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BlackBerry unveils Leap smartphone; continues shift to software

BlackBerry had billed “a very strong device roadmap” in the buildup to its Mobile World Congress presence this year. What the company showed at its press conference this morning was a full touch screen smartphone, called Leap.

BlackBerry’s CEO John Chen also promised a curved-screen handset with a separate keyboard to come out “as soon as it’s done.” In addition, the company stressed the integration of its software into Samsung’s KNOX workspace.

The Leap smartphone comes with a five-inch 1280 x 720 touch screen and no keyboard and will cost $275. But the latest BlackBerry handset “will find it tough to compete with the iPhone and Android devices,” according to analyst house CCS Insight. However, the research company added that “the Leap will be essential to a more-rounded portfolio.”

In the meantime BlackBerry made it clear it remains heavily focused on developing cross-platform software services that Chen said will extend to “any end point” – i.e any IP address – “whether it is a vending machine or a rice cooker”. In addition to developing a software platform to address the internet of things market, BlackBerry is aiming its enterprise mobility software at the vertical sectors of healthcare, finance and government.

“We’re expanding into the software and services business and doing it quickly,” said Ketan Kamdar, global head of device portfolio, BlackBerry.

Hardware still accounts for the majority of BlackBerry’s revenues, according to Chen, who admits “it will take some time for hardware and software to be twin towers”.

In its effort to build up software revenues quickly BlackBerry is working with any operating system, whether it is Windows, Android or iOS. In particular, BlackBerry underscored its collaboration with Samsung to “create a highly integrated experience” for BlackBerry’s enterprise software on Samsung KNOX. The strategy of putting BlackBerry’s enterprise software and encrypted messaging functions onto Samsung phones could call into question the future of BlackBerry handsets. However, for now BlackBerry claims to be committed to continuing to develop handsets aimed at the enterprise market.

BlackBerry’s enterprise software services include secure access, and a split billing function that lets companies pay only for work-related voice, data and SMS usage. The company, which cites operators as its key channel, also showed collaboration tools, such as one-touch conference call dial that does away with the need to enter passwords.

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Google To Offer Wireless Data Plans In Hopes Of Getting More People Using All Of Their Products

(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

MOUNTAIN VIEW (CBS/AP) – Search giant, self-driving car developer, smartphone and tablet maker. Turned data plan provider?

Google wants more people to get online so they can search around and click on its ads. And it’s shaking up the telecom world to do it. The company said Monday at the wireless show in Barcelona, Spain, that it will soon sell data plans for smartphones and tablets in the U.S. The announcement confirmed leaks and media reports in late January that Google planned to enter the telecom market.

More information will be released “in the coming months,” Sundar Pichai, Google Inc.’s senior vice president of products, said during his presentation.

The move into the wireless market mirrors what Google has been trying to do for hard-wired Internet access at home. The Mountain View company currently sells an ultra-fast fiber-optic Internet service in a handful of markets scattered across the U.S. in an attempt to pressure long-established broadband providers to improve their prices and cut their prices.

Google conceivably do something similar for wireless by offering discounted data plans that would pressure major carriers such as AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications to offer better deals and services or risk losing customers to a powerful rival.

READ ALSO: 16 crazy Google products you had no idea they were working on

“Any time there is a new entrant with the resources and imagination of Google, it most definitely could shake up the market,” said Gartner analyst Bill Menezes.
Pichai downplayed the competitive threat that Google might pose.

“We don’t intend to be a network operator at scale,” he said. “Our goal here is to drive a set of innovations which we think the ecosystem should evolve and hopefully will get traction.”

Pichai compared Google’s latest move to its decision to launch its own line of Nexus smartphones, which he said Google uses not to compete with other smartphone makers, but to introduce innovations in mobile hardware.

Finding a way to provide a “seamless” Internet connection when a device moves from Wi-Fi to cellular coverage as one example of goals Google would like to target, Pichai said. He also noted that Google is also working on “Android Pay,” a mobile payment system similar to “Apple Pay,” that will work across all Android-powered devices.

Google plans to be a “mobile virtual network operator,” which means it will lease space on an existing system. Pichai didn’t name Google’s wireless partners, but previous media reports have identified Sprint Corp. and T-Mobile US Inc. Neither of those carriers has confirmed those plans yet.

