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How Apple and ATT can fix the iPad 3G pricing bait-and-switch
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Editorial, Features, Handhelds, Wireless / WiFi,
After having a couple of days to let the absolutely ridiculous bait-and-switch that AT&T just pulled on Apple’s iPad 3G customers sink in, I’ve come to the conclusion that one, or both, of these companies needs to do something for the customers that just got screwed.
In a nutshell, when Apple announced the iPad, there was the Wi-Fi-only version, and there was the 3G version. The big draw with the 3G model was that it had a very reasonable unlimited data plan for $29.99 for 30 days of access. You could start and stop at any time, no contract required. Let’s not fool ourselves here—this plan was a major selling point for the 3G iPad. However, in just three days—just a little over a month after the iPad 3G went on sale—that unlimited plan goes away and is instead replaced with a $25 plan that allows you just 2GB of data. A true bait-and-switch if we’ve ever seen one.
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Gallery: How Apple and ATT can fix the iPad 3G pricing bait-and-switch
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Opinion: Apple, iPhone 4, and the Case against Gizmodo
Posted by Alex Lifschitz Categories: Apple, Smartphones, Editorial, Features, Handhelds, Rumors,
I’m a pretty crappy journalist.
I do it in my free time, and for the most part, I’m an opinions and hands-on writer. I don’t go monstering around the nation’s capital with a fedora and notepad, and I rarely find myself in a position where I have to probe into anything that matters past an arbitrary release date. I don’t always fact check if I’m not making accusations.
But I know a scummy move when I see one. And Gizmodo’s actions in the iPhone HD prototype debacle have been consistently unethical, unprofessional, and, yes, illegal.
It sucks. Gizmodo’s parent company, Gawker Media, is home to a lot of great blogs and great people – people who seem to have some professional standards. But in the face of such reprehensible journalism, Gizmodo has been inexplicably wearing their tarnished reputation from this saga as if it were some kind of badge of pride. I’m sure they have lawyers going over every step of their story, but how someone in their legal or PR departments could have greenlit this is really beyond my comprehension.
Before I get into the ethical issues of yellow journalism, I think it’s important we establish a fact pattern and what I hold to be the optimal course of actions they could have taken through this whole sordid affair. Join me while I use my rudimentary Google-fu to make my case against the actions of nearly all parties involved.
Click to continue reading Opinion: Apple, iPhone 4, and the Case against Gizmodo
Gallery: Opinion: Apple, iPhone 4, and the Case against Gizmodo
McAfee pushes bad update, takes down Windows XP computers
Posted by Dan Hughes Categories: Corporate News, Editorial, Internet, PC / Laptop, Software,
Yesterday, McAfee pushed out a DAT file for its Enterprise virus-scanning software that tracked down a core Windows XP system file and quarantined it as malware. Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of computer systems were damaged as a result. Windows XP cannot run without the quarantined file, SVCHOST.EXE, and as a result, automatically shut itself down. Other weird settings and symptoms were evident, such as taskbars disappearing, blue-screens-of-death, and other crash-related symptoms.
On one hand, relief simply did not come fast enough. On the other…what more could McAfee have done to repair the damage? McAfee rolled back the virus definition as quickly as it found out, and released an addendum file that could be manually applied to infected PCs. The servers hosting the offered file were strained by the demand, resulting in disconnect errors and failures to update the McAfee software.
“We believe that this incident has impacted less than one half of one percent of our enterprise accounts globally, and a fraction of that within the consumer base,” said Barry McPherson, on McAfee’s blog Wednesday. He goes on to identify the error in the update, stating that it was an attempt to detect a potentially damaging virus, and the update “clearly did more harm than good.”
“Having talked to literally hundreds of my colleagues around the world and emailed thousands to try and find the best way to correct these issues, let me say this has not been my favorite day. Not for me, or for McAfee. Not by a long shot.”
Click to continue reading McAfee pushes bad update, takes down Windows XP computers
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Gallery: McAfee pushes bad update, takes down Windows XP computers
SXSW 2010: Location-based Marketing and Advertising: Targeting the Mobile Consumer
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smartphones, Editorial, Features, GPS, Internet,
Navteq and their parent company Nokia believe that LBS or Location Based Services are going to be a $7 billion dollar industry by 2013. This is due to an increase of mobile connected devices and their ability to receive targeted advertisements when they are near a specific location.
Navteq currently has 80 people globally in their sales force, working with mobile operators as well as smaller application developers to help sell the data that they collect about locations. They warehouse this information by deploying “data collection trucks” which have high definition cameras mounted on the rooftop and drive most all of the major cities roads . These cameras take photos and collect other data such as elevation as they drive through the streets. Company spokesman and presenter Shawn Gunn said future unknown applications will leverage this. To seed such innovation, Navteq has a location based challenge that they run annually and several augmented reality projects are frequently presented from that.
Gallery: SXSW 2010: Location-based Marketing and Advertising: Targeting the Mobile Consumer
SXSW 2010: Twitter and an Airline: A story
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Editorial, Features, Google, Internet, Transportation, Wireless / WiFi,
My friend Jeff Pulver commandeered a room on the 4th floor at SXSW and had several people who he has met around the world present what they believed were success stories about the Twitter service. This goes hand in hand with the 140 Conferences that he is throwing around the world. One such speaker, Bowen Payson, was from the airline Virgin America that has been using Twitter to outreach to their customers.
