No Unlimited iPhone 3G Data Plans in Australia, Either
Feels weird to type this, but judged against many of these other carriers around the world, AT&T isn’t so bad. â
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Maccast 2008.06.28
A podcast about all things Macintosh. For Mac geeks, by Mac geeks. Show 231. iTunes hits 5 billion mark. Canadian iPhones won't have unlimited data. Japanese iPhone pricing also announced. O2 offers pay as you go 3G iPhone plans. Orange will launch 3G July 17th. Apple also expands iPhone 3G channels in other countries. What about the iPod Touch?. Apple still making "bank" from At&T iPhone sales. Remote Desktop Trojan surfaces. Snow Leopard to bring ZFS, finally? Apple adds TV to iTunes Australia. iPhone 2.0 update, SDK beta8, and iTunes 7.7 pre-release sent to developers Application for batch MP3 tagging and renaming. Emailing attachments trick. Thoughts about how Apple defines new market segments. Clearing out Mail recent recipients. Review of mouse gesture app launcher Sapiens. Bluetooth keyboard knocking out Wi-fi. Creating your own Audiobooks. Share iPhoto Library amound multiple user accounts. EOL: Obamapod, What's on Obama's iPod Special thanks to our sponsors: Circus Ponies - Free 30-day Trial of Notebook Audible.com - Free audio book New music, A Little Sign by Derek Clegg [ Buy on iTunes ] But I'm not good at anything, mom. Face it, I'm just an egghead. -- The Sandlot (1993) Shownotes in: HTML or OPML Subscribe to the Podcast Feed or Get the MP3
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More iPhone lessons
I've received a lot of terrific comments and emails about my posting yesterday about Lessons from my son's iPhone. I'm dashing off to a meeting today, but here are some of the highlights:1. Why the iPhone feels so much more responsive. Anders Brownworth nailed the answer to this one better than I could have:I think the graphics on the Nokia are noticably slower than the iPhone because the iPhone has a dedicated graphics processor. So for example when you want to do coverflow or scrolling of contacts, the OS just tells the graphics chip that there is a surface with this picture or that text on it. Then the OS just tells the graphics chip where to position that pannel and it's up to the graphics hardware to actually render it. Of course the graphics hardware is much more efficient at rendering things, so it looks extremly responsive without ever burdening the main processor.This works quite will until the graphics subsystem runs out of RAM. Like, for example, if you load the NYTimes page in Safari and quickly scroll to the bottom before the OS has time to render the layout and send it to the graphics chip. At that moment you end up seeing a checker-board pattern. That's the pannel without rendered content on it. As soon as the CPU catches up, you see the content, but the interface never "freezes" while that happens.That's the revolutionary thing here. No other mobile device that I am aware of offloads graphics processing to specialized hardware. Hence, of course, Apple couldn't just purchase an off the shelf mobile OS. I think of this as a key competitive advantage for the time being. It's not something Windows Mobile contemplates yet but it is something Apple has had in OSX from day one.My initial reaction to this was, "Well, of course!" And then I thought about it for a few minutes and decided it was actually quite remarkable. After all, who ever imagined that a device designed to facilitate audio communication and playback would need a high-speed graphics processor? To me, this represents a clear example of Apple "Thinking Different" about the mobile phone market and innovating in a significant way.2. ATT Family Plans. I received a one email saying that this has been a sore point with many in their move to the iPhone. I would have to say it depends on your family plan. My friend Maribel Lopez had the opposite experience: the salesperson she worked with sold her a family plan to actually reduce her total bill, but that was because she was a new (Orange side) ATT customer, not an old (Blue) one. For those of us on the Blue side, there really is no alternative. You will be assimilated by the death star. Oh, by the way, I now have had two people tell me (and one of them was the salesperson at the Small World ATT store) that the Blue ATT network will be shut down in March 2008, so resistance really is futile.3. iPhones in Canada. One reader asked when we'll see iPhones north of the Canadian border. While we just heard today that the iPhone will go to Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands in addition to France and Spain, word on Canadian availability has been sparse. However, with the Canadian dollar appreciating against the US dollar, perhaps we'll see some progress there soon -- or not. Apparently the sticking point is the unlimited data plan, which Rogers has been resisting, but that's all I know.4. Why don't I have an iPhone? I have two answers to this question. One is that I have a start-up business and keeping that and my family afloat has taken priority over wonderful new phones. And secondly, I soon will, thanks to the generosity of an anonymous donor. And no, it's not Apple; even when I was a Forrester analyst, they never gave products away. I don't think they've changed that policy since.Technorati Tags:Apple, ATT, iPhone, Mobile phones, Canada, Family Plans, Lessons
