Author Archive | Ed Oswald

Time Running Out for iPod Competitors

Posted by Ed Oswald on April 10, 2009 at 12:00 pm

If anything was evidence that Apple’s iPod is ready to be the de-facto digital music device, the latest survey of teens by financial research firm Piper Jaffray should be it. Of the 606 teens surveyed (54 percent male, 46 percent female), those planning to buy a player all responded they were considering Apple’s iconic device.

About one out of every five teens are planning to buy a new music player in the next 12 months, down from 34 percent in the fall survey. Of that group, 100% say an iPod.

For whatever reason, Zune’s share has collapsed — probably due to the fact the players have gone without any update for quite awhile. In the fall, 15 percent said they were considering a Zune. If this is true, Microsoft may find itself being forced out of the digital music player market as the youth is what drives this industry.

There really isn’t much untapped potential here either: 92 percent of teens own a player, up from 87 percent in the last survey. So even if this is exaggerated, the growth potential is slipping away for Microsoft — I’ve often heard them argue about the untapped market as its salvation.

I just can’t see with the increasing amount of negative data for Zune how it is worthwhile for the company to stay in the market. We are hearing that the wagons are circling in Redmond and talks are ongoing with partners on the next Zune model, which should come out in the fall if what we are hearing is correct.

However, will it even be worth it?

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CompUSA Makes a Comeback

Posted by Ed Oswald on April 10, 2009 at 9:50 am

After Circuit City bit the dust earlier this year, you probably thought that Best Buy would pretty much be on its own in the electronics super-retailer category. Think again — an old name is making a comeback. CompUSA has now opened 30 locations — mostly in Florida — with a new outlook on retail.

Company execs call their effort “Retail 2.0.” According to Wired, Systemax is bringing back the brand through stores with better lighting, more inviting stores, aggressive pricing and in-store web access. The web access is intended to allow customers comparison shop right from the store to ensure they’re getting the best price.

No doubt CompUSA is also using its connection through Systemax to Tiger Direct, its sister company, to help it be more competitive in this retail environment. Tiger has generally been competitive when it comes to price as well. In fact, whether you go to Tiger or the retail store, the prices on products will be the same.

CompUSA will not restrict the Internet either — so a user could just as easily jump on Amazon and see if they can get what they’re looking at cheaper there. It’s somewhat of a risk, but the company feels that it will give consumers more confidence and thus lead to a sale.

With Circuit City gone, if this concept works well it could be an opening for CompUSA to re-emerge as a competitor on a national level to Best Buy. It could also be a plus for consumers — Best Buy would not have free reign on setting prices.

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Telephone, Internet Outage in Silicon Valley

Posted by Ed Oswald on April 9, 2009 at 1:19 pm

Wire services are reporting that a massive telephone and Internet outage is affecting Northern California, including portions of Silcon Valley. Telephone and Internet is out for Verizon customers in Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties, NBC News reports. This does appear to be a case of deliberate vandalism: as many as five AT&T fiber-optic cables have been severed, and a Sprint cable was severed hours later.

The incident occurred around 1:30 am PT (4:30am ET) this morning. Verizon is sending technicians to the scene to assist AT&T in repairing the damage, although at this time it is not known how long the repairs will take. In the meantime, AT&T has begun to take steps in order to reroute traffic.

ZDNet were affected by the outage, with slow page loading times and time outs. 911 and other emergency services in the region have also reported some connectivity issues.

Who’s the vandal? AT&T is currently involved in tense negotations with the CWA over contracts for landline workers. The CWA has issued a statement, denying that its members have any involvement, and condemned “vandalism.” More on this as we get it…

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Just How Easy is it to Get Pirated iPhone Software?

Posted by Ed Oswald on April 9, 2009 at 12:04 pm

You might remember Brian Chen at Wired’s reporting on iPhone App Store piracy. That got us to thinking, is it really an issue, or just an exaggeration of a minor problem? To test our theories, we decided to attempt to install a pirated app on one of our own iPhone 3G’s here at Technologizer.

We’d like to apologize ahead of time to the developer whose apps we have used in this experiment. Your app wasn’t singled out or anything, it was merely selected to show the process. It has since been deleted: Technologizer has no interest in participating in this activity.

Anyways, back to our test. The first step in the process was to use the website Mr. Chen sourced, The Monkey’s Ball. We found that from a perspective of actually searching for sources say via Google and the like, easy-to-use sources for average Joe Pirater are not readily found. Yes, the searches will uncover places to download apps, but you’re pretty much on your own to figure out how to use them.

We surfed around TMB and found that there wasn’t any download links to use when looking through the applications, so we moved on to Appulo.us. Success. Within minutes I had surfed to find MLB At Bat 2009.

The next part absolutely floored me. I clicked on one of the apps and Firefox detected the .ipa extension as executable by the iTunes app. Fair enough, I selected “open.” Within moments, the full version of At Bat 2009 was in my list of Applications. That’s scarily easy.

We hit a road block however — MLB could not be installed because iTunes could not verify them. So we moved on to Capcom’s Mega Man II. Same error. So we did some searching, and found out why. To install cracked apps you need to have a jailbroken phone, and the application IPA Prep installed.

So, for the most part, developers can breathe easy because a majority of us are running non-jailbroken phones. But for those who have jailbroken phones, all you need is an app and a web browser, and just about any application you can imagine is well within your reach.

Apple has just made it too darn easy.

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Yahoo Share to Likely Shrink in 2009

Posted by Ed Oswald on April 9, 2009 at 9:18 am

Definitely not good news for the world’s second biggest search provider. Yahoo is set to lose a chunk of market share over the next year or so, experts say.

