reader to quickly pay for a cup of joe.

However, this ease could open up the doors for a new type of criminal. In theory, shady characters with portable scanners can read the information off your RFID card by getting close enough to you that your card is in their reader’s electromagnetic field. This type of theft hasn’t taken off yet, due to clunky technology and minimal monetary gain (most RFID and NFC cards have low spending caps), but an on/off trick could be a smart preventative step.

Researchers at the Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering are working on a simple new technology that would require customers to place their finger on the card to turn it “on” when they pay. When you place your finger on a specific spot on the card, say a logo or icon, it would complete a circuit and enable readers to charge the card. If the circuit isn’t complete, the card’s NFC or RFID technology would be disabled.

“Our new design integrates an antenna and other electrical circuitry that can be interrupted by a simple switch, like turning off the lights in the home or office,” explains professor Marlin Mickle in a statement. “The RFID or NFC credit card is disabled if left in a pocket or lying on a surface and unreadable by thieves using portable scanners.”

The extra step would take very little time for the customer, and researchers think the technology would be fairly easy and inexpensive for credit card companies to adopt. They recently filed a patent application for the on/off card technology.

Both houses of Congress passed a bill today that could give Americans access to more of the wireless spectrum; however, this access will cost us some free broadcast TV stations.

If you search for some kind of appropriately named piece of legislation like the “Open up more wireless spectrum so my iPhone browser will load faster act”, you won’t find it. That’s because the bill Congress passed was actually an extension of the payroll tax, which essentially lets people keep more of their paycheck by removing some of the standard taxes.

To pay for this extension, Congress needed a new source of income. That’s where the TV spectrum comes in.

The bill is setting up a voluntary auction for the block of spectrum currently reserved for television broadcasts. Many of the owners originally granted a license for their part of the spectrum are getting a pretty good deal; they paid very little money compared to what it’s now worth on the open market.

To give you some kind of understanding of the spectrum’s value, the 2008 auction for wireless spectrum ended up bringing $19.6 billion, with more than $16 billion of that coming from AT&T and Verizon. Verizon is also poised to pick up a large chunk of wireless spectrum from Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House Networks for a cool $3.6 billion (pending approval by the Department of Justice).

So clearly, we’re talking about a lot of money here, of which the U.S. government will get a hefty cut.

Despite the FCC’s countless pleas to make more spectrum available, Congress has mostly neglected to address the issue directly. The payroll tax extension is more or less seen as a way to kill two bird with one stone. And that’s both a good and a bad thing.

The good thing about this auction is wireless carriers will be able to speed up their networks, expand coverage area of high-speed internet to rural areas of the country, and (in turn) create more jobs.

The bad part about this legislation is that it has the potential to sacrifice some the broadcast TV channels that are barely starting to get used by tech companies as a valuable public resource.

For instance, Boxee just launched a Live TV stick, which feeds the HD TV broadcast signal into the company’s Boxee Box set-top box, thus providing owners with a way to both cut the cord and still get some live content like local news and sports. There’s also recent Barry Diller startup Aereo, which uses tiny HD antennas (one per user) to stream the broadcast TV content thru a variety of connected devices.

While I welcome the additional spectrum availability, part of me wonders whether it would have been better for Congress to directly address the issue rather than issuing a voluntary auction to pay an immediate bill like the payroll tax cut extension.

[Via the Washington Post; Gavel photo via ShutterStock]

Rumors have been swirling around that Apple‘s iPad 3 will be outfitted with a coveted high-resolution Retina display.

One of these displays for an iPad 3 unit may have made it into hands outside Apple’s supply chain.

MacRumors allegedly has a Retina display (shown on right) that belongs to the iPad 3, which is still in production. The display measures 9.7 inches, which falls in line with the first and second iPad models.

After inspecting it with a microscope, MacRumors determined that the screen has a resolution twice as good as the current 2048 x 1536-pixel resolution seen on the iPad and iPad 2. The resolution was calculated by looking at pixel swatches taken from the iPad 2 and purported iPad 3 screens. Four pixels from the iPad 2 screen fit inside the swatch, whereas 16 pixels from the new display fit into a swatch of the samesize (shown below).

The iPad 3 is rumored to be released on March 7. It’s also thought to sport a faster processor and graphics chip.

It’s hard to hang your hat on many Apple rumors, particularly after the October iPhone 5 miss, when Apple actually launched the iPhone 4S to many Apple fans’ chagrin. However, the idea that the iPad 3 would have a screen upgrade is not a far-fetched assumption.

Angry Birds has been the major success story of mobile games in the past couple of years with more than 700 million downloads for the game.

For the three people unfamiliar with how the game works, you shoot cute Angry Bird characters via slingshot at some big green pigs who hide in structures that can be crushed by the birds. The game has made its way into emerging markets in a big way and debuted on Facebook this week. No game has grown so quickly and so broadly in the mass market, and Rovio is milking the success as much as it can with everything from movie appearances to plush toys.

