Week 10 Tech News

AT&T makes major changes to iPhone, iPad data plans

By Charles Starrett

Senior Editor, iLounge
Published: Wednesday, June 2, 2010
News Category: iPad, iPhone

AT&T has announced that it is making several major changes to its data plan offerings, including those for the iPhone and iPad, as well as giving a concrete timeframe for its iPhone tethering launch. The single $30 unlimited iPhone data plan will be replaced by a pair of options: DataPlus, which offers 200MB of data for $15 per month, and DataPro, which provides 2GB of data for $25. Should a customer exceed their data limit, they will receive either an extra 200MB of data for $15 on DataPlus plans or an extra 1GB of data for $10 on DataPro plans. Similar changes will be made to the company’s iPad data offerings, with the $30 unlimited plan being replaced by the new $25 for 2GB a month plan. All of the data plans offer free access to more than 20,000 AT&T Wi-Fi Hot Spots as well. Finally, AT&T will be offering iPhone tethering to customers on DataPro plans for an extra $20 per month; the feature will be available when iPhone OS 4.0 is released. Current customers are not required to switch to the new plans but can do so if they wish without extending their contracts; the plans will be available beginning June 7.

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Week 9 Tech News

May 24, 2010 4:00 AM PDT

WebM and Google's Web-video plan (FAQ)

by Stephen Shankland

Share9 

Google, trying step by step to rebuild everything in the computing industry from Internet protocols to cloud-computing services, began a new project called WebM on Wednesday that seeks to begin a new chapter in Web video.

Even after Google's high-profile WebM announcement at its Google I/O conference, there's plenty of confusion, and some questions concerning the technology can't be answered yet. Here, however, is our attempt to demystify WebM and its effects.

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Week 8 Tech Post

Google Wave officially available to all

Google has announced that it has officially opened up its Google Wave service to everyone.
Instead of waiting for an invite, users can now access the service straight from the Google homepage.
Google had said back in 2009, that it wanted to make the service available to all by the end of 2010 so it looks like it is ahead of schedule.

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Week 7 Tech News

What's the bug up Apple's @$$?

By David Goldman, staff writerMay 17, 2010: 9:43 AM ET

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Seriously, what's gotten into Apple?
For the past decade of Steve Jobs' second go-around as CEO at Apple, the company has secured a strong following of loyal customers by playing the role of the David in a world of tech Goliaths. You can see it in the famous Mac vs. PC ads: Apple is the everyman, and its competitor (Microsoft) is the stuffy, out-of-touch "Man."

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Week 6 Tech News

A technology created to track political violence in Kenya with social media is now being used to log the effects of the oil spill on the Gulf Coast. Witnesses’ texts, tweets and e-mail messages generate the rainbow of dots on a map and database of spill-related damage at the Louisiana Bucket Brigade’s Web site.






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Week 5 Tech News

For the first time, marketers spent more in 2009 on Internet advertising than in magazines, according to a report from ZenithOptimedia, which said online ad spending would rapidly close ground on newspapers. Despite a record-setting $6.3 billion fourth quarter, online advertising revenue declined 3.4 percent for the year from 2008, the first year-over-year falloff since 2002. The loss in ad spending across all media was an even steeper 12.3 percent for the year and 2 percent for the fourth quarter.

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Week 4 Tech Post. Companies Slowly Join Cloud-Computing

Companies Slowly Join Cloud-Computing

SAN FRANCISCO — This year, Netflix made what looked like a peculiar choice: the DVD-by-mail company decided that over the next two years, it would move most of its Web technology — customer movie queues, search tools and the like — over to the computer servers of one of its chief rivals, Amazon.com.




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Second Life

I went to the Second Life website and was kind of blown away, it is amazing. The concept that you can be someone else and connect with other people is wonderful. I thought that the graphics are great and the scenery was beautiful. I think that Second Life would be a great tool to connect with people and to find out about things that you may not be able to do such as go to different museums and see different places.

Week 3 Tech News

SAN FRANCISCO — Microsoft is trying to hone in on a younger, chatty demographic with two new cellphones centered around social networking.
The phones, the Kin One and Kin Two, allow users to keep in close synch with sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. For example, they have a start menu that displays a montage of photographs from friends and notes about what they’re doing rather than a more traditional menu that caters to phone functions. The Kins also have touch-screens, links to the Zune music service and high-powered cameras that make them well suited to taking photos and videos.

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Week 2 Tech Post

The analysts at Gartner must have been fairly impressed with the Apple iPad because their latest research report predicts that over 50% of the computers purchased for children will have touchscreens by 2015. In this case, Gartner defines children as those under the age of 15 or, as we like to call them, "Generation I." (This is the new, hipper terminology for children of the 2000's once dubbed "Generation Z" or "digital natives.") They're the ones born into a world where computers and cellphones are introduced as baby toys, where the iPod has always existed and where everyone they know can be found on Facebook. And now, it seems, they're going to grow up with computers in an entirely different way, too.

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Week 1 Tech Post

Windows: File Blender is a free and portable interface for more than a half-dozen tools. Drag and drop everything from pictures to music to File Blender and convert it to something new.

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