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Lessons from my son's iPhone
My 14-year-old son has saved his allowances and earned money all summer to purchase an iPhone. And after the early Christmas present that Steve Jobs delivered on September 8 -- the $200 iPhone price cut -- he finally scrounged enough money to actually buy an 8 Gigabyte refurbished version for $349 from the Apple Store. And last night his long-awaited purchase arrived, as can be seen below.I'll spare readers the blow-by-blow, but I will touch on the highlights of iPhone unboxing night last night:1. Refurbished iPhones come in white boxes. We've bought refurbished products form Apple before, and they've traditionally arrived in brown cardboard boxes advertising their lower cost and refurbished status. But refurbished iPhones break that tradition by arriving in a clean white Apple box with the Apple logo on the top. This nicely sets them apart from new iPhones that come in black boxes. But even more intriguing, Apple appears to have optimized the packaging yet further -- the white boxes are, to my eyes, about two-thirds the size of the new iPhone boxes.[Robert enjoying the unboxing experience. "It's so small and shiny!"]2. Not all AT&T accounts are created equal. We've been AT&T wireless customers for about 10 years. That means we've been through the sale of AT&T wireless to Cingular, and Cingular's sale to SBC, and the subsequent rebranding of Cingular to AT&T. And our reward for 10 years of loyalty? We couldn't activate Robert's iPhone on our AT&T family plan because our account was "on the blue system" of Cingular instead of the good "Orange side." We called AT&T, and they literally said they couldn't help us over the phone; we'd have to go visit an AT&T retail store and trade in our old phones for new ones.So we trekked over to Small World in Acton, MA (an AT&T franchisee, not a corporate AT&T store), and a wonderful gentleman there made it all better with nearly an hour and a half of fussing with the AT&T systems. The bottom line: since I had an unlocked phone (my Nokia E61i), I only needed a new SIM card. But since my wife's ancient Nokia 3650 was locked to the old AT&T wireless, she'd need a new Nokia phone -- which they didn't have in stock. Now given we had a child who had just spent $350 that he saved for months and was dying to turn his iBrick into an iPhone, we asked if there was any way we could get this done today rather than waiting for a phone shipment. To Small World's credit, the agent electronically activated our new SIM cards, transferred a phone from another store, which the agent would personally pick up and deliver tomorrow, and got us up and running after only an hour and a half of customer service calls, computer entries, and activation hassles. We were pleased and astonished at the amount of work the agent was willing to do to help us, but we were similarly appalled by how customer-hostile the back-end systems were he was fighting with.3. Once our plan was right, the iPhone experience was flawless. Once we got home with our new plan activated and our wallets lighter for the experience, Robert fired up iTunes and activated his phone. Within five minutes, he had a phone number and a working phone on our family plan. The contrast with the AT&T store experience was like night and day; it was just click, click, click, and go.So now I have a son with an iPhone, a family AT&T plan "on the orange side", and a wife with a new Nokia. And even with less than a day's experience, I already have some takeaways from the transaction.Even with my recent vintage Nokia mobile, I'm jealous of my son's phone experience. As I've written before, the specs on my Nokia E61i far surpass those of the iPhone; it has 3G data, WiFi, video recording, zoom camera, installable software, and countless other whizzy features. Yet, I'd trade my phone for even a 4 Gig iPhone in a heartbeat. Why? Because I've spent nearly two months configuring my phone to do about half as much as my son could do within minutes of unboxing his phone. The experience of using my Nokia compared to the iPhone is comparable to using PC DOS compared to Mac OS X. The former is painfully functional but never helpful, while the latter is delightful and simple. The iPhone is going to undermine cellular carrier's business as usual The experiential difference between an hour and a half activation at a store and a five minute activation at home is huge. Add to that fact that iPhone purchasers are paying full retail prices and signing up for unlimited data plans, and you're seeing significant cream-skimming of the mobile phone market by Apple. Don't be surprised if Apple gains even more power over the mobile phone carriers simply because of the massive buying power that iPhone customers will come to represent. And in the process, manufacturers of "free" carrier-subsidized phones are going to be at a significant disadvantage competing with Apple's high customer satisfaction (and even higher margin) business model.AT&T still has significant work to do. The whole "blue versus orange" distinction, while understandable, is something AT&T has to fix and fix fast. The store agent said that they plan to require all customers to be "on the orange side" by March 2008. But the fact that we had to buy at least one new phone, spend $130, and commit to new service contracts just for the privilege of adding