Verizon's Fios TV is coming to New York City starting Monday.
The phone company sent a media advisory on Friday about the launch and will provide more details about the service during a Webcast press conference Monday morning. New York City granted Verizon its TV franchise back in May. And on July 16th, the company won final approval to offer its TV service from the New York Public Service Commission.
Verizon has been aggressively marketing its Fios Internet and TV service in the New York City suburbs for the past couple of years. And the company has offered the Fios high-speed Internet service in some apartment buildings in New York City. Now the company will be able to offer a complete package of telephony, TV, and broadband services to New Yorkers, helping it compete head-to-head with Time Warner Cable, the predominant cable operator in the city.
Verizon's Fios service uses a new fiber network that extends directly into people's homes to deliver nearly unlimited bandwidth capacity.
Technology blogger Dave Zatz reported earlier this week that Verizon will soon offer Web-based videos as part of its Fios TV offering through its set-top boxes. Initial Internet video partners include YouTube, Veoh, Blip.tv, and Break.com, the post said.
Overstock.com has filed a lawsuit challenging a New York law that expands the state's requirements for online retailers to collect sales taxes.
The Utah-based company announced Friday that it is asking the court to issue an injunction and declare the law unconstitutional.
In April, Gov. David Paterson signed a new law requiring companies that pay New York-based entities for "directly or indirectly referring customers" to their retail business to collect sales taxes from New York-based customers. The new law goes into effect Sunday. It's an attempt to get around a 1992 U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Quill v. North Dakota case that says retailers aren't required to collect sales taxes from customers who live in states where the businesses don't have a physical presence.
About two weeks ago, Overstock announced it was cutting ties to its New York-based affiliates because of the new law. The discount online retailer said it told its more than 3,400 affiliates that as of Sunday they would no longer be able to provide advertising for the company.
"I am confident of our position in the suit," said Mark Griffin, Overstock.com general counsel, in a statement. "The applicable United States Supreme Court cases on the question of whether the state can collect taxes under these circumstances make it clear that New York cannot constitutionally require Overstock.com to collect these taxes."
The New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, tax commissioner Robert Menga, and Paterson are named as defendants in the suit filed with the New York State Supreme Court.
Amazon, which filed a similar suit in April, has said it plans to abide by the law and begin collecting New York state sales taxes.
CNET News.com's Anne Broache contributed to this report.
New York's expansive new online sales-tax requirements are drawing mixed responses from major e-tailers that haven't previously collected such fees in the Empire State.
Despite a pending lawsuit challenging the law's constitutionality, Amazon.com has said on its Web site that it still plans to abide by the law and add sales tax to orders shipped to New York when the mandate kicks in June 1.
But online outlet store Overstock.com wants nothing to do with collecting the new tax, according to reports at the Affiliate Tip blog and The New York Times.
A few weeks ago, New York's governor signed a new law that requires any company that pays New York-based entities for "directly or indirectly referring customers" to its retail business to collect sales taxes from New York-based customers. It's an attempt to get around a 1992 U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Quill v. North Dakota case that says retailers aren't required to collect sales taxes from customers who live in states where the businesses don't have a physical presence.
New York's new law directly implicate Amazon, Overstock, and other companies that operate "affiliate" programs, which, in the e-tailers' cases, means they offer commissions to external Web site owners who link to their products and prompt sales. Amazon has hundreds of thousands of such affiliates, although in its court complaint against New York state, the company said it wasn't sure exactly how many were truly located in New York.
Overstock, for its part, is opting to cut off its 3,400 affiliates in New York, telling the Times that it couldn't afford to deal with collecting sales taxes in the state, although it, like Amazon, believes the new policy is unconstitutional. An e-mail from Overstock's affiliate program manager republished by the blog Affiliate Tip characterized the situation as "temporary."
For some lucky New Yorkers living in two of Manhattan's largest mega-apartment complexes, Fios super high-speed Internet access is here. As for the rest of us living in New York City, we'll have to suck it up and deal with sub-10-megabit-per-second speeds.
Verizon said Monday it has struck a deal with Tishman Speyer Properties to deploy the Fios fiber-to-the-home service to Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, the two biggest apartment complexes in Manhattan with 110 buildings and more than 11,000 apartments covering 18 city blocks along the East River of Manhattan.
But for most of the 8 million people living in New York City, such as myself, Verizon's fiber network, which offers 50-megabit-per-second downloads, is only a dream. And now we have yet another reason to be jealous of the lucky folks living in what was once a rent stabilized enclave for middle-income New Yorkers.
Seven buildings in the complex have already been hooked up to the fiber network, according to the Associated Press. And the rest of the deployment is expected throughout the spring and summer.
