Apple agitated Bitcoin devotees late Wednesday after it deleted Blockchain, the last remaining Bitcoin wallet for iPhone, from its iOS App Store.
According to Blockchain CEO Nicolas Cary, the app was dropped with little to no explanation from Apple. Cary told Wired he received an email stating Blockchain was “removed from the App Store due to an unresolved issue.”
The Blockchain app, which was used by 120,000 global iPhone users that wanted to buy and sell Bitcoin over their phones, perhaps owed some of its popularity to the fact that it was the only remaining Bitcoin wallet allowed in the App Store. BitPak was dropped back in 2012 with a similar non-explanation from Apple. And this November, Apple ditched Coinbase, too.
Bitcoin believers are taking the Blockchain news as evidence of Apple’s dislike of competition. CEO Tim Cook recently hinted that Apple was developing a new mobile payment system that could come out as soon as alongside the iPhone 6. For this reason, Apple might see Bitcoin as competition.
These actions by Apple once again demonstrate the anti-competitive and capricious nature of the App Store policies that are clearly focused on preserving Apple’s monopoly on payments rather than based on any consideration of the needs and desires of their users.
According to Jerry Brito, senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and director of its Technology Policy Program, it’s probably less about developing a monopoly and more about Apple’s historic aversion to risk with regards to apps in its App Store:
I think they see the curation of the App Store as a value they add, and they tend to reject anything that's remotely risky and that they think could make for a bad user experience. Remember when they got in trouble for rejecting Mark Fiore's political cartoon app? I don't think it has to do with Apple trying to eliminate competitors to its rumored forthcoming payments technology, but because they are not completely transparent about their decision making, you can't blame people for thinking that's the case.
Meanwhile, the Bitcoin community isn’t waiting for an explanation. Members of r/bitcoin are recording videos of themselves smashing their iPhones in hopes to replace them with a more Bitcoin-friendly Nexus 5.
I reached out to Apple for comment on Wednesday. This story will be updated if the company has anything to add.
As we approach the final days of the old copper-wire telephone network, regulators are already looking at what rules to apply to new Internet-based networks that will replace it.
Today, the Federal Communications Commission is poised to allow AT&T Inc. and other phone companies to run Internet phone networks without the current rules in limited tests. Phone companies would still be required to offer consumer protections like immediate access to 911 and reliable phone quality, but they’d be allowed to experiment with how to provide those services.
“We will be focusing on how enduring network values — public safety, universal access, competition and consumer protection — can be preserved and enhanced throughout technological change,” an FCC spokesman said. There is no date set yet for ending the trials.
The tests are part of a broader effort by Washington to figure out what to do about the FCC’s archaic rules, which have strained to keep up as phone and video services have migrated to the Internet or wireless networks.
In 2003, about 93 percent of U.S. households subscribed to traditional phone service, according to USTelecom, the phone and broadband industry lobbying group. Ten years later, that figure had dropped to about 26 percent. Consumers have dumped old landlines in favor of Internet phones packaged in pay-TV companies triple-play bundles. Or they’re increasingly relying exclusively on wireless phones.
Legacy phone rules, which govern everything from dial tones to rates companies pay each other to connect calls, have looked increasingly obsolete as AT&T, Comcast Corp. and other broadband providers have moved phone services onto the Internet.
Phone companies want to shut off their old copper-line phone networks and upgrade to internet protocol-based networks, including wireless services. AT&T and Verizon Communications have been asking the FCC for years to look at this issue. The issue gained more notice last year, after some New Jersey residents complained when Verizon decided to build a wireless network to replace the old copper-wire system that Hurricane Sandy washed away.
There’s not expected to be much of a fight from phone providers about retaining existing consumer protections, like privacy rules to protect consumers’ billing info or making sure everyone can reach 911. Things get a little dicier when it comes to more expensive issues, like ensuring that everyone in the U.S. — even in ultra-rural areas — has access to reliable phone service.
The upcoming tests “will give policymakers and all stakeholders the ability to observe and learn from the facts on the ground, rather than being frozen by false fears,” AT&T said in a statement last month, when the FCC announced plans to allow the trials. “Ultimately, the IP trials will ensure that no one is left behind as the country moves forward to an Internet-enabled future.”
More contentious will be new rules about how phone companies connect with each other to transfer phone or data traffic. The FCC currently has a mind-numbing collection of rules which dictate how phone companies pay each other to complete calls. The agency hasn’t begun seriously tackling that issue yet. The agency overhauled those rules a few years ago but hasn’t yet begun tackling the interconnection issue yet. (Update: Just clarifying the FCC’s actions so far.)
(Comcast Corp. owns NBCUniversal, which is an investor in Re/code.)
When Google released its Q4 earnings on Thursday, all eyes were on Motorola’s performance; the search giant had announced Wednesday that it is selling Motorola’s cell-phone business for close to $3 billion to Lenovo, ending an adventure that cost the company another $384 million last quarter.
But while the sale of Motorola may give the impression that Google is going back to its roots by only making money with ads, it’s worth noting that the company saw some of its fastest revenue growth outside of its traditional ad business. Non-ad revenue, which includes both app and media sales as well as sales of hardware products like Chromecast, grew 99 percent in 2013.
During Q4 of 2013, Google generated $1.65 billion of non-ad revenue, compared to $829 million in Q4 of 2012. Revenue from this segment now makes up for 10 percent of Google’s overall revenue, compared to six percent in Q4 of 2012.
Google’s Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora said that the growth in Q4 was largely due to hardware sales, and gave a special shout-out to one product: “One of the things that has done really well for us is Chromecast.” Google’s CFO Patrick Pichette added that the Nexus 5 had a substantial impact as well.
Chances are, that the company will be able to point to additional hardware product having an impact on those numbers soon: Google acquired smart thermostat and smoke detector maker Nest earlier this month, and Pichette said Thursday that the goal of the acquisition was “to help them scale.”
Arora added that Google also sees potential in other emerging hardware areas, including wearables. “We are continue to be committed to hardware,” he said.
Google’s core business, including ads, apps and hardware sales, saw $15.7 billion in revenue during Q4 of 2013, compared to 12.9 billion in Q4 of 2012. Motorola’s business generated $1.24 billion in revenue in Q4 of 2013, compared to $1.51 billion in Q4 of 2012. The company’s GAAP operating income was $3.92 billion last quarter, compared to $3.39 billion during Q4 of 2012. This resulted in $9.90 GAAP earnings per share, compared to $8.62 a year ago.
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Amazon CFO Tom Szkutak revealed that the company may be hiking the price of its popular Amazon Prime service—possibly by as much as $20 to $40 beyond the current $79 annual fee. Szkutak spoke during Amazon's fourth quarter 2013 earnings call today.
The reason is obvious. Shipping is expensive, and Amazon's current system is groaning under the burden of all the free shipping Prime allows. Szkutak said that transportation costs are up, and so are Prime shipments. (He said that Prime units have grown to 19 million from 1 million.)
