An FCC commissioner has sent an open letter to Verizon Wireless, scolding the carrier for its new early termination fees.
Mignon Clyburn,
FCC commissioner
Mignon Clyburn, one of five members of the Federal Communications Commission, was responding to the defense that Verizon sent the FCC last week about early termination fees, or EFTs.
"The company's answers...are unsatisfying and, in some cases, troubling. In particular, I am concerned about what appears to be a shifting and tenuous rationale for ETFs," she said in a statement (PDF) released Wednesday by the FCC. "No longer is the claim that ETFs are tied solely to the true cost of the wireless device; rather, they are now also used to foot the bill for 'advertising costs, commissions for sales personnel, and store costs.'"
Verizon's early termination fees recently climbed from $175 to $350 for smartphones and other "advanced devices." In early December, the FCC asked Verizon to explain itself.
Among its defenses, Verizon asserted that the fees enable the company to sell phones at lower upfront prices and to reduce losses if customers break their contracts early. The carrier also noted that it prorates the fees and that the additional revenue helps keep its broadband network strong.
Clyburn asserted that consumers already pay hefty amounts to carriers. "So when they are assessed excessive penalties, especially when they are near the end of their contract term, it is hard for me to believe that the public interest is being well served," she said.
"I am also alarmed by the fact that many consumers have been charged phantom fees for inadvertently pressing a key on their phones thereby launching Verizon Wireless's mobile Internet service. The company asserted in its response...that it 'does not charge users when the browser is launched,' but recent press reports and consumer complaints strongly suggest otherwise."
A Verizon representative told Bloomberg that the company will "take a good hard look at her concerns and address them in an appropriate fashion."
John Hering, co-founder and chief executive of Lookout
(Credit: James Martin/CNET )SAN FRANCISCO--In July, John Hering and Kevin Mahaffey demonstrated an SMS attack targeting a variety of smartphones at a security show. This week they are launching a company, with backing from some heavyweight investors, that will offer a fix for that problem, as well as protect smartphones from many other security issues.
Lookout has received $5.5 million in Series A funding from Khosla Ventures, Trilogy Partnership, and angel investors including Phil Paul, founder of Paul Capital Partners; Chris Sacca, former head of special initiatives at Google; and Joseph Ansanelli, former chief executive of Vontu.
Lookout is a cross-platform, Internet-connected application that offers advanced security and backup services, as well as the ability to locate devices that go missing or get stolen, and over-the-air management capabilities. The service is currently in private beta in more than 170 countries across 400 mobile networks, Hering, Lookout's chief executive, said in an interview.
It will be offered publicly on a subscription basis in early 2010 and an enterprise version will come later in 2010 or early 2011, he said. Pricing will be announced later.
Hering, Mahaffey, and the third co-founder, James Burgess, all met while attending the University of Southern California, and have honed their skills in the mobile space over the past five years, initially calling the company Flexilis.
They conducted research, helped handset makers with diagnostic tools, and discovered vulnerabilities in mobile devices and software--including uncovering a serious hole in the iPhone's implementation of Bluetooth in 2007 and hitting a world record by hacking a mobile phone from more than a mile away via Bluetooth in 2004.
With the funding and name change comes a move to San Francisco from Orange County in Southern California. The twentysomething executives were busy interviewing prospective employees in their sparse, new offices in the South of Market area in San Francisco. They have taken over part of the offices formerly occupied by Twitter.
"Hopefully, the Twitter luck will rub off on us," Hering said, as he gave a tour of the digs.
Lookout works on all the major smartphone platforms.
(Credit: James Martin/CNET )The Lookout software is downloaded to the device and gets updates and backs up data in real-time via Lookout servers in the cloud. Antivirus and firewall software protects against electronic threats such as hackers, malware, and spyware. A dashboard allows for easy management of multiple devices.
Security veterans like Symantec and McAfee, as well as a host of smaller companies, are quickly moving into the mobile security space. But Hering isn't worried.
"Other companies offer a more PC-based approach," he said. "We're protecting the device and data, and we're multi-platform."
Lookout silently blocks malware in the background, but particularly serious threats prompt a notification to the user. The software also will protect against bad or unauthorized apps that might be downloaded, and attacks attempted via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.
