Author Archive | Ed Oswald

Amazon’s PayPhrase to Speed Checkout

Posted by Ed Oswald on October 29, 2009 at 12:56 am

amazonlogoAmazon on Wednesday rolled out its latest effort to simplify shopping on its site with a service called PayPhrase. Essentially, customers would set up a specific phrase and PIN which would be linked to shipping and billing information on Amazon. When used, the checkout process could potentially be shortened to a matter of seconds.

PayPhrase won’t be limited to just the online retailer. It plans to offer the service to other retailers as well. So far DKNY, Jockey, Patagonia, Buy.com, J&R, and Car-Toys have signed on with the service. Other sites that use Checkout by Amazon would also be able to employ the PayPhrase service, it said.

The nation’s largest online retailer sees this as a big boon for the holidays, where speed is a benefit for shoppers with long Christmas lists.

Is Amazon on to something however with PayPhrase? I think so. Even online methods of payment like PayPal still require several steps to complete a transaction. This requires only two steps: entering the phrase, click, enter PIN, click, done. You can’t get much easier than that while still staying secure.

What remains to be seen however is whether Amazon can drum up more support for this platform. Besides itself, the only other partner with significant market share is Buy.com: that’s way too little reach. If it can manage to snag say two or three more big name partners, PayPhrase may become the next big thing in online payments.

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AT&T: Our Network is Fine, Thank You

Posted by Ed Oswald on October 28, 2009 at 11:15 am

att_header_logoSpeculation over the causes of AT&T’s network issues moved back to the forefront this week when a researcher speculated that the way the carrier had configured its network was the cause of its troubles. In other words, it ain’t the iPhone’s fault.

The research and idea was first presented by Brough Turner, a 25-year veteran of the communications industry. Turner’s work was republished by several media outlets (including us), and again put AT&T in the now familiar position of damage control.

Well, the carrier is none too happy about having to defend itself again. “The AT&T wireless network is designed and engineered to deliver the highest possible levels of capacity and performance. Our standing as the nation’s fastest 3G network is validated by multiple third-party testing organizations on the basis of millions of drive tests annually,” the carrier said in a statement to Technologizer.

What about Turner’s accusations of configuration issues? AT&T says there is no basis in fact for his research. “We believe that recent online speculation regarding AT&T wireless network configuration settings is without foundation. Allegations in these posts regarding packet loss network settings are incorrect,” spokesperson Seth Bloom said.

Back to the drawing board for those trying to figure out what’s going on with the “nation’s fastest 3G network” I guess.

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iPhone On Track to Become #1 Smartphone in US

Posted by Ed Oswald on October 27, 2009 at 6:36 pm

Future iPhoneApple’s iPhone continues it’s march toward market dominance, a survey released by ChangeWave Research on Tuesday indicates. From June to September, Apple’s share of the market jumped from 25 to 30 percent, while competitors RIM and Palm basically stayed unchanged over the same period.

RIM’s share fell 1 percent to 40 percent, while Palm’s share remained unchanged at 7 percent. It’s clear from these figures that the Pre has done little to fix the company’s woes, adding weight to the calls of “failure” from some industry watchers.

(It could also be due to the fact that the lady on those commercials is just creepy looking, but I do digress.)

The news gets even better for Apple: Over the next 90 days, 36 percent of those surveyed said they plan to purchase an iPhone in that period, compared with 27 percent for RIM and 8 percent for Palm. In other words, the iPhone’s share isn’t done growing yet.

Part of this success may also have a lot to do with customer satisfaction: Apple completely kills the competition here. 74 percent report being satisfied with their devices, with the next closest, RIM, coming in at 43 percent. You have to go to sixth spot to find Palm, with only a third satisfied — behind competiors LG, Sanyo, and HTC.

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Internationalized Domain Names Closer To Reality

Posted by Ed Oswald on October 27, 2009 at 4:48 pm

ICANNIt’s been a pet peeve for countries that use non-Roman written text in their languages, but ICANN appears to be set to vote Friday to keep the process moving forward. Internationalized domain names would mean that a domain could be written completely in a non-Roman language — for example Arabic, Chinese, or Hindu to name a few.