Prime membership also includes access to Amazon's free video-streaming service and the ability to "borrow" some Kindle e-books for no additional cost.
In the same announcement, Amazon's financial results fell short of Wall Street expectations, despite revenue growth of 20 percent to $25.59 billion.
It can sound like a gentle wave, an eager ding, or perhaps a vibration on our phone felt from a pocket. It’s email, and regardless of how much we talk about the future of work and collaboration, we cannot ignore this blaring reality of all employee lives. Email keeps us handcuffed to our phones and computers–always alert to that distracting delivery notification of a new message.
It’s like a virus spreading beyond containable proportions. It has become an out of control situation.
We use email for everything related to communication and collaboration at work even though it’s no longer the most effective way to do either. Everyone has an email account. Its widespread reach is both its greatest strength and biggest weakness. There are five ways that email is making the lives of employees around the world today miserable.
Too much of it
There are around 90 billion business emails sent out every single day. According to Mimecast, an enterprise email management company, we spend around half of our working day (four hours) using email (although other reports have this number to be at around 25-30%). Additionally, 39% of users regularly send, receive, and check emails outside of working hours (Mimecast “The Shape of Email 2012″). This means that half of what we get paid to do as employees is use email. This a scary statistic.
The amount of email employees get is so overwhelming that it’s oftentimes one of the first things people check in the morning and one of the last things they do before retiring to bed. Radicati Group estimates that employees receive around 78 business emails a day and send around 37 a day. This brings the total to around 115 emails a day (sent and received)! On average employees check their email 36 times an hour which amounts to 288 times a day for an eight hour work day. To make matters worse it takes employees around 16 minutes to refocus on their tasks after handling email. The fact that employees get so much email every day (and this is just business email), means employees have to work longer hours. This is because half of their time at work isn’t actually spent working. Bottom line, too much email makes employees miserable.
Forwarded conversations
Forwarding long threaded email conversations has become the norm for looping other team members in. Since email is the default communication medium in most companies, when an employee needs to join the conversation he or she is conveniently sent a massive forwarded email thread which kindly says “see below.” This employee is now stuck weeding through a massive, unformatted, and disorganized email thread. Quite simply this takes accountability off the sender by sending a message similar to: “I forwarded you the conversation so you should have all the info you need.” This tactic is not only ineffective but it’s time consuming. It also makes the lives of employees…miserable.
Rapid response expectation
When email first came out it was used for asynchronous communication. You would send an email and in a day or two would get a response back. Nowadays if you don’t respond to someone’s email in a few hours they think you’re dead. Most employees are essentially email slaves. Now that employees can check and respond to email on their mobile devices they are forever connected to the email overlords. Not only have companies created a work culture where employees are expected to respond to emails right away, but many of them are expected to do so on the weekends too. In a study by Good Technology they found that 38% of employees routinely check work email at the dinner table, 50% do so while still in bed, and 69% won’t even go to bed without first checking their email.
This expectation that employees always need to be checking and responding to emails makes employees…miserable.
Used for everything and anything
Want to share a document with someone? Email it. Want to invite an employee to an event? Email them. Need to ask a question? Email it. Need to send a one word response to something? Email it. Want to send meeting notes to your team? Sure, just type them up in your email and blast it out to everyone.
Email has gotten out of control to the point where it’s used for everything and anything. Today only around one in three emails is essential for work. To give you an analogy, imagine trying to fix every problem in your house with just a screwdriver. Regardless of what the problem is, you have that trusty screwdriver to help you out even though it’s clearly not the best suited tool for most of what you need to get done. The fact that companies use email for everything and anything makes employees miserable
Email as the company therapist
You ever get those emails from someone only to find that what you’re reading sounds like it should be contained in a personal diary of the person who sent it? Oftentimes employees can send out verbose emails with scattered ideas that colleagues are expected to read just to find that one piece of relevant information that they need. It’s kind of like a weird game where I send you an essay and say “find the one sentence in this text that answers your question.” No matter what this schizophrenic email says employees are expected to read it. Finally, the fact that employees are expected to read everything that comes their way makes employees…miserable.
The hard truth is that email is not the most effective tool for communication or collaboration. There are better technologies and strategies out there. Stay tuned for my second post providing actionable advice on how to stop making employees miserable with email.
In the meantime, let’s stop making the lives of employees miserable!
The time has certainly come. Americans are rushing to cut the cord to the once-ubiquitous analog network in favor of better and cheaper Internet-based voice services from providers large and small.
That’s the kind of innovation Accenture’s Paul Nunes and I call a “Big Bang Disruptor,” so named because of its devastating impact on a once-dominant technology and the businesses that offered it. In 2003, more than 90 percent of U.S. homes had a wireline connection. Today, it’s 26 percent. Bang!
The old network, required as a matter of law to continue operating, is now an expensive white elephant. Once invaluable assets have quickly becoming liabilities, pulling the wireline phone business into an economic black hole. If nothing else, the eventual transition to all-IP voice services for all Americans — perhaps by the end of the decade — will end the waste of maintaining worse and more expensive analog technologies, freeing up private capital better used for improvements to their digital replacements, wired and wireless.
But there’s a more urgent reason to encourage and accelerate the so-called IP transition. Doing so will definitively close what’s left of the “digital divide” that separates those enjoying the benefits of broadband Internet from those who don’t.
Source: Pew Internet and American Life Project (as of May 2013)
Who are the Internet have-nots? The answer may surprise you. According to the Pew Internet Project, nearly half of the 15 percent of American adults who don’t use the Internet are 65 or older. (Other factors, including sex, race, income and geographic location are less significant, and continue to decline.)
That number lines up nearly perfectly with the percentage of older Americans — between 10 percent and 20 percent of them — who, according to numbers reported by AARP, still rely exclusively on the analog phone network.
The eventual shutdown of the phone network, in other words, will close the digital divide for older Americans, at least for voice. And once the holdouts have gotten over their understandable resistance to better and cheaper new technology, helping them appreciate the value of the rest of the Internet — in health care, in continuing education, in home automation, in social, public safety, energy and entertainment services, among others — will be that much easier.
It is also essential. According to the Pew survey, the most frequent answer given by non-users as their primary reason not to connect is that the Internet is “just not relevant to them.” The next-biggest factor is usability. The problem, in other words, isn’t availability or cost. They simply don’t believe there’s anything online for them. And they lack the ability to discover otherwise.
Last year, in testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee, I argued that these findings offer the most compelling reason of all to transition the dwindling number of wireline users to the Internet as quickly as possible.
While critics of the proposed shutdown (largely local and rural phone companies) warned of the risk of leaving behind the dwindling number of households that still rely solely on the analog network, the reality is precisely the opposite.
Getting the last 25 percent of predominately older Americans exclusively onto IP networks sooner rather than later will make it easier and less expensive for them to connect to other broadband services, including video, email and Web access. Which, thanks to the economic magic known as network effects, means a more diverse, valuable and robust online experience for everyone.