The missing device locator function will most definitely attract attention. If the device is lost, the owner can use the Web app to make it "scream," and a truly obnoxiously loud siren will sound that will annoy everyone within earshot. If the device is set to silent or mute mode, the scream feature overrides that.
For people who think their device may have been stolen and want to track it down, there is a nifty way to trace it via an online map. Device owners can pull up the Find My Device Web app to see the approximate location of the device on a map, and either lock the device so no one can use it or access the data, or wipe the data entirely. If the device is recovered, the data is easily restored. A combination of Global Positioning System, cell tower, and Wi-Fi technology is used to track the devices.
For backup and recovery purposes, the data and settings on the device can be set to what they were at any point of time in the past, and data can be transferred to other devices.
As phones become increasingly powerful computers and storage devices that accompany users everywhere, they become even more attractive targets for attackers and thieves.
"Smartphones are the next computing platform," Hering said. "Ultimately, I think this will be the primary platform. It's in my pocket, and goes everywhere with me. There are not many computing devices that have that power and personal connection."
Chief Technology Officer Kevin Mahaffey and Chief Executive John Hering, co-founders of mobile security firm Lookout, which now occupies the former offices of Twitter in San Francisco.
(Credit: James Martin/CNET )
Tired of Guitar Hero? Try jamming with your iPhone or iPod Touch and Shimon, an autonomous, marimba-playing, octopus-armed hipster robot.
Gil Weinberg, director of music technology at Georgia Tech, is developing Shimon as a socially dynamic band mate. He says the robot "listens like a human and improvises like a machine" thanks to complex algorithms that allow it to perceive and improvise a groove.
(Credit:
Credit: Video screenshot by Tim Hornyak/CNET)
Weinberg is also behind ZOOZBeat, an app that turns your iPhone into an instrument and sequencer, letting you remix and loop your own music by shaking, tilting, and otherwise getting down with it. Beats come bundled with the app, but you can also download packs with vocals, hooks, and instruments.
If there aren't iPhone-only bands out there already, ZOOZBeat will probably start a trend. But as I mentioned in an earlier post about the exciting new Eigenharp, electronic music concerts can benefit from a more dynamic physical performance, and that's where Shimon, with its bobbing cyclops head, comes in.
As the vid after the jump shows, Shimon can take your ZOOZ loop with a Wi-Fi flick and run with it. Here, it repeats and improvises on a jazzy loop, playing in a variety of styles resembling jazz greats like John Coltrane or Thelonius Monk.
... Read moreThanks to a clandestine meeting with a source, I got a chance to play with and try out the Nexus One. It's basically, from my time with it, Google's Droid killer. It's thin, it's fast, it's better in every way.
My source was very firm about no photography, and I didn't want to jeopardize anything on my source's end, so there are no photos, hence these photos are ones we've already shown you. But, based on all the leaked shots this week, plus the very pretty and very clear one last week from Boy Genius, everyone knows what the phone looks like already. Hell, there's even a complete UI walkthrough today that's on YouTube. So I'm going to focus on the experience, and how it compares to the Droid and the iPhone 3GS.
... Read moreResearch In Motion has pushed out new software to correct a problem that left some BlackBerry users high and dry Tuesday.
Blame BlackBerry Messenger for Tuesday's data service outage.
(Credit: RIM)A new version of BlackBerry Messenger is available that apparently fixes the problems experienced by BlackBerry customers, according to a report by BusinessWeek. For several hours on Tuesday, BlackBerry users were unable to use the data services on their phones, preventing e-mails from being received and applications from working correctly.
In a statement provided to CNET, RIM said the "root cause is currently under review, but based on preliminary analysis, it currently appears that the issue stemmed from a flaw in two recently released versions of BlackBerry Messenger (versions 5.0.0.55 and 5.0.0.56) that caused an unanticipated database issue within the BlackBerry infrastructure. RIM has taken corrective action to restore service."
BlackBerry Messenger version 5.0.0.57 is the one to install, if you're currently running either version described above, and that should be available through the phone's browser or in BlackBerry App World. Tuesday's outage follows another one last week shorter in duration.
