News from the technology industry.
Adobe has announced it will discontinue its Creative Suite product, and will instead concentrate on Creative Cloud. A number of outlets, including TNW, CNET, and Slashot, are reporting that Adobe will be switching to the subscription-only service, with no further versions of Creative Suite planned after the current CS6.
Highly popular mobile chat apps for smartphones are slowly replacing traditional SMS text messaging. The Next Web describes the results of Informa research suggesting that while SMS messaging is by no means dying (usage continues to grow), it is being replaced by free mobile messaging apps. Eventually, the assumption is that SMS will disappear altogether, […]
Dropbox has announced that it is rebranding Dropbox for Teams, its product aimed at large enterprise, as Dropbox for Business. The idea, according to TNW, is to get the message out that this Dropbox product is meant to handle hundreds or thousands of employees rather than the ten or so that the word “team” implies. […]
A worldwide outage of the Microsoft Azure cloud storage service was caused by the expiry of an SSL certificate on Friday, according to reports. This comes on the heels of a week-long outage of an SQL server component of the Azure service. The news was reported in a number of outlets, including Slashdot, which cites […]
Coursera & edX, two major providers of massive open online courses (MOOCs), have recently announced the addition of 35 new schools between them. According to TechCrunch, Coursera has added 29 schools, 90 courses, and 4 new languages. edX has added 6 schools.
The unlocking exemption from the United States’ Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), previously maintained by the Librarian of Congress, has been allowed to expire. Unlocking a smartphone in the United States that was purchased after October 28, 2012 is therefore now illegal. For now, unlocking remains permitted in Canada. Digital Trends has a question-and-answer article […]
Belkin has announced a deal to take over the Linksys brand from Cisco, which has owned Linksys since 2003. Engadget provides a copy of Belkin’s press release along with a brief summary, noting that Belkin intends to continue support for Linksys customers. CNET also mentions that Cisco has dropped some other consumer-oriented products from its […]
Microsoft Office 2013 pricing has been announced, the first to include a monthly subscription option. Microsoft’s licensing and pricing, especially for “Enterprise” software products, can be Byzantine, so it comes as little surprise that the first version of Office to have both boxed and Software-as-a-Service options will be available in no less than nine distinct […]
Blackberry users in the UK and Ireland experienced an outage that lasted through the morning on Friday, in another blow to RIM’s reputation. The Independent reports that the service was back up by lunchtime, but any outage is bad news for RIM’s already shaky reputation. A number of system problems over recent years have weakened […]
For a short period on Monday, Adobe Creative Suite 2 (CS2) was made available for free download without any activation requirement. As this Ars Technica post points out, it was a nearly brilliant move that turned out to have been done by mistake. When Adobe shut down the activation servers for Creative Suite 2, there […]