To be sure, there remain tricky engineering and business issues to be resolved, including emergency services and the incompatibility of older analog devices (some fax machines and phone-activated security gates, for example) that weren’t designed to work on digital networks.
That’s why the FCC is wise to begin the process with voluntary consumer trials in specific geographic markets. The trials will surface the remaining issues, including regulatory roadblocks and consumer education, which will need to be solved before a full transition can be scheduled.
But time is of the essence. Before Thursday’s order, the FCC had been considering the trials for over a year. In the meantime, the pace of consumer defection from the old network has accelerated. It’s becoming increasingly difficult and expensive to maintain last century’s technology.
The 2009 shutdown of analog broadcast television in favor of its digital disruptor offers important lessons the FCC would be wise to heed. After only four years of planning, broadcasters managed to complete the transition, but still lost most of their remaining market share to cable, satellite and, increasingly, better and cheaper Internet-based video services. Many stations have found it difficult to use new digital platforms to compete effectively. As over-the-air broadcasters start to throw in the towel, consumers lose local content and competition suffers.
For engineers, consumers and regulators alike, nothing motivates like a deadline. So, in the inevitable shift to all-digital voice services, the best way to finish what customers have already started is to set an aggressive target date and stick to it.
In the short term, that may unsettle some older Americans. But more quickly than anyone can imagine, they’ll get over it and enrich our lives by bringing their absent voices to the digital conversation.
The second larget U.S. cellular giant saw 566,000 wireless postpaid net adds during the quarter, as T-Mobile's efforts to shake up the wireless industry are beginning to take its toll.
Apple’s iPad isn’t the only device that gets free 4G data from T-Mobile. Look around carefully and you can find the HP Chromebook 14 and a few other HP devices with the same data deal. While you only get 200 MB of mobile broadband access each month, the service is free for as long as you own the device.
I first saw word of this deal in a Google Group where some commenters pointed out Costco as a source for the HP Chromebook 14 with data for life. Chromebooks have come with 200 MB of free monthly data in the past but it has only been good for two years. I checked Costco’s site and verified the deal; for $379.99, the free connection on T-Mobile’s 4G network is good for as long as you have your Chromebook.
“Don’t worry about connecting, even when you go beyond Wi-Fi with free 4G. Enjoy 200MB of free data each month, no annual contract, for the life of your device. For offer details and information: hp.com/go/freemobility.”
I hit up the HP site mentioned and the limited time offer applies to not just the HP Chromebook 14 but also the company’s Slate 7, Slate 10, Envy 14 Touchsmart, Envy 14 Sleekbook and ElitePad. The HP product page for the Chromebook 14 also mentions the free data for life.
Again, 200 MB won’t go very far if you use it for a primary connection. But I’ve been able to check in on email, update a few social networks, pull down an e-book and browse a few websites each month on the free data I get from T-Mobile with my iPad Air. And it’s a smart move for T-Mobile: If the network delivers as promised, potential customers could quickly become actual subscribers for their data hungry devices.
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Gmail service went down worldwide Friday afternoon, frustrating millions of users. The outage also affected other Google services such as Hangouts and Google+.
Google's apps dashboard initially showed all Google services in the green, but it was updated at around 2:20 p.m. ET to show a service disruption for Gmail. Gmail stopped working for both web and mobile apps as well as third-party clients such as Apple Mail, suggesting that the entire back-end (IMAP) service was affected.
Judging from the response on Twitter, the outage appeared to be worldwide and affected other Google services as well. Hangouts and Google+ both stopped working; some Google Drive users were reporting connection issues, too. The Google homepage remained unaffected, though, as were Google's main search products. Google Calendar appeared unaffected as well. Read more...
I’m not a huge football fan. But I do marvel at the drama of professional football.
In particular, I admire what Peyton Manning has done for the Broncos the past two years. His individual contributions are well documented. But what I’ve been most impressed by is the positive impact he seems to have had on the rest of the team. Sports are a great metaphor for many aspects of life. In this case, entrepreneurs could learn a lot from Peyton Manning and the leadership he’s brought to the Broncos.
Sense of Urgency: Manning has had one goal since he arrived in Denver and he’s pursuing it with maniacal focus. Set a goal and pursue it fervently.
Be Precise: In an era where many NFL quarterbacks are making an impact with pure athleticism (Cam Newton, Kapaernick, Russel Wilson), Manning makes an impact with precision. The Bronco’s offense is a meticulous yardage producing machine. You can’t single-handedly carry your company and win consistently. Inspire execution precision across your entire team and your company will perform. Run your company with the level of precision that Manning runs the Bronco’s offense and your company will be a capital efficient value-creation machine.
Have a Contingency Plan: Manning is better than any other quarterback in the league at running through his progressions (the contingency) so that if the play does’t work as designed, he can check-off to another receiver. Always have a contingency plan; just in case your first attempt doesn’t work out as intended.
Work Ethic: Manning has a reputation for working harder than anyone else on the team. This is a guy who, on his one-day per week off practice, can be found soaking his injured ankle in a hot-tub with his helmet on and iPad listening to his offensive coordinator call practice for the rest of the offense. With the level of success he’s had, he has every right to slack off every now and again, but he doesn’t. We should all set such a high bar for ourselves.
We not I: Listen to Manning at a press conference. This past week, all of the talk was about Brady-Manning. All Manning wanted to talk about was the team. Whenever possible, he accepts blame that shouldn’t be put on him and deflects praise directed toward him on others. Corporate leaders can/should do the same.
Be Selfless: What Manning does better than any quarterback in the league is take what the defense give him. If the defense wants to play 7 defensive backs, he’ll run the ball. If they want to crowd the line of scrimmage, he’ll throw it. He adapts, on a dime, and runs whatever play the circumstances call for. He’s not interested in how he looks when he audibles, but rather that the play is the “right” one for the situation. The point here is that more often than not he makes the right call regardless of how it affects his own personal stats. In the end, the only way to “look good” is to have your company perform. The selfless call is more often than not the right right call.
Set an Expectation of Greatness: You sense that Manning’s high expectations for himself extend to everyone around him. He doesn’t accept mediocrity from anyone. Remarkably, everyone around him seems to rise to the challenge. I’m a big believer that people will behave the way you expect them to. If you expect greatness, they will perform great, if you expect mediocrity, they will perform just well enough to get buy.
In full disclosure, I grew up a fan of the lowly Detroit Lions. They will forever be my “home-team” and rank ahead of my “adopted team, the Broncos. So this isn’t some kind of fan-boy post. I’m not sure Matthew Stafford’s leadership offers a whole lot of learning for entrepreneurs.
If you haven't yet, you should watch this 25-second clip of MSNBC "reporter" Andrea Mitchell cutting off Congresswoman Jane Harman just as she was explaining why the government needs to end the Section 215 bulk phone records collection program that spies on all Americans... in order to rush to cover the "breaking news" of Justin Bieber's court appearance live. Yes, apparently, making sure they cover Bieber's bond hearing live is more important than discussing the US government surveilling every American illegally. Of course, an argument can be made that this is what the American public wants, though that's partly because the cable news programs have learned since the OJ era that nothing gets viewers like covering a high profile court case to an extreme level.
