The promised connected pajamas failed to make an appearance at Mobile World Congress, while many of the touted devices in GSMA's Connected House exhibit -- such as the vending machine you can interact with on Facebook -- failed to impress. But beyond the gimmicks was an undercurrent of serious innovation around the Internet of things.
Ericsson(s eric) and AT&T (s t) both tried to answer the question of how our future connected devices will communicate with each other as well as humans.
Updated: Microsoft Azure went down Monday night and stayed down for hours. That news comes as Microsoft(s MSFT) is trying to pitch two-year-old Azure as a safe and reliable platform for consumer and business applications.
As first reported by The Register, which cited Microsoft's service page, Azure's service management system started acting up just before 6 p.m. Pacific time, and the problem persisted for at least 12 hours.
Voice search on mobiles is becoming all the rage, and the folks behind the popular Dolphin Browser are adding more voice functionality in their latest version. Dolphin Sonar is part of the 7.4 release of Dolphin Browser for Android(s goog), making it easy to search the web, share links or open specific web apps and pages by speaking.
by Ella Ide
VICTORIA — Passengers, including 13 Canadians, faced a third day without power and hot food on a stricken Costa cruise ship in the sweltering Indian Ocean on Wednesday, as helicopters airlifted fresh bread to the liner.
Towed by a fishing boat and guarded by coast guard vessels in the pirate-infested Indian Ocean, the Costa Allegra was carrying passengers who prepared to spend a third night on the vessel since an engine fire knocked out power on Monday.
Facebook is giving brands and organizations new tools to manage the way they interact with users on the social network, with updated Pages that will provide a better visual experience to users and advanced administrative tools for responding to user messages.
The new Facebook Pages include many of the same elements that individual users have: They include a large cover photo, a smaller profile photo and apps with photos, videos and places.
With more than 550,000 apps, finding the right app in Apple's App Store (s aapl) can be a challenge for some. Though the App Store is still ahead of rival Android Market (s goog) in discovery features, Apple clearly sees a need to ramp up and improve the way it helps consumers pick through its growing collection of apps. That's what's behind the acquisition Thursday of Chomp, an app discovery engine that helps users search for apps on iPhone, iPad and Android devices.
Updated: Box is enhancing the Android clients for its cloud-based storage service in a plan that makes Android first among equals in smartphone and tablet OSes.
Box, formerly known as Box.net, is one of several companies -- including fan-favorite Dropbox as well as Microsoft(s msft), and Google(s goog) -- competing to store your digital paraphernalia -- Word documents, presentations, photographs, whatever -- in the cloud and make it accessible from your devices of choice.
