Google Calendar Now Syncs with BlackBerry
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Enter 'GoogleBerry' -- A a free download from Google lets BlackBerry users sync up with Google Calendar.
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Software developer Information Appliance Associates announced on Thursday the release of an application synchronising Research In Motion&#39;s BlackBerry devices with Apple&#39;s Mac OS X.
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FaceBerry or BlackBook. Whatever combo-name is used, Research In Motion's new application for Facebook on the BlackBerry moves the company's popular mobile device further into the Web 2.0 world.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft has fixed a problem that made it difficult for users of the most recent Windows Mobile devices to synch with PCs running Vista.
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College parties met business e-mail on Wednesday as Facebook said it is adding its social-networking platform to Research In Motion Ltd.&#39;s BlackBerry devices.T-Mobile will be the first carrier to build a Facebook application into the BlackBerries it sells, but BlackBerry users on any network will be able to download the application starting later Wednesday, Facebook Co-Founder and Vice President of Engineering Dustin Moskovitz said in a keynote address at the CTIA Wireless IT&#160;and Entertainment show in San Francisco.In the keynote, Moskovitz demonstrated taking a photo with a BlackBerry Curve device, adding tags to it and posting it to Facebook without even starting up the Facebook application. Other features include the ability to set special ringtones for Facebook events and invite friends to join Facebook through BlackBerry e-mail. But it&#39;s the open nature of Facebook&#39;s platform, which allows third parties to add new applications, that sets the company apart, Moskovitz said.The tie-up brings together the highest profile social-networking player, with almost 50 million active users, and an enterprise mobile pioneer vying for market share against Microsoft, Palm, Symbian, Apple, and other device and OS vendors. Executives of the two companies met at the CTIA Wireless Show in March in Orlando and agreed to work together, Moskovitz said. Openness is the key factor they had in common, he said.Starting from a base of thousands of colleges and high schools, Facebook last year opened its network to anyone, and members over 35 years old are the fastest-growing segment, Moskovitz said. RIM has its roots in corporate e-mail tied to specialized enterprise servers so the partnership could help Facebook grow right where it&#39;s catching up.The announcement came amid reports on Wednesday that&#160;Google and Microsoft are wooing Facebook.Facebook also announced a few other advances in the mobile arena, where it expects to have 4 million active users by the end of this month. There are Facebook services available on most major U.S. and Canadian carriers, and Moskovitz announced its first carrier deal outside North America, with O2 (U.K.) Ltd.One extension announced Wednesday lets users add information from third-party Facebook applications as a box in their mobile profiles. As an example, Moskovitz showed a user&#39;s profile that listed two causes he supports. Another extension lets organizations text-message Facebook members to send a text message in support of a cause. The member&#39;s support is immediately reflected on Facebook on the Web, he said.
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Mark/Space has released a &#8220;public preview&#8221; version of its forthcoming The Missing Sync for BlackBerry. The software makes it possible to synchronize data on your Mac with a BlackBerry smartphone.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft and IBM executives Wednesday admitted feeling heat from Google now that the Web search giant is trying to make inroads into the enterprise market with its hosted suite of communication and collaboration tools. Google Apps, a hosted service, is gaining traction primarily in universities but is a welcome addition to enterprise software because of its simplicity and ease of use, said Rob Curry, director of Microsoft's Office business platform group, during a panel discussion today at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. "We actually see [Google] as a great competitor in this space," Curry said. "And they bring a good spirit in terms of simplicity, ease of use and things we're trying to leverage as we go forward in our development cycle." Google Apps was described as a "direct shot at Microsoft Office" by Forrester Analyst Erica Driver when Google released an enterprise version of the tool in February. For US$50 per user per year, customers get e-mail, instant messaging, a calendar tool, a Web page creator, support for e-mail on BlackBerry mobile devices and integration with Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Analysts say Google Apps offers less functionality than Office but is less expensive. IBM, which offers the Lotus Notes set of e-mail, calendaring and collaborative applications, and Lotus Sametime, an IM and Web conferencing tool, has partnered with Google but still sees the company as a potential competitor. Lotus Sametime allows IM customers to communicate with users of Google Talk. "We're a key partner of Google's," said Ken Bisconti, vice president of messaging and collaboration software for IBM, during the panel discussion. "We partner with them, and continue to partner with them, hopefully for the good of our customers. I also fully expect them to become a competitor to us in the business space." Google executives are busy trying to understand the requirements of enterprises, a learning process that will be crucial if the search company hopes to gain market traction for Google Apps outside of academia, Bisconti said. "Most of our customers tell us they're talking to the Google enterprise team," he said. "Google is doing a good job of collecting information to understand enterprise requirements. ... I don't see them as a near-term competitor but as a long-term potential substitution." No Google officials participated in the panel. The session, titled "Vendor Spotlight: Assessing IBM & Microsoft Platforms for Collaboration & Unified Communications," also gave the vendors a chance to discuss the broad trend in which employees expect the types of instant communication available to them in their personal lives. This is placing increased important on IM, Web conferencing, video and audio conferencing, and mobile communications. "The role of instant messaging has completely transformed and it has become a business expectation," said Akiba Saeedi, IBM's program director for unified communications and collaboration products. Years ago, people questioned whether e-mail would become a necessary business function. No one would question e-mail's importance today, and IM seems to be heading in a similar direction, Saeedi said. Bisconti cautioned against getting caught up in industry buzzwords such asÂ "enterprise 2.0," but said the desire for collaborative technology in general is real and has created a huge business opportunity for software vendors. "I have never seen so much senior-level interest in companies in improving the way they communicate, collaborate and improve the speed and agility of their business," he said.
