Kevin covers mobile broadband, carriers and wireless infrastructure for GigaOM. He has been writing about wireless networks and technology for 11 years, working first at Telephony Magazine and its online successor Connected Planet. Kevin spent his early career at several small Texas newspapers. He made the shift to tech writing upon moving to Chicago, where he now lives.
AT&T is seeking a guinea pig to test out its idea for a subsidized mobile internet, and Hulu fits the bill perfectly. If Hulu foots the bill for its own data traffic, consumers could stream video to their hearts’ content. Read more at GigaOM »
Tango has already built up a surprisingly large following of social gamers within its communications app. Now it plans to export its video, voice and messaging platform to other game makers. Read more at GigaOM »
Content providers will soon pay mobile carriers to exempt their traffic from consumers’ mobile data plans, says AT&T’s Randall Stephenson. That may seem like a good deal for consumers but in the long-term it’s actually a raw deal. Read more at GigaOM »
ESPN is reportedly in negotiations with Verizon to exempt its content from the carrier’s data caps. Such a deal would set a precedence for a very different mobile internet than the one we know today. Read more at GigaOM »
Feast CEO David Spinks is combining the e-learning model pioneered by education sites like Udemy and Coursera with his experience in building online communities, and he’s applying it all to building on online cooking school. Read more at GigaOM »
Brands claim they’re taking to social media, but they’re really inserting ads into other people social engagement streams — not engaging themsleves, says the founder of the Dachis Group. Read more »
Sometimes an April Fools’ fake news item is more than just a gag. Here are a few pranks we think hint at larger trends in the tech industry. Read more at GigaOM »
Springpad takes in a lot of loose information from the web and organizes it, but that information stays on Springpad. With its new Embedded Notebooks tool, however, Springpad plans to expose that organized content back to the web. Read more at GigaOM »
As Punchfork gets ready to shut down its API post Pinterest acquisition, Yummly hopes to step into its shoes, proving recipe content to food sites and apps. Yummly’s semantic search technology, however, has a lot to offer. Read more at GigaOM »
Amazon is officially part of the connected car, having launched its first app, Cloud Player, on Ford’s Sync platform. It’s next app should be obvious. Amazon already has the technology to integrate the Kindle into the dashboard. Read more at GigaOM »
BlackBerry App World is becoming simply BlackBerry World as RIM prepares to revamp its mobile storefront. In addition to apps and games, RIM will be selling multimedia. Read more at GigaOM »
Rhapsody has retooled its relationship with MetroPCS. Instead of bundling its music subscription service in all upper-tier Metro smartphone plans, it’s selling the service for $5 a month to any Metro customer. Read more at GigaOM »
By multicasting popular content over cellular networks, carriers figure they can conserve valuable 4G capacity. But as consumers use their smartphones and tablets to personalize their multimedia consumption, the ship may have already sailed on multicast’s potential. Read more at GigaOM »
Swedish DJ and producer Avicii has agreed to work with network builder Ericsson to experiment with a crowdsourced music composition on. Starting on Wednesday, the public will be able to submit audio tracks that could wind up in Avicii’s new single. Read more at GigaOM »
Cooking inspiration is already one of Pinterest users’ biggest reasons for using the popular social network, and Pinterest has decided to make the most of that trend. Its first acquisition is recipe aggregator and culinary inspiration portal Punchfork. Read more at GigaOM »
Berg Insight believes mobile content companies are going to figure out how to monetize mobile traffic. Berg’s analysts predict that ads and marketing won’t just become a much bigger part of the online ad market, but also a sizable segment across all advertising. Read more at GigaOM »
In a digital world, the recipe has transformed from a static set of instructions into a kind of open-source code which any cook and adjust or reformulate. Food Network’s Alton Brown proposes to embrace that trend to create a form of living recipe. Read more at GigaOM »
Crowdsourcing may have liberated the restaurant review from the critics, but Steve and Jared Rivera think its also produced a lot of bad food recommendations. There answer was to create Chefs Feed, a food app where recommendations come solely from professional chefs. Read more at GigaOM »
Food Network is continuing its push into mobile media, this time with a new restaurant finder app called On the Road. The app isn’t Yelp or Urbanspoon. It draws its content and recommendation solely from FN’s TV programming, and that’s the way Food Network likes it. Read more at GigaOM »
