UPDATED 12:28 EST / MARCH 26 2013

BlackBerry’s Mystery & Mozilla’s Strategy In The Smartphone Wars

SiliconAngle’s Kristin Feledy went over today’s biggest consumer tech and enterprise news on this morning’s NewsDesk segment, discussing the latest updates from Spotify, Yelp and others.

Spotify partnered with Microsoft and Echo Nest to launch Mixshape, a data-driven tool that enables users to manipulate their playlists visually. There’s also rumor of another offering, an upcoming video streaming feature that the company plans to offer along music subscriptions, but CEO Daniel Ek said in a statement that “right now, we’re focused on music.”

Yelp announced a new number crunching feature of its own. The new widget estimates the profitability of listings by identifying leads and using an algorithm to calculate average revenue per customer.

Summly, the startup behined the text shortening app of the same name, was acquired by Yahoo for an undisclosed amount that is speculated to be around $30 million. BlackBerry (formally RIM) also announced a major win: Brightstar ordered one million Z10s, the first phone model that runs on the vendor’s new BlackBerry 10 operating system.

Mozilla published a new workshop series that instructs developers on how to develop and optimize an app for Firefox OS, a web-based operating system that shares many similarities with Google’s open-source Chromium platform.  The search giant also made news recently when it updated the Google+ mobile client with augmented photo manipulation and sharing capabilities. The new features are based on technology the company obtained through the acquisition of Nik Software.

Cisco acquired a company called SolveDirect, which is known primarily for its service-level agreements monitoring platform. The management software is used by a number of major technology vendors including Cisco itself.

Last but not least, Facebook rolled out threaded comments. You can now respond to comments directly, follow conversations, and easily identify the entries that got the most Likes.

See the entire segment below:

 


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