It does not come without its pitfalls however. Standard DNS can only handle Roman characters. Thus it has taken much of the past three years that IDNs have existed to rewrite DNS to prevent these domains from breaking the Internet — in other words, shutting these sites out to the Roman language world.

November 16 is the date where the country code (i.e. .ru, .jp, etc.) will now also be able to be written out in non-Roman script. Countries will have to apply to ICANN in order to start testing this new method out.

China, Russia, and Japan appear to be the first to apply for this new DNS method. It is expected by the next meeting in March that they would have had testing complete and be able to advise other interested countries on how they should proceed.

One thing I am not clear on is how these sites would work for Latin-alphabet net surfers. Will these sites have two addresses? Obviously, in some of these languages, the translations are not so exact.

Maybe we have somebody out there in Technologizerland who might know the answer to this. If so, speak up in the comments.

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MySpace Looks Past Social Networking

Posted by Ed Oswald on October 27, 2009 at 3:43 pm

myspaceMySpace has been especially busy it seems in recent weeks to recast itself as an entertainment destination as it cedes the social networking space to Facebook. In fact, the two sides are talking about ways they could work together, according to comments made to the Telegraph newspaper.

Facebook is apparently interested in MySpace’s content, which they suggest could be incorporated into Facebook through its Connect feature. Both sides have confirmed that talks are indeed ongoing, but haven’t really specified how far the talks may be.

One thing is working in Facebook’s favor: MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta is a Facebook alum. So I don’t think its a far stretch to say that Natta himself probably is leading MySpace into the willing arms of its now larger rival.

I’m not saying this was his plan all along — but when you’re getting to the point that MySpace is, everything should be on the table.

This isn’t the only partnership that MySpace is apparently working on. Next up, Microsoft. Kara Swisher reports that Redmond is looking at MySpace Music to beef up its music offering on MSN, another potentially lucrative move. With MSN Music struggling, teaming up with a market-leading service like MySpace’s just makes good business sense.

In the end, it looks like MySpace has just about given up on social networking from recent news that’s coming out of the company. I guess we’ll find out soon if that was a smart idea or not, no?

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Sony Getting the Antitrust Eye Over Optical Drives

Posted by Ed Oswald on October 26, 2009 at 1:22 pm

sonylogoIt’s not quite clear why it is happening, but Sony disclosed Monday that its Optiarc division in the US is under investigation by the Justice Department for possible antitrust violations. Sony Optiarc is one of the larger manufacturers of optical drives, including DVD and Blu-ray.

The DOJ is not the only government agency worldwide looking into Sony’s practices: other countries are apparently also requesting information as part of a wider investigation into the industry. It is unknown whether any other companies may have received requests for information.

An educated guess would lead to the investigation centering around price-fixing. While it’s not known, Blu-ray prices have remained high even though the technology has now been commercially available for over three years, and its competitor HD DVD has been gone for nearly two-thirds of that time.

Then again, it could have nothing to do with Blu-ray. Fact is we just don’t know much at this point. More on this as we get it…

(Hat tip: IDG)

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AT&T’s Wireless Data Issues May Be No Fault of iPhone

Posted by Ed Oswald on October 26, 2009 at 12:00 pm

att_header_logoAT&T’s favorite scapegoat when talking about data issues is the ever increasing number of iPhone users on its network. While no doubt these folks can be bandwidth hogs, there may be another reason why there are issues: network configuration.

Brough Turner, a 25-year plus veteran of the telecommunications industry, took to his blog on Sunday to discuss AT&T’s data network problems. In his estimation based on his own research and that of others, it appears as if the carrier may not have its configuration settings correct.

(Reader beware: the above link has quite a bit of technical jargon. It may be a bit difficult to understand for most.)

AT&T’s ping times can vary widely, from a fairly normal 200 milliseconds to an absolutely horrendous 8 seconds or more. This is likely caused by an issue with the buffers in place to normalize Internet traffic.

For the less technical among us, Internet buffers help to smooth out traffic and prevent bottlenecking when the amount of traffic exceeds the bandwidth. Thus to prevent long wait times, sometimes packets are dropped.

But here’s the problem. Turner hypothesizes that AT&T has its network set to have no packet loss at all. This is practically unheard of in wireless data, and is causing slower loading times for users.

