Rocky Mountain Bank: Rocky, Rocky Security!

MediaPost is reporting that Rocky Mountain Bank, a small institution in Wyoming, accidentally e-mailed the names, Social Security numbers, addresses, and loan information to a Gmail address. When it realized its mistake, it e-mailed the address again and got no response–so it went to court, and a California appellate court judge has told Google that it must deactivate the Gmail address in question. Even though nobody’s accused the e-mail recipient of doing anything wrong.

MediaPost’s story leaves multiple obvious questions unaddressed, so I’m cautious about expressing any opinion at all about this story. The biggest one: Does anyone know who the Gmail account belongs to, and has anyone made any attempt to contact its owner other than Rocky Mountain’s initial e-mail? Do we know that the recipient is using the account at all? Do we know who this person is?

The temptation to heap scorn upon District Court Judge James Ware is obvious, but I’m most appalled by the reported initial actions of Rocky Mountain Bank. Why was anyone there e-mailing Social Security numbers to anyone? The company has a security statement on its site explaining the measures it takes to protect customers’ Social Security numbers, but I find no acknowledgement of this Gmail incident. (“Dear customer: We accidentally leaked your private information to a random stranger, and we’re not sure what he or she is doing with it. Our apologies, etc., etc.”)

While I was rummaging around the Rocky Mountain site hoping to find useful information, I clicked on the Letter From CEO link, and got this:

Doesn’t exactly inspire vast amounts of confidence, does it?

5Words: Ballmer’s Windows Mobile Mea Culpa

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Ballmer: we bungled Windows Mobile.

Verizon (not) snubbing Palm Pre.

Pre hits $99 at Amazon.

New iMacs arriving in October?

Vertu phone not worth $7000.

Details on Toshiba’s cell TV?

Windows 7 netbook performance info.

The twelve biggest Twitter annoyances.

The future of iPhone MMS.

Gmail Outages: The Debate Continues

[UPDATE: Google responded to this post with some details about Gmail outages and how it responds to them.]

For about two and a half hours this morning, some Gmail users found that their contacts or the entire service was unavailable. Once the service bounced back, folks continued to debate whether Google outages are a sign of serious trouble or not.

The Wall Street Journal’s Ben Worthen quotes a Gartner study that says corporate e-mail is only available 95.5 % of the time on average, and says Gmail is more robust than many:

About 150 million people have Gmail accounts, making its failures highly public. Even if the service is available 99.9% of the time – the service level that Google guarantees for its corporate customers – it will be unavailable for about nine hours a year. That looks to be around the amount of time that just nearly everyone on the planet notices these failures.

GigaOm’s Om Malik, however, is a nonplussed Google customer:

What really bothers me is the crap Google posts on its Google Apps status page. “We are aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a small subset of users,” it posted this morning. Seriously, guys? If you look at the number of people complaining on Twitter and Facebook, it sure doesn’t look like only a small subset of users is affected by this.

Google didn’t define what it meant by small–but when a service has as many customers as Gmail does, even a small percentage adds up to a lot of unhappy campers who can’t get their stuff done.

At 9:58am, Google’s Apps Status reported that the glitch had been resolved, and apologized for the disruption. But it didn’t explain what had happened. And unlike the last significant Gmail outage, this one went unacknowledged by the Gmail blog.

Me, I’m still willing to believe that Gmail’s track record for reliability is still respectable. But I’d like to see the company consistently address major outages on the blog, telling us all what happened–even if the circumstances are dreary and technical. The company’s blogs are pretty good as is, but wouldn’t they be even better if they reliably tackled difficult Google news as well as cheery rollouts of new services? And wouldn’t concerned Google customers feel better if the company gave them as much evidence as possible that it takes outages really seriously?

Is Twitter Worth a Billion Dollars?

Twitter, the micro-blogging company with no fully-disclosed revenue model, has reportedly raised around $100 million in private equity from T. Rowe Price and Insight Venture Partners, placing its total valuation at about one billion dollars. It’s Twitter’s responsibility to share its business plan with investors, but I see nothing but a new manifestation of the dot-com bubble. Call it a microbubble.