Related Story: Google’s drone-based internet almost ready to take off

Selling Google access to their wireless networks would help Sprint and T-Mobile recoup some of their extensive investments. If Google’s entry into the wireless market is successful, the company may even try to take over Sprint or T-Mobile, Menezes said. “This could end up being a ‘try it and then buy it’ strategy,” he said.

T-Mobile already has been lowering its prices and rolling out other wireless plans that have undercut the status quo. Some of those changes have prodded AT&T and Verizon to take steps that have helped their existing customers save money.

Google is constantly looking for ways to get more people online in an effort to drive more traffic to its Internet-leading search engine, Gmail and YouTube video site. All those services display the ads that generate most of Google’s revenue. Google also collects commissions on millions of ads distributed to other sites.

The company is using solar-powered drones and a fleet of high-altitude balloons to beam Internet service in some parts of the world.

Google has developed a technology to tell whether ‘facts’ on the Internet are true

Cables at a Google data center. (Courtesy Google)

The Internet, we know all too well, is a cesspool of rumor and chicanery.

But in a research paper published by Google in February — and reported over the weekend by New Scientist — that could, at least hypothetically, change. A team of computer scientists at Google has proposed a way to rank search results not by how popular Web pages are, but by their factual accuracy.

To be really clear, this is 100 percent theoretical: It’s a research paper, not a product announcement or anything equally exciting. (Google publishes hundreds of research papers a year.) Still, the fact that a search engine could effectively evaluate  truth, and that Google is actively contemplating that technology, should boggle the brain. After all, truth is a slippery, malleable thing — and grappling with it has traditionally been an exclusively human domain.

Per this recent paper, however, it’s not too difficult for computers to determine whether a given statement is true or false. Basically, to evaluate a stated fact, you only need two things: the fact and a reference work to compare it to. Google already has the beginnings of that reference work, in the form of its Knowledge Graph — the thing that displays “August 15, 1990” when you search “Jennifer Lawrence birthday,” or “American” when you search “Obama nationality.”

Answers from the Google Knowledge Graph, which pop up when you search “flu,” “Obama nationality” and “Jennifer Lawrence birthday,” respectively. (Google)

Google culls those details largely from services like Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook; a separate, internal research database, called Knowledge Vault, can also automatically extract facts from the text on Web pages. Whichever database we’re talking about, Google structures these ‘lil factoids as things called “knowledge triples”: subject, relationship, attribute. Like so:

(Jennifer Lawrence, birthday, August 15 1990)
(Barack Obama, nationality, American)
(Somalia, capital, Mogadishu)

… so to check if a fact found in the wild is accurate, all Google has to do is reference it against the knowledge triples in its giant internal database. And to check whether a Web page or a Web site is accurate, Google would just look at all the site’s knowledge triples and see how many don’t agree with its established body of facts.

The distant suggestion, these researchers write, is that Google’s version of the truth would iterate over time. At some point, perhaps even Google’s hotly debated and much-studied ranking algorithm — the creator and destroyer of a million Web sites! — could begin including accuracy among the factors it uses to choose the search results you see.

This chart basically shows the distribution of accurate (toward the right) and non-accurate (toward the left) Web sites, for sites where the research team could extract seven or more facts. The good news: There are a lot more accurate sites! (Google)

That could be huge, frankly: In one trial with a random sampling of pages, researchers found that only 20 of 85 factually correct sites were ranked highly under Google’s current scheme. A switch could, theoretically, put better and more reliable information in the path of the millions of people who use Google every day. And in that regard, it could have implications not only for SEO — but for civil society and media literacy.

It’s worth noting, in fact, that the Barack-Obama-nationality example comes straight from the Google report, which would seem to imply that the technology’s creators envision it as a tool against stubborn misconceptions and conspiracy theories.

“How do you correct people’s misconceptions?” Matt Stempeck, the guy behind LazyTruth, asked New Scientist recently. “People get very defensive. [But] if they’re searching for the answer on Google they might be in a much more receptive state.”

Increasingly, information intermediates like Google have begun to take that suggestion seriously. Just three weeks ago, Google began displaying physician-vetted health information directly in search results, even commissioning diagrams from medical illustrators and consulting with the Mayo Clinic “for accuracy.” Meanwhile, Facebook recently launched a new initiative to append a warning to hoaxes and scams in News Feed, the better to keep them from spreading.

It’s unclear exactly what Google plans to do with this new technology, if anything at all. Still, even the possibility of a search engine that evaluates truth is a pretty incredible breakthrough. And it definitely gives new meaning to the phrase “let me Google that for you.”

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