Bowen began his session by speaking about the differences in their airline from a physical experience. From the black leather Recaro seats, to the mood lighting. Their on-demand in flight entertainment is just as high tech as their communication strategy. The Twitter story began without a strategy and unfolded and matured into more than
60,000 followers as I write this. Their main social contact, Nick Schwartz is the voice of the airline and loves social networking, partially because of his age. They try to keep a consumer centric voice and mind set, and work to make the experience better incrementally.
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Gallery: SXSW 2010: Twitter and an Airline: A story
SXSW 2010 Keynote: Systems Design and Inspiration
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Editorial, Features, Internet,
The Sunday SXSW 2pm keynote was from Valerie Casey, a consultant who works with entities as large as the government to up and coming Louisiana food startup Naked Pizza.
Valerie is part of a group called Designers Accord who has a mission to use the skills and talents of this team to give back to the community and ultimately Mother Earth. Her profound opening statement was “When will we start thinking that less bad is good?” The example shown was a Dell studio PC, a small desktop computer with an optional bamboo case that adheres to the highest levels of green standards for office computers. Yet, it is still another computer, which has components inside which will ultimately end up in a landfill and be harmful to humans or the environment. A heart-wrenching photo was shown of a child living an an area of China whose community cannot even drink their local water due to contaminants from the e-waste trade; where components are stripped from circuit boards over fire pits for their little precious metal content.
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Gallery: SXSW 2010 Keynote: Systems Design and Inspiration
SXSW 2010: From Hulu to Yahoo Widgets: Will the Internet Transform the TV?
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Editorial, Features, HDTV, Home Entertainment, Internet,
Rovi Chief Evangelist, Richard Bullwinkle had an afternoon session at SXSW 2010, dealing with convergence in the living room, “From Hulu To Yahoo Widgets: Will The Internet Transform The TV?”
He started the session with the statement “It is difficult to upgrade your television because it is affixed to a wall.” With computers, you can go to a new website, such as moving your social network from myspace.com to facebook.com. With a mobile phone you can delete the location centric Loopt app and load Foursquare or Whrrl. But your
television cannot be updated and it is typically maintained by someone who put it on the wall.
With the American market being spread out over thousands of miles, broadband penetration and the speed of those connections becomes the next issue. Music and streaming television is not a problem with existing bandwidth; be it via cable, to the house or Wi-Fi within. As we get to HD quality, few have the capacity to our homes to achieve this rate. I know of this pain point personally and have solved it by running three networks at the house, one for devices like the iPhone and Chumby at 2.4 GHz and the others for high definition video distribution over Gigabit Ethernet and 802.11N at 5GHz.
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Gallery: SXSW 2010: From Hulu to Yahoo Widgets: Will the Internet Transform the TV?
SXSW 2010: Evan Williams Twitter keynote
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Editorial, Features, Internet,
Three years after the Twitter 2007 launch at South by Southwest, Evan Williams announced @anywhere pages at SXSW 2010. This service allows web publishers to enable OAth Twitter logins, much like the Facebook Connect strategy. They are not the first web service with hundreds of millions of users to attempt this tactic. Hotmail users were able to use that log on on other sites via the Microsoft Passport service, after the software giant bought the first web mail provider in 1997. This account was used across all Microsoft platforms like Expedia and even shopping sites like Buy.com until it was ultimately removed from service in 2009. Today, Facebook Connect allows their 300+ million users to log on and make comments on thousands of sites and blogs. Twitters user base is much lower and they are a bit late to this strategy so it will be interesting to see how many sites will employ the service.
With a 10’s wide and thousands deep line to get in, the SXSW day three keynote of Evan Williams, one of the founders of Twitter was off to a rocky start. He started with an awkward announcement their latest service offering via a video demo and audio problems with the mic of the moderator Umar Haque.
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Gallery: SXSW 2010: Evan Williams Twitter keynote
SXSW 2010: Playing with Place - Location-aware games
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Editorial, Features, GPS, Video Games,
Katheryn started off the session giving us geo location coordinates that only a machine would love. Her followup to this was the context matters; our location around a place and who is around that space with us. There is also excitement around discovery with geo. An example could be geocache games which created back in the old old black and white LCD “latitude and longitude” GPS units and have worked their way into the App stores of the iPhone and Android handsets.
Although location is in its infancy, Foursquare has opened their APIs and sites like gatsby.com are using location data + user preferences to send SMS messages to those who are in proximity with one another and could potentially benefit in meeting up in real life. While this leads to privacy issues, it is opt-in and could let “regular strangers” connect and communicate in ways that they might night work up the courage to in the physical world.
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Gallery: SXSW 2010: Playing with Place - Location-aware games
RealAudio and ultimately Real Video was the original, old school audio and video compression used on the Internet during the early Web 1.0 days. No doubt that Web 2.0’s rise in popularity was caused in part by YouTube and the ability for its users to easily send video up to a server and have it transcoded and streamed on the fly - without the need for expensive programs like the RealMedia server set.
YouTube leveraged the Adobe Flash technology, which in its infancy, would show only cartoon like video, then incorporated codec, or software decoding support for television like motion video. This has been the standard for video distribution on the Internet, but requires support for software, and only lately has incorporated decoding within hardware. Notably the iPad and iPhone are two such media devices that do not have flash media decoding support due to a long feud between Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Adobe. Jobs calls flash a CPU hog, and a claims it would cut battery life on his devices from 10’s of hours to just an hour if it was supported. Instead, he and many others hope to see HTML5 take a rise to prominence.
In this SXSW 2010 session, Christopher Blizzard, director of developer relations with Mozilla, and Michael Dale, lead developer of the MetaVid project and WikiMedia foundation, go in depth on what HTML5 has to offer as it pertains to video on the web.
Click to continue reading SXSW 2010: Fun with HTML5 video