an iPhone after being 10-year loyal AT&T customers leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Somewhere in AT&T there must be a person in charge of customer experience who should be forced to go try to put an iPhone on a blue AT&T plan every day until he gets the service fixed. As it stands now, it's the biggest blemish in the iPhone experience.Bottom line: While the Nokia E61i is less than the sum of its specifications, the iPhone experience is more than the sum of its parts. Apple has raised the bar about six feet on what users should expect from a mobile phone. And when even a high-school kid can save his money and buy his own iPhone, that experience isn't just for a few well-heeled technophiles; it's going to affect everyone who owns a phone and every carrier who sells them.Full disclosure: the author owns Apple stock.Technorati Tags:Apple, ATT, Customer experience, iPhone, Marketing, Mobile phones
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Game Over
The question we were left with two weeks ago was "Why has America lost its broadband leadership?" but it really ought to have been "Whatever happened to the Information Superhighway?" It died. This column has been around long enough that I actually covered terms like "Information Superhighway" and "National Information Infrastructure" back when they were commonly in use and may actually have meant something. That was pre-2000, I'd say, because once the Internet bubble began to burst, followed of course by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, people simply got interested in different things. And just when the population as a whole gets interested in different things is when -- at least in American culture -- a lot of shady business begins to happen. What we are talking about here is the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the first real rewrite of the Communications Act of 1934 that established the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the first place. The 1996 Act was primarily the work of Senator and then Vice President Al Gore, who may not have invented the Internet but sure helped push it into commercial operation. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was intended to open up communication services to broad competition on the most basic level, so of course the nation has since 1996 gone from 15 national broadband ISPs to five and a dozen big landline telephone companies to three. When it comes to government policy things hardly ever work out the way you expect them to. In 1996 I had 384-kilobit-per-second (kbps) symmetrical DSL while my TV production partners in the UK had nothing at home and 128-kbps ISDN at the office. America was the top broadband country in the world. But now we're in the middle of the pack among developed countries and there are nine DEVELOPING countries that have more and better broadband service than does America according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). To those who say this is BS and that we're actually ahead of the world if you control for rural populations, family size, the effect of Wi-Fi hotspots, etc., I say that is simply wrong: we are behind and losing ground. And the countries ahead of us, a diverse lot including France, Iceland, Japan, Korea, Switzerland, the UK, and even Canada, are for the most part growing faster than we are in large part because of this IT advantage. There are many reasons for this change of circumstance, but much of it comes down to government policy or lack of it and some of it comes down to pure luck. In large part we've been locked in our own little world where government and business feed on each other in ways that are always symbiotic and often destructive, but this time the rest of the world just passed us by while we were distracted by other things. Two weeks ago I mentioned, for example, that my friend Ira in Yokohama, Japan pays less than $30 per month for 100-megabit-per-second fiber-to-the-home Internet service. Well it turns out that in Japan such plans can cost as little as $10 per month, which is less than what our telephone companies claim it costs simply to maintain their billing infrastructure. If it costs $10 per month per subscriber for our telephone companies to stay in business without even pushing electrons over the wires, how can they charge that little for 100-mbps Internet service in Japan? What do they know that we don't know? Japan is an instance where I believe luck was actually a factor in the country's broadband success. Most things cost more in Japan than they do in the U.S., not less. The country's export-based economy was built on selling the same goods for more in the country where they were made than they sold for in Peoria. Sometimes this price differential was absurd, too. In the mid-1990s I had an Internet start-up (it later failed) and wanted to place one of my PC-based servers in Japan. So I went to NTT, the big Japanese phone company, and asked for space in one of its data centers where the company then maintained most of Japan's Internet resources. It was reasonable for me to do this because NTT was an investor in my company. But they told me that while they would love to host my little server (I was building a content distribution network with features that have still not been matched by any subsequent service), as a regulated monopoly they would have to charge me the full retail