Customers with Sky Broadband might find their speeds crawling northward toward the end of the year. The broadcaster is paying Virgin Media’s business arm £49 million ($74 million) for some of Richard Branson Liberty Global’s deliciously fast fiber infrastructure. While there’s no mention of BT, we wouldn’t be surprised if this technological makeover was prompted by its corporate rival’s recent assault on Sky’s sporty golden goose.
Filed under: Networking, Internet, HD
Via: The Next Web
Sure, Evernote is great for jotting down recipes and syncing notes to the cloud, but users lacking in the memory department still had to rely on external alarm apps to remind them of their to-do lists. That all ends today with the introduction of Evernote’s Reminders feature for Mac, iOS and web applications. Simply tap the alarm clock icon on each note and set the desired date and time you want to be reminded of it. You’ll then get an in-app alarm or an email reminder sent to you if you’ve set it up that way. That particular notebook will also now have a Reminders section on top to help you keep track of your various projects. Sadly, there’s no word on an Android implementation just yet — perhaps we should ask Evernote to set a Reminder for that.
Filed under: Internet, Software
Source: Evernote
With Hong Kong boasting pretty much the fastest average internet speed on this planet, it’s no surprise that the city is also one of the first to launch commercial 150 Mbps LTE Cat 4 service — just right after SingTel’s launch in Singapore earlier this month. Announced yesterday by CSL (who operates both one2free and the more premium 1010), its FD-LTE network takes advantage of the recently acquired 5MHz extended spectrum, in order to increase the capacity of 2600MHz from 2 x 15MHz to 2 x 20MHz. This upgrade is what enables Cat 4 download speed of up to 150Mbps on compatible devices, and it went live yesterday.
The company’s 1800MHz spectrum will also get an upgrade from 2 x 10MHz to 2 x 15MHz in June, followed by another jump to 2 x 20MHz towards the end of the year. You’ll find a live demo video (courtesy of RingHK) showing the performance difference between Cat 3 and Cat 4 after the break, with CTO Christian Daigneault claiming he’s seen a speed increase of up to twice as fast in the lab.
Filed under: Wireless
Source: Engadget Chinese, RingHK (Chinese), Huawei
MediaFire says its cloud storage service now has 30 million users, but it seems that only a minority of those are using its Android or iOS interfaces — so far, the former has seen less than 500,000 downloads. One extra feature that might boost the utility of these is the forthcoming addition of media streaming, to help MediaFire compete with likes of Amazon Cloud Player — and with the added draw of 50GB free lifetime storage (or a time-limited offer of $24.99 annually for 100GB). There’s no sign of the app update on either platform just yet, but it’ll get there when it gets there.
Filed under: Cellphones, Portable Audio/Video, Tablets, Storage, Internet, Software, Mobile
Source: Google Play, iTunes
Twitter Cards are meant to enhance a user’s — er, advertiser’s — tweets with relevant links and photo previews. Three such cards currently exist, but today the social network introduced a new one: the Lead Generation Card (marketing speak, much?), which essentially lets users accept discounts and provide the required personal information directly from a business’ tweet. The feature is located within a brand’s expanded tweet: you simply click a button, and your email address and handle are passed along. Essentially, it’s autofill for Twitter, which you’ll either love or hate. For its part, the site says this feature simplifies the user experience, and it promises your personal info is sent directly and securely to the company you’ve specified. Currently, a few brands are beta-testing the card, and Twitter says a global launch is soon to follow.
Filed under: Internet
Source: Twitter Advertising Blog
Google Ventures has a reputation for backing tech winners early on — it gave a boost to this little startup called Nest, for example. It wants to exert influence every step of the way, however, and it’s launching Google Capital to make this happen. The new fund is investing in firms that aren’t quite so young, but are doing “amazing things” aligned with Google’s interests, according to general partner Mike Pearson. While Google Capital won’t make its formal debut until the summer, it has already invested in three unnamed companies; we wouldn’t be surprised if we learn a lot more about the fund a few months’ time.
Source: PCWorld
Unless you’ve been living under a proverbial rock, you’ve at least a passing familiarity with Twitter’s #Music service, and today the platform given us another reason to check it out, thanks to the addition of genre charts. When #Music launched a month ago, it provided the means to discover and hear tunes from popular, emerging and suggested artists along with those you and your friends follow. Now those discovery pages have been expanded to include ten musical genre charts (country, hip-hop, rock, etc.), plus five additional charts titled Superstars, Popular, Emerging, Unearthed and Hunted.
The Superstar and Popular charts display the most popular songs and new music that’s trending, while Emerging and Unearthed are two avenues for finding lesser-known songs and artists. Finally, the Hunted chart displays music that’s currently popular in the blogosphere. So, people of Twitter, go forth, use these new charts and find your musical bliss, but only on the web, ’cause the iOS app is without them… for now.
Filed under: Internet
Via: TechCrunch
Source: Twitter #Music
Music streamers on Rdio for iOS are used to getting novel features quite often — but hey, as they say, the more the merrier, right? Keeping up with that tradition, Rdio announced earlier today it’s introducing a few new tidbits to the application with version 2.2. Most notably, the app will now allow users to quickly find friends and artists via a new feature dubbed — appropriately, no less — Find People. Building up on the search improvements, Rdio’s also added an option to easily discover a record label’s top musicians and albums, which is, in part, made possible by a number of UI enhancements (like a revamped navigation menu) that were also included in this release. All that sound good? Then you shall wait no more; the goods can be found at our source, or you could always download straight from your iOS device.
Filed under: Portable Audio/Video, Internet, Software
Source: App Store
It’s certainly been a long time coming, but the latest version (2.2.1) of Twitter for Mac finally brings support for Notification Center in OS X Mountain Lion. Aside from the side-pane pings for your @replies and DMs, a number of fixes have been implemented that should stabilize your experience some more. Most notably, Growl users on Lion and Mountain Lion can enjoy receiving notifications again. The update is available directly from the Mac App Store right now, so hit the source link if you’re interested.
Filed under: Internet, Software
Via: 9to5Mac
Source: Mac App Store
Instead of waiting until the end of the year for Google’s annual Zeitgeist, you can now find out what’s trending in any given month with a new Top Charts feature from Google Trends. Updated monthly and going back to 2004, Top Charts is built on the Knowledge Graph, so it’s smart enough to house related keywords under one term for more accurate rankings. For example, searches for “giants baseball” and “sf giants” would go toward pushing “San Francisco Giants” up the ranks in a sports-related chart. Right now there are more than 40 top ten lists with more than 140 time periods available for your perusal. In addition to the charts, the Trends team has also rolled out a new visualization tool for “hot searches” that displays trending topics in a large colorful layout — as seen below, you can customize it to display up to 25 searches at a time that endlessly shift and refresh, thus consuming our attention for the entire day.
Source: Official Google Blog
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