Board the hype machine and rewind back to 1996 when a hot start up company called Mirabilis revolutionized how people communicated with a technology known as “instant messaging,” compelling AOL to acquire it for $407 million. What payback did AOL receive on that bubble investment?

While it’s true that Twitter is not ICQ, and there is no doubt that it is under more pressure than ever to find a business model, it still hasn’t shown how it will pull in revenue. This week, executives ruled out running advertisements for the remainder of the year. What other rabbit is in its hat?

On the bright side, Twitter is a small company without high expenses, and its messaging platform is hugely popular (even though many of its users are sleepers). Maybe its management is more visionary than I am.

Also, Twitter would not receive financing if it did not have plans to spend it. I’m sure that AOL had grandiose plans for ICQ too. Instant messaging became a generic technology, and nothing has convinced me that the same thing will not happen to Twitter.

There are open source alternatives cropping up, as well as start-ups like eSwarm that have applied micro-blogging to solve different problems. Facebook has also invested more to soup up its Twitter-like events stream.

Twitter is looking far less distinctive than it did a year ago. Does anyone disagree?

Windows 7′s Early Arrival

October 22nd may be Windows 7′s official arrival date, but at least one manufacturer plans to not only be ready for it but ahead of schedule. Custom PC manufacturer Puget Systems says it’ll begin shipping Windows 7 machines on October 13th, nine days before so many of us will be holding festive Windows 7 launch parties. Sounds like anyone who springs for fast shipping could have a PC on his or her desktop around a week before the OS’s formal debut.

I can’t remember how firm the release dates for Windows upgrades past have been, but if Puget has permission to do this, you gotta think it most likely isn’t the only company who plans to ship early. I guess operating systems aren’t like hot books whose publishers do their very best to prevent any sellers from jumping the gun.

I continue to believe that it’s not only rational but arguably the most sensible plan of action to wait a few weeks before buying Windows 7 or a Windows 7 PC, just so any showstopping technical problems get fixed before they bedevil you. But I wonder how many folks will decide to buy a Puget PC to get a nine-day head start on even other early adopters?

Let’s end this with a T-Poll:

Making Money from Podcasting: Screencasts Online

(This interview is part of David Spark’s (@dspark) series “Making Money from Podcasting” (read summary “9 Successful Techniques for Making Money from Podcasting”) where he interviews podcasters who are actually generating revenue from their podcasts. There are many techniques, and here’s one person’s tale of how he’s making money from podcasting.)

Don McAllister, host of ScreenCastsOnline

Give away every other episode. Make them pay for the rest.

Don McAllister is the host of ScreenCastsOnline, a weekly video podcast of how-to tutorials of some Mac software. Each 25-30 minute episode is a screen recording of his monitor as he narrates his way through the software. The goal of each episode is to help Mac users get the most out of the latest and greatest software.

McAllister has built a business model for ScreenCastsOnline where he gives away every other episode for free. If you’d like to get all the episodes (four a month instead of two), then you have to become a subscriber. Subscribers also get high def versions of the shows (higher res icons! Yay!) plus chapters within individual shows. To become a subscriber costs $57 for a six month subscription, which gives you access to McAllister’s back catalog of more than 200 shows. After the initial six months, continuing your subscription costs $25 for the next six months.

Interview (Time: 11:04)

Download MP3

McAllister’s been doing his show for four years now, and like most podcasters who are now making money, the show started out purely as a hobby and for free. He created a fan base and during those early days his viewers sent emails asking how they could contribute to the show. Heeding their call, McAllister set up a donation page. Funds from donations started working out ok, but it wasn’t enough. He wanted to move into a paid subscription model, but he didn’t think he could sustain it. So before he jumped to subscriptions, he approached some software vendors and offered to demo their software for a fee. Essentially he turned a few of his episodes into an infomercial screencast. He still produces paid-for screencasts, but not nearly as often. When McAllister does do those shows, he always discloses that they’ve been sponsored, and he makes those shows available for free.

