Gene Munster—yes the iTV guy—is out with a new report today looking at the state of Siri's ability to accurately answer and respond to queries. The Piper Jaffray analyst regularly assesses the accuracy of Apple's digital assistant.
In his latest look, Munster found that Siri has continued to improve with the release of iOS 7, particularly in its ability to properly interpret questions being asked and its overall performance when accessed in noisier situations...
The search monster Google today updated its free Drive for iPhone and iPad app with the much-needed ability to sort your cloud files according to several built-in criteria. The highly requested feature finally makes it easy to access your files by last edited, last modified, title and last opened by you. Additionally, you can also find and replace in documents.
I switched from the native Microsoft Office apps to Google Docs years ago and never looked back. Google's suite of cloud productivity apps has won me over with its ability to access, edit and share my stuff on any network-enabled computer, right in a web browser, without having to install anything...
In the past year or so, Yahoo's been bolstering up its video and rich content expertise by acquiring smaller startups left and right. The company kicked off the acquisition spree by buying the mobile news startup Summly for $30 million and the #2 blogging platform Tumblr for north of $1 billion. Soon after, Yahoo paid $50 million for the cool iPhone video app, Qwiki.
In the ensuing months, Yahoo snapped up the DreamWorks-funded video-sharing app Ptch and announced that the New York Times technology columnist David Pogue and American television journalist Katie Couric are joining its A-team of premium content producers.
Today, it was reported that Yahoo in another acqui-hire move bought the cross-platform video startup called QuikIO...
Good news Family Guy fans. The San Francisco-based game studio TinyCo has just announced that it has teamed up with Fox Digital Entertainment to build an official mobile game for the popular TV show, which first debuted back in 1999.
Headed to Android and iOS in 2014, the title is said to feature an original story based on the show's 212 episodes. Fox says that in the game, players will adventure throughout the city of Quahog, recruiting and confronting popular characters...
iBeacons, an Apple indoor positioning system based on Low Energy Bluetooth 4.0 (BLE) wireless technology packed inside tiny transmitters, seems to be picking up steam as of recently. Although Apple never conceived iBeacons technology to be platform-dependent, current installations are limited to sending push notifications right to the Lock screen of nearby iPhone, iPod touch or iPad devices.
These alerts use a combination of physical location, activity, time and personal interests and typically include various marketing messages, such as store discounts, freebies and so forth.
Surprisingly enough, Apple's supplier Qualcomm has now entered the game with the Gimbal, its own iBeacons-compatible platform which promises to bring location sensing to a micro-location level at an affordable price...
Episode 006: We talk about some of the best photo and weather apps from 2013, Sebastien installs new RAM in his iMac, Jeff and Cody debate heavily over Touch ID accuracy issues. The crew discusses iOS 7's sparse design details, frequent crashing issues, and Apple's new App Store milestone.
The Google Play Books app has received a nice update this morning which lets you search through the contents of scanned pages.
If you've used the Google Books service before, you know that the Internet giant supports a variety of book formats, including those with free-flowing text, scanned pages or even a combination of both.
Unlike the regular text which can be copied and pasted, scanned pages are regular images. Therefore, to make searching of scanned pages possible some sort of an optical character recognition (OCR) feature needs to run either on the device itself or on the server.
That's exactly what this Google Play Books update does for you...
Flint is a nice little mobile payment service that lets anyone easily accept and process credit cards on the go.
The service provides an interesting alternative to the likes of PayPal (which revamped its iOS app and just launched a digital gift cards shop) and Square (which just redesigned its credit card dongle).
Flint is cross-platform and fees start at just 1.95 percent.
Today, the company has refreshed its free iPhone application with notable new capabilities, like the ability to scan and redeem coupons using your iPhone's built-in iSight camera. Flint Mobile version 2.0 also lets you create invoices within the app and supports loyalty coupons in the form of Passbook passes...
In another move meant to capitalize on the success of its free iTunes Radio streaming-music service, Apple's hired a top radio exec as the company preps to offer iTunes Radio to advertisers in 2014 and take the service international, AdAge claims.
Former Cumulus Media Executive Vice President of Sales, Michael Pallad, has now joined Tim Cook & Co. and is now overseeing ad sales for iTunes Radio internationally, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke to AdAge. He will report into the iAd unit, which is led by Apple Vice President and former Yahoo exec Todd Teresi...
Following reports last week indicating that Apple's iPhone 5s has finally achieved 100 percent availability across Apple's retail stores in the United States, the online Apple Store on Tuesday has updated its shipping times as well.
Web orders for the device are now shipping in 24 hours, another sign that Apple and its suppliers have fully caught up with demand, which is always good news with the Christmas shopping frenzy upon us.
All iPhone 5s models are now being advertised as available to ship within 24 hours, regardless of capacity, color or carrier...
VLC, the free cross-platform desktop media player, has been through some turmoil as VideoLan, which manages the project, has undergone reorganization as the multinational development team now spans twenty nations.
The open source media player made its App Store debut back in October 2010 as one of the first iPhone apps that could render media file formats unsupported by iTunes and iOS. Unfortunately, the app got pulled in January 2011 over licensing issues.
The problems came down to the GNU General Public License (GLP) requirements as developer Rémi Denis-Courmont, lead contributor to the VLC project, filed a licensing claim based on the code he had contributed to the project.
Following a two-year hiatus, VLC made its way back into the App Store earlier this summer (you can download it for free). And today, VideoLan has pushed an update to VLC for Mac and Windows desktops, bringing a lot of fixes and a cool experimental decoding of media files in HEVC and WebM/VP9 file formats...
The nation's top wireless carrier, Verizon Wireless, last month admitted its strained network in major cities such as New York, San Francisco and Chicago was underperforming, with many users experiencing their 4G data throughput dropping to slower 3G speeds.
Verizon yesterday blamed the sub-par network quality on “capacity constraints” and argued these data throughput hiccups are now a thing of the past as the carrier has successfully fixed its network in New York City...