Tim Conneally

Google on Monday unveiled a new service called Hotpot which marries Google Places with Google Profiles to try to provide more accurate recommendations when searching for physical destinations such as local restaurants and businesses.

Users of the new service are encouraged to use their Google Profile to rate and review businesses they've had experience with. These reviews then serve two main purposes: to strengthen the database of Google Places reviews, and to build a profile of what the user likes and dislikes to help Google learn what to suggest to him in the future.

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After a long battle for its place as a native iPhone app, Google Voice is finally available in the iTunes App Store.

Google today announced that Google Voice for iPhone is now available in Apple's App Store, compatible with iPhones running iOS 3.1+ in the United States only.

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Mobile network operators AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and T-Mobile USA today announced they have joined forces in a new venture called Isis, a commerce network based upon so-called "wallet phones."

The idea is that a user's smartphone is equipped with a near-field communication (NFC) chip encoded with their banking information, and exchanging money is as quick as swiping your phone over an NFC reader. These types of devices have been in use in Japan for more than six years, and have been extensively tested in the United States by the likes of MasterCard, Citigroup, Nokia, AT&T, and Visa, but this is the first time such a unified move by network operators has been made in the space.

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Popular social networking site Facebook today announced it is rolling out a whole new messaging system over the next few months that "isn't just e-mail," but integrates four common ways users communicate: email, Facebook messages and chat, and SMS, and archives it all in a single thread.

The new system puts a user's identity above the communication protocol. Facebook Engineer Joel Seligstein today said, "You decide how you want to talk to your friends...They will receive your message through whatever medium or device is convenient for them, and you can both have a conversation in real time. You shouldn't have to remember who prefers IM over email or worry about which technology to use. Simply choose their name and type a message."

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SkyTerra 1, the communications satellite that will be a part of LightSquared's hybrid satellite/terrestrial mobile network, successfully launched into orbit yesterday afternoon, LightSquared announced this morning.

The satellite launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 12:30 yesterday afternoon, and established its first connection with ground-based communications approximately nine hours later.

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On Monday, the front page of Apple.com changed into a full-page message that teases an "exciting announcement from iTunes" at 10am EST tomorrow, November 16.

ITunes has received a significant number of updates since version 10 of
the popular cross-platform music software debuted in September. A major addition to the newest iTunes was Ping, a social music sharing service. Last week, popular microblogging service Twitter announced it had partnered with Apple to bring iTunes to Twitter via Ping, and last Friday Apple released the 10.1 iTunes update to coincide with the launch of iOS 4.2.

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WiMAX network operator Clearwire is in arbitration talks with its majority shareholder Sprint, an SEC filing from Clearwire revealed today. The two companies are in dispute over dual-mode WiMAX phones such as the HTC EVO 4G and the Samsung Epic and the wholesale charges they incur.

"We have been engaged in ongoing negotiations with Sprint to resolve issues related to wholesale pricing for Sprint 4G smartphone usage under our commercial agreements with Sprint." The filing says. "On October 29, 2010, we received a notice from Sprint initiating an arbitration process to resolve these issues. The process is in the early stages, and its outcome is unknown."

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When Google officially integrates its own Web services into Android and Chrome, the products usually work well and are always worth at least a look by users of those platforms. Yesterday, Google announced new official Chrome extensions for Calendar, Google Docs, and YouTube which offer new, but somewhat limited, first-party features to Chrome.

The Google Calendar extension lets users click add events to their Google Calendars from their Chrome toolbar. This extension works in a couple of ways: users can add events from scratch, or they can import event information presented in the hCalendar microformat or some of its derivitaves like hResume. So if an event on Facebook or Evite is compatible with the extension, a green plus sign will appear that users can click and automatically import the event data in their calendar.

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Ping, the social music service introduced as a part of iTunes 10 in September, can now be linked with Twitter, the popular microblogging service announced Thursday.

Starting today, Ping users can connect their iTunes Ping account to their Twitter account and share their listening activity in their Twitter feed. Tweets sent from Ping include the album and artist information, album cover, song preview, and a link to the iTunes store to buy the music mentioned.

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Mozilla Wednesday released a significant update to the beta of its Firefox 4 browser. The update adds a new JavaScript JIT compiler, going by the name of JägerMonkey, and improves the browser's support for hardware acceleration, OpenType fonts, and WebGL 3D graphics (the technology used to create an HTML5 version of Quake II back in April.)

Additionally, the latest beta includes a stable add-ons API, so developers can finally update their add-ons to Firefox 4.

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For years, Industry researchers have been saying that the drop in price for pocketable technology will cause more people to switch from simple "voice and text" phones to sophisticated smartphones. Now, after four years of smartphone sales growth in the neighborhood of 30-50% per annum (source: IDC, Gartner, ABI research) an explosion in smartphone sales is now taking place. However, in emerging markets, it's a different story.

Market analysts at Gartner Inc. today published their worldwide mobile phone sales numbers for the third quarter of 2010; and smartphones, which includes BlackBerry, iPhone, Android, Symbian, and Windows Phone devices, has grown 96% since the third quarter of 2009. These results sync very closely with the shipment figures published by IDC last week, which tracked an 89.5% annual growth in the number of smartphone shipped to retailers.

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For the last 72 hours, reviews of a new browser called RockMelt have been turning up all over my feeds, and now that the initial hype of the limited beta is dying down, I thought I'd unlock my tongue and talk about it.

Betanews readers have proven time and again to be die-hard browser connoisseurs, and after spending a day playing with the beta of Chromium-based RockMelt, I almost didn't want to write about it. The entire browser, from its concept to its code, is pretty contrived.

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Amazon on Tuesday announced it will begin paying 70% royalties to magazine and newspaper publishers who release their periodicals on the Amazon Kindle starting in December. The move follows a similar royalty increase Amazon made in June, when the company began offering a 70% option for books published through its Digital Text Platform (DTP.)

Coincidentally, the company today launched the Beta of the Kindle Publishing for Periodicals tool, which is similar to DTP, but lets publishers add content and preview Kindle formatting prior to making their titles available on the E-reader.

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Google on Tuesday announced yet another upgrade to its search results pages intended to provide more information so that users don't haphazardly click away: Instant Previews. These previews are as simple as a small magnifying glass icon next to a search result, which users can click upon to see a visual snapshot of the linked site. These snapshots may also include search terms highlighted in orange where they appear in the resulting page. That's about it.

It's an understandable concept, and Google said on Tuesday that the feature increased users' satisfaction with search results by about 5% in internal testing.

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Samsung today announced a new Galaxy S smartphone called the Continuum, which adds a secondary "ticker" screen beneath the main one, that can be activated simply by gripping the phone.

Not unlike Barnes & Noble's first generation Nook e-reader, there's a 1.8" almost-always-on touch panel mounted beneath the Continuum's 3.7" Super AMOLED screen. The ticker screen can be used to show RSS updates, incoming and missed messages, be used to launch widgets, or control calling and media player functions while the main screen is turned off.

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