It hasn't been a good time for NSA defenders lately, with a court calling the program unconstitutional and the White House's own "independent task force" highlighting serious problems with the programs, and recommending some fairly major changes. This has resulted in many of us suggesting that, at this point, it's kind of crazy to argue that Ed Snowden did something wrong, and rather he should be welcomed back as a hero. After all, he exposed a secret program that has been called unconstitutional. Isn't that the very definition of a whistleblower?
However, it seems the visceral hatred of Snowden has only ratcheted up a notch with two top former officials flat out saying that Snowden should be hanged. This is oddly specific (and ridiculously antiquated). First up, we have former CIA director (under Bill Clinton), James Woolsey who said Snowden should be hanged:
"I think giving him amnesty is idiotic,” said Woolsey, who ran the CIA from 1993 to 1995. “He should be prosecuted for treason. If convicted by a jury of his peers, he should be hanged by his neck until he is dead."
"I must say absent some other important piece of information, it has to be one of the dumbest things that I've seen in a long time, to be speculating about it publicly, even if they are contemplating a deal with Snowden some kind of amnesty," Bolton said. "The last thing that people ought to be doing is speculating about it publicly. It will inevitably make it a political football and enhance Snowden's bargaining power."
Bolton continued, "My view is that Snowden committed treason, he ought to be convicted of that, and then he ought to swing from a tall oak tree. But even if you don’t believe that, if you’re gonna say anything publicly, that is closer to what you should be saying to enhance our own bargaining leverage."
The similarity of both comments -- both attacking the idea of amnesty, and focusing on the very specific punishment they're salivating over concerning Snowden, certainly hints at a series of insane talking points being passed around among extreme security state apologists. I expect we'll see more like this. I'm curious, though, how either of these guys can continue making these claims given everything else that's been happening.
Tommy Edison, who has been blind since birth, has made a name for himself on YouTube with his fun and informative videos that answer questions about his day-to-day life.
In his latest video, Edison tries to determine the color of scented markers based on their smells, as per a commenter's request
Betting on himself to guess four of the nine markers, Edison uses the scents to carefully recall his knowledge of fruits and the colors he's learned to associate with them
The video is just another of his fascinating series in which he helps seeing people better understand what it's like to be a member of the blind community. Read more...
ReadWriteReflect offers a look back at major technology trends, products and companies of the past year.
Every once in a while, a tech article grabs you and doesn't let go—whether it’s because it offers much-needed help and guidance, gives you more insight into an area of interest, or transforms a topic you previously didn’t care about into a fascinating subject.
It’s the same for the editorial staffers at ReadWrite, who took a moment to reflect on a few of their favorite stories of 2013. If you haven’t checked out the following articles before, or would like to revisit some classics—all crafted with original insights and reporting—take a stroll through these selections, hand-picked by our writers and editors.
At first, this article reads like something out of dystopian science fiction. But as Brian piles on the research done to the contrary, it becomes clear that this is our greatest argument for giving the Internet of Things ironclad security. —Lauren Orsini
With iOS 7, my 4S had continual crashes, and the features that everyone raved about (i.e. parallax and motion, automatic app updates) ruined the experience. After applying the changes Adriana talked about in this article, my iPhone's performance improved. Though it's still not perfect—iOS 7 is built for iPhone 5 and above—it definitely helped. —Selena Larson
This was a terrific ReadWrite story on just about every front. It told readers something surprising about the digital services many have come to rely on, and backed up its assertions with compelling evidence. It deftly moved from discussion of streaming business models (or the lack thereof) to the history of artist-studio relations and back again. And it's very nicely written, infused with just enough personal perspective and narrative nuance to lend the piece terrific authority while keeping it light on its feet. —David Hamilton
Lauren does an excellent job breaking down Bitcoin for the casual reader who may not know what it is. I envisioned her in some dark alley buying Bitcoin in person, like she was buying Walter White's blue meth. Instead, she found a trustworthy, amiable man who helped her understand the Bitcoin market a little better. This piece puts a face on one of the most esoteric technologies of our time. —Dan Rowinski
“Anticipatory systems” is where all that data-gathering by tech companies is supposed to lead—to features that successfully anticipate what people want, and deliver it when and where they want them. It’s the driving force behind numerous current trends, from Foursquare check-ins to Siri and Google Now, as well as emerging trends, like connected homes, wearable computing and the Internet of Things. Owen insightfully keyed in on anticipatory systems and zoomed in on its primary challenge: “… how to design a great anticipatory service around a specific need — without feeling creepy or, worse, clumsy.” Nailed it. —Adriana Lee
An article about thrift-store shopping is way outside my field of interest, but Stephanie's wit and snap had me hooked: "Thrift shopping is a harrowing experience. Anyone who has ever stepped inside a thrift store knows it is a haven of ill-fitting clothes, mysterious stains and the overwhelming smell of mothballs and sadness." That was my favorite lede of the year. —Brian Proffitt
The tale of GoldieBlox could have been another hackneyed Kickstarter success story. But Lauren Orsini made it distinctive, by focusing on the passions of founder Debbie Sterling and the problems she solved along the way. I’m also enchanted by how readers found the story: With 125,000 pageviews generated through 79,000 shares, it made its way to its audience, not in some mass-media blast, but in the classic way we used to tell each other stories—person to person. —Owen Thomas
On Friday, a very big story broke on Reuters, saying that the NSA had paid RSA $10 million in order to promote Dual EC DRBG encryption as the default in its BSAFE product. It had been suspected for a few years, and more or less confirmed earlier this year, that the NSA had effectively taken over the standards process for this standard, allowing it to hide a weakness, making it significantly easier for the NSA to crack any encrypted content using it.
As plenty of people noted, the news that RSA took $10 million to promote a compromised crypto standard pretty much destroys RSA's credibility. The company, now owned by EMC, has now put out a statement in response to all of this, which some claim is the RSA denying the story. In fact, RSA itself states: "we categorically deny this allegation." But, as you read the details, that doesn't appear to be the case at all. They more or less say that they don't reveal details of contracts, so won't confirm or deny any particular contract, and that while they did promote Dual EC DRBG, and knew that the NSA was involved, they never knew that it was compromised.
In short: yes, RSA did exactly what the Reuters article claimed, but its best defense is that it didn't know that Dual EC DRBG was compromised, so they didn't take money to weaken crypto... on purpose. Even if that's what happened.