Brand researcher YouGov released new data from its BrandIndex survey this week that show that consumers estimations of T-Mobile are on the rise – and they’re rising at the expense of arch-enemy AT&T. The BrandIndex’s key metric, called purchase consideration, found that the percentage of consumers willing to consider purchasing AT&T service has fallen from 25 percent to 23 percent since the beginning of 2013, while the percentage considering T-Mobile service has risen from 10 percent to 13 percent. YouGov polled 30,000 adult consumers for the report.
Purchase Consideration from 0 to 100%
The YouGov poll on perceived value of mobile service found that both carriers started out 2013 roughly even, with a slightly negative perception. But ever since T-Mobile started selling the iPhone last spring, its scores have been rising, while AT&T’s have been falling.
Brand value measured from -100 to 100
In terms of customer satisfaction, AT&T is still well ahead of T-Mobile, but as in the case of purchase consideration, T-Mobile is gaining. Its satisfaction score has risen from 3 to 5 (measured from -100 to 100) in the last year, while AT&T’s has stayed flat at 7.
Customer satisfaction measured from -100 to 100
Finally YouGov measured the more abstract concept of buzz, asking consumers at various points of the year if they had heard anything negative or positive about the two carriers in recent weeks. T-Mobile saw a lot of spikes coinciding with its big Un-carrier announcements: the launch of its first iPhone in April, the rollout of its Jump phone upgrade program in late summer, and its offer at CES to pay switchers’ early termination fees. Legere made be loud and brash, but he’s definitely being heard.
Buzz measured from -100 to 100
We’ll see whether T-Mobile’s recent goodwill is being translated into more customers in next month when T-Mobile reports its Q4 earnings. Verizon Wireless so far appears unfazed, adding 1.7 million new connections in the last three months of 2013. AT&T, not Verizon, has been the biggest target for T-Mobile’s attacks, and of all the operators it has reacted most directly to its un-carrier strategy.
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A committee of the European Parliament has almost unanimously voted through net neutrality proposals that had been proposed by digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes – but not without some amendments that seriously tighten up the language. For the most part, these changes will please net neutrality advocates (who are in any case getting their first European net neutrality legislation here).
As the text now stands, it looks very much like ISPs and content providers have lost the explicit right — included in the original proposals — to strike deals between one another for “specialized services”. This doesn’t mean they can’t strike deals, but it does mean that ability is not entrenched in Europe-wide law. The amendments also place stricter conditions on the deals that can be struck.
It also appears that there will be stricter limitations on how internet traffic can be shaped or limited – only for transient network congestion and specific court orders, and not for crime-fighting or at the whim of the national government. (That said, sources in the legislative process have suggested to me that the original text in fact included fewer loopholes than now exist. I’m trying to nail that down, and also trying to find a publicly-published copy of the amendments to link to.)
In a statement on Thursday, Kroes welcomed the 35-1 vote by the Internal Market and Consumer Rights (IMCO) committee”, but said she and her team would “need to assess in more detail whether the actual amendments provide in all cases enough legal certainty to meet our shared objectives.”
Specialized services
The most contentious issue here is that of “specialized services” such as IPTV, and whether ISPs and content providers can strike deals to see content pushed into a fast lane — a move that net neutrality activists say could lead to under-investment in regular internet connectivity, and let big content providers outspend startups into obscurity. Kroes’s original proposal said such deals would be fine, as long as the result isn’t “marketed or widely used as a substitute for internet access service.”
On the subject of defining “specialized services,” an INCO amendment takes out the “widely” and throws in some extra conditions, including that such services are “optimized for specific content, applications or services, or a combination thereof, by deploying traffic management to ensure the appropriate level of network capacity and quality, provided over logically distinct capacity and relying on strict admission control.”
Some new language also pours cold water on any ideas people might be having about fencing off the European internet: “End-users shall be free to access and distribute information and content, run applications, and use devices, services and software of their choice, irrespective of their origin or destination, via their internet access service.”
This paragraph is out of the text now, too:
“End-users shall be free to enter into agreements on data volumes and speeds with providers of internet access services and, in accordance with any such agreements relative to data volumes, to avail of any offers by providers of internet content, applications and services.”
That’s because committee members said regulation wasn’t needed to cover what contracts of this kind can and can’t say, and also because access to the open, non-discriminatory internet should be a right, not a freedom.
Traffic management
Article 23 is the part of the proposal that says ISPs and content providers can “enter into agreements with each other to transmit the related data volumes or traffic as specialized services with a defined quality of service or dedicated capacity.” Or at least it was – an amendment means ISPs or content providers can offer specialized services.
Now, remember the bit above where INCO made sure “traffic management” was part of the language used to describe what a specialized service is? The committee also included much tighter language for what “reasonable traffic management” can entail. This is now almost exclusively a matter of reducing network congestion on a temporary, limited basis, although it can also involve implementing a court order (the blocking of a copyright-infringement site, for example).
What did Kroes include as “reasonable traffic management” that’s now out of the text? The implementation of legislative provisions, preventing or impeding “serious crimes” such as child pornography, preserving “the integrity and security of the network” and preventing spam.
Data protection authorities now get the chance to be involved in keeping an eye on what traffic management ISPs are applying, and “the criteria for defining reasonable traffic management measures shall be subject to periodic review.” And where Kroes said national regulators should be able to mandate minimum quality-of-service requirements, the committee has also added the possibility for “other quality-of-service parameters” to be imposed where appropriate.
What next?
Another parliamentary committee, that for Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE), will still need to vote on Kroes’s proposals on 24 February, and its members will no doubt have their own amendments. After that, it’s over to the full Parliament for a plenary vote, probably in April. It’s also worth remembering that the legislation has many other elements too, such as making it easier for consumers to switch provider.
This ain’t over yet, but what happened today went a long way towards tightening up the legislation’s language and, I believe, ensuring that European citizens can continue to enjoy an open, non-discriminatory internet.
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[If you are new around here, then you should know I've been writing about WebRTC lately. You can skim through the WebRTC post series or just read what WebRTC is all about.]
If you think about it, M2M has two things it handles:
Devices. Of various shapes and sizes
Networking. Between those devices, with the help of a backend
What should be WebRTC’s role in the Internet of Things? Does it have a place there? Does it make any sense, or is this gut feeling of mine just me hyping myself around with this new toy?
I can’t really be sure of the answer, but I think most of us have been looking at WebRTC in the wrong way. It is why I took the time to discuss the data channel uses and why I am stabbing at M2M this time.
Here’s what I think:
Most of us look at WebRTC and what we see is a flashy video (not Flash – just flashy). It has all that complex bells and whistles, and it is so easy to use compared to what we had before that we go and tinker with it, taking the time to build a video calling app and hosting it somewhere. When we get down into the details, we then see that it can do voice only as well and that there’s a data channel somewhere in there. This is VoIP thinking.
