Headaches are mounting for Research In Motion, the company behind the BlackBerry smartphones.

Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM is facing pressure from activist shareholders at home while its customers in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Brazil, Chile and Argentina have complained of service problems and outages over the past few days.

The Canadian company on Tuesday acknowledged that its customers are experiencing messaging and browsing delays and blamed the problem on a core switch failure. RIM (ticker: RIMM) says it is “working to restore normal service as quickly as possible.”

To read the full story: USA Today

Steve Jobs, the innovative co-founder of Apple who transformed personal use of technology as well as entire industries with products such as the iPod, iPad, iPhone, Macintosh computer and the iTunes music store, died Wednesday.

The Apple chairman was 56.

The iconic American CEO, whose impact many have compared to auto magnate Henry Ford and Walt Disney— whom Jobs openly admired — abruptly stepped down from his position as CEO of Apple in August because of health concerns. He had been suffering from pancreatic cancer.

To read the full story: USA Today

Is $99 the magic number for tablet computers?

Tech giant Hewlett-Packard Co. couldn’t sell its TouchPad tablets until it reduced the price to $99, slashing hundreds of dollars off the original cost. Then they flew off the shelves.

The wildly popular promotion, in the wake of HP announcing that it was quitting the tablet business, may have some people thinking that $99 is the tipping point, when tablets will shift from being the coveted gadget of the few to an accessory that almost everyone has, like a cellphone or laptop computer.

But for now, analysts say, $99 is not a realistic retail price for a tablet computer that isn’t a toy.

“The TouchPad was an anomaly in the market,” said Rhoda Alexander, director of monitor research at IHS iSuppli. “They are exiting the market and they’re losing a lot of money by selling the tablets that cheap.”

An HP TouchPad includes more than $300 in component parts, according to a tear-down analysis by iSuppli, not including software or labor costs. That’s similar to the $326 worth of parts in the runaway bestseller among tablets, Apple Inc.‘s iPad 2.

“From a manufacturing standpoint, there is no way you can make a quality tablet for $100 right now,” said Kevin Wiens, co-founder of teardown expert iFixit. “It’s basically impossible. The cheaper tablets out there are very, very poorly made.”

To read the full story: Mcall

AT&T(T) said Friday in a court filing that its proposed acquisition of T-Mobile USA, which is being opposed by the Justice Department, will mean better service for consumers.

According to multiple media reports, the company filed comments with the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia late Friday, saying it believes the public will see a benefit from the combination and that overall service will improve.

To read the full story: The Times Herald

The square patterns found in the corner of print ads, in store aisles and elsewhere can be scanned by consumers’ smartphones and tablet computers to open a Web page, play a video or even place a call.

Suddenly, they’re popping up everywhere — those square, futuristic-looking matrixes that appear to be a cross between abstract art and Rorschach tests.

You’ll find them in the corner of newspaper and magazine ads, in department store aisles, on product displays, price tags and For Sale signs in front of homes. Giant-sized versions have shown up on billboards.

Called quick response codes, or simply QRs, they’re the barcodes for the digital age — but ones that convey far more information, and which can be scanned by consumers with smartphones and tablet computers to open a Web page, play a video or even place a call.

The technology has been around for years, but only recently has it been embraced by U.S. retailers and other companies looking for fresh ways to connect with customers. The number of QR scans recorded by the industry’s leading code maker has soared to 2 million a month, nearly double the rate last year, and up from 80,000 a month in 2009.

“Advertisers are regarding them as the hottest new tool of mobile advertising,” said Colin Gibbs, an analyst at research group GigaOm Pro. “They love QRs because they’re cheap and easy to deploy, and you can put them anywhere from print ads to the back of stadium seats.”

Macy’s Inc. has QRs displayed throughout its stores, with signs giving step-by-step instructions on how they’re used. Shoppers who aim their smartphones’ cameras at the codes get videos — on their phone screens — of makeup guru Bobbi Brown dispensing application tips or Martha Stewart dishing out decorating advice.

To read the full story: Los Angeles Times

A privacy-rights group said it plans to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission over Facebook’s facial recognition feature for photo tagging.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center based in Washington, D.C., is working on the complaint and will present it to the agency by Thursday, said Marc Rotenberg, the group’s executive director. Other privacy and consumer groups plan to sign onto the complaint, Rotenberg said, declining to identify them.

Facebook, owner of the world’s most popular social networking service, said on its blog Tuesday that “Tag Suggestions” are available in most countries after being phased in over several months. The feature uses facial recognition software so when a user posts a new photo to a Facebook page it suggests names of people to tag based on pictures in which they are already identified.