We made the decision to use Dual EC DRBG as the default in BSAFE toolkits in 2004, in the context of an industry-wide effort to develop newer, stronger methods of encryption. At that time, the NSA had a trusted role in the community-wide effort to strengthen, not weaken, encryption.
Right, but that raises questions of why RSA trusted NSA to be a good player here, rather than trying to insert compromises or backdoors into key standards.
This algorithm is only one of multiple choices available within BSAFE toolkits, and users have always been free to choose whichever one best suits their needs.
Yes, but it was the default. And, as everyone knows, a very large percentage of folks just use the default.
We continued using the algorithm as an option within BSAFE toolkits as it gained acceptance as a NIST standard and because of its value in FIPS compliance. When concern surfaced around the algorithm in 2007, we continued to rely upon NIST as the arbiter of that discussion.
Again, this doesn't make RSA look good. As has now become clear, the NSA had basically sneakily taken over the whole standardization process. RSA more or less trusting NIST without looking into the matter themselves raises questions. Especially if there was a $10 million contract that incentivized them not to dig too deeply. RSA promoted this standard as the default in BSAFE. You would hope that a company with the stature in the space like RSA would be more careful than just to rely on someone else's say so that a particular standard is secure.
RSA claiming it didn't know the standard the NSA paid them $10 million to make default was suspect is hardly convincing. Why else would the NSA suddenly pay them $10 million to promote that standard? Furthermore, it appears that news of this $10 million contract was known a bit more widely. Chris Soghoian points to an email from cypherpunk Lucky Green, from back in September, to a cryptography mailing list in which he more or less reveals the same info that Reuters reported on Friday, though without naming the company.
According to published reports that I saw, NSA/DoD pays $250M (per year?) to backdoor cryptographic implementations. I have knowledge of only one such effort. That effort involved DoD/NSA paying $10M to a leading cryptographic library provider to both implement and set as the default the obviously backdoored Dual_EC_DRBG as the default RNG.
This was $10M wasted. While this vendor may have had a dominating position in the market place before certain patents expired, by the time DoD/NSA paid the $10M, few customers used that vendor's cryptographic libraries.
While this describes the right amount, if the NSA is really spending $250 million, it's certainly possible that it has quite a few other $10 million contracts out there to promote or avoid certain other encryption standards depending on what it desires. Hopefully, some reporters are currently reaching out to all the companies on this list to see if they've got any contracts with the NSA concerning Dual EC DRBG.
Companies taking money from NSA, but claiming that they didn't realize the encryption the contract pushed them to promote was compromised, aren't going to find a very sympathetic audience outside of the NSA. The RSA's "categorical denial" here misses the point. It certainly doesn't suggest that the Reuters story was wrong -- just that the RSA was so blinded by a mere $10 million that it didn't bother to make sure the standard wasn't compromised.
[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.]
With all this fighting going around between H.264 and VP8, we’re forgetting the bigger picture here. And that is the fact that VP8… or H.264… are just a footnote.
I remember back in my days, we talked about H.263. And then H263+. And then H.263++. And then about this brand new thing called H.264. And how it is great. But can’t be used anywhere because it just too darn expensive to run. At that time, H.263 was ubiquitous.
Today? Today, H.264 is great, but getting a bit old and boring. VP8 isn’t that different, though you might call it “newer”.
There are 3 new players in town – ones you should know about:
H.265
H.265 is the continuation of H.264 for all intents and purposes.
It is just as boring (besides for the technologists), and it just as expensive – it comes with the usual hefty sum you’ll need to pay (probably to MPEG-LA as well).
While its future in WebRTC depends on H.264 being selected as the mandatory codec, it seems that its future in the streaming industry, at least if you ask content creators, is bright.
Oh… and it has another name, just to confuse us all: HEVC – High Efficiency Video Coding. As if H.266 won’t be any more efficient.
I wonder if Cisco will be “open sourcing” this codec with all of its patents so happily as well.
VP9
VP9 is the continuation of VP8 for all intents and purposes.
Google is pushing it full steam ahead, and they are using whatever ammunition they have – placing this codec in YouTube and in their Chrome browser in its current state. They WANT it to be the web standard for video.
To make things interesting, Google has thrown SVC (Scalable Video Coding) into the mix here, by partnering again with Vidyo, to get their SVC magic into VP9.
Daala
Daala. Daala is an attempt by Mozilla to bring its own free, open source codec. Something that surpasses H.265 without patents. It is so new that the first real encoded stream was achieved in May 2013. To me this means there’s a long way to go here.
I find it hard to believe it will garner more of our attention in the next 3-4 years.
With codecs usually having a run of a decade, not sure where that leaves Daala.
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We’re no fighting over VP8 and H.264 not for the sake of having them in WebRTC, but rather for the selection of the future codec – the one that will rule the internet, and maybe even paid video content. There are a lot of interested parties in this game – many with patents they plan on monetizing.
Getting out of the path of patented video codecs will benefit us all. It will spur more innovation and reduce barriers of entry for new and interesting services. It will also simplify licensing and legal issues related to patent royalty payments.
I wish the end result will not include an ‘H’ prefix in it.
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All that said, a few people already told me they just couldn’t care less as long as we end up with a single codec – their use case just needs whatever codec there is.
I guess we’re making a bit too much of a fuss about it.
What happens after you click “buy” on Amazon.com? To most people, that’s a mystery. I flew out to Phoenix earlier this month to find out by taking a tour of one of Amazon’s warehouses — what it refers to as “fulfillment centers.”
I spent about 90 minutes inside the facility, and documented what I saw in photos. I had limited verbal interactions with workers during my visit, so if you’re looking for a detailed description of what it’s like to work in each role, you’re going to be disappointed.
But if you want an inside look at the operation that CEO Jeff Bezos recently referred to on “60 Minutes” as the “secret” to Amazon’s success, you’ll likely enjoy the photos in the slideshow below.
My American Airlines flight soared over this mountain range on my descent into Phoenix. I imagined Jeff Bezos tinkering with drones somewhere within.
The road leading up to the warehouse was pretty industrial-looking. I also imagined Jeff Bezos working on drones inside these tanks.
We finally pulled up to 5050 Mohave Street, which is Amazon's fulfillment center. My first reaction was that it looked like a prison, but a nice prison.
The entrance was blocked so I had to hop out of my taxi. The colorful flags made it look less like a prison.
I tried going in this entrance, but the door was locked. I later learned this is where high-level Amazon warehouse employees visit to learn fulfillment center black arts.
