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BlackBerry: BB10 is stealing customers away from rivals

It's not just the BlackBerry faithful signing up for the BlackBerry Z10.

More than half of the customers snapping up a Z10 -- 55 percent -- are coming from a different platform, BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins said during a conference call today.

Heins wouldn't go into detail about the breakdown of where these customers were coming from, but it's an encouraging sign that the Z10 was enticing enough that people were willing to switch over to the new device. It's one sign of progress for a company badly in need of a home run.

"We'… Read more

Video not yet ripe on Twitter's Vine

Athletes do it. Celebrities do it. Brands do it. Even fashionistas find it trendy. Yet Vine, the 2-month-old "it" video-clip service from Twitter, isn't as popular you might expect. Nor is the entire video-sharing genre, which looks totally unhip when compared against our generation's photo-sharing ways.

Vine, a 6-second looping video application for iOS, launched on January 24. The app is celebrated for its panache, and allows users to patch together teeny-tiny clips to make artsy or inane mini movies.

Probably the best advancement in red carpet tech ever. #grammys vine.co/v/bvmPO6EZdxY

— Ryan Seacrest (@… Read more

Samsung poised to double lead over phone rivals, IHS says

Thought Samsung's smartphone market share was high before? Just wait until the Galaxy S4 is released, IHS said today.

The technology research firm expects Samsung to more than double its percentage point lead over rivals from 2012 to 2013. Samsung held 29 percent of the cell phone market in 2012, while Nokia ranked No. 2 with 24 percent. IHS didn't specify what percent of the market Samsung should control this year but said its lead over its nearest rival should rise to 11 percent (from the 5 percentage point lead in 2012).

That's a pretty bullish estimate … Read more

SEC probe on Facebook pre-IPO sales ends in financier's arrest

To many investors last year, it must have seemed like an amazing opportunity -- giving financier Craig Berkman thousands in cash in exchange for early dibs at Facebook's highly coveted pre-IPO shares.

Berkman, 71, seemed trustworthy. He was a former gubernatorial candidate for Oregon, the state's Republican chairman between 1989 and 1993, and an ex-investment banker.

Little did they know that Berkman was said to have pocketed that money -- totaling $8 million -- and then allegedly used it to pay off debts and fund personal expenses.

Berkman was arrested in Florida today for allegedly defrauding investors in … Read more

Yahoo looks to buy stake in video-sharing site Dailymotion

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is working on buying a controlling stake in video-sharing site Dailymotion, The Wall Street Journal reported today.

Unnamed sources told the Journal that Yahoo is in talks with France Telecom, the company that owns Dailymotion, to buy as much as 75 percent of the site. The site may be valued at about $300 million.

It's far from a done deal at this point, according to the Journal's sources, but Yahoo could use a boost in the video-sharing space, which is mainly dominated by services like Google's YouTube.

Although Mayer purchased a recommendations startup … Read more

RapidShare scraps unlimited storage with short notice

Online storage provider RapidShare is expanding what it offers for its free service -- but it's also scrapped its earlier unlimited plan, even for customers who paid in advance for a longer-term period.

The Swiss company, with more than 50 employees, more than a thousand servers, and the capacity to store several petabytes of user data, announced the change March 12. Paying customers get a choice between a 250GB plan costing 10 euros ($12.96) a month and a 500GB plan costing 20 euros a month. The previous unlimited-storage option vanishes Wednesday.

The change reflects a reality for cloud … Read more

Get to know Netflix and its new Facebook integration

Earlier this week Netflix announced it was rolling out social integration with Facebook for its U.S. customers.

According to Netflix, by the end of this week all U.S. users should have the option to connect the service with Facebook. To see if your account has been enabled, simply log in to your Netflix account and view your home page. Scroll down through the various lists of shows and you should come across the prompt seen above. If you don't see the prompt, try refreshing the page or coming back to it later in the day; it'll … Read more

Do more with Dropbox's new desktop client

Dropbox updated its desktop client for Macs and PCs yesterday, bring added functionality to the Dropbox window you access either via your Mac's menu bar or your PC's task bar.

The old desktop client was good for getting you quickly to your Dropbox folders or the Dropbox Web site, but it wasn't good for much else. With the Dropbox 2.0 desktop client, you get easy access to your folders and the Web site, along with the ability to initiate sharing a file and accept or decline invites without needing to visit the Dropbox interface. Meanwhile, the … Read more

Dropbox 2.0 adds system-tray alerts and sharing features

We Dropbox users have gotten very accustomed to our boring yet reliable Dropbox desktop clients (download for Windows, Mac, Linux 32-bit, and Linux 64-bit) chugging along tirelessly, syncing files and folders between computers and devices with no muss or fuss, that it was with some trepidation yesterday that I updated to version 2.0, the brand-new release from the online-hosting service. The new update gives the system-tray-based app a slight cosmetic makeover--the utilitarian menu as been supplanted with a more modern UI that includes links to your Dropbox folder, the Dropbox Web site, three "recently changed" files, and … Read more