What a Microsoft smartwatch might look like.
Microsoft is designing a new smartwatch that could allow it to compete with upcoming devices from the likes of Apple, Google, and Samsung, The Wall Street Journal reports. The company has already asked suppliers in Asia to ship components for the device, which will reportedly boast a “touch-enabled” display.
Messaging standards are great! Maybe that’s why we have so many of them.
Don’t look now, but people communicate via the Internet. Whichever company can get the majority of users on their system wins. To quote Newman, the Seinfeld mailman: “When you control the mail, you control… information!”
The reason is that communication is where most of the online eyeballs are. And the network effect factor is overwhelming. (Network effect is: more users make a network more valuable to users, and users want to use networks that are more valuable.)
The carriers want everybody texting. It costs next to nothing to deliver text messages, but carriers can charge a lot and, for some reason, people pay. It’s free money, as far as the carriers are concerned.
Thousands of app makers want you to give up SMS and embrace some app-based communications system. Some work like texting. Others like an intercom system. Many of them are really great, but they’ve got an uphill battle getting everyone to embrace them.
Apple wants to get all OS X and iOS users messaging via iMessage.
Facebook wants to leverage Google’s Android to get everyone embracing Facebook Home.
And Google’s hatching a killer service based on Google+ called Babel. Allegedly.
Facebook Home is now available on Google Play, but only for specific Android devices. The HTC One X, HTC One X+, Samsung Galaxy S III, and Samsung Galaxy Note II are supported. AT&T has also begun preorders for the HTC First, the first (get it?) smartphone to come with Facebook Home preinstalled.
Facebook Home may be launching on just five Android smartphones today — one of which hasn’t even hit stores yet — but one of its new features is now available to everyone. Chat Heads was just added to the Facebook Messenger app, making quicker and easier than ever to reply to messages and switch between conversations.
Police officers in New York now have instant access to a wealth of criminal information on the go thanks to a new Android app. Feed it an address and the app returns the names of every resident with an open warrant, arrest record, or previous summons; the names of residents with orders of protection against them and those who own a gun; and the photographs of every parolee in the building.