McAllister soon had enough money and fans to launch his paid subscription business model. It’s been going so well that three years ago he made ScreenCastsOnline his sole source of income. He estimates 10 to 15 percent of his total free subscribers have become paid subscribers. Not only does he make money from subscriptions, but he’s built up his brand as well and is often offered paid speaking opportunities.

McAllister’s paid subscription model works and is repeatable as proven by another podcaster, Israel Hyman, who has successfully copied McAllister’s subscription model three times. Read and listen to my interview with Israel Hyman, host of Izzy Video, as he tells his tale of meeting McAllister and learning his tricks of the trade.

McAllister attests his success as being unique in the world of podcasting. There aren’t many other people doing what he’s doing. When I asked about Lynda.com which offers a huge library of screencast tutorials, McAllister notes that those programs are usually focused on pro applications and they’re much longer form, four to five hours long if not more.

Listen to my interview with McAllister as he provides advice to others that wish to follow his lead on how to make money from podcasting.

More episodes of “Making Money from Podcasting”

• Never Not Funny (Technique: “Partial show for free – full show paid”)
• Personal Life Media (Technique: “Build your own media network of programming and sell advertising against it”)
• Pregtastic (Technique: “Get your own sponsors”)
• Elsie’s Yoga Class (Technique: “Sell an iPhone application along with your podcast”)
• Mac OS Ken (Technique: “Give away five shows for free, make them pay for the sixth”)
• Alaska HDTV (Technique: “Get your own sponsors”)
• Duct Tape Marketing (Technique: “Build your brand to sell your services”)
• Izzy Video (Technique: “Give away every other episode. Make them pay for the rest.”)
• Slate Gabfests (Technique: “Integrating sponsorship with the show’s editorial”)
• Wizzard Media (Technique: “Got audience? We’ll get you sponsors. Or, get sponsors on your own and we’ll insert the ads” PLUS “Sell an iPhone application along with your podcast”)
• Premiumcast.com (Technique: “Build an audience and sell premium podcasts”)
• Manager Tools (Technique: “Build your brand to sell your services”)
• ESPN (“Build your own media network of programming and sell advertising against it”)
• Mevio (Technique: “Motivate your audience”)

Wii Price Drops, Sony and Microsoft Beat Chests

Nintendo finally responded to the pressure from Sony and Microsoft, cutting the Wii’s price to $200, effective this Sunday. There were plenty of warning signs – store circulars, retailer’s internal e-mails, and plain old common sense — but now it’s official.

I’ve said my piece about the Wii’s holiday prospects, but I had to chuckle today at the indirect responses from Sony and Microsoft, who individually offered the same message. To paraphrase: “Hey, we’re making motion controllers too, you know!”

Exhibit A is Microsoft’s brag-laden press release about Project Natal, an upcoming 3D motion-sensing camera peripheral for the Xbox 360. Microsoft name-dropped a dozen publishers who are “actively working on games” for the motion controller, and spoke of a “high-powered panel” at Tokyo Game Show, in which a few top game designers will talk about how they love the new technology.

The message is that Microsoft loves third-party development, and wants to get publishers on board early on. That’s a not-so-subtle dig at Nintendo, which has a reputation for putting its in-house work on a pedestal. I’m still waiting to see whether the accuracy-boosting Wii Motion Plus will be adopted by more than a half dozen brave publishers.

Not to be outdone, Sony revealed some concrete information on its remote-like motion controller. Resident Evil 5, which was released earlier this year, will get a “Directors Cut” with motion controls, and 13 other titles are in development now. Some are existing games, like Flower and EyePet, while others are mysterious working titles, such as “Champions of Time” and “Eccentric Slider.”

I’d say Sony has been far more open about its technology than Microsoft, which makes sense because the Playstation 3 motion controller isn’t that revolutionary. It’s merely a ticket for the motion control bandwagon, and Sony’s trying to get on board by next spring.