price for rack space and bandwidth -- $75,000 per month! What changed for Japan was a new government policy fostering competition in a very similar manner to our own Telecommunications Act of 1996. In fact the Japanese policy was inspired by the U.S. law. But this policy would have been meaningless in Japan, a country even more corrupt than the U.S., had not one ISP decided to push the new rules to their limit. SoftBank BB took a multi-billion dollar risk and began offering broadband service in Japan at ridiculously low prices using the NTT infrastructure. The company was literally throwing money away, which a regulated monopoly could never do but SoftBank could, selling most of its U.S. operations along the way to support this expensive habit. For 2-3 years the company was so stretched by the service that simply paying to NTT the disconnect fees for getting out of the business would have been enough to throw SoftBank into bankruptcy. It was simply luck that SoftBank's broadband ISP turned to profitability before the company was completely broke. And once it was profitable, SoftBank BB suddenly had lots of competitors. Ira has his choice of nearly 20 ISPs willing to pump photons into his apartment in Yokohama. These services are NOT run at a loss. SoftBank BB and Japan set a standard that has been replicated in most of the countries that have better broadband penetration and service than the U.S. The model is a single connection to the home managed by a utility but with Internet bandwidth and services provided over that connection by any of a number of competitors. We had that, too, for a while in the 1990s but the big telcos, the incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs), hated it and worked to undermine their new competitors, the Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (CLECs). And none of those competitors had the deep pockets or the willingness to assume risk of a SoftBank BB, which literally broke the Japanese monopoly. Part of the reason why we didn't stay on a similar path is because of the highly developed U.S. cable TV industry, which is unique in its scale. The telephone companies generally didn't care about the cable companies because they were in different businesses. Until one day the cable folks started installing DOCSIS cable modems and suddenly they were in the same business, which the telcos hated, but it was too late. Worse still, by then the cable companies had as much clout with the government as the telephone companies did and maybe more because cable companies had relations with every city and town government as well as with states and the FCC. The cable companies weren't going away, their eyes locked on stealing voice service from the local phone companies. The way the U.S. has embraced ISP diversity is different than in most of the rest of the world. Where the 14 OECD countries ahead of us on the list generally use telco infrastructure to provide Internet bandwidth, we use a combination of telco and cable. There's a problem with that from an efficiency standpoint. In the U.S. we're supporting two completely separate and different technical infrastructures, two billing systems, two service departments, two head offices, two corporate jets. There are economies of scale as our cable and telephone companies consolidate, sure, but they'll never become one and the prospect that the telcos would continue to be forced to share their infrastructure with competitors is being removed by the transition to fiber, because those advanced pipes are exempt from sharing under a subsequent revision of the Telecommunications Act. It is very doubtful, almost impossible, that we'll catch up to those countries ahead of us in broadband penetration. They are too far ahead and our native demand is simply less because our Internet economies are developing more slowly. Absent some miracle, the game is already over. As I wrote two weeks ago, the situation is likely to improve somewhat over the next year or two as the telephone companies sacrifice a little to lock us in before we switch to DOCSIS 3 cable modems and the cable companies, in turn, offer incentives to jump to their voice products. But these companies don't think at all in international terms and they simply don't care about international competitiveness or the growth of our economy. They should, but they don't. And they don't because they have never had to. Though they are required to operate in the public interest and to provide public services, these monopolies have never been forced to consider our place in the world. If there's a solution to this problem it isn't wireless. U.S. mobile carriers are as far behind their foreign counterparts as U.S. ISPs are generally. For all the companies' talk of unlimited mobile broadband, three Slingboxes can take down an EVDO cell. What would happen if AT&T gave every iPhone as much bandwidth as it could easily use? Gridlock. And WiMax is effectively useless too, because the sweet spot in cell size is so large that no ISP can provision enough bandwidth to serve even a quarter of the people who might potentially sign up. They could do it with smaller cells, but then the companies wouldn't make money. These are moving targets of course, but nothing is going to change without a dramatic new policy or the entry of a deep-pocketed competitor with a death wish like SoftBank, and I don't see even them ever doing it again.