I soon learned I had to walk down the length of the building to enter the main entrance. There were loading docks as far as the eye could see.
After a five-minute walk, I reached the entrance of the "fulfillment center," as Amazon calls it. "Work hard. Have fun. Make History," it says on the front doors.
Amazon's staff enter through these turnstiles and then proceed through metal detectors.
Some workers choose to store belongings in these lockers near the entrance.
The fulfillment center I visited spans 1.2 million square feet and is one of four Amazon warehouses in Phoenix.
In many ways, it looks like a real-life version of the Chutes and Ladders board game.
In the middle of the floor, a pallet of the new XBox One gaming consoles. Perhaps gifts from Jeff Bezos' to each member of his executive "S Team."
When a package arrives through a loading dock at Amazon's facility, it is scanned into the inventory management system here so there's a virtual record to match the physical product.
This woman stores items wherever she finds room on shelves, scanning the product and the shelf to record the location.
An assortment of Amazon products waiting to be picked, packaged and shipped.
A volleyball sits next to two bags of gum balls. Why? Only the "stower" knows.
This woman is a "picker," which is a role that has developed a level of notoriety for the amount of walking involved. Her scanner directs her to the next item to be picked.
When a product is discovered laying on the floor, it is deposited in this blue tote. Placing it on just any shelf would mess with the operation.
After products are picked, a computer program tells workers such as this one how to organize items by customer order. Each slot represents an order.
Amazon said it planned to make 70,000 seasonal hires in the U.S. Here, two young women gift-wrap some items before they get packed for delivery.
This worker grabs items off of a conveyor belt and then scans them; Amazon's computer system tells her which envelope or box size to use for packaging.
This packing employee asked me to take a picture. He said he hoped his outfit and the Michelle Obama calendar would get the First Lady's attention.
This contraption, also known as the slam line, weighs the package for accuracy.
Then, it "slams" on a shipping label.
The orange pieces on the "ship sorter" automatically push boxes down these chutes to the right loading dock based on speed and shipping company.
Even taking a photo in panoramic mode, I couldn't fit the entire building in the shot.
BlackBerry reported a $4.4 billion loss and a 56 percent drop in revenue for its fiscal third quarter on Friday and said it would step back from its once-core handset business through a partnership with the Asian contract manufacturer Foxconn. […] The third-quarter loss included a $2.7 billion write-down mainly related to BlackBerry 10 phones. Of the 4.3 million BlackBerrys purchased by consumers and businesses during the quarter, 3.2 million were models that use the obsolete BlackBerry 7 operating system.
One of the biggest problems people and forecasters make is to extrapolate from current trends into the future.
But trends change. Consider textile manufacturing, once a staple in the U.S. Northeast and U.S. Southeast.
Rising costs have made it more expensive to spin yarn in China than in the United States, said Brian Hamilton, a 2012 doctoral graduate of North Carolina State University's College of Textiles, who wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the global textile industry.
He found that in 2003, a kilogram of yarn spun in the U.S. cost $2.86 to produce, while it cost $2.76 to produce a kilogram in China. By 2010, however, it cost $3.45 to produce a kilogram in the U.S. and the cost in China had jumped to $4.13 per kilogram. U.S. production costs were lower than Turkey, Korea and Brazil.
Perhaps you have heard the phrase "and the last shall be first." Sometimes it happens in business.
So you got yourself a Chromecast, either as an early holiday gift, or you just bought it for yourself. You unpacked it, installed it, watched a bit of Netflix or YouTube, and now you are wondering: What else can I do with this?
A lot, actually. Chromecast offers access to media through a growing list of apps (14 at the time of writing), and there are a whole bunch of neat ways to get additional functionality out of the device. We’ve compiled ten of the best Chromecast tips and tricks below:
1. Turn on your TV from your mobile device
One of the coolest things about Chromecast is that it can turn on your TV, and even change to the right HDMI input, when you start casting music or videos from your mobile device – no TV remote required. That’s because Chromecast uses a little-known technology called HDMI-CEC that is supported by most modern TVs.
Some TVs require you to change some settings before Chromecast can make the remote control obsolete.
However, some TVs don’t have CEC enabled by default, so you might have to dive into the settings and look for CEC options to turn on. Unfortunately, not every TV maker calls it by that name, so you may have to scour for Anynet+ (Samsung), Bravia Link or Bravia Sync (Sony), Simplink (LG), Viera Link (Panasonic), Regza Link (Toshiba) or similar terms and then try to enable options to power the TV and switch input (as seen in the photo above). And if that still doesn’t do the trick, double-check that you are using the power adapter that came with the Chromecast as opposed to your TV’s USB port to make sure it gets power even when the TV is turned off.
2. Mirror your computer screen with the Chrome extension
There are now more than a dozen apps with Chromecast support, but you can get even more content to the TV by installing the Google Cast extension for Google’s Chrome browser, which is available for Windows, OS X and Google’s own Chrome OS. With that extension, you can not only cast videos straight from YouTube’s and Netflix’s website, but even beam entire websites — or videos playing on any website — to the TV.
The Google Cast extension for Chrome allows you to beam entire websites to the TV.
A fair warning: Casting videos from your computer requires a lot of processing power, so your PC shouldn’t be too old, and the results can be mixed. But casting websites can still be great if you want to quickly show everyone something, be it a presentation or some holiday pictures. And you can even opt to mirror your entire computer desktop by going into the extension’s settings.
3. Add Emoji to your Chromecast name
Don’t want to give your Chromecast a boring name like “Living Room TV”? Then this one is for you: Using the Android or iOS Chromecast setup and configuration app, you can add Emoji to your Chromecast name. Android supports Emoji natively starting with version 4.4, and I was also able to add Emoji to my Chromecast’s name with the Chromecast iOS app and the Mac OS X app as well.
Adding Emoji to your Chromecast device name is easy with Android 4.4.
You should be able to do the same with the Chromecast Windows app, and dedicated Emoji keyboards may even make the same possible with older versions of Android, but your mileage may vary.
My Chromecast has a new name – complete with Emoji.
4. Play local media
There are now a number of ways to play local media — including the videos you took on your last vacation, on your Chromecast — and each one has its strengths: Avia is a currently the best way to cast photos from your Android mobile device, but video playback buffers a lot.
Plex is great for playing homemade or downloaded videos on your Chromecast. The Plex server even transcodes videos on the fly that aren’t in the right file format.
