market

HP aims to get back into the smartphone game

Hewlett-Packard plans to jump back into the smartphone business.

Yam Su Yin, HP's senior director for consumer PC and media tablets for Asia Pacific, told the Press Trust of India that the company will focus on all segments of the market, including tablets, notebooks, and all-in-one PCs, the Indian Express reported Sunday.

Asked specifically about a smartphone, Yin said: "The answer is yes, but I cannot give a timetable. It would be silly if we say no. HP has to be in the game."

HP attempted to carve a bigger slice of the mobile market after acquiring Palm in 2010. … Read more

Rival mobile browsers chip away at Safari's lead

Safari, the top browser in terms of mobile usage, lost a little share to three rivals in June.

The Apple browser dropped from 60.0 percent of usage in May to 58.0 percent in June, still well ahead of competing browsers, according to statistics released by tracking firm Net Applications on Monday. Google's unbranded Android browser, in second place, also dipped, from 20.7 percent to 20.6 percent.

Picking up the slack were Opera Mini, which rose from 10.5 percent to 11.2 percent; Google's Chrome, which rose from 3.2 percent to 3.8 … Read more

Windows 8.1 has arrived

In this episode of Update:

- All of the goodies announced today for Windows 8.1.

- Early access to Kinect for Windows opens up for developers.

- Square goes after online sales with Square Market.

- 1 million Android users have unknowingly downloaded apps with adware.

- Google is ready to ship the Google Play versions of the Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One.

CNET Update delivers the tech news you need in under three minutes. Watch Bridget Carey every afternoon for a breakdown of the big stories, hot devices, new apps, and what's ahead. Subscribe to the … Read more

Square challenges Amazon, eBay with online marketplace

Square, the mobile payments startup best known for its credit card readers, is branching into e-commerce to take on the likes of eBay and Amazon.

The company on Tuesday launched Square Market, an online marketplace that allows merchants to sell their wares online without the expense of building and maintaining their own sites.

"Creating an online marketplace is our next step in making commerce easy for everyone," Ajit Varma, Square's director of discovery, said in a statement. "Square Market makes local businesses accessible to customers down the block and across the country."

The marketplace allows … Read more

Kroes: Unify the mobile market or Europe will fall farther behind

Neelie Kroes, the European Commission vice president in charge of the digital agenda, sketched out several steps toward the unified mobile-network market she believes is necessary to keep Europe's economy from falling behind.

In a speech Tuesday, she called for several steps to lower barriers that today make it hard for carriers to expand from one country to another and for customers to use mobile devices outside their home countries. Among the steps she suggested:

A "passport" that let a carrier, once certified to operate a mobile network permission in one country, operate in other countries, too. … Read more

Impact of Twitter outages grows as stock traders go social

Twitter suffered its largest outage in some time Monday following an error in a "routine change" to the microblogging site.

In a statement, the company said the site was not available from 1:08 p.m. to 1:33 p.m. PT. A mere 25 minutes. For the 200 million Twitter users, that was a while, at least since the days of the regular "fail whale."

But now that Bloomberg terminals -- the computers that Wall Street analysts, financial types, and traders use -- have tweets flowing through them, there's a greater onus of responsibility … Read more

Chrome starts staking out mobile-browsing turf

The Android version of Chrome has begun carving a niche for itself in the mobile browsing market.

In May, usage of the mobile version of Google's browser on smartphones and tablets accounted for an all-time high of 3.2 percent, according to Net Applications' usage statistics. That figure may not sound like a lot, but the browser only crossed the 1 percent threshold in November 2012, and it's now surpassed Microsoft's IE at 2 percent of mobile browser usage.

At the same time, Google's unbranded Android browser, which predates Chrome, appears to be waning. Its usage … Read more

Google may build wireless networks in emerging markets, WSJ says

Google's bid to connect everyone to the Internet may have it entering the wireless service business.

The company is looking at building cellular networks and offering service to emerging markets such as sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, according to The Wall Street Journal. Citing anonymous sources, WSJ reported that the networks would be available outside of big cities, where service is spotty or not available. Google is reportedly working with local companies on a possible deployment and thinking up business models to support the networks.

Google is also looking at building low-cost phones using its Android operating system, considering … Read more

SAP touts service that sells customer data from phone firms

Verizon Wireless already sells its customers' mobile data to marketers. Now European enterprise-software giant SAP is taking things a step further by testing a service that will sell data collected by a number of wireless providers.

SAP announced its Consumer Insight 365 mobile service this week at the CTIA 2013 wireless show in Las Vegas. The service will, the company said in a release, pull data from SAP's "extensive partner network" including "over 990 mobile operators;" aggregate and analyze it "without drilling down into user-specific information;" and make results available to subscribers through … Read more

BlackBerry regains some lost market share in Canada

BlackBerry has managed to regain some lost market share in its home country of Canada.

In a research note to investors on Thursday, Raymond James analyst Tavis McCourt reported that while BlackBerry's market share was just 6 percent in Canada in the fourth quarter of 2012, it jumped to 13.5 percent in the first quarter of 2013. The analyst believes that there was some excitement that cropped up around BlackBerry's latest handsets, the Z10 and Q10, which helped spur the change.

Still, BlackBerry is still far behind where it once was. According to McCourt, BlackBerry had a … Read more