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Motorola has sold around 100,000 Xooms since launching the new tablet in late February, says a Deutsche Bank research report released yesterday.

Based on the percentage of Android 3.0 Honeycomb devices showing up on the Android Developer Web Site, Deutsche Bank estimated the total Android installed base at around 50 million units. Of those, only 0.2 percent are running Honeycomb. That points to a figure of 100,000, give or take, for the Xoom as the only known Android tablet so far outfitted with Honeycomb.

The research firm had initially estimated sales of 50,000 Xooms during the first quarter and 150,000 for the second quarter.

In comparison, Apple may have sold 500,000 iPad 2 tablets in the first weekend it was available last month, said Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, though some analysts believe the figure could be as high as a million, according to Reuters. The original iPad sold to the tune of 300,000 units in its initial weekend a year ago.

Neither Motorola nor Apple has disclosed sales figures for the respective tablets.

Though the Xoom's sales may seem paltry compared with the iPad, Deutsche Bank called 100,000 units after only a short time on the market "a decent start."… Read more

In yet another example of amazing human spirit and goodwill after the tragic events in Japan a couple weeks ago, one of the country's largest telecommunications and media corporations, SoftBank, will give orphans from the earthquake and tsunami free iPhones.

According to GadgetsDNA, an iPhone and iPad-centric blog site, SoftBank will also cover all the communications fees until the children turn 18 as well as living costs for another 1,200 people that had to be relocated to Takeo.

The gesture, announced via Twitter by SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, is another way in which SoftBank has used social media … Read more

The number of people accessing their bank or brokerage accounts through mobile devices surged 54 percent in the fourth quarter last year compared with the same period in 2009, according to a new report from ComScore.

During the fourth quarter of 2010, 29.8 million Americans tapped into their bank, credit, or brokerage accounts via cell phones and other mobile devices, according to the Mobile Financial Advisor report released yesterday.

Drilling down further, 18.6 million people accessed their financial accounts via a mobile browser, 10.8 million used a mobile app, and 8.1 million used text messaging, said … Read more

Here's what I can tell you about the drinking water situation in the tiny Rwandan village of Mwite. The few closest spring catchments--basically cement basins with a pipe of flowing water--are working, but not producing as much water as they should. The catchment further to the west, a handmade system nearly a century old, is no longer functioning, so the best bet will probably require a walk to the northernmost safe water source in the area, the newest cement-encased spring catchment, built in 2007.

I didn't speak to anyone in Rwanda for this story, or to anyone who had recently been to Mwite, north of the capital city of Kigali, but I can confidently relay details about the water situation in that far-flung rural village thanks to...what else? An Android-based app.

The agencies and nonprofit organizations that work to ensure that places like Mwite have clean drinking water will tell you that infrastructure is just one challenge, among others being highlighted today on World Water Day. After the pipes and pumps are installed, there's the never-ending task of monitoring and maintaining thousands of sites spread across the challenging terrain of places like Rwanda, Liberia, or Bolivia.

For years, teams would go into the field with pounds of paper questionnaires, cameras, and maybe an expensive GPS, and gather data on individual sites--all of which would then be stuffed in a file cabinet somewhere back in the capital city, spending most of its time collecting dust.

Today's high-end smartphones combine all those monitoring tools into a single, inexpensive, convenient device that not only collects data on water projects but can also analyze, map, and share it--tasks that would have in many cases taken an unthinkable amount of time just a year ago.

That's when Water for People, a Denver-based nonprofit working on water and sanitation projects in 11 countries, started thinking about an easier way to monitor its projects. The group brought in developer Dru Borden of Gallatin Systems to design an application that could handle survey results, photos, and geolocation data in a single package. The result is Field Level Operations Watch, better known as FLOW. Water for People deployed a team equipped with smartphones loaded with FLOW for the first time in Rwanda last August. … Read more

Bank of America's online-banking service is down for U.S. customers.

When users across the U.S. try to access their online banking, the Bank of America home page displays a message saying "online banking is temporarily unavailable." It provides no indication of when the service should be back up and running.

Bank of America has stopped short of calling the issue an outright "outage." Company spokeswoman Tara Burke told CNET in a phone conversation today that an update to BofA's Web site over the weekend is causing the "intermittent service disruptions." … Read more

A new Trojan dubbed "OddJob" is stealing people's money by taking over their online banking sessions after they think they've logged off.

The Trojan, which targets Windows-based computers, is being used by criminals in Eastern Europe to steal money from accounts in the United States, Poland, and Denmark, Amit Klein, chief technology officer of Trusteer, writes in a blog post today.

Klein said in an e-mail that he could not identify the banks being targeted or provide an estimate on the number of victims.

"It is early days for this malware," he said. "… Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--In a mobile world, size shouldn't matter, but context should.

That was the message from Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz as she demoed the company's new Livestand service at the Mobile World Congress 2011 here today.

Livestand, announced last week, aggregates and personalizes all types of content for users and optimizes it for every type of device. Dubbed a "digital newsstand," it serves up stories, information and ads based on a person's interest and eliminates the need for publishers to create multiple versions of content for different devices.

For mobile devices, where small screen size … Read more

When I read Roger Ebert's latest blog post bashing 3D last week, modestly titled "Why 3D doesn't work and never will. Case closed," I couldn't help but wonder whether he was right. As a TV reviewer, my job sure would be a lot easier if I could just ignore 3D and focus on what my readers have overwhelmingly expressed as more important to them: good picture quality in 2D mode.

Alas, I don't think Ebert is right. There's the little fact that 3D works well enough to adequately entertain millions of viewers of blockbusters like "Avatar" and "Toy Story 3." And "never" is a long time.

Regardless of the headline's hyperbole, Ebert's most damning piece of anti-3D evidence has merit. The crux is a statement by Walter Murch, a highly respected film and sound editor, who says:… Read more

Cybercriminals buy and sell stolen information using a vast network of online stores, forums, and even social-networking accounts, according to a report released yesterday by PandaLabs.

Posing as a cybercriminal to gain access to this online black market, PandaLabs researchers uncovered a world where the bad guys work together to buy and sell stolen bank account information, credit card numbers, passwords, and other products. Much of this illegal enterprise is done through online stores and forums, but PandaLabs found criminals using Facebook and Twitter accounts to set up shop as well.

Though this black market is relatively open, the security … Read more