Plex is a great solution for people with extensive local media libraries, but it requires a bit of a learning curve, and users also have to run a server application on their PC. Also, Chromecast support is currently limited to members of Plex’s paid beta program.
This is a video stored on my iPad, accessed through my Nexus 7 and playing back on my TV, all thanks to RealPlayer Cloud.
RealPlayer Cloud finally is the easiest way to cast videos recorded on your phone. And as a bonus, you can even share media across devices, and for example launch playback of a video stored on your phone from your iPad.
5. Use Chromecast with your Kindle Fire
Chromecast officially only supports iOS and Android mobile apps, but here’s a secret: You can also cast with any Kindle Fire. You won’t find YouTube or any other official Google apps on the Kindle Fire, but using Chromecast with apps like Netflix, Hulu+ and Pandora works just fine.
Pandora and other apps supports casting even from a Kindle Fire.
6. Troubleshot your Netflix streaming
Do you feel like Netflix doesn’t look as good as it should on your Chromecast? There’s an easy way to check if the service living up to its potential on the device: Just play a Netflix title called Example Short 23.976 on your Chromecast, and you’ll see the bit rate used and other information displayed on the screen. You can then compare these results with the performance of other devices on your network. For example, hardwire your PC and see if results are better to see if you need to improve your Wi-Fi. And if you want to know the backstory to the admittedly pretty odd video, read my story about Netflix’s Secret Cult Hit.
Netflix has a test video that you can use to check your Wi-Fi connection.
7. Have a YouTube party
One of the neatest things about YouTube’s Chromecast integration is that you can queue up videos in your mobile app to play in order on your TV. And that’s not all: This can also be done by multiple people on multiple devices, both on iOS and Android, as long as everyone is on the same home Wi-Fi network. Just have everyone search for their favorite YouTube videos, queue them up and voila: you have an instant YouTube party.
Chromecast + YouTube = instant party.
8. Use it in a hotel room
Wouldn’t it be great if you could skip the expensive Lodgenet charges, and instead just watch Netflix or even movies stored on your own devices on your hotel room TV? You can — kind of, anyway. Chromecast doesn’t work with your typical hotel Wi-Fi network, but some users have had success with using their mobile device as a hotspot (just keep those mobile data caps in mind). Using your PC as a router might work as well, but internet sharing under Mac OS X unfortunately doesn’t work with Chromecast. Trust me, I tried. The final option for people who travel a lot would be a portable travel router, which can cost as little as $20.
9. Launch Netflix shows from Google Now
This is a really cool hack for anyone with a little too much time on their hands: Using Google Now and Tasker, you can launch TV shows on your Chromecast just by talking to your phone.
10. Turn any Android device into another Chromecast
Now that you’ve gotten used to your Chromecast, wouldn’t it be great if you could have this casting functionality everywhere? You can, thanks to an app called CheapCast that turns any Android device into a Chromecast receiver.
Cheapcast can turn your old Android phone into a cast-compatible music player.
To be fair, Cheapcast doesn’t work with Netflix, and I also couldn’t get Plex to work, but it’s still good enough to turn an old Android phone into a dedicated music player and cast away with Pandora.
Want more Chromecast tips? Then you should check out the excellent Chromecast community on Google+, where I got many inspirations for this article. And feel free to leave your favorite tips and tricks in the comments below!
Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research: Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
T-Mobile is ready to make another big move, announcing plans for a media event at January’s CES to discuss the next step in its “un-carrier” strategy.
“This one you aren’t going to believe,” T-Mobile says in an invitation to journalists. T-Mobile is planning a media event for Wednesday, Jan. 8, at the Las Vegas event.
The first wave of the strategy was doing away with contracts and device subsidies. Since then, T-Mobile has also announced its Jump early upgrade program, as well as a free data offer for tablets and the ability to cheaply roam globally, albeit at slower data speeds.
According to the latest report from independent analyst firm MZA, Mitel is leading the market for business communications (PBX/IP PBX) in Canada for the third quarter of 2013. Mitel has a 33 percent share of the IP extensions market in the country.
My friend runs a mid-size hedge fund, I noticed she liked to listen to audio play backs of investor calls while doing housework or at the gym. I asked what the purpose was since she wasn’t taking notes. “Oh, I’m waiting for them to lie.” When do they lie? “Oh, all the time“, she said. It was at this moment she imparted on me the 3 most important things I must always remember when talking to CEOs. In order of priority, (1) they lie, (2) they lie and (3) the most important one — you guessed it — they lie.
A mere gulp, cough, pause, change in speech tempo or similar utterance could trigger her team to deep dive investigate the statement for weakness. When playing the stock market, even the slightest edge is just that, they’re always looking for some tidbit that will improve performance.
Fast forward, Polycom (Nasdaq: PLCM), a “leader” in video conferencing systems decided to “eat their own dogfood” and hold their quarterly investor call via video. Huge mistake. Robert Hagerty (then CEO) was well prepared for the typical canned preamble. Looking carefully into the camera, trying to be like Walter Cronkite, he spoke in measured tones. However, when the Q&A began- it all fell apart. Even I could tell when poor Robert was “extending the truth” with questions about future expectations, customer demands and all things financial. By the end, he was looking uncomfortable. Polycom stock chart looks like a mountain range and has mostly been in the valley of death since.
Polycom still broadcasts the canned preamble investor piece via video, but switches to audio only for the investor Q&A. Smart move. I’m sure it’s for “technical” reasons.
The notion of WebRTC is that we will all be doing more video. But first we either have to stop lying or perhaps we’ll get better at lying. We all lie. We do it all day long. I’m busy, can’t meet up, working on that now, almost done, very interested, not interested. Whatever we say, most of us rarely tell the entire truth. Our communications are all filtered works of art.
This brief 18 minute TED video by Pamela Meyer highlights the many lies we seem to tell.
Former FBI agent, Joe Navarro has written a great book on how to spot when someone is lying (or extending the truth) titled “What every body is saying“.
While WebRTC turns video conferencing into child’s play. The question is are you ready for it. Tell me the truth.
Google's latest Gmail tweak makes viewing photos in Gmail easier for you—and the process of tracking you via emailed images much more difficult for marketers and advertisers.
Google on Thursday updated its Gmail service so that you'll never have to click that pesky “Display images below” link again. Gmail will now automatically display images in email, the catch being that Google will host those images on its own servers. Prior to the change, most emailed images would be loaded from third-party servers—often enough, those of marketers.