If we look at WebRTC from an M2M prism, then first and foremost it provides a data channel, and only later voice and video. And that data channel is hard to crack, because it doesn’t stand on its own and it requires a web browser.
Back to M2M.
We have devices. We have a network. We have servers. We have a use case to develop.
Backend is easy. We use web tools to build it. Probably a bit of analytics and Big Data would make sense as well, but this is all known territory.
Network is ok. We’ve done that as well. And we know how to do this at web scale if needed.
Devices. We can do devices, but somehow using the traditional ways doesn’t look that attractive anymore. You know – taking a proprietary real-time operating system that nobody uses, developing the device drivers on our own, writing code in C (or directly to the DSP god forbid) and then dealing with the lack of good IDE and debug tools. It just feels so… 80′. We might as well just go use punch cards for that part of our project.
But there’s a better way. And it fits with Atwood’s Law from 2007:
any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript.
We can do backend today with JavaScript – if we use Node.js.
Why not use Java Script on embedded devices? With or without a visual web browser?
Here’s my suggestion (and I heard it elsewhere as well):
Have JavaScript run as standalone on devices – similar to how it is done in Node.js for servers
Have networking done there using the same browser paradigms available today: XHR, SSE and WebSockets
Add WebRTC to it. At the very least have the data channel implemented
Add bindings and code to deal with voice and video on the device via WebRTC only if needed
What will happen?
It will make development a lot easier.
It will create a thriving developer ecosystem where tools will start to appear for the Internet of Things from non-commercial vendors.
If we want to really open up the Internet of Things and make it into the Internet of Everything, then JavaScript is probably the route to go. And in it, WebRTC’s data channel enables so much more by reducing the reliance on the backend servers that we just can’t pass on that opportunity.
Now we only need someone to bring this vision to life.
If you follow the tech media you would be subject to a lot of narrative biases that are completely off base – and this includes the value of email and phone calls.
TL;DR
Tech news keeps proclaiming “phone calls are dead,” which is useful except that the data suggests the exact opposite. Calls are changing but not dying.
All the data actually suggests with the growth of mobile, inbound sales calls will double from 30 billion to 60 billion in 3 years (source: Kelsey)
In fact 61% of all mobile searches where a customer contacts a business it is via a phone call (source: Google)
There are 2.9 billion email accounts. This figure is predicted to reach 3.8 billion by 2014
The three largest webmail services had over 1 billion global users at the end of 2011
62% of adult US Internet users check or send email on a daily basis
94% of all online adults use email. 73% of those aged 12-17 do so
Social media users are over 60% more likely to check email at least four times a day than those who don’t use social media
Of course that website isn’t completely up to date but it’s a great resource for seeing the overall picture. But my specific point is that while everybody is busy telling you that “kids don’t use email” or “email is dead” I have actual data from portfolio company CEO’s showing the efficacy of email as a communication and marketing channel.
The key is understanding the nuance. Of course unsolicited spam has very low open rates and is filtered by the major providers. But bacn (email you have subscribed to) can have incredibly high open rates. It’s precisely why Twitter now sends you regular emails telling you who has followed you, what your most popular Tweets are, new users suggestions, etc. It’s why opt-in marketing databases can be so incredibly valuable for companies like Gilt Groupe, One King’s Lane and AdoreMe.
And while it’s true that young people are massive text messengers and increasingly using “messaging apps” – as they graduate and join the workforce I assure you they will use email. Yes, email is changing and I personally use it less frequently as I gravitate towards texting, DMing, FB messaging and even just @Tweeting people. But it still is a major force and it ain’t going away. Only naive people believe that but for inexperienced entrepreneurs you can be fooled into the narrative by the press who sometimes write stories without the actual data.
PHONE CALLS
Enter phone calls.
What we’ve heard even more than email is dead is that people don’t make phone calls anymore. In a way it feels intuitive to us – the readers of this blog – because we’re the tech crowd. We love to streamline and text people.
But let me start with some data. In the US alone there are 30 billion inbound sales calls every year. Just. Sales. Calls. Inbound. That number is projected to GROW to 70 billion by 2016 (Source: BIA Kelsey).
Huh? But phone calls are dead? People don’t want to speak to customer service reps. I don’t want to speak to customer service reps!!
Right! Right?
Not so fast. As the mobile ecosystem has grown the industrialized world is now carrying a mini computer in their pocket that is connected to a cellular network. The reduction in screen size has made the economic model of Internet advertising totally inefficient. If you thought people didn’t look at banner ads before, you can imagine how little they look at them on their smart phones.
Google knows it. They now have massive efforts to sign up local merchants and are sending direct mail (yes, erm, physical mail isn’t deal either!) espousing the ease and benefits of signing up with Google AdWords to … you guessed it …. drive inbound phone calls. Restaurants, barber shops, gyms – people still want to call. Not everybody. Not all the time. But that’s still the world we’ll live in for the foreseeable future as these smart phones are now in the hands of the “normals.”
The most obvious phone call ad unit is what we call a “considered purchase,” which is high price, complex and requires lots of information or lots of choice. Home alarms. Insurance. Cars. Home gym equipment. Higher education. Real Estate.
SOME INTERESTING DATA
1. 77% of online shoppers want live assistance available with their purchases so it’s not surprising that 52% of shoppers re-evaluate or abandon shopping carts because of the lack of live assistance. (source: Harris Interactive IM Shopping Poll (August 2009))
That alone is pretty compelling.
2. 61% of mobile searches in which a customer contacted a vendor, a phone call was generated. Sixty. One. Percent. I suppose I could have skipped the whole rest of the blog post and just posted that. Why? The quote comes from Google. And while this data is from mid-2011 I can assure you that data is not going down. More recent data I’ve seen suggests it’s now near 70%.
3. Call centers provide conversion rates of 10x to 20x that of online shopping and also 1.5x to 2x the average order value. When you listen to Tony Hsieh talk about his Zappos customer reps in “Delivering Happiness” you get a sense of the effectiveness of call center relationships.
It’s no accident that 1 out of every 25 employees in America work in call centers.
The broader market knows businesses want calls and people want to make them. We’ve just been biased by our narrower view from “people like us” and the tech press who are in our same demographic. If you don’t understand this you’re potentially operating your business at a disadvantage.
The best evidence is just how much higher these merchants will pay for qualified leads. Here are some representative rates that we’re seeing by category
4. 63% of all consumers looking to buy financial services now research online but only 33% actually buy online. Considered purchase. (Source: Credit Union Times)
5. When you put a phone number in an online ad two unexpected factors go up
12% higher click-through rates on the online ad
15 higher conversion of online lead forms
Simply, customers trust businesses that are available by phone. Even if they don’t want to always call you.
THE ANNOYING THING
The first investment I ever made as a VC was in a company now called Invoca. If you want to understand the power of how they’re built inbound call management into a SaaS category where they’re the market leader watch this one minute video. Go on. I’ll wait.
