Mobile

Verizon customers looking to save a few dollars on data should get their wish this year in the form of a shared family plan.

Answering questions at a Deutsche Bank conference on Monday, Verizon Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo said the carrier will launch a family data plan by midyear (PDF). Specifically, Shammo referred to data sharing as "having the ability to connect more devices without having to in essence pay more for a bundle."

Many families would be happy to share budget-friendly data plans among their notebooks, smartphones, and tablets. Data plans for each separate device can … Read more

Editors' note: This is a guest column. See Morgan Reed's bio below.

In the Broadway musical "Oliver!," orphaned Oliver Twist famously holds out his empty bowl and asks, "Please sir, may I have some more?" For those of us who make mobile applications, we feel like Oliver, holding out our virtual bowl, begging for more spectrum to fill the hungry bellies of our customers.

App developers cheered when the divided Congress passed legislation providing for incentivized spectrum auctions while freeing up unlicensed spectrum. This is a step in the right direction, but it didn't … Read more

Imagine this scenario: You're on a business trip in another city, where you just wrapped up your last meeting of the day in a coffee shop. Since you're a proper digital nomad, you fire off a tweet announcing that you're done for the day and ready to grab a drink.

Meanwhile, an old friend from college updates his Facebook status to say he's just arrived at a bar (a few blocks away) where he's meeting friends. Like your tweet, his status is embedded with a geographic tag (geotag), signaling the location of the message. If … Read more

Coming soon to an iPhone or iPad app near you: simple and easy person-to-person voice chatting. No carrier required.

While Apple has made iMessage a staple of iOS communications, it's not behind this new development. Rather, it's Twilio, a San Francisco startup that has become a major player in the cloud communication space by giving everyone from small app developers to large corporations an inexpensive and efficient way to integrate voice communications.

Now, with the release of its software development kit today, Twilio is giving iOS app developers the same voice over IP (VoIP) tools. And while those … Read more

Mobile phone customers around the world may soon have a way to pay any merchant or any other person with their device.

Today, San Francisco-based Boku unveiled Boku Accounts, a white-label service that will allow wireless carriers to offer their customers a mobile payments system that could work throughout the world. Those mobile users, in turn, will be able to make payments at any credit card terminal either with their phones, or with a special debit card.

Though no carriers have yet formally adopted the new service, Boku says one U.K. operator is well into trials. The company, which … Read more

Not long after Mozilla brought its browser to Android, the organization has adapted its Jetpack tools for building browser add-ons for mobile use, too.

"Now you can start developing add-ons for the mobile version of Firefox," said Dave Mason, Mozilla's product manager for add-on technologies, in a mailing list message yesterday about the latest Jetpack, formally called the Add-on SDK version 1.5. "For this initial release we have the page-mod API working so that you can, among other things, create add-ons that will display mobile-friendly versions of Web sites that do not have that option.&… Read more

Twitter has again tweaked its iPhone and Android apps, reviving a few "high-demand" features that were jettisoned from the previous versions, as described yesterday in Twitter's official blog.

Both apps have brought back the swipe shortcut. Swiping a tweet in your timeline now displays the toolbar of icons that let you reply to, retweet, share, or view the tweeter's profile all without having to exit the timeline.

And both versions have added a new alert to the "Find Friends" feature. Now when you tap on the feature at the bottom of the Discover tab, … Read more

Last month, I stumbled into Umami Burger, a restaurant here in San Francisco. It was lunchtime on a weekend and the restaurant was crowded, but the host asked for my mobile phone number and told me the restaurant would text me when a table was ready.

There's an app for that, it appears, since the host put my number into an iPad. And it worked: About 10 minutes later, while I was out for a walk, the message came in. The app in question: NoshList, which is leaving closed beta and should be appearing for free in the App … Read more

Niklas Zennstrom changed the telephone industry when he co-founded VoIP juggernaut, Skype. Now he's preparing to attack the industry again with the introduction of free mobile broadband from FreedomPop.

FreedomPop today announced that it would partner with Clearwire for its upcoming mobile broadband service. Backed by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom, FreedomPop aims to disrupt the mobile broadband industry by providing mobile Internet to consumers free of charge.

FreedomPop had previously named LightSquared as its launch partner, but it appears that relationship has stalled due to mounting complications in the LightSquared camp. The FCC yesterday suspended LightSquared's waiver to … Read more