In a blog post, Gmail product manager John Rae-Grant described the change as a way to better secure your email since Google will now scan photos and graphics for known viruses or malware before displaying them. The service is rolling out to Gmail on desktop today and should make its way to Gmail apps for Android and iOS sometime next year.
Lowering The Boom On Marketers
But by filtering these photos through its own servers, however, Google may have shut out the use of Web bugs or beacons—bits of code that lets an advertiser know that an email has been opened. Marketers use images as beacons because, at least until now, services like Gmail would load such images from an advertiser’s own web server. Any image can be a beacon, even an invisible one no more than a pixel wide.
Rae-Grant likens the image proxying to Gmail’s other protective features like default https access, suspicious activity detection, and free two-step verification. Marketers, however, are already a bit anxious about the change. At Econsultancy, a publisher of online business advice, email-marketing expert Philip Storey noted the following likely consequences for his audience:
Marketers won't be able to tell whether you've opened an email for the second or subsequent time
Web bugs won't report reliable geolocations for opened emails, as they'll pick up the IP addresses of Gmail servers, not recipients
Analytics will only track the first time an email is opened
Marketers won't be able to update or change images once they're sent out
Others put on a brave face. “It is important to remember that images still have the same impact for email marketers as always,” Matt Hayes, co-founder of Kickdynamic, told EConsultancy. “When users go back and re-open the email for the second time the same image is also displayed as normal. The user experience remains unaffected.”
AT&T probably is the first Internet service provider ever to agree to pay users for the value of their browsing behavior. AT&T might not be the first app provider to do so, as some might argue Google has had a limited program in place for about a year or so.
But the big deal is that AT&T, in Austin, will give gigabit access users a choice: pay $99 a month for a gigabit access connection, with no tracking, or $70 a month, when users give AT&T the right to track browsing behavior in return for a $30 a month discount on access fees.
For policy advocates and others who think users actually own their data, and should be compensated when behavioral data is used to target advertising, that essentially is what AT&T will do in Austin, Texas.
AT&T in Austin, Texas is launching it “GigaPower” all-fiber Internet access network for prices starting at $70 a month, featuring speeds of 300 Mbps downstream initially, and a boost to 1 Gbps in 2014.
AT&T will offer two “U-verse with GigaPower” offers. The “Premier” version will cost $70 a month, while the “Standard” plan will cost $99 a month.
You might find it odd that the premier version costs less than the standard version.
The reason is the value to AT&T of collecting use browsing history. “U-verse with GigaPower Premier offer is available with your agreement to participate in AT&T Internet Preferences,” AT&T says.
Internet Preferences allows AT&T to use customer Web browsing information, such as the search terms people enter and the Web pages customer visit, to provide relevant offers and ads to customers based on that profil, e.
That will not be a popular practice in some quarters, but some have argued that users should be compensated when ISPs or other application providers “pay users for the value of their behavior.”
In essence, that is what AT&T is doing, compensating users at $30 a month for the right to use browsing behavior to tailor advertising and other marketing offers.
As now has become a standard industry practice, potential buyers can sign up at www.att.com/gigapower. AT&T then will build first in the areas with highest indicted demand.
“Expansion plans will, in part, be influenced by the number of Austinites voting for their neighborhood at www.att.com/gigapower,” AT&T says.
It might be overlooked, but AT&T is doing what some have advocated for some time, namely compensating users for the value of their behavior online, when used to target advertising.
At an investor conference on Tuesday, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson expressed a pretty shocking belief: Carrier subsidies for new cell phones must come to an end. According to CNet, Stephenson thinks that wireless carriers need to shift their focus from getting new customers on their network to getting current customers to use more of the network.
For consumers, this would mean the end of paying $200 or so for a new phone on-contract every couple of years. Instead, buyers will have to pay full retail price for phones, which is usually much closer to $500 or $600.
This isn’t just a grab for more money. According to Stephenson, “When you’re growing the business initially, you have to do aggressive device subsidies to get people on the network… But as you approach 90 percent penetration, you move into maintenance mode. That means more device upgrades. And the model has to change. You can’t afford to subsidize devices like that.”
This explains some of the reasoning behind AT&T’s new Mobile Share Value plans, which gives monthly $15 discounts to customers that bring their own phone, buy a phone at full retail price, or continue using a phone that is no longer under contract.
Of course, Stephenson isn’t expecting that customers will want to plunk down a full $500 or more every time they want a new phone. Instead, programs like AT&T Next offer customers the ability to get a new device for no money down every 12 or 18 months. You then pay off the entire cost of the device through monthly installment fees. This is similar to T-Mobile, which earlier this year did away with subsidies completely and became the first big U.S. carrier to offer a device finance plan.
On top of this, Stephenson says that AT&T is planning to tackle the prepaid market more aggressively, and believes that the connected car and home industry will grow considerably over the coming years. But it’s a new carrier business model that focuses on financing rather than subsidies that Stepehenson believes will ultimately be “transformative.”
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Japan is now the top country worldwide in revenue from Apple’s App Store and Google Play, according to a new report from App Annie. The app analytics company attributed the surprising shift to rapid smartphone adoption over the past year in Japan — where feature phones have held on for longer — and explosive growth in Google Play spending, outpacing global trends due to the availability of carrier billing as an alternative to credit cards.
On Friday, November 8, Jeff Bonforte, the well-regarded techie who is now in charge of Yahoo Mail and all its communications products after the Silicon Valley Internet giant bought his startup Xobni, took to the stage at its weekly FYI employee meeting.
As described by dozens of Yahoos, Bonforte explained how things were going with the new Yahoo Mail product, which was enduring loud protests from users for a wide variety of reasons, including the removal of a popular tabs feature.
As has been widely reported, a relentless and vocal group of Yahoo Mail users have been complaining vociferously after Yahoo drastically revamped its popular service in October.
According to those in attendance, he said the metrics of use were flat, although there were signs of minor improvement.
While acknowledging customer complaints and dissatisfaction, he added that Yahoo would need to “kick the users hard” in a certain body part to get them to leave Yahoo Mail, according to numerous people there.
Hard indeed, as the initial Yahoo Mail issues have turned into a full-scale disaster, with various outages that seem to be taking place across the network, impacting countless individuals and the many small businesses that rely on the service.
