Technology briefs: T-Mobile offers Facebook deal

T-Mobile enables voice calls to Facebook friends

NEW YORK — T-Mobile USA is doing something unusual for a phone company: enabling free calls on computers between Facebook friends.

T-Mobile released a series of software add-ons for the most popular browsers Tuesday. Once installed, a phone icon appears beside each name in the chat section of the user’s Facebook page. Clicking the icon places a call through the Internet connection.

Only the caller needs to have the software installed for the call to go through, but both participants need to be logged in to Facebook and have headsets or microphones and speakers.

The software add-ons are branded “Bobsled by T-Mobile.” The company plans to use the brand for other Internet-calling features, such as phone apps that can place calls directly to Facebook friends.

Brad Duea, T-Mobile USA’s senior vice president of marketing, says the point of “Bobsled” is to put T-Mobile’s brand in front of more people. (That brand may go away in a year or two anyway, as AT&T Inc. seeks regulatory approval to buy T-Mobile for $39 billion.)

T-Mobile could also add advertising or start charging for calls from PCs to phones.

Smaller companies have offered Internet calling with various degrees of integration with Facebook. T-Mobile USA, which doesn’t own any conventional phone lines in the U.S., also sold conventional Internet calling devices for a few years. They worked with regular home phones instead of PCs.

For Facebook calling, T-Mobile is using backend technology from Vivox Inc., which provides voice communications for several online games, including “Star Wars Galaxies.”

The “Bobsled” software has been available for a few months as T-Mobile and Vivox tried them out under the “Vring” name. The connection to T-Mobile was secret.

Apple hit by lawsuit over in-app purchases by kids

NEW YORK — Apple is facing a lawsuit from a Pennsylvania man whose 9-year-old daughter racked up $200 in charges buying “Zombie Toxin” and other game items on her iPod.

The lawsuit seeks class-action status, saying Garen Meguerian of Phoenixville is among many people with bill shock after children went on buying sprees in iPhone, iPad and iPod games. These games are typically free to download, but players can buy items that speed up the game.

An Associated Press story in December highlighted the issue. In many cases, it appeared that children bought items such as “Smurfberries” from “Smurfs’ Village” without knowing they were spending real money. ITunes didn’t ask for a password for in-game purchases if it had been entered within the previous 15 minutes for any reason. This meant that parents could download a free app, hand over their devices to their kids, and later find big charges on their iTunes accounts.

Apple reversed the charges of complaining customers. It also tightened its password policy with a software update in March. Entering the password outside an app no longer triggers a password-free period for in-app purchases, which now have a separate 15-minute timer.

Apple spokeswoman Kristin Huguet said the company does not comment on pending litigation.

The lawsuit was filed last week in federal court in San Francisco. CNET reported on it earlier.

“Tap Zoo,” a kid-oriented game that’s free to download but charges for items, was the top-grossing app in the App Store on Tuesday.

Google invests $100 million in wind energy

SAN FRANCISCO — Google Inc. has invested another $100 million in a clean energy project. The funding for the Shepherds Flat Wind Farm in Oregon brings Google’s total clean energy investments to more than $350 million and represents the company’s latest attempt to support reliable new ways to power its expanding data centers.

Data centers, or server farms, are notorious power hogs. And Google has many of them. The simple act of typing in a Google search taps into Google’s computing resources — and the grid that supplies energy to those machines.

Google also invested last year in a project to line the sea floor off the East Coast with electrical cables to send power from offshore wind farms back onto land. Building capacity is one of the major costs of clean energy projects. Google has also invested in solar energy.

Google says it’s interested in the Shepherds Flat project “not only because of its size and scale, but also because it uses advanced technology.”

“This will be the first commercial wind farm in the U.S. to deploy, at scale, turbines that use permanent magnet generators — tech-speak for evolutionary turbine technology that will improve efficiency, reliability and grid connection capabilities,” Google said in a blog post. “Though the technology has been installed outside the U.S., it’s an important, incremental step in lowering the cost of wind energy over the long term in the U.S.”