Will the Playstation 3 or the Xbox 360 beat Nintendo at its own game? We’ve barely seen either in action, so it’s hard to tell on quality alone. But the Wii’s price cut, combined with undying interest in franchises such as Mario, will ensure Nintendo’s success for a long time.

Can AT&T Pull Off a Smooth iPhone MMS Rollout?

We are now less than a day away from the start of the long-awaited rollout of MMS on the iPhone. AT&T is planning to roll out the functionality in bunches starting at 10am ET, with a text message being sent to iPhone customers when the account is enabled for MMS, according to an anonymous source quoted by Broadband Reports.

The question now is, given AT&T’s history, will this rollout go off without a hitch? It’s questionable. During tests, the carrier’s MMS servers reportedly failed for those invited to participate. Additionally, in the test groups, “record traffic” was reportedly seen during peak hours. If the situation is as reported, it seems to suggest that Friday could be another one of those days for the carrier’s millions of iPhone users.

If traffic is 40 percent higher than normal as some are predicting on Friday,the grief that iPhone users may experience could bleed to non-iPhone users, further damaging the company’s already weak standing for service reliability with a good chunk of its customers.

Certainly, it’s going to be interesting to watch how AT&T’s network does in the first days of the rollout. Since users will have to connect to iTunes to sync the new “carrier file” which enables the functionality within the iPhone’s software, it’s fairly likely we won’t see any potential problems crop up until later in the day or on Saturday.

Sorry AT&T, but I’m not holding my breath here that you guys can do this. Too many times since I’ve switched to you folks in October for the iPhone 3G you’ve let me down. I never thought I would actually want to go back to T-Mobile and EDGE data (yep, that’s all they have here), but at least they weren’t dropping calls.

Eleven Sites for Watching and Downloading Free TV and Movies

Last week I told you about Sling’s MediaCatcher, the device that’s ideal for viewing streaming videos on your TV, as well as MediaGate’s MG-800HD, the other gizmo for watching downloaded movies on your TV. (See “Stream Movies from Your PC to Your TV.”)

This week I’ve got a score of spots where you can watch legal movies and TVs shows, some streamed, others downloaded, and a few sites with illegally pirated movies. I’ll also review MediaGate’s inexpensive, portable media device.

Next week I’ll spend a little time showing you how to capture streaming video.
Continue reading this story…

5Words: A Twitter App Store

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An app store for Twitter.

GSM Pre due in October.

Google’s Windows Mobbile app upgraded.

Wacom tablets get multi-touch gestures.

iPhone home screens: a gallery.

Microsoft: We’re not buying EA.

Pro tips for improving DEMO.

Microsoft: Chrome Frame is risky.

Pre is getting plentiful mindshare.

Google Sidwiki: Good! And bad!

Gmail: Sick Again

I awoke this morning to find that hundreds of folks were reading an old Techologizer story on Gmail problems–which is always a sign that Gmail is misbehaving on a grand scale. As usual, I checked my own two Gmail accounts, and found that my inboxes were available–but that both were displaying a message I’d never seen before:

Then I checked the Google Apps status page, which confirmed that something was amiss but didn’t mention contacts (I’m also not sure why it calls it “Google Mail,” but let’s avoid addressing that for now):

Lastly, I turned to Twitter, which rarely explains why something is going on, but which can certainly help determine whether it’s widespread. It did confirm that some people can’t get into Gmail, period:

Whatever’s going on, it comes less than a month after Gmail’s last major disruption. When this is sorted out, I hope that Google not only publishes an explanatory blog post, but also one about that addresses more overarching issues concerning Gmail reliability.

So are you having Gmail issues this morning?

Microsoft Phones Revealed?