Yet when we went out to fund raise this year after 4 years of a 200% revenue CAGR (compounded annual growth rate) the first firm that we spoke with said,
“We love what you do and we love SaaS. You’re data looks fantastic. But we can’t get over the fact that phone calls are dying.”
Are you kidding me? You’re a VC with access to your own portfolio company data which should show you that email, phones and direct mail are alive and well (albeit changing) and you have public market data by Google, Kelsey and others showing the trend on mobile is INCREASING and you’re going to fall pray to the narrative of the tech press?
Luckily most investors were more savvy. We quickly found ourselves with multiple VC firms wanting to invest and I’m super proud to announce that we have just announced a $20 million round of funding to continue to grow the business into the enterprise class leader that I know we can become.
I have long admired the telecoms prowess of Rich Wong at Accel and of course know of the legendary reputation of Jim Breyer (who has the best Twitter handle of any VC I know). But through this process our team got to work with Ryan Sweeney, the lead of Accel’s growth practice (who won me over by announcing he was an Eagles fan) and newest growth partner Kobie Fuller.
So even though I swore we wouldn’t do it, we cut off the process early when we realized how aligned our team was with Accel and how much the team felt Accel could help with our growth.
It’s funny but recently I was at the CornerstoneOnDemand conference in Santa Monica. My friend Byron Deter of Bessemer was on stage and was saying, “local [LA] investors are great in the earliest stages of a business when you need local, hands-on support. But when it’s time to scale you need to bring in a bigger firm that has global resources and relationships that can’t be matched by smaller funds with less resources and staff.”
I think when Byron said that he kind of feared that he might slightly be offending some local VCs. I found myself nodding in complete agreement. It’s why I spend time early with great partners like Byron who have deep SaaS skills and global practices because as you scale a business you need different skills, different resources, more & different relationship. So I send Byron any SaaS investment I do at the earliest stage where I know we’ve nailed product / market fit.
You’re company needs to evolve as you grow. You can’t act like a seed-round company when after you raise your $5 million A round. And you can’t act like a B-round company when you raise $20 million in growth capital. Companies need to evolve and so do boards. I wrote a post recently about how we’ve evolved the board at Invoca by adding experience industry veterans and tried to offer some advice on how to think about this for your company.
I couldn’t announce at the time that we had also added Accel but now I can. And I look forward to how the combination of our great management team and industry board members added to Accel can go own to build a valuable part of the enterprise ecosystem.
Harvard and MIT have released the draft of a working paper that makes a strong case for the potential benefits of massively open online courses, or MOOCs, despite low completion rates. The paper is rich on data about their respective HarvardX and MITx courses (although they plan to release significantly more data and analysis soon) and focuses on what I think has always been a faulty focal point of many MOOC criticisms. In a free, online environment, completion rates are vastly overrated.
This chart from the paper about sums up the message. Every person who registered for a class between Fall 2012 and Summer 2013 is represented by a dot. Those who got certified are above the horizontal line, but as the authors note, it’s the bottom-right quadrant that’s the most interesting. They’re the ones — like myself in some cases — who explored at least half the course content but either didn’t pass certification muster or never tried. But they likely learned something.
In the long run, that’s potentially the real value of MOOCs. Even if we count as a loss the 91 percent of HarvardX and MITx students who viewed less than half the course content or never did anything more than enroll in a course, 79,133 people likely learned some valuable information without paying thousands of dollars or even having to leave their homes. Of those, 43,196 actually obtained their certifications.
Although it’s not a perfect analogy, I like to think about MOOCs as kind of the education equivalents of cloud computing servers. Cloud servers in many ways are not as good as physical servers, but in some ways they’re much better. Cloud servers cost a lot less to get started on, they’re easier to use and to access, and they enable the kind of experimentation that helped fuel the startup boom over the past few years. Because it doesn’t take millions in venture capital just to buy enough gear to get a web company off the ground.
It’s a mystery why we can’t think about online courses in the same way. For a true education, they’re presently no match for an actual college, for many reasons. But for people who want to learn a new area or skill on their own time, or want to experiment with a topic to see if they like it — perhaps even as a precursor to enrolling in college — MOOCs are great. They’re the cheap, flexible, easily accessible education option that never existed.
What’s more, scientific and engineering courses — areas that many argue are key to the future global workforce — at HarvardX and MITx (this is not to mention the numbers at Coursera, Khan Academy and Udacity) reached more than 100,000 individuals without bachelor’s degrees. Enrollees with high school educations or less accounted for up to 40 percent of registrants — and, yes, certificate earners — in some of those courses. Harvard has released an early set of data tools on education levels, among other metrics, here.
Yes, talk of MOOCs and online education replacing traditional education is probably premature. Using them as an excuse to cut university funding at this point almost certainly is. But talk of them disrupting and democratizing education by at least reaching millions of people who might not have the time, money or geographic proximity to follow traditional routes is not premature.
When my wife and I went backpacking around Europe 10 years ago, we made a vow to each other. After seeing the stunningly blue waters off Greece, the paragliders sailing through the Austrian Alps, the idyllic countryside of Slovenia, we said, “Never will we take our children to Disney World. Why would you need something so manufactured when you have the real world?”
It’s 10 years later. And I left for Disney World on Thursday. The thing I didn’t understand, which, now that I have three boys, I know in my bones is this: You can’t see Buzz Lightyear while backpacking.
Oh well, Walt! You win.
But as a data scientist at a tech company, I have to admit, I’m geeking out over the technology. Disney World is like a petri dish for advanced analytic techniques because the hotels and parks are all tied together in one large, heavily controlled environment. If you ever wanted to star in TheTruman Show, a trip to Disney is the next best thing — it feels like a centrally planned North Korea only with more fun, less torture and the same amount of artifice.
From the mundane to the magical, the fact is there’s probably an engineer behind the scenes at Disney who has thought through it. Disney has industrial engineers that work on everything from optimal food-and-beverage pricing and laundry facility optimization, to attraction performance and wait-time minimization (the vaunted FASTPASS system).
MagicBands: like magic beans, except they grow data
But those tried-and-true efforts at optimization were just the appetizer. Earlier this week, there was a knock on my door and there on my doorstep sat a little bit of hand-delivered magic. I opened the package with the sweaty palms of anticipation because, to me, this package represented a billion-dollar investment by Disney in big data analytics.
That investment is called MagicBands. They’re a new technology for the park, and the program officially opened up about a month ago. Disney has thought of everything.
The soft matte finish … Source: John Foreman
The box in which the bands arrived rivaled Apple in its Incredibles-themed design. Each magic band was tucked in a slot, standing up straight, ready to be put on by the vacationer like some fabled amulet. Each rubber wristband was smartly colored with a soft-touch matte.
But under all that visual appeal, beneath the surface of the band, was the reason for Disney’s huge investment: a sophisticated RFID tag. These bands, which are individually coded to each visitor, allow Disney to track individuals wherever they go in the parks and resorts with long-range RFID readers. You check into FASTPASS rides with your band, you purchase food by swiping your band and you use it as a key to your hotel room.