This is due to the loss of two toolbar partners: HP, who signed up with Microsoft’s Live Search toolbar early last year; and Acer who silently switched its search provider to Google in October.

That failure could cost the search company about 15 percent of its market share, or about 3 percent in the overall rankings. While the company does admit that the termination of the deals will cause its share to shrink, it told the Wall Street Journal its own internal study showed less of a negative effect.

Losses wouldn’t be realized right away: instead, Yahoo’s share would likely shrink slowly as consumers replace their aging machines. The search provider could even be helped out by the deep recession in the meantime, which has slowed the replacement cycle even more.

Shrinking share could also have another effect: driving Yahoo’s search business into Microsoft’s open arms. It’s becoming ever more clear that if Yahoo and Microsoft really want to compete with Google, they are going to have to join forces.

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Laid-off Virgin Mobile Customers to Get Free Service

Posted by Ed Oswald on April 9, 2009 at 8:14 am

Paying bills when you’re laid off can be quite difficult (trust me, I know). If you’re a customer of Virgin Mobile, that is about to get a whole lot easier. The company introduced a service called “Pink Slip Protection,” which offers to pay the phone bill of those who are laid off.

To be eligible, the customer must be subscribed to Virgin’s $49.99 monthly unlimited plan — another new offering from the carrier announced Thursday — and customers of the carrier for at least two months previous. In addition, the customer must also be receiving unemployment benefits.

Several automakers have offered similar assurances to their customers, but this is the first time a cellular phone carrier has offered such a courtesy. It is also a function of ever more desperate companies, realizing that the first thing people do in hard times is clamp down on spending.

As Virgin has no contracts, customers do not lose anything by canceling at will.

The $49.99 unlimited plan represents a $30 price drop from its previous offering, and puts it in line with other budget carriers. There is no text messaging or data included however.

New plans and services will go into effect on April 15.

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Reality Trek

Posted by Ed Oswald on April 8, 2009 at 11:48 pm

In just a month from now, I and millions of other Trekkies will have our behinds firmly planted in movie theater seats, taking in the latest Star Trek film, directed by Lost’s J.J. Abrams. I can not tell you how excited I am. Just as with Battlestar Galactica, a re-imagining of the series is much needed to make the old show relevant to today’s more demanding audience. The Trek films of the past became campy relics of a bygone period in sci-fi. But for all its period feel, Star Trek is also oddly contemporary. Over the franchise’s four-decade history, the TV series and movies have influenced–or at least predicted–multiple new technologies and gadgets that are either now available or on the way.

So in anticipatory celebration of the eleventh Trek movie, here’s a look at eleven current and emerging technologies that were foreshadowed by the tech of Trek.

Live long and prosper.
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Twitterers: Don't Expect Privacy When You Squat a Brand Name.

Posted by Ed Oswald on April 8, 2009 at 9:57 am

There is a bit of hub-bub on the net right now over Twitter’s actions surrounding the release of contact information regarding an account that had been registered to the Skype brand name by a former employee of the company. Apparently, the VoIP provider found out that it couldn’t tweet under its own name because somebody already owned it.

The user id @skype was registered to Stephanie Robesky, a former employee of the company who is now with venture capital firm Atomico, started by the former Skype founders. According to her own account, while at the company she registered the name and told someone in marketing “who ignored her,” according to TechCrunch Europe.

Robesky then says she forgot about the account, and only was reminded of her ownership of the account when a Skype employee contacted her about the account. Twitter had released her contact information, which included an @skype.net email address, which obviously was no longer valid.

Continue Reading →

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So Much for Cheaper Music on Amazon

Posted by Ed Oswald on April 8, 2009 at 9:19 am

Well, it didn’t take very long for the other music stores to follow suit after iTunes’ price hike Tuesday. By late evening, both Amazon and Wal-Mart had simarily raised prices on some of their top tracks by 30 cents. Both had priced their tracks at 99 and 94 cents respectively.

Like iTunes, both stores have cheaper tracks too: Amazon will have tracks for 79 and 89 cents, and Wal-Mart will have selected tracks at a price of 64 cents. In either case, though, the number of more expensive tracks in the top 100 are much less than iTunes.

For Amazon, that number is only eight, and Wal-Mart has 17.

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Twitter Will Be Down a Lot More, Count On It.

Posted by Ed Oswald on April 7, 2009 at 8:27 pm

Us twitterers are used to seeing Mr. Failwhale. We’ll be getting accustomed to seeing him a lot more if the traffic statistics released by comScore late Tuesday are any indication. Traffic to the microblogging site has nearly doubled in just the past 60 days.

Worldwide, nearly 10 million unique visitors came to Twitter during the month of February, up from around 5 million in December 2008. Year over year, the service has registered a 700 percent increase in traffic, says comScore.

Some may think our youth are driving this growth as they seem to be the most apt to employ social networking tools. That is not true, says the firm. The majority of the growth in Twitter is being driven by the 25-54 age group, with the 45-54 segment the most likely to be visiting the site.

That may seem odd to many, but consider the rapid growth in twittering by professionals. It’s a pretty safe bet that most of these folks are above the age of 25, and many will likely be quite a bit beyond that.

comScore doesn’t have data ready for March yet, but it says it appears to be another “huge” month for Twitter.

Either way, the increased strain of more tweets is likely going to bring the failwhale around much more often. While the site has made some effort to improve capacity and its code, its no escaping the system was not built for the way users employ it (the company itself has admitted that fact).

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