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Microsoft Should Continue Windows 7 Family Pack Licensing

Posted by David Worthington on December 4, 2009 at 5:20 pm

Microsoft has been offering family packs of Windows 7 to customers for a discounted price–while supplies last. It would behoove it to make the family packs a permanent offering.

CNET’s Ina Fried is reporting that the packs have nearly sold out. The packs sell for $149.99, which is a bargain considering that three stand-alone copies of 7 Home Premium list for $359.97.

There are two good reasons why Microsoft should make the family packs permanent: Its Windows licensing revenue is suffering, and Apple has long offered them for OS X. (A Snow Leopard 5-pack sells for $49.99.)

While Windows 7 has boosted Microsoft’s license revenues, netbooks have begun to chip away at the Windows cash cow. Windows 7 has proven popular with early adopters, and anything that Microsoft could do to get more customers to upgrade is a good thing.

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FCC Demands Answers from Verizon on Fees

Posted by David Worthington on December 4, 2009 at 5:09 pm

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) sent a letter to Verizon demanding answers about why it increased early termination fees for smart phone users as well as whether customers are charged for inadvertently accessing Verizon’s Internet services.

At dispute is that Verizon doubled early termination fees (ETF) for new customers that signed up to its wireless services with a smartphone. The company also charged a $2 fee of a number of customers who accessed its mobile Web by inadvertently loading their browsers.

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Survey: Social Media Makes Kids Better Writers

Posted by David Worthington on December 4, 2009 at 5:06 pm

The debate over whether computers are making kids dumb was reignited today with a BBC report about a survey which concluded that children who use technology may be better writers.

The survey was conducted by the UK’s National Literacy Trust with a sample size of 3,001 school children aged nine and showed that 16. 24% had their own blog, 82% sent text messages at least once a month, and 73% used instant messaging services, according to the BBC’s report.

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Apple May Buy Lala? That Could be Very, Very Good. Or Very, Very Bad

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 4, 2009 at 4:32 pm

Rumor on the Internet today has it that Apple is in “advanced ” talks to buy one of my favorite music services, Lala. Even if the conversation is real, it doesn’t mean it’ll amount to anything. But anyone who’s ever used Lala can grasp why Steve Jobs & Co. might be tempted to make it their own.

The company has an oddball history that includes a period as a CD-swapping service and a foray into radio, but for over a year, it’s focused on pretty much being what iTunes might be if it were an entirely Web-based service. You can buy streaming-only songs for a dime apiece, but the first listen to any song is free. Like the late, lamented original MP3.com, Lala replicates your music collection on its servers so you can listen to it anywhere–but Lala does so much more easily…and it does so legally. It wraps everything up in a user interface that looks like iTunes’ browser-based twin brother, and adds hooks to services such as Facebook and Google.

After much delay, the company recently finished work on a new product that would make its ties to Apple even closer: an iPhone app that brings most of the Web-based service to Apple’s smartphone. Lala has submitted it to Apple but it’s not yet approved for App Store distribution. However, it gave me a prerelease copy for review, and it’s as spectacular as the Web version–all of a sudden, the iPhone’s relatively skimpy memory isn’t nearly as much of an issue, since you can stream all the music you’ve got in iTunes on a PC or Mac to your phone. You can also listen to and buy songs from Lala’s 8-million song store. It’s all surprisingly fast for a streaming service, and it even caches recent music you’ve listened to so you’re not completely out of luck if you don’t have an Internet connection.

I’m fond of multiple iPhone music apps (Slacker is one favorite), but Lala is the most interesting one to date.

So why, specifically, might Apple want to snag Lala? Cnet’s Greg Sandoval gives two reasons: Lala founder Bill Nguyen is a smart entrepreneur (true) and Lala’s billing system might save Apple a ton of cash (possibly true, but profoundly tedious). I’d love to think that Apple might merge all of Lala’s goodness into iTunes itself, creating a seamless experience across Mac, PC, iPhone, and iPod. But I’m also concerned that if the service itself isn’t what has Apple excited, it might just go away. (It may be the first iPhone music app that’s good enough that it could cut into sales of songs on iTunes.)

After the jump, some screen shots of Lala for iPhone in action. One way or another, I hope you get to try it soon…

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DARPA Offers $40,000 to Spot Ten Red Balloons

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 4, 2009 at 1:26 pm

The Defense Department’s DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) program will be looking at how information spreads virally on the internet through a contest looking to see who can be the first to correctly spot ten red weather balloons around the country.

These balloons will be launched from “readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roads” on Saturday. Those wishing to participate in the contest must first register at DARPA’s website and would have until December 14 to complete their submissions.

The agency hopes to understand how information goes viral. Specifically, the website says the effort “will explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems.”

Participants are already harnessing the social aspects of the Internet in order to compete. Websites such as ispyaredballoon.com have popped up to centralize and verify reports, and in some cases, if a team wins the winnings would be divided among those who correctly report balloon locations.