If he’s right, this is very embarrassing for the carrier. Did they really screw up in configuring their network? Hopefully Turner’s research compels AT&T to take a second look just to be sure.

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Curtain Call for GeoCities

Posted by Ed Oswald on October 26, 2009 at 9:53 am

geocities-logoSometime today, the servers for what once was one of the most popular sites on the web will be shut off. As earlier announced, Yahoo will be shutting down the once very popular GeoCities web hosting service for good. The company says it will not be archiving the content, so if you have an old webpage there you better act quickly to do it yourself.

The company did say the Internet Archive was archiving content from the GeoCities servers, however there’s no guarantee it would have every page.

Yahoo announced its plans to do away with the service back in April of this year. The company said at the time that “we have decided to focus on helping our customers explore and build relationships online in other ways,” and suggested those that would like to continue hosting with Yahoo migrate their websites to one of the company’s paid hosting plans.

Either way, its sad to see GeoCities go, even though the service now is a far cry from its heyday in the late 1990s-early 2000s. Chances are if you were an Internet geek at that point, you at least had one website on the service. I know personally I either created or lended a hand in creating at least three.

I wonder if it’s still there? I’ll have to search. Would be a nice trip down memory lane…

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Facebook’s New Front Page Looks DOA

Posted by Ed Oswald on October 25, 2009 at 7:48 pm

Facebook LogoFor a market-leading company, Facebook’s moves are sometimes so half-baked that it’s practically mindnumbing. The latest example of this is the site’s new home page. For whatever reason, Facebook has tweaked the news feed to become more of a “top stories” format then a chronological timeline of your friends’ activities.

(If you’re curious, here is why the company says the change was necessary.)

Oh yes, you still can get the old layout, but that’s now something you have to click through for and is called “Live Feed.” The site has attempted to make up for this by making that feed actually real-time: you no longer have to reload for the latest updates.

This was sprung on users without any warning at all. I initially thought Facebook was choking yet again when I noticed the status updates were all jumbled up. I actually didn’t realize there was a change until I noticed a news article highlighted on Techmeme.

Apparently, neither did most of my friends. “What the hell is wrong with Facebook now?” one said. Those that did notice what just happened were not much kinder. “This new layout sucks!” was a common meme.

Now Facebook groups are popping up demanding the old news feed come back. One called “Facebook: SWITCH BACK TO THE OLD NEWS FEED!!!” has garnered some 648,000 members in just two days. Another has about 440,000 members, and yet a third with over 51,000 users.

Such rapid opposition signals to me that Facebook is going to have a lot of trouble keeping this around. But it also should be a concern to those with interests in the social networking company: it is repeatedly making questionable decisions that really seem as if they are not being thought out very well.

Facebook has grown exponentially as MySpace has collapsed. But at the same time, MySpace seemed to think through changes before it made them, or realized sometimes it’s good to leave things alone.

I see no good reason why Facebook needed to mess with the news feed. To begin with, this Twitter-like layout wasn’t really popular with its users, and now they’ve messed with it again in a move that seems to have significant opposition.

If they keep doing this, Facebook’s time at the top may not be long-lived. In the end the customer is always right.

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Psystar Selling Software to Build Your Own Hackintosh

Posted by Ed Oswald on October 23, 2009 at 11:24 am

psystarPsystar is about to become an even bigger thorn in Apple’s side. The company has announced software that would allow users to run Mac OS X and six other operating systems on a PC called Rebel EFI. If it sounds like virtualization software, you’re pretty much right.

The company is even going as far as to license this technology for use by other PC manufacturers. While I’m pretty sure most companies won’t touch this one with a ten foot pole until the legal issues are straightened out in court, you can buy the software for $49.99 from the company’s online store.

Not sure if you want to fork over the money? Psystar also has a downloadable demo version available, although it only allows for two hours of use. In all cases, the company warns it can not be held responsible for any data loss as a result of its use.

If anybody out there is brave enough to give this software a shot, please let us know. I’d love to hear about your experiences with it. Either way though, you have to hand it to the Psystar folks for showing absolutely no fear in continually taking on the world’s most notoriously closed tech company.

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