Some reports and downtime sites show multi-day outages over the course of many days, while others show shorter times. The complaints have most certainly been mounting for weeks.
What is consistent are two things: Outages have been occurring regularly and Yahoo has been woefully negligent in informing its users about the problems.
They have also declined to return emails inquiring about the issue and others related to Yahoo Mail from this site for weeks, in perhaps the most astonishing display of PR incompetence I have experienced in a very long time. Heretofore excellent communications staffers I have worked with in the past have seemingly been rendered mute.
To be clear, other Internet sites have done this kind of thing in the past — not responding quickly or in detail to various consumer issues. And, to be fair, sources inside the company said the delay was due to trying to find out exactly what was going wrong before talking about it.
But that was a week ago. Since then, the silence has been deafening.
How many people have been or are currently impacted and for how long? Yahoo will not respond.
Where are the outages taking place? Yahoo will not respond.
What exactly is being done to fix the problem? Yahoo will not respond.
Instead, Yahoo has relied on a series of news-free tweets on the issue, which only began appearing yesterday and today, as well as promises it was fixed when it was not:
Yahoo Mail is aware some users are having service disruptions. The eng team is working on the issue. Pls stay tuned for updates.
But, just now, in the first significant communication about the problem in weeks, Bonforte posted to Yahoo’s Mail blog a short note acknowledging the issues, but with few concrete details:
We are very sorry for recent difficulties with Yahoo Mail.
Some of our users have not been able to access their mail since 10:27 PM PT on Monday night, due to a hardware problem in one of our mail data centers. The issue has been harder to fix than we originally expected.
We have dozens of people working around the clock to bring it to a resolution. We believe our current efforts will restore our users’ access to their inboxes by 3 pm PT today. We’ll post again then on our @YahooMail Twitter handle.
While I am certain Bonforte — for whom I have had great respect for a long time — and his team are trying their best to fix the problem, the contrast to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s insistence on engineering excellence and innovation and the inability of the company to provide a cogent explanation about what is happening to one of its most important daily interfaces with its customers could not be any more stark.
In other words: What could be bigger than a Fail Whale? This.
Ephemeral messaging startup Snapchat has raised $50 million in a Series C round of venture capital, according to an SEC filing. The money was contributed by a single investor, CEO Evan Spiegel told TechCrunch. With today’s investment and the $60 million Series B round just a few months ago, Snapchat has raised upward of $120 million in total.
Cisco has failed in its attempt to reverse the European Union’s approval of Microsoft’s 2011 $8.5 billion Skype takeover – but the thinking behind the verdict should dampen any Microsoft celebrations.
When the EU green-lit the deal with no reservations, Cisco – which makes expensive videoconferencing gear for the enterprise — threw a hissy fit. It and Italian VoIP outfit Messagenet launched a challenge with the EU General Court, claiming the deal would harm competition. On Wednesday, the court dismissed the action in its entirety.
The logic behind this decision can be fairly summed up like this: Microsoft’s position in the consumer market is not enough of a sure thing to go worrying about market domination. The verdict should not make for comfortable reading over in Redmond:
“Even if the acquisition of Skype enables Microsoft to hold an 80 to 90% share of a segment of consumer communications, corresponding to video communications made on Windows based PCs, the operating system developed by Microsoft, the high market shares and high degree of concentration on that segment of the market are not indicative of a degree of market power which would enable Microsoft to significantly harm effective competition in the internal market…
“Microsoft, which has traditionally held a very large share of the PC software market, is less present on new operating devices, such as tablets and smartphones, which are becoming increasingly important on the consumer communications market. Any attempt to increase prices of communications for users of PCs might encourage them to switch to alternative devices. Furthermore, since services on that market are usually provided for free, a commercial policy of making users pay would run the risk of encouraging users to switch to other providers continuing to offer their services free of charge.
“The Court notes also that, on devices other than Windows based PCs, competing operators of Microsoft have sufficiently large market shares to constitute communication networks whose level of use and attractiveness for users are at least comparable to those of Skype and Microsoft, taken together.”
Cisco and Messagenet also tried to argue that Microsoft’s creation of interoperability between Skype and its enterprise unified communications platform Lync – but not with rival products – was anti-competitive.
On this point, the court noted that “the precise advantages of and the real demand” for such an integrated system were “vague.” It also pointed out that, er, Cisco is a bigger force in the enterprise communications market than Microsoft is.
So much for the threats of market dominance. And farewell, then, to a very silly suit – but also to Microsoft’s former glory days.
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It’s taken a while for JetBlue to get its long promised Wi-Fi service ready, but its passengers likely will feel it was worth the wait. The airline on Wednesday launched FlyFi, an inflight internet service JetBlue claims will be the first to deliver a broadband experience akin to home connectivity. But that’s not the half of it: JetBlue is also giving away basic access to the network free to all passengers.
JetBlue isn’t tapping all of that capacity, according to Jamie Perry, JetBlue’s director of product development, but JetBlue isn’t rate-limited like other airlines. As more passengers sign on to use the service, overall network speeds won’t decline for all users. Instead ViaSat will pump more capacity into the aircraft, ensuring a decent broadband connection is available to all, Perry said.
What’s a decent connection? Perry said speed tests on FlyFi’s trial flights produced connections as fast as 20 Mbps to the device, though as with any shared wireless network, speeds are subject to fluctuations. JetBlue isn’t promising any baseline speed, however. Instead, Perry said, the airline is claiming that passengers will get a true broadband experience. They will be able to browse the web with ease, stream music, and even watch standard definition video with no interruption, he said.
JetBlue wanted to make the service an amenity similar to the free DirecTV access it offers to flyers, so it’s made the basic internet service gratis. It’s charging $9 an hour for an upgraded streaming service, which will let customers’ stream video and music. Customers on the basic plan can still watch video without bandwidth restrictions, but after they consume a certain amount of data (Perry didn’t say how much) they’ll find their speeds throttled for the rest of the flight.
“If you went to YouTube and watched a 90-second video, you would be fine,” Perry said. “If you went to Netflix and started watching a hi-def video, it wouldn’t be long before a message popped up saying you should upgrade to the premium service.”
So far JetBlue has FlyFi installed on only three aircraft, but it is in the process of rapidly upgrading its fleet. It’s Perry’s hope that the majority of its aircraft will be FlyFi-capable in the third quarter, and the entire fleet will have the service in 2015. JetBlue is testing out the current pricing for six months to see how passengers use it, and it could tweak the pricing next year depending on the mix. But Perry said JetBlue will most likely keep some kind of free option in place since these types of amenities distinguish it from its airline competitors.