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Google on Thursday, October 5, announced a new test service. People will need only mobile phones or handheld devices and they should tap Google&#39;s Web search via text messages, or short message service.
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Research In Motion and Facebook said Wednesday that they have integrated Facebook into the Blackberry smartphones.
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Calendar application is one of the first non-blogging uses of the standard.
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Nokia is adding BlackBerry connectivity to its Series 80 mobile devices, including the Nokia 9500 Communicator, and has unveiled a new business smartphone, the Edge-compatible Nokia 9300.
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College parties met business e-mail on Wednesday as Facebook Inc. said it is adding its social-networking platform to Research In Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry devices.
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Google will add a presentation application to Google Apps lineup by year-end.
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Sci/Tech News, SAN FRANCISCO: Google Inc. announced a new test service that allows people to use mobile phones or handheld devices to tap Google&#39;s Web search via text messages, or short message service.
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(InfoWorld) - Google isÂ putting finishing touches onÂ the integration of Docs & Spreadsheets with Google Apps for Your Domain --another step in its strategy to build a suite of hosted applications for organizations. The introduction of the new version ofÂ Google Apps for Your DomainÂ including Docs & Spreadsheets will happen this quarter, and it could come as early as next week, several people familiar with the company's plans said. It has been widely assumed that at some point Google would add Docs & Spreadsheets, a word processing and a spreadsheet program, to Google Apps, a suite of communication services for organizations. Docs & Spreadsheets lets multiple users share files and collaborate on them. Google Apps provides white-label versions of several Google communication services, including the Gmail Web mail service, the Talk instant message and voice chat service and the Calendar online scheduling service. Organizations can provide these services with their own Internet domain and branding to their users. Arizona State University, which launched Google Apps in October for its students, would be very interested in having Docs & Spreadsheets as part of the suite, said Kari Barlow, assistant vice president of the university's technology office. "Where the strength is with Docs & Spreadsheets is in the ability to synchronously collaborate on documents," Barlow said. Groups of students could use it to collaborate on class projects, she said. "Google Apps has been highly successful for us. We're looking at extending the environment and implementing new technologies as they are released to us. It'll be interesting to see when Docs & Spreadsheets comes out, how that will impact the environment," Barlow said. Not everyone sees a use for the Docs & Spreadsheets integration, however. San Jose City College is delighted with Google Apps, which it adopted mostly to provide e-mail accounts to its students, but doesn't see a clear need to offer them hosted word processing and spreadsheet software at this time, said Michael John Renzi, the college's director of finance and administration. However, the college would like the suite to have a course management application, he said. Google Apps is free but Google plans to introduce a more sophisticated, fee-based version for large organizations. Google Apps and Docs & Spreadsheets have been parallel projects in Google's attempt to enter the hosted applications market and expand beyond its core search engine business. Many see Google gearing up to compete against Microsoft's PC-based Office applications suite. Proponents of hosted applications say they are more convenient than the PC-based, packaged software upon which Microsoft has built its empire. Hosted applications are housed in vendor servers, freeing customers' IT departments from installation and maintenance work, and from having to purchase extra hardware and storage, proponents say. However, the consensus currently is that hosted applications suites don't come close to offering the breadth of features that Microsoft Office has. Google has other hosted applications for organizations, including Google Analytics, a hosted service for tracking Web site usage and traffic. The company also has a wiki platform that it acquired when it bought JotSpot Inc. last year. It has been rumored that Google is developing a presentations application. Google declined to comment for this story.
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BlackBerry mobile data services were disrupted Monday afternoon due to a problem with Research In Motion&#39;s infrastructure, apparently affecting customers of all major North American mobile operators, an AT&amp;T Wireless spokesman said.RIM told AT&amp;T the problem began at about 3:30 p.m. Eastern Time and that the Waterloo, Ontario, company was working to identify and solve the problem, said AT&amp;T spokesman Mark Siegel. RIM officials were not immediately available for comment.After 6 p.m. Eastern, users on a BlackBerry Internet message board began reporting that service had returned to normal.The popular smart phones rely on both a cellular network for transport and RIM&#39;s own network for pushing e-mail to end-users. Last month, problems with AT&amp;T&#39;s network disrupted service to some of its subscribers with BlackBerrys, as well as iPhone users.Several users on various mobile networks reported connection problems on Monday afternoon on the message board.BlackBerry users may not be able to send or receive messages, browse the Internet, or use the BlackBerry Internet Service Web site, according to a message from RIM that some users on the board posted. In addition, BlackBerry Enterprise Servers may not be able to connect to RIM&#39;s infrastructure, and carriers and resellers may not be able to create accounts or provision services, the notice said. The outage happened because &quot;a component of the network infrastructure is experiencing a service interruption.&quot;Zenprise, a maker of service management software that monitors BlackBerry service and notifies administrators of problems, detected the outage and notified customers at 3:23 p.m. Eastern, according to Ahmed Datoo, Zenprise&#39;s vice president of marketing. After running a series of tests, Zenprise determined that the root of the problem was in RIM&#39;s infrastructure. The Fremont, California, company, which counts about 100 enterprises and SMBs among its customers, has not determined the total scope of the outage. BlackBerry service for Zenprise&#39;s own customers has been going up and down during the outage, Datoo said.
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NEW YORK, September 8 (New Ratings) - Nokia (NOK.NYS) reportedly announced yesterday that its Series 80-based handsets, which are scheduled to be launched in 1Q05, would integrate the BlackBerry software.