Techmeme: Outages Expose Wireless Carriers' Backup Plans (Wall Street Journal)

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November 3, 2012, 3:35 PM

Top News

Wall Street Journal:

Outages Expose Wireless Carriers' Backup Plans — Three days after superstorm Sandy made landfall, people in some of America's most densely populated neighborhoods remained without wireless service, highlighting new risks as more people drop landline phones.

More: Metropolis, TechNewsDaily.com, Tech Daily Dose, Forbes and Washington Post

Marguerite Reardon / CNET:

With lights back on, cell service returns for many Sandy victims — Wireless phone service is quickly being restored to millions of customers after commercial power companies restore electricity to thousands of customers in hard hit areas after Superstorm Sandy.

More: Con Edison of New York, AllThingsD and Slashdot

Zack Whittaker / CNET:

Apple's mea culpa: U.K. site posts apology, new statement — After testing a British court's patience with a not so apologetic public statement, the iPhone and iPad maker is finally eating humble pie. — Apple has reissued and updated its Samsung “apology” statement on its British Web site …

More: Engadget, Apple, The Next Web, GadgeTell, ZDNet, SlashGear, Geekosystem, PhoneArena, Gizmodo.com Updates, Forbes and iDownloadBlog.com

Nick Bilton / NYT Bits:

Twitter to Add Photo Filters to Compete With Instagram — Twitter is finally learning a lesson from Facebook: If you can't buy it, build it. — In the coming months, Twitter plans to update its mobile applications to introduce filters for photos that will allow people to share altered images …

Aaron Souppouris / The Verge:

Barnes & Noble cutting Nook Color and Tablet prices to $139 and $159 — Less than three months have passed since the Nook Color and Nook Tablet saw a price drop, but Barnes & Noble is cutting the prices of its e-reader tablets again. The Nook Color will now cost just $139 …

More: Ars Technica, VentureBeat, CNET, ZDNet, TeleRead, HotHardware.com News and Business Wire

Timothy B. Lee / Ars Technica:

Uber says Chicago is trying to drive its sedans out of the city — The battle between the city of Chicago and Uber, a startup seeking to disrupt the taxi and limo industries, heated up this week. Uber has already faced unwanted attention because its pricing model for taxis conflicted with Chicago regulations.

More: Uber Blog, SocialTimes, VentureBeat and TechCrunch

Alexia Tsotsis / TechCrunch:

Foursquare Looks Into An Fourth Round At An Over $700M Valuation, Investors Skeptical — Foursquare has been taking VC meetings recently, looking into raising a Series D round of funding of between $50 million and $100 million according to multiple sources.

More: Gizmodo.com Updates. Tweets: @rabois. Thanks:@loyalelectron

Matt Brian / The Next Web:

Samsung's Galaxy S III tops 30 million sales, adding 10 million in less than two months — Samsung predicted that its Galaxy S III flagship would pass 30 million sales by the end of 2012, and with November and December still largely ahead of it, the Korean manufacturer has reached that milestone …

More: Softpedia News, digitaltrends.com, SlashGear, Pocketnow, Cydia Blog, Engadget, MobileSyrup.com, PhoneArena, GSMArena.com, The Verge and LAPTOP Magazine

Richard Stallman / Wired:

Let's Limit the Effect of Software Patents, Since We Can't Eliminate Them — Patents threaten every software developer, and the patent wars we have long feared have broken out. Software developers and software users - which in our society, is most people - need software to be free of patents.

More: Forbes

AnandTech:

Google Nexus 4 and Nexus 10 Performance Preview — Earlier this week Google announced two new flagship Nexus devices: the Nexus 4 smartphone and the Nexus 10 tablet. We received review samples of both earlier this week, and while we're hard at work at full reviews of the devices we couldn't help …

More: ExtremeTech, Engadget and The Verge

Brittany Darwell / Inside Facebook:

Facebook tests ‘Pages Feed’ so fans can see all updates in separate stream — Some Facebook users are seeing a separate “Pages Feed” where they can view all the updates from pages they Like in a single stream. — This seems to be another move by Facebook to help users see more posts from pages they're interested in.

More: SlashGear, nbcnews.com, PandoDaily, The Next Web, WebProNews, Betabeat and AllFacebook

Chris Foresman / Ars Technica:

Apple increased R&D spending by $1 billion in 2012 — Apple published its annual Form 10-K for 2012, a detailed (and tedious) fiscal report for investors required by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Along with a summary of numbers for the past three years, the filing reveals spending …

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