Taiwan's HTC: iPhone's 'quiet' challenger

East Asia is the world's electronics factory, yet unless they are Japanese, producers are anonymous. Now HTC Corp., a Taiwanese maker of smart phones, is moving out of the shadows and trying to establish its own brand name as it competes with Apple's iPhone. HTC supplies major U.S. carriers Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile but says a year ago only one in 10 Americans knew its name. With the help of marketing by cellular carriers and HTC's own television ads during the baseball World Series, HTC says that number is up to 40 percent.

Via Wireless Week

Apple drives another nail into sluggish Sony's coffin

Apple has stolen a march on its rivals again with the new TV and music service Ping, says John Naughton. You have to feel sorry for Sony sometimes. I mean to say, there it was on Wednesday in Berlin, at the IFA consumer electronics show, launching a new music and video download service called Qriocity (it's like "curiosity", only it couldn't get the domain name, I suppose) – and what happens? Steve Jobs goes on stage in San Francisco and announces that Apple is having another go at the TV download business.

Via The Guardian

Town halls 'saving millions by embracing new technology'

Local authorities have embraced new mobile phone, satellite and “location based” technology to better inform residents about a variety of council services such as meals on wheels, schools, busses, refuse collections and planning applications. The new technology has helped increase council “productivity” by £230 million, the Local Government Association research found, as local authorities struggle to plug budget black holes.

Via The Telegraph

Twitter logs big jump in mobile usage

Twitter has experienced a surge in mobile users over recent months. Chief executive Ev Williams said in a recent blog posting that the number of Tweets originating from mobile devices has jumped by some 62 per cent since April of this year. "We quickly understood that we were doing users a disservice by not having a great client on each of the major mobile platforms," said Williams. "As we had hoped in April, these clients are bringing more people into Twitter, and, even better, they are attracting and retaining active users."

Via V3

Royal Mail's stamps can be read by iPhones, Androids

Royal Mail has come out with what it calls the world's first "intelligent" stamp. A stamp that shows online content when a smartphone is used to read it has been released by Royal Mail. A smartphone that has the free image recognition application - Junaio - can view the stamp, which takes users to a webpage. Junaio has versions for the Apple iPhone and Android phones.

Via T3

The PlayStation powered super-computer

Playing the PlayStation and getting your homework done are not usually activities which go hand-in-hand, but one university professor may have cracked it. Dr Gaurav Khanna has no less than 16 Sony PlayStation 3 consoles working together to create a super-computer which he says rivals the power of more than 200 conventional PCs.

Via BBC News