Arik Hesseldahl in Enterprise on December 24, 2010 at 9:22 am PT
After two days of struggling with an embarrassing pre-holiday system failure, Skype appears to be running again today. The company is offering free service to customers, but hasn’t yet explained what happened.
Liz Gannes in Social on December 20, 2010 at 1:21 pm PT
Because of free Gmail voice calling, I don’t need a landline to back up my crappy AT&T cell service. And Google announced today that free Gmail calls from the U.S. to anywhere in the States and Canada would be extended through all of 2011.
Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal in News on August 11, 2010 at 10:38 am PT
Facebook Wednesday took issue with Google and Verizon’s proposal to exempt cellular networks from rules that would ensure equal treatment of Internet traffic, saying the social-networking giant supports equal treatment on “both landline and wireless networks.”
Peter Kafka in D8 on June 2, 2010 at 7:55 am PT
Depending on your perspective, Comcast is the most dominant force in media, or the one most likely to be disrupted by Internet-fueled upstarts. COO Steve Burke, not surprisingly, argues that his company isn’t going anywhere. Also not disappearing anytime soon: “Bundled” cable TV packages. You might think you only want to pay for a couple channels, Burke says, but that’s not what cable programmers want to sell. Meanwhile, what’s his plan to turn around NBC? Reverse course: “You can’t cut your way to success in broadcast TV.”
John Paczkowski in News on May 13, 2010 at 4:00 am PT
Nearly one in four U.S. households has abandoned traditional landline telephones in favor of their wireless brethren. That’s the word from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which says in a new study that 25 percent of the households it polled for its Wireless Substitution survey are wireless-only, while just 15 percent are landline-only.
Walt Mossberg in Personal Technology on February 17, 2010 at 6:06 pm PT
Walt reviews magicJack, an Internet-based device for making phone calls from a computer.
Nitrozac and Snaggy in News on January 6, 2010 at 1:49 pm PT
Here is the latest comic from our Joy of Tech friends at
Geek Culture, Nitrozac and Snaggy. Joy of Tech appears three times a week in the Voices section of this site. (Click on the image to see a bigger version.)
Peter Kafka in Media on January 5, 2010 at 7:24 am PT
Here’s an interesting side note to GPhone (a.k.a. “Nexus One”) day–Google is still experimenting with its “click-to-call” program for advertisers on “high-end mobile devices.” Coincidence?
John Paczkowski in D7 on May 27, 2009 at 8:17 am PT
Randall Stephenson is just two years into his tenure as CEO of AT&T, but faces challenges that have been decades in the making. Among them: remaking AT&T amid the steady decline of its landline business, future-proofing its business as our appetites for bandwidth grow, competing with the likes of Comcast in the cable TV market and fending off the proponents of Net neutrality who don’t care much for the idea of a two-tiered Internet. Beyond this there is the issue of continuing to build out AT&T’s wireless business, which if not iPhone-dependent, is certainly nursing a hell of a habit.