The company says Angry Birds Space is “the biggest game launch since the original Angry Birds.” It will include simultaneous launches in mobile gaming, animation, retail, and publishing.

Angry Birds was the fifty-second game created by Rovio. The new space game will have numerous new characters, and players can expect the physics part of the game to be accurate (Vint Cerf would be so pleased). The only exception, of course, is that pigs and birds can’t breathe in space. On top of launching birds at pigs in zero gravity, the game will have a variety of other gameplay elements, including slow-motion, light-speed destruction, and other new features.

Angry Birds seems ready to enhance its worldwide presence even further this year, with this growth across the Facebook community. As it does so, Rovio chief marketing officer Peter Vesterbacka’s dream of building an “integrated entertainment franchise” akin to Disney looks to be getting one step closer.

Here is the teaser trailer:

“As a top manufacturing company in China, the basic salary of junior workers in all of Foxconn’s China factories is already far higher than the minimum wage set by all local governments,” the company’s statement said. “We will provide more training opportunities and learning time, and will continuously enhance technology, efficiency and salary, so as to set a good example for the Chinese manufacturing industry.”

The 1800 yuan works out to around $280 a month. This is the third raise workers have received since the beginning of 2010.

The working conditions at Foxconn came under attack recently in an article from The New York Times. Apple CEO Tim Cook at first responded by calling the reports “offensive” in a letter to employees, which was leaked to the press. But earlier this week, Apple changed its tune, calling for a new series of independent investigation into Foxconn by the Washington D.C. based Fair Labor Association, a group partially funded by Apple.

Those new inspections are already being called into question, however, after the president of the FLA, Auret van Heerden, praised the conditions at Foxconn, saying after only a few days that “facilities are first-class” and “Foxconn is really not a sweatshop.”

“Generally, in a labor rights investigation, the findings come after the evidence is gathered, not the other way around,” Scott Nova, executive director of the Workers Rights Consortium, told The New York Times. “I’m amazed that the F.L.A. would give one of the most notoriously abusive factories in the world a clean bill of health — based, it appears, on nothing more than a guided tour provided by the owner.”

Welcome to another edition of yellow journalism with Julia Angwin of The Wall Street Journal. The reporter who brought you the “What They Know” series has caught Google with its pants down. The WSJ found that Google managed to get temporary tracking cookies assigned to people using Safari on the iPhone and iPad, even though both Apple and Google told consumers that Safari, by default, blocked this kind of activity.

When it was informed of this story, Google changed its approach and deleted text from its website, making it look very guilty.

At the risk of being seen as an apologist for the culture of tracking — the dark side of the web supported by advertising (that’s how Google pays the bills, remember) — this story glosses over a lot of important details in its rush to judgement. The first paragraph declares Google “tricked” Apple’s software into letting it track users, which sounds pretty dark.

John Battelle, a journalist and founder of Federated Media, has an interesting take on this: “Google and many others have figured out ways to get around Apple’s default settings on Safari in iOS — the only browser that comes with iOS, a browser that, in my experience, has never asked me what kind of privacy settings I wanted, nor did it ask if I wanted to share my data with anyone else (I do, it turns out, for any number of perfectly good reasons). Apple assumes that I agree with Apple’s point of view on ‘privacy,’ which, I must say, is ridiculous on its face, because the idea of a large corporation (Apple is the largest, in fact) determining in advance what I might want to do with my data is pretty much the opposite of privacy.”

Oh, and here’s another interesting tidbit. There appears to be two versions of this story floating around on the WSJ website. The story currently causing an uproar is co-bylined by Julia Angwin and Jennifer Valentino-Devries. There is another piece by Valentino-DeVries that covers the exact same material, but dives into more technical detail. The last paragraph of that story reads, “An update to the software that underlies Safari has closed the loophole that allows cookies to be set after the automatic submission of invisible forms. Future public versions of Safari could incorporate that update. The people who handled the proposed change, according to software documents: two engineers at Google.”

That update took place seven months ago.

At Google, one hand often doesn’t know what the other is doing. While the advertising team was exploiting a loophole to get tracking cookies in Safari, another set of Google engineers was closing the loophole. That seems like a fact worth mentioning, especially since it squashed this bug in Safari’s settings more than half-a-year before this story came out.

Cookie Monster via Flickr user bsabarnowl

Discovered in 2008, nomophobia is defined as the fear of being out of mobile phone contact. When first studied, the phenomenon afflicted 53 percent of respondents. Now, that number has grown to 66 percent, according to a survey conducted by SecurEnvoy, a mobile security service.

Between the genders, women suffer more; 71 percent compared to 61 percent of men. But, men are much more likely to have two phones — compensating for their phobia by having a backup phone. Younger populations are more susceptible too; 77% of 18 to 24 year olds survey takers related to nomophobia.

You have to take these findings with a grain of salt, especially since they come from a mobile security company. But this type of behavior is becoming common. Most of us know at least one person who constantly has their phone by their side. MTV’s real-life documentary series “True Life” even ran an episode about people addicted to text messaging.