The bands are even uniquely colored and monogrammed with your family members’ names so that they won’t get switched up. Why? Because they don’t want their database to get confused and think that you, a 45-year-old man, rode the teacups instead of your little son Timmy. This is one of the first examples I’ve seen of physical design (e.g., monogramming and coloring) for the sake of digital data purity.
… the strict instructions about who can wear it. Source: John Foreman
If ever there was a testimony to the importance big data has achieved in business it’s this: We will now shape our physical world to create better streams of digital information.
Mickey thinks you need some Buzz Lightyear time
Stop a moment and dream of the MagicBand possibilities.
The pitch that Disney is making is personalization. For each band, for example, Disney asks for the name and birthday of the person who’ll be wearing it. So if your kid is having a birthday in the park and there’s a character wandering nearby, that character can be notified to sneak up on your kid and creepily wish them a happy birthday individually.
Now, let’s dig a little deeper.
What does Disney get out of the deal? In short, it tracks everything you do, everything you buy, everything you eat, everything you ride, everywhere you go in the park. If the goal is to keep you in the park longer so you’ll spend more money, it can build AI models on itineraries, show schedules, line length, weather, etc., to figure out what influences stay length and cash expenditure. Perhaps there are a few levers they can pull to get money out of you.
Some 33-year-olds like the carousel at Disney’s California Adventure. Source: Derrick Harris
Or perhaps its models know that your family is staying in a high-dollar luxury Disney resort and that this morning you forked over lots of money at the Cinderella character breakfast. But right now your high-dollar family is stuck in a long line at an attraction. If your family gets too tuckered out or frustrated, you might be inclined to call it a day.
So, a model marks you as a candidate for “encouragement.” Within the park, a character is notified to make its way over to your children and entertain them until they can get on the ride. This increases enjoyment, decreases perceived exhaustion, and hopefully keeps you around for more meals, more trinkets and more arcade games.
The research questions that might be answered with this type of tracking data are endless:
What menu items served at breakfast at the resort hotel restaurants will result in the longest stay at the park?
Do we detect an influx of park-goers into the bathrooms for long stays on the toilet? Perhaps they all ate at the same place, and we can cut off a foodborne illness problem before it gets worse.
Is there a roller coaster that’s correlated with early park departure or a high incidence of bathroom visits? That means less money in the park’s pockets. How might that coaster be altered?
Is there a particular ride and food fingerprint for the type of park visitor that’s likely to buy in-park high-dollar merchandise? If so, can we actively get vendors in front of this attendee’s eye by moving hawkers to them at just the right time?
The allusion of freedom and agency still exist within the park, but with these bands, you are giving up much of your privacy and freedom to experience something “untailored” in exchange for a better time. Even if that better time is achieved by spending more money.
The future of big data is in meat space
“Meat space” (coined by William Gibson in Neuromancer) is a term for the physical world where our bodies (meat) move around and do meat-like things (for example, eat, jog or go clubbin’). The interesting thing about the term is it’s a play on “cyber space” — meat space is an internet-first way of viewing the world.
And that internet-first way of seeing the world is what’s driving these changes at Disney, casinos, insurance companies, etc. We’ve been “cookie-ing” people online and tracking their browsing habits for years, and in that contained environment, businesses have seen the value of acting on personal transactional data. But now businesses are taking this approach and applying it to meat space.
Why? Because cyber space is small, it starts and stops at internet-connected devices. Think of the transactions and interactions that are carried out each day in meat space. Think of the money spent in meat space (on your caramel macchiato, for instance).
While not everyone is online all day long, we’re all implicitly offline. Wouldn’t it be great it we could gather meat space data and use that to tailor the offline experience much like companies now tailor your online experience? “Personalizing your meat space experience” is a gross way of saying “pretty much control your life.”
Which is frightening. But that’s exactly what companies want to do.
It’s not new. It’s one of the fundamental goals of marketing. For example, a discount pricing model implemented on airline seats wants to control your booking decisions by adjusting prices. The control is targeted and specific, so you feel pretty good about it.
We now know this is Google’s end game. Self-driving cars, Google Glass and the purchase of Nest — Google is dying to get out of your computer and all up in your life. With Nest, Google won’t just know how you like your air to feel. It’ll know when you’re at work and when you’re at home. It gets pieces in a data puzzle that is your entire observable life.
Loyalty cards (those things you swipe at the grocery store) were the first salvos into this real-world data gathering. Now, department stores are doing a lo-fi version of MagicBands by tracking the hardware ID on your cell phone’s Wi-Fi card as you wander the store.
Hey, look! That’s the same Wi-Fi ID as the person who bought a necklace from us last week. Maybe a sales associate should propose a pair of earrings to them?
This is where data science is headed, and it’s part of the reason why there aren’t enough qualified data analysts to meet demand. The reach of the discipline is moving out of the browser and into every business that can gather data on your life.
But I’d like to keep my meat private, thanks.
At this point, I’m sure a lot of you are freaked out by the privacy implications of where all this is headed. Indeed, one journalist just compared what Disney is doing to the recent disclosures about the NSA’s own tracking programs. But at the end of that article there’s a big glaring difference between the NSA and Disney: “Disney fanatics, for their part, can’t wait to get their hands on the [MagicBands].”
We want MagicBands!
We don’t want the NSA tracking us, because we get nothing in return. It tries to sell us on “terrorism prevention,” but most people don’t experience that benefit in a visceral way. But this is not to say Americans won’t give up privacy for anything.
On the contrary, Americans are very, very cheap dates. For just a modicum of convenience, entertainment and comfort, I’m happy to give you a list of everyone I call and everywhere I go. That’s more than I’m sure the NSA has on me. And despite your privacy concerns, most of you are exactly the same way.
Don’t believe me? I recently installed a flashlight app on my phone. In exchange for this app that does no more than turn on my phone’s camera flash, I give it my geolocation all day long. Who owns this app? No idea. Probably some Ukranians. What I do know is that this app is worth like $5 to me, and yet that was enough to give these strangers all my info.
Same with Angry Birds (tracks location). Same with LinkedIn (can read AND WRITE my phone call data, can read my “calendar events plus confidential information”, etc.). Same with the freaking Shazam app that let’s me identify that song playing in the mall. Have you heard of Stylitics? You get your wardrobe mirrored back at you in a virtual closet –whatever that is — and Stylitics gets to sell your clothing data to retailers to better understand where else you shop beside their stores.
We’re all wringing our hands over the NSA, and meanwhile we’re handing our data as fast as we can to other entities for next to nothing. If the NSA were smart, it would buy Candy Crush Saga, change the permissions, and be done with it.
If we’re honest, we give privacy lip service, but we vote with our keypresses and our dollars, and the bands we strap to our wrists.
Expect your future meat space world to feel very much like your cyber space one. The next time your RFID tag lets Mickey know you’ve got diarrhea, maybe the stall door can make suggestions to you: “Customers who got funnel cake diarrhea also bought Maalox.”