BlackBerry Bold
(Credit: Research in Motion)For the second time in less than a week, BlackBerry smartphone users across the country and beyond are reporting problems accessing e-mail.
BlackBerry maker Research in Motion confirmed Tuesday night that some users of the smartphone in the Americas are experiencing delays in message delivery.
"Technical teams are actively working to resolve the issue for those impacted. RIM apologizes for any inconvenience experienced by customers," read an e-mailed statement from company spokesperson Jamie Ernst. Ernst declined to elaborate, however, on the cause or extent of the outage, and offered no estimated time of repair.
This, of course, comes on the heels of similar short-lived outage on Thursday, which happened to be the same day the company announced it beat analyst expectations in the fiscal third quarter of 2009 with strong sales of its BlackBerrys.
As we close the book on 2009 and ready for 2010, a legal settlement takes us back to 2007 and 2008, when Comcast got into trouble with customers and the feds for throttling peer-to-peer traffic on its network.
Comcast has agreed to pay $16 million to end to a class action lawsuit alleging the broadband provider promised and advertised certain download and upload speeds, but blocked peer-to-peer traffic on its high-speed Internet network.
"Comcast denies these claims, but has revised its management of P2P and is settling to avoid the burden and cost of further litigation," according to the proposed settlement, pointed out to us by Ars Technica.
The settlement, still pending in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, goes on to say Comcast will pay up to $16 million, which per share is an amount not to exceed $16. "The settlement is not an admission of wrongdoing by any party."
As for wrongdoing, the Federal Communication Commission sees it a little differently. Comcast is in the process of appealing an FCC ruling finding Comcast's throttling of BitTorrent traffic unlawful. That marked the first time any U.S. broadband provider has ever been found to violate Net neutrality rules. The FCC issued a cease-and-desist order and required the company to disclose to subscribers in the future how it plans to manage traffic.
Comcast had said that its measures to slow BitTorrent transfers, which it voluntarily ended in March 2008, were necessary to prevent its network from being overrun. Comcast later announced plans to reduce Internet service to customers it deems to be using too much bandwidth.
A new study suggests that driving while texting makes you six times more likely to crash.
(Credit: CC indyplanets/Flickr)It's no surprise that driving while texting (DWT) falls under the category of driving while stupid (DWS).
It's even been compared with driving under the influence (DUI). Still, anywhere from one-third to 60 percent of teens admit to texting behind the wheel.
Yet another study--this one out of the University of Utah--reinforces the fact that driving while texting is incredibly dangerous (PDF).
Drivers who text are about six times more likely to crash than those paying full attention to the road, this study says, and their reaction times are on average three times slower than the reaction times of drivers talking on cell phones.
According to the study's results published in the Human Factors journal:
Drivers apparently attempt to divide attention between a phone conversation and driving, adjusting the processing priority of the two activities depending on task demands. This requires drivers to switch their attention from one task to the other. When such attention-switching occurs as drivers compose, read, or receive a text, their overall reaction times are substantially slower than when they're engaged in a phone conversation."
The study was done on just 20 men and 20 women (ages 19 to 23) in a driving simulator, so it may or may not translate directly to what happens on the road. In the simulations, drivers tended to follow other vehicles more closely when texting and had worse reaction times, which includes being slower to hit the brakes.
Reading text messages also affected braking time more than did composing messages.
The National Safety Council has called on state and federal lawmakers to ban the use of cell phones and text-messaging devices while driving, which several states have already done.
New data on the top 10 mobile phones puts Apple on top due to the sheer number of iPhone owners. But both Research In Motion and LG actually control more market share because they sell multiple, popular models.
Nielsen's data on the top 10 phones in use in the U.S. from January through October shows Apple with 4 percent market share, RIM with 6.3 percent, and LG with 6.4 percent. But the trio lead a very fragmented market. In fact, the top 10 phones account for just over 20 percent of the total devices in use.
With an estimated 271 million U.S. mobile subscribers at the end of 2008, accounting for about 88 percent of the U.S. population, even 1 percent market share is significant.