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There’s a war ranging on inside Google. It is a war between the Chrome team and the Android team. I don’t know if this is an invented war that goes inside my head only.
There’s the Android team. They go and look up at Apple’s iOS as their competitor. Playing catch up in some areas and running faster in others. They have the same thought processes: Apps economy
Get developers to use Java APIs
Get better integration with hardware, devices and peripherals
Build and enhance their app store
Try to deal with the likes of Amazon, Samsung and Xiaomi who enjoy Android by try to monetize it instead of letting Google do that
Push the envelope into new territory – smartwatch (maybe), TV (rumored)
And then there’s the Chrome team. They are all into replacing Microsoft Windows:
Getting Chrome browser and the web in general to do whatever is possible on a PC natively: WebGL, Web Audio, WebRTC, etc.
Get Chrome to run as an OS of its own – Chromium OS
Add an app environment
Map mobile capabilities to HTML5: push notification, location, etc.
Here’s the real question though: what happens when you look into the future?
Is it going to be HTML5 apps or native apps? A hybrid approach?
What happens if we end up with a successful Firefox OS ecosystem or a Tizen one? Both of these mobile operating systems are HTML5 only. What is the direct competitor Google has in front of them? Is it Chrome OS or Android?
I think the Chrome one wins
They are in the process of onboarding everything you need to develop in HTML5
They are getting it to run just as fast as native code
They have a better cross platform development story
The signs we can see of this happening is the replacement of the default browser in Android to Chrome in the recent releases of Android and the switch to using Chrome inside application web views in the KitKat release of Android (=latest version).
A web view is a way for a native app (in both Android and iOS) to run HTML5 code. It is one of the mechanisms used for cross platform development. Switching it to Chrome means tighter integration of Android to Chrome, and in the future, it might mean faster time to market for new versions.
I assume Google are working to get web views updated faster than Android versions – making the browser portion of Android to improve at the speed of the web. A lot more releases, in less time, for a better solution. It may also be a good strategy against Amazon and Samsung breaking rank – an incentive for others to stay within the official Android ecosystem.
Both teams seem very aggressive, but somehow, I think the Chrome team are the ones running with their knives between their teeth, trying to gobble up everything in their way – including Android’s lunch.
In the very early days of APIs, when John Musser founded ProgrammableWeb, the default for every new API was open–wide open. As the industry has matured, companies have become more careful to enter the open, public API waters. Though the number of APIs is still growing rapidly, most new APIs look very different from those of a few years ago. Popular services used to launch with public APIs, or perhaps have them soon after. Now the popular services are more likely to hold out for awhile, perhaps learning from those before. This wariness of openness has perhaps gone too far, ignoring the positive potential of embracing the ecosystem.
The Case Against Open
Firstly, the whole label of “open” is often misunderstood. Developers and providers alike often interpret it as “free of cost.” A better term, which I’ve been trying to use more, is public. The idea of public APIs–those that are available for developers to sign up–contrasts nicely with private APIs, which are typically only for use internally within the company that creates it.
The Google Maps API is the classic example that many think of with an open API. For years the service was free for unlimited usage an any number of sites. Google even once deprecated API keys for geocoding. The era of mashup mayhem created thousands of websites plotting any data onto a map, including data that doesn’t even belong on a map.
Google Maps, and the Facebook craze that followed, caused many companies to believe the secret to API success was to not make any money off of your API. Somehow, you’d make up for it. Developers would build something you never thought of and from that something amazing would be born. This happens sometimes, but it’s far too laissez faire for today’s web.
How Twilio Landed Intuit
SMS and voice API company Twilio has long been a model of public APIs. Twilio might be way overused as an example, but the following story of how it landed Intuit as a customer is too good to pass up.
Intuit is a much, much larger company than Twilio. Even though Twilio has raised over 100 million dollars, Intuit turned 30 this year, has over 8,000 employees and billions in revenue.
Yet, a couple years ago on a Friday afternoon one of those thousands of Intuit employees was browsing Twilio’s website. Documentation and code samples abound. The employee was able to register directly for an account and use free credits to test out the platform. She went home and over the weekend built a prototype to perform voice verification phone calls.
On Monday morning she showed the test application to co-workers. They agreed it would go a long way toward helping verify the millions of people whose salary runs through Intuit’s payroll service.
Intuit Payroll is a major Twilio partner. It was simply open documentation and a self-serve interface that won Intuit’s business.
Infrastructure Sells, Business Models Abound
Twilio provides tele-communications infrastructure. Making voice calls or sending text messages programmatically is hard stuff that Twilio makes easy. Because it provides immense value, it can charge developers money for the time and investment they save. There are many examples of these new types of infrastructure businesses.
The idea of “the cloud” is infrastructure made virtual and sliced up to be affordable to anyone. Amazon and many others are doing it with storage, computing power and databases. My employer does it for email. Infrastructure APIs take a developer problem and make it go away. The solution is self-serve, available to all, which makes it highly scalable from a revenue perspective.
That’s not to say infrastructure APIs don’t have employees devoted to business development or sales. Most do both, some relying on the self-serve as only one form of lead generation.
And though infrastructure APIs are the common example of APIs as Products, there are many others that are able to get developers to pay for their API. Even Google Maps, the gold standard for wide open APIs, has learned from the API as Product trend. High volume websites must now pay to access the Google Maps API.
Developers paying for an API is only one of many API business models. The key is to make sure the API provides a value to developers and that by developers using the API, they provide value back to the provider.
Adam DuVander is Developer Communications Director for SendGrid and Contributing Editor of ProgrammableWeb. Previously he edited this site and wrote for Wired. You can follow him on Twitter.
A recent Bell Labs study forecasts total metro traffic will increase 560 percent by 2017, largely driven by IP video and the increasing adoption of cloud/data center services and applications.
IP video and data center (DC)/cloud traffic are the largest drivers for growth. According
to the study, metro video traffic (including subscription TV and Internet video) will increase 720 percent.
Metro cloud and data center traffic will increase 440 percent by 2017, the study predicts.
As the demand for video content increases, video caching is now being implemented
within metro networks, moving content caching deeper into the network.
As a direct consequence, traffic between data centers in metro areas will grow, keeping much traffic off the backbone networks. That’s a significant change.