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AT&T dropping Unlimited Date for “Pay As You Go” Customers
As much as I love my iPhone, I hate AT&T. I was always a can of Cingular, and when AT&T bought them - things went down the toilet. If it wasn't for the iPhone I doubt I would be a customer (though, in all fairness - I might not have a choice - AT&T is the only company that provides decent coverage in my area). Regardless, if you needed a reason to showcase why they suck - here's one. AT&T is dropping their unlimited Media Net $20 a month unlimited data plans for pay-as-you-go users. The reason for this, they claim, is that “no one was using it”. I suppose they mean that there weren't many people using it - because some of the people who were are already complaining to sites like Gizmodo about this situation. So what are pay-as-you-go customers supposed to do? Well - they have the choices of 1Mb or 5Mb options…which an iPhone can easily eat up in a single day. If they go this route, and cross their plan data rate, they'll be charged $450 per gigabyte they go over. AT&T better hope they NEVER lose their iPhone exclusive status - because this is the kind of thing that will make me switch carriers on principle. If I could move to T-Mobile today without jailbreaking the iPhone - I'd do it. What they're doing is just bad business. What do you think?
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Google's Android Market Guarantees Problems for Users
Daniel Eran Dilger It's great news that Google is planning to deliver a market for mobile software with its own centralized âAndroid Market.â It should give Apple's iPhone Apps Store competitive pressure to continue to innovate, and provide a safety net for smartphone users if Apple fails to deliver progress fast enough. If Apple and Google both fail, users will be stuck with the failed third party software models related to Microsoft's Windows Mobile and Nokia's Symbian. Those high stakes make it all the more disappointing to find that the Android Market fails to answer the tough issues correctly. iPhone App Store vs Android Market. There's no doubt that there will be apps that make it into Google's Android store that aren't currently available from Apple, likely including WiFi tethering (for using your mobile's data plan to give your laptop Internet access on the road), a feature Apple forced NullRiver's NetShare to remove from the iPhone store. That was apparently at the behest of AT&T, which staunchly refuses to support tethering without charging an expensive additional fee. AT&T's 3G network is already strained to carry relatively light-duty mobile traffic; unrestricted amounts of data being dumped on the network from far more demanding desktop apps by millions of users is currently just infeasible to accommodate. Other providers have 3G EVDO bandwidth to spare, but will cut you off just as quickly when you reach their finite definition of âunlimitedâ data access. Finite bandwidth is not a problem Google's 'free and open' software market can solve, because Google is not the only link in the chain in providing mobile apps. AT&T isn't going to allow tethering from Android phones either, regardless of Google's intended store policies. And Verizon Wireless likely isn't going to allow WiFi on Android phones at all. So it's a joke to say Android will transcend every problem in ways that Apple hasn't. This isn't a case of Google acting like Netflix to offer unlimited content to rival Blockbuster's censorship; instead, Google is simply making great sounding campaign promises it won't be able to deliver. AppleInsider | Google reveals open Android Market to rival iPhone's App Store Will Googleâs Android Play DOS to Appleâs iPhone? Why Apple Plays God with the iPhone SDK But Wait, There's More (And Less). The Android Market will also deliver lots of problems Apple isn't, including a way to distribute malware that can't be remotely killed, or untraceable spyware that professes to be on the up-and-up when you install it, but then works behind your back and phones home sensitive data to a rogue developer's servers. Remember all the speculation last year about the possibility of developers being able to hack the iPhone open and install their own malicious tools to watch what you're doing? Under the iPhone SDK, access to that dangerous path is simply forbidden. Under Android, there's not so much as a handrail for users. Apple has already reprimanded iPhone developers who provided inadequate protection of their users' data, and then forced them to fix their problems immediately. With Google advertising its âsee no evil, hear no evilâ policy for its self-policing development community, Google won't even know if there's a problem. It will also lack any way to stop or reverse problems, and having renounced any accountability for protecting users with regulatory controls, Google will lack the leverage to push malicious or possibly just incompetent developers to take any action once it does discover problems. Malware and junkware on the PC is a big problem, but on a smartphone it is orders of magnitude more serious of an issue. Having to run spyware cleanup on a PC is a nusance. Having your phone subverted into a tool for advertisers or identity thieves could easily