aggregators

Ericsson yesterday demoed a new version of LTE technology that's 10 times faster than today's current standard and delivers speeds of nearly 1 gigabit per second.

Conducted in the company's home base of Sweden, the demonstration of LTE Advanced was presented to the Swedish Post and Telecom Agency (PTS). Using existing commercial hardware, Ericsson was able to use a test frequency provided by the PTS to show off certain features of LTE Advanced for the first time.

One feature of LTE Advanced that Ericsson demonstrated was carrier aggregation, which combines signals from multiple carriers to achieve a … Read more

Earlier today Bill Keller hurled some invective against Web aggregators in general and Arianna Huffington in particular.

It's a great, punchy read! But if you're in a hurry:

The New York Times' executive editor calls media commentators and media recyclers "oxpeckers who ride the backs of pachyderms, feeding on ticks."

He compares aggregators to pirates, then says that AOL's $315 million purchase of Huffington Post has been poorly described: "Buying an aggregator and calling it a content play is a little like a company's announcing plans to improve its cash position by hiring … Read more

As evidenced by the introduction of Unifi at CES 2011, there's a move to provide cloud storage services that focus specifically on media files. Of course, the problem one runs into with these types of files is that they tend to be a lot larger than things like documents, spreadsheets, and presentations--downright huge, in the case of video. A new software and service called Libox is aiming to tackle that problem.

Like Unifi, Libox serves to aggregate your media files from various drives and devices (though at this time, it doesn't bring in content you may have stored … Read more

Taptu started off as a mobile search application aimed at helping users locate appropriate content for small-screened devices, with a particular focus on creating a user-friendly interface for touch screens. Now, the company is trying to make that even more apparent with My Taptu, an entertainment-centric app updated for Android devices.

The main goal of My Taptu is to provide users with entertainment on the go while filtering out content that is not optimized for mobile devices. It accomplishes this by pulling in specific RSS feeds that are made for small screens, but if you search for something that doesn'… Read more

Taptu started off as a mobile search application aimed at helping users locate appropriate content for small-screened devices, with a particular focus on creating a user-friendly interface for touch screens. Now, the company is trying to make that even more apparent with My Taptu, an entertainment-centric app updated for iOS devices.

The main goal of My Taptu is to provide users with entertainment on the go while filtering out content that is not optimized for mobile devices. It accomplishes this by pulling in specific RSS feeds that are made for small screens, but if you search for something that doesn'… Read more

Taptu started off as a mobile search solution aimed at helping users filter appropriate content for small-screened devices. It first appeared several years ago as a simple search portal on Web-capable phones, and then as an app for the iOS just last year. The folks over at Taptu have always had touch screens in mind while developing the interface for their apps. Today, they aim to make that even more apparent with My Taptu, an entertainment-centric app updated for both Android and iOS devices.

The main goal of My Taptu is to provide users with entertainment on-the-go while filtering out … Read more

Readers might remember hearing about Threadsy last September, which is when the catch-all social aggregator first debuted. Its promise, which was made in a short demo at last year's TechCrunch50 conference, was that it would pull together correspondence from places like Twitter and Facebook alongside your Web mail from multiple providers. Eight months of beta testing later, it's finally open to the public. But has it been worth the wait?

Before answering that question, let's first take a look at the problem Threadsy is trying to solve. If you're the type of person who has a Twitter and Facebook account, as well as multiple e-mail accounts, you've probably got several tabs running throughout the day that keep these sites open. Threadsy's solution is to put all the messages from those places into one interface, which has been done with some elegance.

Social updates from Twitter and Facebook sit on the right of the page, where you can see the latest items from both networks mixed together. If a user has linked to a photo, Threadsy will give you a nice large preview. The same goes for linked audio files and updates from various Facebook applications.

Web mail has been handled with a similar level of simplicity. When first setting up the service, you give it access to your various e-mail accounts, which at least for Gmail, can be done without giving Threadsy any of your account credentials. Instead, you just authorize it to get access to those messages--just like enabling connections to your Facebook and Twitter profiles. Threadsy then blends together all the messages from your Web mail accounts along with direct messages in Twitter and Facebook into one big in-box.

Unfortunately, for all its simplicity, the universal mailbox breaks down in terms of how easy it is to create new messages compared to using each service's proper messaging client. Gmail, as well as Facebook's messaging service, offer really excellent auto-complete for contacts, but on Threadsy it's just not as good. In my testing it was able to pull up people I was Facebook friends with, but not frequently e-mailed family members. It was also unable to do its magic on last names, which may not seem like all that much of a hindrance, but it is. … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--With a new tool called Spindex, Microsoft's Future Social Experiences Labs division is diving into a niche where many have failed: social-media aggregation.

Lili Cheng, general manager of Microsoft's FUSE labs, unveiled the tool onstage here at the Web 2.0 Expo on Tuesday afternoon, saying, "we kind of call it the impossible project."

Spindex will launch with an array of data that isn't typically found in a social-network feed dashboards like Seesmic or TweetDeck--a genre of app that has been thrown into limbo in the wake of Twitter's decision to launch official mobile and eventually desktop clients. … Read more

His company publicly derided as a leech of the newspaper business, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told a group of newspaper editors he believes newspapers can make money online.

In a keynote speech to open the annual conference of the American Society of News Editors on Sunday, Schmidt lauded newspapers as "fundamental" to democracy and predicted the newspaper business would formulate a new business model based on advertising and subscription revenue, according to an Associated Press report.

"We have a business model problem; we don't have a news problem," Schmidt said, adding that "We're … Read more