Until recently, metro traffic had a “north-south” flow from a content source to the end user with content sources typically located at a national central location and delivered over the wide area
backbone network.
But there is a change coming, Alcatel-Lucent says. The north-south flows increasingly will be replaced by “east-west traffic flows for traffic flows from data center to data center, increasingly located within metro centers.
There are revenue implications for providers of high-capacity metro networks.
Amazon got a lot of ink for its sci-fi drone delivery idea this week, but a more real and immediate robot effort underway in the Seattle retailer’s warehouses could save it as much as $916 million a year, according to one analyst.
Amazon’s rollout of robots from a company it bought called Kiva Systems — which can shuttle shelves full of merchandise to warehouse workers rather than the other way around — may help pare 20 percent to 40 percent off the typical $3.50 to $3.75 cost of fulfilling a typical order, says Shawn Milne, a Janney Capital Markets analyst in a research note.
Thanksgiving is over, and we're already deep into December. It's time for a look back at all the blunders, catastrophes, epic fails and major screw-ups of 2013.
The U.S. Supreme Court will attempt to answer a question that has perplexed the technology industry for decades: When is a piece of software patentable?
On Friday, the high court agreed to hear an appeal of a case that has tied lower courts in knots. A May ruling in the case from a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., yielded seven opinions, totaling more than 120 pages, and no clear answer to whether — and when — computer code should get patent protection.
We’ve already logged a few sightings of Verizon’s powerful new LTE network in New York and other cities, but in the last few months Verizon has been rapidly working behind the scenes on upgrading its LTE infrastructure across the country. Today on the third anniversary of its initial 4G network launch, Verizon Wireless revealed to Gigaom that it has now set the new network beast loose in dozens of major markets across the country.
In the commercial corridors of major cities like New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Boston, Seattle and Washington, D.C.. Verizon has tripled its LTE capacity by tapping new airwaves, while in downtown San Francisco and Los Angeles it’s boosted capacity by 150 percent. The end result is that in cities where it’s completed the upgrade, customers will not only have access to much faster peak speeds – as high as 80 Mbps – than its first LTE network could support but Verizon also will be able to support many more connections at faster speeds.
Verizon isn’t publicizing this network launch all that much, though it did make a brief mention of the new upgrades in its 3rd anniversary blog post this morning. But Verizon Wireless Chief Network Officer Nicola Palmer shared all of the details in an interview with me today.
Verizon is tapping the Advanced Wireless Services airwaves it acquired from the cable operators back in 2012, and these are no paltry frequencies. In every major city east of the Mississippi and in several western markets, Palmer said, Verizon has fielded LTE systems utilizing a full 40 MHz of spectrum, twice as big as the 20 MHz network it’s spent the last three years rolling out nationwide. In some cities it couldn’t piece together a 40 MHz block, but it has been able to get close: In San Francisco and Los Angeles, for instance, the new networks are hosted on 30 MHz of AWS spectrum.
Those setups could support theoretical speeds for 100 Mbps to 150 Mbps, though real-world speeds will be much slower, especially as more subscribers move onto the network. More importantly though, the upgrade gives Verizon much needed capacity.
Already two-thirds of all Verizon’s mobile data traffic has migrated onto its old LTE network, Palmer said. “This is the data network,” she said. “It’s carrying a lot of data, and it’s carrying it well.” But Palmer expects that data load to grow by a factor of six or seven times in the next few years, meaning Verizon had to find new airwaves on which to put that rapidly increasing number of LTE connections.
These new network upgrades should solve any capacity problems for the next few years. At the very least, they will restore Verizon’s LTE service to its former glory, but most likely customers in bigger cities with AWS-compatible phones will see dramatic speed increases in the near-term. Palmer said Verizon has already completed the upgrade on thousands of cell sites, and by year end it will have 5,000 AWS sites online with an additional 5,000 sites in various stages of completion.
Verizon’s LTE coverage in dark red
Not every device will connect to the network just yet, though Verizon began seeding the market with new AWS-capable phones back in the second quarter. Devices that can take advantage of this NEW NETWORK today — the iPhone(a aapl) 5s and 5c, the Samsung Galaxy S4, the Motorola Droid Maxx, Mini and Ultra, and several LTE modems — all have the necessary radios and software. Verizon will also be sending out over-the-air software updates to enable the AWS radios in the Galaxy Note 3 and other Android devices shortly.
About 15 percent of Verizon’s smartphone base can tap the new networks, but by the end of the year that number should be 20 percent, Palmer said. From this point forward nearly every new smartphone Verizon picks up will have AWS capabilities, she added.
Mobile carriers play catch-up
The other carriers are also working on various upgrades. T-Mobile recently doubled its LTE capacity in major cities putting it on par with Verizon and AT&T’s nationwide networks, and it has plans to deploy its own 40 MHz 4G configurations, giving it one of the most networks in the country. Sprint made a big splash with its Spark service launch earlier this month, but the initial launch still uses only 20 MHz of spectrum. Sprint can easily add capacity to Spark in the future, though, from its treasure trove of 2.5 GHz airwaves.
AT&T is a bit of unique situation. It doesn’t have the contiguous airwaves in most markets to launch a 40 MHz monster, but it is scouring its old 2G and 3G networks for spectrum to use for LTE. We’re already seeing new LTE networks in the PCS airwaves in NYC, but AT&T is working in other bands as well. So maybe AT&T won’t be able to field together the speed-demon that Verizon just deployed, but it will add a lot of capacity to its network, which will boost the overall quality for all its users.
Verizon has the upper hand for now — at least in the major cities — but it’s surprisingly not making a big deal out of its new super-charged LTE service . For instance, it has no plans on boosting its advertised network speeds beyond the 5-12 Mbps its been marketing for years. Palmer pointed out that networks are finicky creatures with speeds varying wildly depending on what city you’re located in, how close you are to a tower and how many other connections occupy the same cell.
“You could see 80 Mbps today and 20 Mbps tomorrow and then 10 Mbps the next day,” she said. Verizon wants to keep its networks powerful enough that they can maintain its advertised 5-12 Mbps baseline, she said, but if it manages to dramatically exceed consumer expectations on these new networks, so much the better.
Tis the season to be frugal. Does you holiday gift list include someone who could use a premium Bluetooth headset? Here’s a good candidate; Daily Steals is today offering the Plantronics Voyager Legend for just $39. This the very headset that I have been using for the past year. It’s the follow-on to the Voyager […]