result in issues on the level of life safety. If you thought it was embarrassing to have Outlook send out spam in your name in 2001, wait until Android starts drunk dialing all your contacts to tell them about special offers, attaching your GPS location and perhaps a recent photo from your album so they know they can trust you about it. Google seems to think it can simply ignore security problems by asking developers not to take advantage of its users. This is absurdly ridiculous in our modern context. Google may as well be building unvented fireplaces in a tornado alley trailer park. Ten Myths of Leopard: 9 Apple is Spying on Users! The Unavoidable Malware Myth: Why Apple Wonât Inherit Microsoftâs Malware Crown Wired's Grotesquely Rank Hypocrisy in Mobile Security. Where did all of those mobile phone security experts from last fall run away to? They were abuzz about the imagined catastrophe that might befall the âcan't even run any softwareâ iPhone, but none have stepped forward to posit an opinion on why Android's exposed spinning blades in a dark room might result in the world's next Windows XP. Wired, which led the witch hunt against the iPhone last fall, published an article this summer titled âGoogle's Open Source Android OS Will Free the Wireless Web,â which went on breathlessly for days about how Android would solve the industry's problems with giddy can-do chutzpah. Nowhere did the article even suggest a criticism of its wide open, security-free business model. Instead, the author announced, âEngineers who write for just about any mobile operating system today have to spend time and cash obtaining security keys and code-signing certificates. Android would allow any application to be installed and run, no questions asked.â If you're waiting for the other shoe to drop, don't bother. It ended right there on the âtime and money savingsâ of not having any security model. Microsoft saved a lot of money by ignoring security, too, as long as you don't count the $11 billion malware industry. Shame on Wired for continuing its descent into hopelessly unplugged irrelevance. UnWired! Rick Farrow, Metasploit, and My iPhone Security Interview Kim Zetter and the iPhone Root Security Myth High Risk, High Likelihood for Exploitation. The tech media more recently went into high alert to warn users that Apple's MobileMe web apps didn't perform SSL encryption, allowing the possibility for spies to target them in order to read their calendar and email transactions, were they to used the web apps over a public network. That's a valid concern to voice, but also an extremely unlikely threat for users to spend much time worrying about, particularly since there are a number of straightforward precautions users can take to avoid any risky exposure scenarios. There's also little business model behind sniffing calendar appointments and the kind of mundane email threads that .Mac users might engage in while drinking coffee at Starbucks. On the other hand, malicious software and social engineering exploitation is a billion dollar industry, and organized criminals in Korea, China, Russia, and of course Nigeria are as desperate for new dollars outside of the PC desktop as Google is. Rather than the unlikely scenario of on-site spies targeting a specific individual to sniff out truffles from their browser's email, these people have organized and profitable methods for delivering viral payloads to wide audiences from the convenience of a position thousands of miles away. On a smartphone, they can take your money simply by having installed software send a paid SMS. This is a real threat, not a contrived bunch of hysterical nonsense dreamed up by fear-mongering pundits. It is simply criminally negligent for Google to design a smartphone software platform with nearly zero regard for the safety of its users. We can justifiably criticize Microsoft for its lax stance on security in the 90s that resulted in the Windows malware crisis, but many of the potential dangers of certain decisions weren't fully recognized back then. Google is organizing an olympic-sized skating party on a lake it knows has dangerously thin ice. Is Appleâs MobileMe Secure? Store vs Market? It's also worth mentioning that the media is comparing what Google only intends to do with what Apple has already pulled off; I could easily draft plans for a phone that sounds better than the iPhone, but I certainly couldn't deliver it. Apple has years of experience in media sales and micro-payments in iTunes. It began selling software through iTunes in 2006, and spent years refining its software deployment system to make sure iTunes would work as a true market place for mobile software once the iPhone was ready. Anyone can open a store. There are a dozen online music and video stores that have gone out of business trying to sell music like iTunes. Apple created a real market, where both buyers and sellers can have confidence that they're getting a fair deal. Google has tried to backhandedly condemn Apple's App Store for being called a âstore,â negatively associating the word with a commercial endeavor as opposed to the community effort Google's marketing team has branded a âmarket.