The feature is also drawing scrutiny in the European Union, where a group of privacy watchdogs from the EU’s 27 nations said Wednesday it will study photo tagging for possible rules violations. Authorities in the U.K. and Ireland said they are also looking into the situation.

To read the full story: MercuryNews.com

While the sun beat down last week on a $187,000 rooftop solar system on his Chester County barn, Edward Frankel watched his electrical output add up.

Every two minutes, a meter ticked off another kilowatt-hour of power generated by the 150 solar panels Frankel installed last year at his Honey Brook farm.

For every 1,000 kilowatt-hours the system produces, Frankel earns one Solar Renewable Energy Credit – an SREC, the coin of the realm in green energy.

“Almost 37 SRECs,” Frankel, a veterinarian, said as he watched the cumulative total on the electric meter climb toward 37,000 kilowatt-hours. “Yes!”

Last year, Frankel was more enthusiastic about SRECs, when utilities paid him more than $300 for each credit. Now a cloud is gathering over his cash flow. The SREC price has crashed to under $100.

“I think you’d be nuts to build a system in Pennsylvania today,” said Frankel, 73. He canceled plans to install a second solar system on his veterinary practice, the Honey Brook Animal Hospital.

Pennsylvania’s booming solar industry is going bust.

Attracted by 30 percent federal tax credits and state grants aimed at stimulating pollution-free electricity production, Frankel and thousands of other property owners went solar in the last two years. Taxpayers covered $106,000 of Frankel’s 30-kilowatt system, or 57 percent of the cost.

To read the full story: Philly.com

Nintendo, the manufacturer of the Wii and 3DS game systems, said Sunday that it had been the target of a recent hacker attack, the latest in a flurry of intrusions into corporate Web sites.

Nintendo, which is based in Kyoto, said in a statement that a server at an affiliate of its United States unit was accessed unlawfully “a few weeks ago.” That server contained no consumer information and no data had been lost, the company said.

The attack on Nintendo appears to be significantly less serious than the security breach of Sony’s PlayStation Network, which forced it offline in late April for more than a month. Hackers in that case took personal data from tens of millions of user accounts, including credit card numbers.

Nevertheless, the continuing intrusions underscore the vulnerability of online services at a time companies have raced to expand their Internet offerings.

A hacker group called LulzSec, which has said it was behind several data breaches at Sony, also appeared to claim responsibility for the attack at Nintendo.

In a post on Twitter on Saturday, the group suggested that Nintendo might be spared some of the harsher intrusions it said it had directed at Sony.

“We’re not targeting Nintendo. We like the N64 too much — we sincerely hope Nintendo plugs the gap,” the group said on its Twitter account, referring to the company’s Nintendo 64 game machine, released in the mid-1990s.

LulzSec on Thursday claimed responsibility for breaking into the Sony Pictures Entertainment site and stealing personal information of about 52,000 customers. The group also claimed to have broken into a database for Sony Music’s Japanese site on May 23.

It is a consequential time for Nintendo, as it introduces its e-Shop service for the 3DS, its flagship device that lets users play 3-D games without wearing special glasses.

Nintendo said it has fixed the problem and that the hacking episode would not delay its new online service, the Nintendo e-Shop, which lets users download games for the 3DS hand-held machine. The service will go online Monday in the United States as planned, said Ken Toyoda, a spokesman for Nintendo.

To read the full story: The New York Times

The USPS is a wondrous American creation. Six days a week it delivers an average of 563 million pieces of mail — 40 percent of the entire world’s volume. For the price of a 44¢ stamp, you can mail a letter anywhere within the nation’s borders. The service will carry it by pack mule to the Havasupai Indian reservation at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Mailmen on snowmobiles take it to the wilds of Alaska. If your recipient can no longer be found, the USPS will return it at no extra charge. It may be the greatest bargain on earth.

It takes an enormous organization to carry out such a mission. The USPS has 571,566 full-time workers, making it the country’s second-largest civilian employer after Wal-Mart Stores. It has 31,871 post offices, more than the combined domestic retail outlets of Wal-Mart, Starbucks, and McDonald’s. Last year its revenues were $67 billion, and its expenses were even greater. Postal service executives proudly note that if it were a private company, it would be No. 29 on the Fortune 500.

The problems of the USPS are just as big. It relies on first-class mail to fund most of its operations, but first-class mail volume is steadily declining — in 2005 it fell below junk mail for the first time. This was a significant milestone. The USPS needs three pieces of junk mail to replace the profit of a vanished stamp-bearing letter.

During the real estate boom, a surge in junk mail papered over the unraveling of the postal service’s longtime business plan. Banks flooded mailboxes with subprime mortgage offers and credit-card come-ons. Then came the recession. Total mail volume plunged 20 percent from 2006 to 2010.

To read the full story: MSNBC.com