Android – Iphone – Applications

Sayonara i-Mate, it was nice knowing you. The mobile phone company that built Windows Mobile smartphones has closed their doors for good. Around March 2008 i-Mate laid off their entire staff in the U.S. and yesterday all the employees at the Dubai Internet City location were told that the company will have to shut down indefinitely. i-Mate was delisted from all of the stock markets already. The company shut down in the midst of shipping the i-Mate 810-F mobile phone (pictured above).

Initially the employees at the Dubain Internet City office were told to take a two month unpaid leave and then one day later they were told the company was shutting down. The company was unable to make deliveries or do any sort of business. The 810-F device was launched this past February. One retailer was expecting a delivery of the phones, but they never showed up. Now we know why. The company tried to restructure management a few months ago along with sales channels and distribution, but clearly all efforts have failed.

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AOL bought Third Screen Media, a mobile advertising company in February 2007. The price was not disclosed, but rumor has it that they paid about $80 million. Third Screen Media was rolled into AOL’s Platform-A division, the same unit that runs Advertising.com and PubAccess. Now there is another rumor floating around that Third Screen Media is not making as much money as they had hoped so they’ll end up scaling back the service or shut it down completely.

Rather than focusing on brokering advertising on mobile devices, AOL has strength in building mobile content. According to Silicon Alley Insider, they have heard from mobile industry insiders that AOL is not renewing deals with publishers. AOL is losing customers and is focusing more on internal properties. Many Third Screen Media employees have also supposedly been applying to other jobs.

Before being acquired by AOL, Third Screen Media raised $8 million from TD Capital Ventures and Blue Chip Venture Company. During the time of the acquisition, Microsoft was rumored to be involved with bidding for Third Media also.

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Microsoft Corporation co-founder Paul Allen founded another company called Vulcan Spectrum LLC. In an auction by the FCC in December 2007, Vulcan Spectrum bought 700MHz spectrum space. But now he decided to sell a large chunk of the spectrum to AT&T, more specifically in sections of Oregon and Washington. AT&T is not disclosing the financial details about the transaction, but AT&T spokesman Michael Coe revealed that the company is making the purchase to meet customer demand and support the transition to LTE.

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The Whuffie Bank is a new non-profit service focused on rewarding people for social media participation. The business model of The Whuffie Bank was inspired by Creative Commons. One of the fundamental flaws of Creative Commons contributors is that a lot of them are not financially rewarded. The Whuffie Bank wants to offer Twitter retweeters and Facebook users that share content virtual or physical goods for their efforts. The more Whuffies you have in your bank, the bigger the prizes you receive.

The Whuffie Bank will monitor how many people retweet your content and how many people “like” your Facebook links. Whuffie Bank will also monitor your comments on various blog posts. The Whuffie Bank’s algorithm will also monitor who retweets or likes your Facebook links to make sure they are not spam bots. The Whuffie Bank will also allow you to reward Whuffies to others as payment for services.

The term Whuffie was coined by author Cory Doctorow. The Whuffie Bank was started by Santiago Siri, Martin Añazco, Martin Conte Mac Donell, Diego Meller, and Emiliano Kargieman. The Whuffie Bank is based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The Whuffie Bank demonstrated their service at the TechCrunch50 conference.

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As you may recall, the Google Voice and Google Latitude applications were never accepted into the Apple App Store. Tensions rose between both companies ever since and Google CEO Eric Schmidt stepped down from the Apple Board of Directors.  Even the FCC probed into the reasoning behind why the applications were never approved.  The FCC sent letters to AT&T, Google, and Apple.  Apple made their letters public, but Google asked the FCC to keep their responses confidential…. until today.

Google just made the letter public about why Apple never accepted their applications.  Before Google asked the FCC to keep Question #2 private.  Below is Google’s answer to that question.  The letter was made public Richard Whitt of the Washington Telecom and Media Counsel.

written by admin \\ tags: appleiphone, asked-question, ipod touch, ipodtouch, red bull, redbull