RIM BlackBerry devices and LG handsets--voluminous in offering compared with the singular iPhone also have the benefit of longer time on the market and of promotion by the carriers that don't have the iPhone. LG is the No. 3 handset maker behind Nokia and Samsung. RIM and Apple have nowhere the number of models offered by the top three handset makers, yet they enjoy a stronger market share.
The Nielsen data shows both the opportunity and the challenge of creating the next big thing in mobile devices. Just a few years ago, Motorola's Razr was the belle of the ball, and RIM was firmly fixed as an enterprise device. However, the convergence of voice, e-mail, and browsing, as well as new 3G networks, brought the smartphone to the forefront and helped push both RIM and Apple to the top.
All hope is not lost for currently less popular handset makers, as the market can very quickly change dramatically.
Indeed, there is a big challenge under way from Android-based phones such as the Droid that could thrust laggards such as Motorola back into the spotlight, provided that Google doesn't stomp all over the developer community that has been building up around the new mobile operating system.
| Top 10 Mobile Phones in Use (U.S.) - January -October 2009 | ||
| RANK | Device | Embedded Base of All Subscribers |
| 1 | Apple 3G iPhone | 4.0% |
| 2 | RIM BlackBerry 8300 Series (Curve, 8310, 8320, 8330, 8350i) | 3.7% |
| 3 | Motorola Razr V3 series (V3, V3c, V3m, V3i, V3i DG, V3) | 2.3% |
| 4 | LG VX9100 (enV2) | 2.1% |
| 5 | LG Voyager | 1.7% |
| 6 | Samsung SPH-M540 (Rant) | 1.5% |
| 7 | RIM BlackBerry 9530 series (Storm) | 1.4% |
| 8 | LG VX9700 (Dare) | 1.3% |
| 9 | LG Vu series (CU915, CU920) | 1.3% |
| 10 | RIM BlackBerry 8100 series (Pearl, 8110, 8120, 8129) | 1.2% |
| Source: Nielsen | ||
And mobile phones are not just for those on the run. Nielsen's Convergence Audit (PDF), an annual survey on voice, video, and data products, "shows a rise in households who have 'cut the cord' by trading their traditional landlines for wireless cellular services and an increase in mobile media device usage among a diverse set of households."
In the second quarter, the report said, 21 percent of households were using wireless cellular service only--compared with 18 percent a year earlier. "This increase comes from...households who have dropped their landlines as well as from young adults that started new households with just a wireless phone service," the report said.
Odds are that these percentages will continue to climb as young mobile users reach adulthood and as adults look to their mobile devices to do more than just make calls.
Ford cars are about to become true mobile hot spots.
The carmaker announced Monday the next generation of its Sync system designed to let Ford owners plug a USB modem directly into a car's built-in Wi-Fi, creating broadband Internet access to all passengers. Those in the car can jump online through any Wi-Fi-enabled device, from smartphone to laptop.
Ford said that this factory-installed capability will be available next year on certain Sync-equipped cars and that no extra hardware or subscriptions will be needed outside of an existing broadband modem, which the customer supplies. Ford's Wi-Fi system will include WPA2 security, ensuring that only people in the car will be able to hop onto the network.
"The speeds with which technology is evolving, particularly on the wireless front, makes obsolescence a real problem," Doug VanDagens, director of Ford's Connected Services Solutions Organization, said in a statement. "We've solved that problem by making Sync work with just about any technology you plug into it. By leveraging a user's existing hardware, which can be upgraded independent of Sync, we've helped ensure 'forward compatibility' with whatever connectivity technology comes next."
Design by Ford and Microsoft, Ford's Sync lets drivers make calls, play music, get directions, grab news and weather, and search for businesses and other information, all using voice and text-to-speech technology. Ford's new Sync edition won't be the first Wi-Fi technology to give people on-the-road Internet. Similar devices have popped up over the past year, some dealer-installed and some independent.
Autonet Mobile designs similar hardware for cars, as does a company called Waav. Autonet does require a subscription fee for its service--$29 a month for 1GB of data or $59 a month for 5GB. But it's an independent device designed to work with different makes and models (though currently available as dealer-installed for Cadillac), while Ford's Sync only comes with certain Ford vehicles.