DARPA has made sure that no one person would be able to spot all of the balloons, thus they would be spread out pretty far across the entire country, according to reports. About 1,500 have signed up to participate, with another 1,000 expected to register before the contest begins.

It will certainly be interesting to see how this contest pans out, as it could have some real world implications. Obviously, the Defense Department would like to understand how information spreads — especially to assist in counterterrorism measures.

We’d like to know if you spot a balloon tomorrow. Let us know here in the comments. (Maybe we should have a Technologizer team?)

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Skiff: Still Another Approach to E-Reading

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 4, 2009 at 9:55 am

The long-rumored entry of publishing behemoth Hearst into the e-reader game is now official. And it’s not an e-reader, it’s an e-reader platform–offered by a new standalone company being launched by Hearst. Skiff says it’ll distribute magazines, newspapers, and books in attractively-formatted versions to a variety of e-readers, smartphones, and other devices. It won’t sell a device, but it’s partnering with chip company Marvell and wireless provider Sprint to help other companies make Skiff-enabled gadgets for sale starting next year.

The most interesting part of this news is not that there will be even more readers to choose from in 2010, but that Skiff is paying attention to the presentation of periodicals. Today’s readers, such as the Kindle, work okay for publications that are mostly hundreds of pages of plain text. But the magazines and newspapers I’ve seen in reader form have been really disappointing, since they’ve lost all the artful melding of type, imagery (preferably color imagery), and other elements that continue to make dead trees one of the best technologies ever invented for conveying information. Nor do you get the interactivity and community that the Web versions of the same publications provide (for free, yet).

The magazines I’ve subscribed to on the Kindle feel like a mashup of aspects of the Web and print–but it’s the worst aspects. The best ones are all left out. I wrote about this in a recent guest post for Folio, and while the Skiff site mostly offers tantalizing vision rather than specifics, I’m encouraged to see that the company’s tackling the problem, at least. Even though I think time is running out for companies to launch new devices and services dedicated to e-reading, unless they’re compatible with absolutely everything else that’s out there.

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This Droid Ad Can’t Be About the iPhone. Right?

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 4, 2009 at 12:39 am

Cnet’s Chris Matyszczyk thinks this new Verizon Droid ad is slagging the iPhone. Watch it, then tell me what you think:

I (mostly) like the Droid and like its positioning as a somewhat homely but useful phone. And yes, I agree that the phone under attack in the ad looks an awful lot like a white iPhone 3GS, although the spot cunningly never shows you it from the front:

But the iPhone is anything but a “digitally clueless tiara-wearing beauty pageant queen,” and–unless the ad is taking a very oblique swipe at the thinness of AT&T’s 3G network–it isn’t slow. (Actually, its browser seems to do quite well in comparison to the Droid’s, though neither makes me think of sawblades going through bananas.) I have no idea what it means to be digitally clueless, but I’m positive that the iPhone isn’t. And I can’t believe that Verizon would think that any prospective customer who hasn’t been hibernating in a cave somewhere would buy the notion that the iPhone is clueless in any meaningful respect. (Imperfect? Hell, yeah–but not clueless.)

If the ad’s about the iPhone, it might as well toss in a claim that the iPhone supports death panels for old people, or paroled a vicious murderer, or assassinated Archduke Ferdinand. So I choose to think it’s about pretty phones in general. You know–the digitally clueless ones.

Let’s end this with a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt: “Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

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Another Day, Another Bing-is-Better-Than-Google “Study”

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 3, 2009 at 10:32 pm

For the amount of time Microsoft spends lately beating us over the heads with how much better its Bing search engine is than Google, you’d think they would be in first place already. One of its latest examples is an effort by the Redmond company to convince us all that two-thirds of Google searchers would probably switch to its search engine if given the chance.

Microsoft has taken to its YouTube page for its latest schtick. In a three-minute video, the company says it recruited a “qualitative research firm” and had fifteen participants use Bing exclusively for a week. The company was not revealed as the sponsor of the study until after these folks told the researchers whether they’d stick with Bing or go back to their old search engine.

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Should We Call It the Bing Screen of Death?

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 3, 2009 at 10:27 pm

Microsoft’s Bing search engine went offline this evening, greeting visitors with an error message instead of a pretty picture and a search field–for somewhere between thirty minutes and nearly an hour, depending on which report you believe. I don’t see any mention of the outage, its end, or the culprit at Bing’s blog, but as TechCrunch’s MG Siegler points out, a member of the Bing team tweeted about it a bit. And the official Bing Twitterfeed says it’ll share details when it has them.

The outage’s timing isn’t auspicious–it comes a day after Bing’s big press event and rollout of new features. But at least it’s in good company: Google had a weird hour-long period back in January when it thought the entire Web was dangerous, and Gmail has suffered multiple extended hiccups this year. I wonder what the biggest Web site is that’s never been suffered for more than, oh, five minutes of unplanned downtime?

[UPDATE: Bing has explained the problem–unintended consequences of a configuration change.)

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