John Foreman is chief data scientist at MailChimp.
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Nintendo has failed to make much headway with its next-generation Wii U game console, and that’s even clearer today as the Japanese company slashed its sales forecast from 9 million to 2.8 million for the April 2013 – March 2014 period — less than one-third of the original forecast.
Signs of trouble already started emerging last year — in July it was revealed that Nintendo had only sold 3.61 million Wii U consoles since the hardware was launched in November 2012. Nintendo even cut the price of the Wii U, but the dismal situation continued, likely due to mismanagement over the functionality of the console and its GamePad tablet controller.
There’s no doubt that the Wii U is being hit badly by the arrival of Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One consoles as well. Sony sold 4.2 million PS 4 consoles in 2013 after being launched only in mid-November, while Microsoft revealed that it sold over 3 million Xbox One consoles across 13 countries in 2013, when it only landed in consumers’ hands in late November.
Ever since the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit stuck down the Federal Communication Commission’s Net Neutrality rules, I can’t stop thinking about how much this reminds me of Governor Chris Christie's New Jersey Bridge Scandal
That mess is proof about how one relatively small body’s actions can make a world of difference on the steady flow of people through one of the nation’s busiest thoroughfares. The Internet has often been referred to as a many-laned highway (or super highway). There are no cars, just billions and billions of bits. They cruise along this digital highway largely unfettered, just as, when things are going very smoothly, thousands of cars can make it to and through the Washington Bridge tolls without much trouble or incident Read more...
Best Buy's efforts to combat showrooming and lure shoppers into stores during the holidays with aggressive promotions appear to have backfired.
The electronics retailer announced Thursday morning that sales at comparable stores — stores open for at least 14 months — declined by 0.8% for the nine week period ending Jan. 5. That came in well below estimates as analysts had expected Best Buy's sales to grow this holiday season
Investors reacted by sending the stock down sharply. Best Buy was down by more than 30% at one point in pre-market trading Thursday.
In a statement, Best Buy's CEO Hubert Joly chalked up the disappointing holiday sales to several factors, including supply constraints, worse-than-expected mobile sales and "aggressive promotional activity" over the holidays, which he says "did not result in higher industry demand and had a deflationary impact on our revenue." Read more...
The appointment of Marissa Mayer as Yahoo CEO has been a godsend for those in the media. If nothing else, the photogenic, enigmatic and workaholic chief executive has made people interested in the company again
In 2011, Yahoo was never mentioned in the same breath as Google or Facebook. But now, Mayer has propelled the company into the top tier of Internet Companies That Tech Writers Like to Cover. Like investors, the media love a comeback story, and Yahoo seemed to fit the bill: Since Mayer joined the company on July 16, 2012, its stock price has risen 159%.
This video with late-night television show host Jimmy Fallon and singer Bruce Springsteen is burning up the Internet views this week, as the pair mocks New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for his staff’s appalling creation of a traffic jam in Fort Lee for political payback.
Christie is a huge Springsteen fan, but the Boss does not seem to be returning the favor anymore with this alteration of his classic hit “Born to Run.”
In case you weren’t sure, your phone is not truly secure. The NSA and who-knows-who-else can hack into iPhone, Android and even BlackBerry devices. So here, finally, is a device that promises privacy in your pocket. Meet the Blackphone.
The first thing you need to worry about with promises like these is who’s behind them. In this case, it’s a solid crew – Blackphone comes from Silent Circle, the secure communications firm founded by PGP creator Phil Zimmermann and Jon Callas, which has set up a joint venture with the small Spanish handset maker Geeksphone. Geeksphone has made Android handsets for years, though generally for a specialist audience (its latest effort can run either Android or a version of Firefox OS).
Blackphone uses a security-focused version of Android called PrivatOS, that should be able to run all the normal Android apps. It can also be used for secure phone calls, texts, file exchange and storage, video chat and browsing, and it also anonymizes activity using a VPN. Much of this is doubtless based on Silent Circle’s existing secure communications products, and I’ll bet Dark Mail, the recently-crowdfunded secure email service from Silent Circle and Lavabit, will also find its way in there when it’s ready.
Zimmermann said in a statement:
“I have spent my whole career working towards the launch of secure telephony products. Blackphone provides users with everything they need to ensure privacy and control of their communications, along with all the other high-end smartphone features they have come to expect.”
Callas added a bit more detail in a video on the Blackphone website, saying:
“It’s configured, set up, modified so that the privacy aspects of it are all melded together from the security parts of the CPU to the hardware of the phone to the operating system and apps, so that just about everything that you do is private.”
Interestingly, the joint venture is based in Switzerland, which has probably the tightest privacy laws in the world and — being neutral — doesn’t willingly hand over data to anyone. The device is unlocked and Blackphone says it will be demonstrated at next month’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Preorders will begin then too, on 24 February.
There could be a huge market for this device in business and also in the public sector. Depending on the as-yet-unannounced price, consumers might also bite. After all, the Blackphone team is promising a high-end handset that isn’t undermined by a data-extracting business model.
Privacy is the business model here. We’re going to see a lot more of that this year.
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Some recent patterns in international voice have not changed: Skype keeps growing, but so does the volume of carrier voice. But prices per minute of usage also continue to decline.
Skype’s on-net (Skype to Skype) international traffic grew 36 percent in 2013, to 214 billion minutes, says Telegeography.
Generally speaking, Skype-to-Skype volume growth has outpaced carrier voice since about 2009.
International telephone traffic from fixed and mobile phones continues to grow as well, increasing seven percent in 2013, to 547 billion minutes.
However, recent growth rates are well below the 13 percent average that carriers posted over many of the past 20 years, and the benefits of traffic growth have largely been offset by steady price declines, Telegeography notes.
Skype added 54 billion minutes of international traffic in 2013, 50 percent more than the combined international volume growth of every telco in the world, says Telegeography.
Increase in International Phone and Skype Traffic, 2005-2013
Work Ethic: Manning has a reputation for working harder than anyone else on the team. This is a guy who, on his one-day per week off practice, can be found soaking his injured ankle in a hot-tub with his helmet on and iPad listening to his offensive coordinator call practice for the rest of the offense. With the level of success he’s had, he has every right to slack off every now and again, but he doesn’t. We should all set such a high bar for ourselves.
4. 63% of all consumers looking to buy financial services now research online but only 33% actually buy online. Considered purchase. (Source: Credit Union Times)
In the long run, that’s potentially the real value of MOOCs. Even if we count as a loss the 91 percent of HarvardX and MITx students who viewed less than half the course content or never did anything more than enroll in a course, 79,133 people likely learned some valuable information without paying thousands of dollars or even having to leave their homes. Of those, 43,196 actually obtained their certifications.
Nintendo has failed to make much headway with its next-generation Wii U game console, and that’s even clearer today as the Japanese company slashed its sales forecast from 9 million to 2.8 million for the April 2013 – March 2014 period — less than one-third of the original forecast.