â Never mind that the words really mean the same thing; Google isn't really creating a market, because markets have enforced rules. Without rules and authority, there is too much risk involved to do legitimate business. If Android were only setting up a barter system between the company's altruistic and noble minded PhDs in the Google cafeteria, there wouldn't be an issue. However, Google is setting up shop in the most corrupt, chaotic, and criminal setting on earth: the wide open Internet, a dirty enough place to turn a brand new PC into a viral porn spam server within fifteen minutes of being plugged in. Hacking iPod Games: How Apple's DRM Works Rise of the iTunes Killers Myth Can Great Google Getter Done? The company's Alfred E. W. Newman approach to security issues is more than a little alarming coming from a company that is fully aware of Internet scammers. Google's main job is identifying and scouring away the criminal tracks that SEO frauds try to leave behind in its search engine results. The company terminates its advertiser partners on a whim when it even suspects an irregularity, and the web is full or people complaining that Google has failed to pay them for hundreds of dollars of AdSense advertising without even a fair explanation. The company is hard edge and savvy when it comes to protecting its own revenues, so why is it being so soft and naive when the security of its users is on the line? Google's âdo no evilâ slogan, paired with its considerable contributions to society, from free search to free satellite imagery, and from its staunch support of the public interest related to WiFi and mobile broadband issues to its investments in progressive technologies to make the world a better place, all simply add up to leave its unreasonable stance on mobile security a mysterious puzzle. Can Google even pull its store off? The company serves up millions of free videos in YouTube, but remember that Google originally tried to build its own YouTube and failed; it had to buy YouTube to enter the market. Google also screwed the pooch when it dropped its own paid DRM video service and told its users to go fly a kite. That kind of customer-oblivious behavior isn't going to successfully lock horns with Apple's proven excellence in delivering the iTunes Store as a customer-friendly market place. Apple pulled together 14 year old torrent freaks and the RIAA's lawyers into the same room and made them play together. It turned the festering boil of the rotten mobile software market into a million dollar per day buffet. Google's Android Market not only faces the same challenges, but also has to fly in the face of the industry darling, starting at zero against Apple's ten million installed base of iPhones and its accelerating market share. The industry outside of Apple is working just as hard to grab its own slice as well. Google taking on the iPhone App Store is a bit like Sony deciding to build cars to take on BMW. That's all fine and good, but let's see the car before we start comparing its âplannedâ zero to 60 performance against that of today's cars with a proven legacy. And stop telling us that lacking both seat belts and brakes is a feature. Did you like this article? Let me know. Comment here, in the Forum, or email me with your ideas. Like reading RoughlyDrafted? Share articles with your friends, link from your blog, and subscribe to my podcast (oh wait, I have to fix that first). It's also cool to submit my articles to Digg, Reddit, or Slashdot where more people will see them. Consider making a small donation supporting this site. Thanks!
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AT&Tâs iPhone Data Plan Terms and Conditions Forbid Tethering
From AT&T’s iPhone Terms and Conditions: Furthermore, unlimited plans (except for DataConnect and BlackBerry tethered) cannot be used for any applications that tether the device (through use of, including without limitation, connection kits, other phone/PDA-to-computer accessories, Bluetooth or any other wireless technology) to laptops, PCs, or other equipment for any purpose. The question is whether Apple is obligated to enforce this. â
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The Downside of Subsidies: In-Store Activation
Gizmodo: We just talked to AT&T’s President of National Distribution Glenn Lurie, who gave us all the pricing and activation details for the iPhone 3G, which won’t be getting special treatment anymore. It will be using all AT&T’s standard voice and data plans, which means $30 for unlimited 3G data for consumers, $45 for business users on top of voice. Also, no in-home activation for iPhone 3G — it will have to be activated in store (at AT&T or Apple Store), which takes 10-12 minutes, meaning that first day line is going to SUCK. So, the data plan goes up $10 a month if you want 3G, and you have to activate the phone in the store, because the $199 price is subsidized. Bad news if you want to buy an iPhone 3G on day one, and worse news if you want to buy one to unlock for use on another carrier. â
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AT&T talks iPhone 3G plans, apps
