CTIA has appointed Jacqueline McCarthy as its director of state regulatory affairs, where she will lobby state and national regulators on issues related to the wireless industry’s initiatives and policies. Prior to joining CTIA, McCarthy served as director of government affairs for PCIA and also worked as the managing director of land use and external affairs for Network Building & Consulting.
Strategy Analytics has come out with some compliments and some criticisms on the
Nokia Ovi Store. The firm’s user evaluation reported that the store has a simple and consistent layout and has a very intuitive content acquisition process. However, the firm critiqued the store’s category layout, calling it confusing. Strategy Analytics analyst Paul Brown said that browsing through content required too many clicks, adding that it will be important for Nokia to improve the structure of the Ovi Store as the amount of available content increases.
Loopt says its service has launched on the
Sprint Instinct family of devices, allowing users to hook up with nearby friends. Besides Sprint, Loopt users can share their location between carrier networks with fellow Loopt users on AT&T, Verizon, Boost, MetroPCS and T-Mobile. Loopt is currently supported on more than 100 mobile devices, including the iPhone and iPod touch through the App Store, BlackBerry devices through the Blackberry App World and select phones with the Android Market.
T-Mobile USA has released the Web-friendly
Samsung Highlight. The device features a full touch-screen display, a 3-megapixel camera with video capture, music player and a microSD slot for up to 16 GB of removable memory. It also offers a personalized home page, Yahoo OneSearch and access to live news feeds with T-Mobile’s web2go widget.
Nuance Communications has acquired
Jott, a mobile voice-to-text applications developer. Nuance plans to package and offer Jott Assistant, its voice-to-text application, to mobile operators as part of its voice services portfolio, including Nuance Voicemail-to-Text. The service is scalable and customizable for enterprise applications and provides open APIs for voice integration with third-party CRM providers and other enterprise applications requiring mobile access.
Education technology firm
Blackboard has announced support for ereaders that allows course text and materials to be displayed on the Amazon Kindle. The Kindle was recently updated with a larger screen and Amazon has partnered with several textbook publishers, colleges and universities that will begin using the new version of the device this fall. Blackboard also acquired Terriblyclever Design, a company which developed iPhone education application MobiEdu. Once adopted by an educational institution, the app allows students to navigate the school’s course catalog, identify their exact location on campus using GPS, check college news alerts, in addition to other uses.
VoIP software company
Voiceserve narrowed its losses to $371,013 from $835, 597 last year on a dramatic increase in sales, which hit $1.9 million for the year ended March 31. The company’s introduction of VoipSwitch, a modular VoIP licensing management platform for resellers, was a main contributor to the increase in sales. The introduction of the company’s mobile softphone technology, which enables calls over the Internet when users are in Wi-Fi zones, also boosted sales.