Mobile network builder Nokia Siemens Networks unveiled tools to optimize video performance on mobile devices on Monday, just in time for the CTIA Wireless trade show that begins Tuesday in Las Vegas.

The new capabilities come out of Liquid Broadband, a portfolio of network performance technologies that NSN announced in February at Mobile World Congress. That lineup includes Liquid Applications for boosting app performance, plus other tools.

Amid all the effort going into small cells, more spectrum and other ways to boost total available wireless capacity, mobile vendors are also crafting tools for using that capacity more intelligently. Around the same time Liquid Broadband debuted, NSN rival Cisco Systems introduced Quantum, a software architecture that can analyze real-time data about the network to improve performance, among other things.

NSN wants to help carriers satisfy their subscribers with smooth video streaming, which may pose a challenge when many users on the same base station want to watch. The company says its new capabilities can reduce video stalling by 90 percent while also cutting demand for capacity by 25 percent.

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Ready for an unconventional upgrade? How about this: You can turn an old, pokey external hard drive into a blazingly fast one with about 10 minutes of your time and $15 of your money.

See, most modern computers have at least one USB 3.0 port. You can plug an older, USB 2.0 drive into one, but you won’t get the faster throughput afforded by the newer technology.

Thankfully, you don’t need to get a new drive just to enjoy speedier file transfers; you just need a new drive enclosure.

You can buy one for around $15, give or take $5, and from there it’s a fairly simply matter to transplant your old drive. Just unscrew the old enclosure, remove whatever screws are holding the drive in place, then separate the drive. Now install it in the new enclosure using the provided instructions (if you even need them; it’s a pretty self-explanatory procedure).

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Google will retire its Checkout payment processing tool on Nov. 20, and warned retailers they will need to move to a different payment processing platform.

Checkout, which launched in 2006, was merged with Wallet, which is a mobile payments tool, last November. The product was aimed at taking on eBay’s PayPal service, which dominates Web-based payments.

Google said it has partnered with Braintree, Shopify and Freshbooks to offer discounted options for retailers that have not yet selected an alternative payment processor.

Wallet will now be the company’s focus. Developers for its Play store will be moved to the Google Wallet Merchant Center, Justin Lawyer, senior product manager for Google Wallet, wrote. There will be no changes for consumers using Wallet on sites such as Priceline and Uber, according to Lawyer.

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Sprint Nextel said it had received permission from SoftBank to negotiate a rival acquisition offer from Dish Network.

The board of Sprint Nextel has the right to terminate its existing merger agreement with SoftBank, subject to certain requirements, to accept a “Superior Offer,” the company said in a statement late Monday. The board has not determined that the Dish offer is in fact superior, and has not changed its recommendation with regard to the SoftBank offer, it added.

SoftBank of Japan announced in October last year that it had reached a deal to acquire a 70 percent stake in Sprint for US$20 billion. Dish, a satellite TV service provider, made a $25.5 billion counter-bid to acquire Sprint last month.

The Japanese company said on Monday that it had given Sprint a waiver of certain provisions under the merger agreement including allowing Sprint to give Dish access to certain non-public information for due diligence purposes, and to negotiate with the rival bidder.

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Yahoo has made some radical changes to its Flickr photo sharing service, which now has a more photo-filled interface and comes with a free terabyte of storage so that users can upload images at their original resolution.

The changes were announced Monday evening at an event in Manhattan and follow Yahoo’s news earlier in the day that it will buy the blogging site Tumblr for US$1.1 billion.

Since acquiring Flickr in 2005, Yahoo has been criticized for allowing the service to languish with few major improvements. Flickr has seen its popularity wane with the rise of competitors like Instagram, and of social media sites generally, though it still has about 89 million users.

The changes announced Monday are designed to “make Flickr awesome again,” CEO Marissa Mayer said several times during Monday’s event.

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Samsung will soon release its first Android tablet based on an Intel Atom processor, according to a source familiar with the plan, in what would be a vote of confidence for Intel chips in mobile devices.

The tablet, a Galaxy Tab 3, will have a 10.1-inch display and run on a version of Intel’s Atom chip known as Clover Trail+, the source said. Samsung hasn’t announced such a product, but a Galaxy tablet running Android 4.2 appeared on several benchmark websites this month, sparking rumors of its existence.

According to the GFXBenchmark site, the tablet’s display will have a screen resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels.

A Samsung spokeswoman declined to comment, saying the product hasn’t been announced. No release data was available.

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Planview has updated the interface of its flagship project portfolio management (PPM) software to make it easier to navigate and appealing to a wider range of potential users.

“Traditionally, portfolio management has been very IT-centric, and it continues to be the biggest part of our business, but [PPM is] increasingly being adopted on the line-of-business side — product development teams, service teams and the revenue-generating sides of business,” said Patrick Tickle, executive vice president of products for Planview. “We needed to step back and revisit the core user experience of the product.”

Planview Enterprise 11, which will be available in both on-premise and hosted editions, has an interface that switches the focus of the application from finding individual functions to providing an environment customized to the user’s needs.

It’s the first major update to Planview Enterprise since February 2012. The new interface is the result of an 18-month design and development process, one with more than 1,000 hours of feedback from 100 customers.

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Windows 8, released to the wild last October, seems stuck in a no-win situation.

On the one hand, it is not catching on with Android- and iOS-loving consumers turned off by the Windows 8 tile-based interface and the Windows App Store, which by Android and Apple standards, is anemic and disorganized. And these days, consumer technology is frequently a precursor to enterprise technology as shown by the BYOD (bring your own device) phenomenon.

On the other hand, the situation for Windows 8 isn’t any better in the enterprise. IT decision-makers interviewed for a new Forrester report don’t see the Windows 8 experience as an improvement over the stable and well-liked Windows 7, mostly due to confusing behavior between applications running in the “Metro” touch interface and those running in the traditional desktop mode.

In the report, entitled “IT Will Skip Windows 8 as the Enterprise Standard,” IT professionals reveal that a top concern about Windows 8 is the “potential for significant user training and support and the need for application redesign to take advantage of the new Windows 8 interface.”

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Yahoo has promised “not to screw up” Tumblr now that it has acquired the freewheeling blogging site. But there are still several ways Tumblr could get better, and worse, as a Yahoo-owned company.

On the bad side, there’s the threat of excessive advertising.

“Tumblr has been unprofitable, and Yahoo has to figure out how to monetize it,” said Forrester Research analyst Zachary Reiss-Davis.

“But it has to incorporate ads tastefully,” he added. Failing that, Yahoo may not have much of a user base to advertise to. Matt Mullenweg, the founder at rival blogging site WordPress, has already reported a massive uptick in its blog post import rate from Tumblr.

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Windows 8, released to the wild last October, seems stuck in a no-win situation.

On the one hand, it is not catching on with Android- and iOS-loving consumers turned off by the Windows 8 tile-based interface and the Windows App Store, which by Android and Apple standards, is anemic and disorganized. And these days, consumer technology is frequently a precursor to enterprise technology as shown by the BYOD (bring your own device) phenomenon.

On the other hand, the situation for Windows 8 isn’t any better in the enterprise. IT decision-makers interviewed for a new Forrester report don’t see the Windows 8 experience as an improvement over the stable and well-liked Windows 7, mostly due to confusing behavior between applications running in the “Metro” touch interface and those running in the traditional desktop mode.

In the report, entitled “IT Will Skip Windows 8 as the Enterprise Standard,” IT professionals reveal that a top concern about Windows 8 is the “potential for significant user training and support and the need for application redesign to take advantage of the new Windows 8 interface.”

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