Filed under: WWDC, Apple, iPhoneAT&T just posted a press release which answers a few questions about the new iPhone 3G. First off, AT&T remains the exclusive iPhone carrier in the US (though there will be plenty of other carriers in other countries). The iPhone 3G is subsidized, and the revenue sharing agreement between Apple and AT&T has ended (you might recall that Apple got a cut of monthly subscriber fees for the iPhone, though no longer).But what about the service plans? It looks like AT&T is getting rid of those easy to choose from iPhone plans, and letting people get whatever voice plan they want, with data plans sold separately. The data plans are as follows: Consumers will pay $30 a month for unlimited 3G data plus $39.99 a month (to start) for voice. Business users will need to pay $45 a month for unlimited data plus a voice plan. This means that the base iPhone monthly cost for most consumers will go from $59.99 a month (that's the base first gen iPhone plan with unlimited data, 450 minutes a month, and 200 text messages) to $69.99 a month. High speed networking costs money, people!AT&T also noted that they, themselves, are working on an iPhone app. Yellowpages.com mobile is an iPhone app that will let you search the Yellowpages on your phone. Not that exciting in and of itself, but using Core Location, Yellowpages.com Mobile will know where you are and search local listings based on your current position. Not too shabby. It will also have 'social networking' features allowing you to share reviews with your friends and plan events.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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Under The Radar News - Monday
Bunge soaking up cash. Soybean and fertilizer giant Bunge (BG) is burning cash at a record pace. Soaring soybean and commodity prices, which should benefit Bunge (and have seen shares double over the past two years), are actually crushing the company due to its hedges, which are forcing Bunge to borrow at record rates. 2007 cash flow was -$411M, vs. -$289M in 2006 -- and it has already used another $353M in cash this year. In 2007, Bunge added $1.6B to its debt, bringing the total to $4.2B. The company's woes are complicated by the fact that soybean farmers are being squeezed by record fertilizer prices, resulting in defaults on their obligations to Bunge. EnCana gushes on breakup plan. Shares of EnCana (ECA) are up 7% after it announced plans to split into a natural gas company and an integrated oil-sands producer. Based on a sum-of-parts analyst, UBS analyst Andrew Potter thinks the company could be worth C$110/share, vs. the C$93 it was trading at this morning. Herbalife whistleblower. Former Herbalife (HLF) Director of Venezuela and Colombia, Ricardo Hollander, says employees of the company are committing fraud by falsifying their official addresses in order to get paid in the currencies of Columbia or Panama despite living in Venezuela. He says he was fired for reporting the illegal activity to his supervisors, and has been stonewalled by the company's human resources department. iPhone to hit Asia. Apple (AAPL) agreed to distribute the iPhone in Asia and Australia through four companies. SingTel will sell the iPhone in Singapore, Bharti Airtel in India, Globe Telecom in the Philippines and Optus in Australia. The iPhone will go on sale in Asia sometime this year. The agreements are not expected to be exclusive, and other carriers could still sign on. Fannie preferred offering. Sources say Fannie Mae (FNM) will market an issue of preferred shares worth at least $1.5B today, with a dividend yielding 8.25%. Fannie said last week it would raise at least $6B in fresh capital. Fannie also said it will sell $2B of three-month benchmark bills due Aug. 13, 2008, and $1.5B in six-month bills due Nov. 12, 2008, in a Dutch auction Wednesday. Friendly move. Sources say Google (GOOG) is set to launch a new set of APIs that allow Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks. The protocol, called "Friend Connect," is thought to be similar to MySpace's (NWS) Data Availability and Facebook's Facebook Connect. Nvidia denies interest in Via. Nvidia (NVDA) says it is not looking at buying VIA technologies. "They don't need our money. I don't need theirs," Huang said. "They're doing fine. People want to create drama." Via makes chipsets for x86-based computers. "Our shtick is that we just focus on one thing," says Huang. "We said we're a visual computing technology company and we're completely focused on this." ADM faces criminal charges. Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) disclosed it is under criminal investigation by the EPA for wastewater-discharge practices at a Missouri facility. Power plant plan fizzles. BP (BP) and Rio Tinto (RTP) cancelled a plan to build a $1.5-2B coal-fired power plant in Australia. The plant was canned after the firms discovered rock formations in the area would not fully seal-in carbon dioxide deposits. Strikes hurt GM dealers. General Motors (GM) dealers say parts shortages and a lack of inventory due in part to the UAW strike against American Axle & Manufacturing (AXL) is causing clients to wait indefinitely for custom cars. GM says the strikes haven't broadly impacted individual retail sales. Turning up the heat on energy trading. A House committee is probing energy-market speculation, sources say. Regulators believe hedge funds and investment banks may have played a role in driving crude oil prices to record highs.