Gizmodo is certainly on a roll–after publishing what seems to be a Microsoft video of a dual-screen concept tablet PC, it’s dug up photos that supposedly show two Windows Mobile smartphones which will be cobranded by Microsoft and Sharp. One looks a lot like a Palm Pre, one looks kind of like a Sidekick, and neither is inherently exciting. Then again, it won’t be hardware designs that will make any upcoming Windows Mobile phone a big whoop–that’ll only occur if Windows Mobile 7 turns out to be a great leap forward. At the moment, at least, almost all smartphone hardware isn’t much more than a container for software–even with the iPhone, maybe fifteen percent of what makes it interesting is the hardware, and the rest is the iPhone OS.

Intel Unveils the Mobile Core i7 Processor

While I’ve been at DEMOfall in San Diego, Intel has been holding its equally newsworthy Intel Developer Forum conference back in San Francisco. Today’s big announcement was the mobile version of the Core i7 quad-core CPU (code-named Clarksfield),as seen in such new laptops as Toshiba’s latest Qosmio. Laptop Magazine has benchmarked a Core i7 notebook provided to it by Intel, and found it to be smoking’ fast–but with iffy battery life. As usual, there’s a limit to the conclusions you can draw about a processor from tests of one computer–especially one supplied by the chipmaker in question. But as more machines ship from major manufacturers–including, eventually, Apple–expect some really powerful systems, starting at a relatively reasonable $1000 or so.

DEMOfall’s Two Worthy Winners

I’m jetting home from DEMOfall 09 (on a Wi-Fi enabled plane–God bless Virgin America). The show ended with an awards ceremony that included best-of-show honors for the conference’s best consumer-oriented product and best business-related one, as judged by a panel of experts. (Each company got $500,000 worth of advertising at publications and sites owned by my former employer, IDG, as well as DEMO producer Matt Marshall’s VentureBeat.)

I didn’t get to chime in, but if I had, I might have voted for the two products that won. The consumer champ is Emo Labs’ invisible speakers, which I’ve been raving about since I heard them back in January. And the other is a nifty-looking item I haven’t written about yet: Liaise, an add-in for Outlook that examines your emails and automatically and intelligently creates sharable action items based on the information it finds. (I love the idea, but it’s so wildly ambitious that I need to see more than canned demos before I can give it an unqualified thumbs up–even so, I’m already hoping it’ll come to Gmail.)

Emo’s technology may not show up in flat-panel TVs until 2010′s holiday season, where it’ll probably add 10-15% to the cost of the set over more mundane speakers; Liaise is in private beta and should be available soon for under $10 a month. Both are clever ideas that stood among the crowd of around 70 exhibiting companies–almost all of the rest of which involved Web-based services and/or iPhone apps.

Toshiba’s Qosmio Gets Blu-Ray

Toshiba’s Qosmio is one of those laptops that’s pretty much an all-in-one desktop PC in disguise: With its 18.4-inch screen and beefy specs, it’s more transportable than portable–and with its emphasis on entertainment, it’s like a Windows Media Center you can fold up and move from room to room.

The company announced the newest Qosmio model today, the X500 series, and the most notable new feature is the overdue, inevitable inclusion of a Blu-Ray drive or burner–Toshiba’s first. (The one-time proponent of HD-DVD formally announced it was getting into the Blu-Ray game last month.) The X500 also has Intel’s new mobile version of its Core i7 processor, 6GB of DDR3 RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTS 250 graphics with a gigabyte of DDR5 memory, HDMI, Harmon/Kardon sound, and room for two hard drives (one of which can be a solid-state disk).

How much will all this run you? Toshiba says it’ll announce pricing on October 13th, and that the system will be available on October 22nd–which, uncoincidentally, is Windows 7 launch day.

5Words: Twitter Gets Geographically Savvy

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Details on Twitter’s geolocation features.

Thirty Windows Mobile 6.5 phones.

Report: Nintendo’s Wii price cut.

Windows 8: early details emerge.

Finally: Starbucks on your iPhone.

OnLive’s cloud gaming service impresses.

AT&T readies iPhone MMS rollout.

Windows 7 party madness continues.

Intel demos new Mobilin OS.

CallSpark: ultimate iPhone address book?