telecommunications

When Microsoft showcased its latest smartphone operating system in Barcelona, Spain, on Monday with innovative features and a new name, CEO Steve Ballmer noted that one thing that won't be updated is its business model. That means original equipment manufacturers who want to feature Windows Phone 7 Series will still pay a fee for each device, estimated in the past by Strategic Analytics at between $8 and $15 per phone.

The Obama administration knew that there'd be a lot of interest in the $7.2 billion for high-speed Internet projects it included in last year's huge economic stimulus package.

The goal was to quickly create tens of thousands of jobs and connect millions of poor and rural communities to broadband, a technology that's essential for economic development, modern medicine and education.

Among the 234 million cell-phone users over age 13 in the U.S. in the fourth quarter, Motorola-manufactured hardware dominated the market of all mobile users, according to a comScore survey released Monday. Among operating systems, Research In Motion had the largest smartphone market share.

The survey showed only a slight loss by the two industry leaders from the period ending in September, a 1.4 percent drop for Motorola to 23.4 percent, and a one percent slip by RIM to 41.6 percent.

If you talked to portfolio managers at any time in 2009, chances were good that they would extol the virtues of technology stocks. The information technology sector of the Standard & Poor's index of 500 stocks rocketed 59 percent higher last year, beating every other sector and doubling the broad index's 23.5 percent advance in 2009.

How quickly fashions change on Wall Street. A month into 2010, tech is down 8.2 percent, more than any sector but telecommunications, itself off 8.9 percent this year. The S&P 500 has dropped 2.3 percent.

Google has enhanced the user experience of its HTC-manufactured Nexus One smartphone by adding a iPhone-like feature. Pinch-to-zoom functionality is now available for the Nexus One's Android browser via an over-the-air download. The function also works with Google Maps and the phone's photo gallery.

The feature, already available on some third-party Android apps, is an idea Google may have, well, pinched from Apple.

Stung by complaints about dropped calls and slow wireless downloads, AT&T Inc. is going to spend an additional $2 billion to improve its network this year.

The country's largest telecommunications company has faced an aggressive ad campaign from Verizon Wireless that attacks the quality and range of AT&T's network.

On Thursday, AT&T executives spent an unprecedented amount of time on their fourth-quarter earnings conference call to defend the wireless network and detail how they plan to make it better.

Maybe AT&T's new slogan should be "More books in more places." The phone company added a near-record 2.7 million wireless customers in the last quarter, defying expectations with the help of new e-reading devices.

AT&T said Thursday it added 1 million non-phone devices with built-in cellular service in the fourth quarter. AT&T has deals to support the latest version of Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle, Sony Corp.'s Reader and Barnes & Noble Inc.'s Nook.

On Thursday, McAfee shed light on the cost and impact of cyberattacks on critical infrastructures such as electrical grids, oil and gas production, telecommunications and transportation networks. More than half of 600 IT security executives from critical infrastructure enterprises worldwide report large-scale attacks or infiltrations from organized crime, terrorists or nation-states.

The average estimated cost of downtime associated with a major incident was a jaw-dropping $6.3 million per day.

The leader of the Mozilla Project, whose Firefox Web browser now has 350 million users, said Sunday that she is concerned that legal restrictions could limit Internet expansion.

Mitchell Baker said she worried about "the increase in laws that make it difficult to run an open network," especially rules about content.

It's surely no coincidence that on the same day Google launched its much-anticipated Android-powered Nexus One phone, Apple had its own announcement: iPhone and iPod users have downloaded three billion applications from its App Store in 18 months. About half those downloads occurred in the last six months, since Apple reported 1.5 billion downloads in July.