Other technology phobias exist too. You can be technophobic (fearful of all advanced technology), ipovlopsychophobic (fear of having your picture taken), or suffer from logizomechanophobia (the fear of computers). There is an opposite of nomophobia too, its called telephonophobia and if you suffer, you are terrified of talking on the phone.

Part of me wants to say that I’ll believe nomophobia exists when I see it in the DSM V, but part of me understands that people suffer from this daily. Excuse me while I go obsessively check my phone to make sure I haven’t lost my signal and my battery is still strong.

Women with phone addiction image via Shutterstock

A Chinese court is leaning in favor of Apple in a convoluted case over who holds the right to use the term “iPad” in that country.

Chinese manufacturer Proview Technology had owned the trademark, but it failed to transfer the trademarks for “iPad” to Apple, which claimed to have purchased the product name years ago.

“We bought Proview’s worldwide rights to the iPad trademark in 10 different countries several years ago,” according to a statement from Apple. “Proview refuses to honor their agreement with Apple, and a Hong Kong court has sided with Apple in this matter.”

Proview Technology says it has owned the trademark since 2001, but Apple says it made a deal to buy the trademark before the iPad was ever released.

Proview has locations in Taiwan, Shenzhen, Wuhan, Hong Kong and Europe, with its Taiwan office acting as Proview Electronics, an affiliate of Proview. The company says Apple bought the trademark from its Taiwan entity. Since the patent belongs to the Shenzhen office, Proview did not feel the need to honor the agreement.

Judge Hon Poon of the High Court in Hong Kong, however, formally disagreed with that assessment.

All Proview’s entities are run by Yang Rongshan, who was the chairman and chief executive of the company until it went bankrupt in August 2010.

According to court documents, the deal between Apple and Proview occured in December 2009, with the “iPad” moniker selling for around $55,000. Apple says it was led to believe all of the Chinese trademarks for “iPad” existed with Proview Electronics, the Taiwanese entity, as proprieter and thus were due the transfer of ownership.

When the iPad was released, Apple found that some of the trademarks existed under Proview Shenzhen and reported it as a “mistake,” after which Proview demanded Apple pay $10 million for the trademark. China Daily reports a lawyer for Proview suggested that Apple either pay the sum requested by Proview or find another name for the iPad.

The financial clues leading up to Proview’s bankruptcy emerged, including a stop on the sale of its stock on the Hong Kong stock exchange. And since all the Proview entities existed under Yang Rongshan, Judge Poon called foul:

“Here, the conduct of all the defendants demonstrate that they have combined together with the common intention of injuring Apple and IP Application by acting in breach of the Agreement. Proview Holdings, Proview Electronics and Proview Shenzhen, all clearly under Yang’s control, have refused to take any steps to ensure compliance with the Agreement so that the China Trademarks are properly assigned or transferred to IP Application (Apple’s third party trademark purchaser). Instead, they attempted to exploit the situation as a business opportunity for the Proview Group by seeking an amount of $10,000,000 from Apple.”

He went on to say, “It is plain the defendants had the necessary intent to injure Apple.. and their conduct will cause damage to them. Accordingly, I am satisfied that there is clearly a serious question to be tried for the claim of conspiracy.”

hat tip All Things D

Apple has altered the terms of its iAd agreements in a way that both developers and potential deep-pocket advertisers should find favorable, an Apple spokesperson told VentureBeat today.

iAd is Apple’s mobile advertising network. It places ad spots into iOS apps to generate revenue for the app’s developer.

Apple launched iAd back in June 2010, initially offering developers a 60 percent cut of the ad revenue generated. The company also initially required would-be advertisers to spend a minimum of $1 million per campaign, which was done to ensure that ads on the network were both high quality as well as lucrative for all parties involved. (In other words, no teeth whitening advertisements or click scams.)

Unfortunately for Apple, advertisers weren’t biting, as VentureBeat reported in December.

Yesterday, however, Apple announced new terms for iAd, which included giving developers an additional 10 percent cut of the revenue and lowering the minimum cost of an iAd campaign to $100,000 for potential advertisers, the company has confirmed. Apple said it listened to industry feedback from ad agencies, brands, and developers when restructuring the new terms.

The changes will go into effect April 1, 2012.

Apple said it’s hopeful the revised iAd terms will spark a renewed interest from developers. The new 70/30 percent revenue split Apple is offering is in line with the industry standards, so there’s a good chance more developers will be willing to deploy the company’s ad network on to their iOS apps.

Also, a greater number of advertisers are likely to do business with iAd now that the minimum commitment for a campaign is significantly lower.

We’re guessing the $100,000 minimum is still higher than many other competing mobile ad networks in terms of barrier to entry. However, Apple is attempting to push iAds as a better service and product much in the same way people feel justified in spending a little more money on Apple computers.

With more than 550,000 apps on the App Store and 315 million iOS devices sold, the iAds audience should catch the attention of potential advertisers.