Initially, Verizon targeted single-family homes in its rollout of Fios. About a year ago, it started targeting apartment buildings in major cities like New York. I was excited about the news when it first came out--until I talked to my contacts at the company who sadly told me it was highly unlikely that my six-story walk-up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan would ever be considered for Fios.
Currently, Verizon has deployed Fios to a handful of high-rise apartments in each of the city's five boroughs. Residents today are only able to get telephone service and high-speed Internet. But the company is negotiating a TV franchise deal with the city, the AP reported.
This means that unlike most New Yorkers, Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village residents will soon have three choices for their phone, TV and high-speed Internet services: Time Warner Cable, RCN, and now Verizon.
Stuyvesant Town and Peter Copper Village were built by the insurance company MetLife in 1947 to house returning veterans from World War II. And up until 2006 when it was sold for $5.4 billion to real estate developer Tishman Speyer Properties, the complex offered thousands of apartments to working class families far below market rate.
The apartments are known to be much more spacious than most shoe-box sized apartments in Manhattan. And because many of the apartments were rent-stabilized, living there was the envy of many New Yorkers in a city that has seen rents and property values soar decade after decade. As you might imagine, scoring one of these apartments was like winning the lottery. For years, I daydreamed about what I would do with all the saved rent money and all that wonderful living space had I ever been able to live in "Stuytown."
Today, many of the rent-stabilized apartments in Stuyvesant Town are gone and rents are just as high as they are all over the city. But now that residents are getting Fios, which offers broadband downloads up to 50Mbps and uploads up to 20Mbps, I'm green with envy once again.
I understand that it's not financially practical for Verizon to spend the capital to dig up streets and lay fiber to my tiny building. But I think I speak for millions of people in Verizon's territory, who see the Verizon Fios TV commercials and will never be able to get the service, when I say, "If you can hear me now, Verizon, please bring fiber to my home!"
Google's new teleportation, its search-within-search function, is getting mixed responses, at least from some site owners, who may be remembering occasions when teleportation in the Star Trek transporter went wrong. Earlier in the month, Google introduced the teleportation functionality as a way to better help searchers find information within a site by providing a search box below the snippet of the top listing, which performs a "site:" search on the domain of that listing using the additional search terms the searcher added in.
The "site:" advanced query is quite familiar to those within the search industry, but much less so to the average searcher. So bringing this functionality front and center for the searcher should be a well-received addition.
When I first saw this, I thought it was interesting--once I was able to get it to show up. It doesn't come up for every site, mainly big-name sites, nor does it come up for every search. One that it did come up for was searching for Amazon.com. After playing around with the teleportation search, I also began wondering how these big-name retailers would react and thought that some might not care for this new functionality. Why would they object?
Let me show you--except I can't use Amazon to do it anymore. According to the New York Times, Amazon is one such retailer that has already objected and asked Google to turn off this functionality for its site. It seems that most of the talk so far, like that happening at Search Engine Land (here and here), has been more about acknowledgment than anything else, but Rishi Lakhani's post at SEO Smarty shows that others have had similar thoughts as I.
Now, before we go much further, understand that I'm not suggesting ulterior motives here on Google's part or that this is even a good or a bad thing. For regular users, I think this will be well received, and Google pays a lot of attention to delivering the best user experience it can--but that isn't to say that there isn't going to be a potential upside for the PPC program as well.
So let's take a look at some examples of how this may impact results and get a feel for why some site owners may be less than thrilled with this functionality. Let's use national retailer Target as an example while we still can since its site is powered by Amazon. We'll try this on searches for plasma TVs.
Below we see the results that someone might see doing a search in Google just for "plasma tv" which includes eight paid search ads.
Google search for "plasma tv."
Below we see the results that someone might see doing a search in Google for "target plasma tv." Notice how there are no paid search results showing up, and not surprising, Target shows up in the top organic listing.
Google search results for "target plasma tv."
Then let's see what happens if someone searches just on "target." No surprise that Target.com shows up No. 1 again in organic results and still no paid search ads. What is different is the appearance of the teleportation, search-within-search, box showing up below the sitelinks in the Target result, labeled as "Search target.com."
Google search results for "target."
Then when we do a teleportation search for "plasma tv," we get the following search results. Notice that this creates the advanced search query "plasma tv site:target.com." Now the searcher gets Target.com specific search results in the organic area, hopefully relevant to the search, but also eight paid listings that Target is now competing with.
Google teleportation search results for "plasma tv" within Target.com.
This isn't all as cut-and-dried as this example may seem. The appearance of ads can vary widely from none to many. But for now it does serve as an example of at least one scenario that site owners need to be aware of.
So what does teleportation mean for the various players? Well hopefully, for the searchers, it does get them to what they are looking for faster and easier, but this can really vary as well and may or may not be more helpful than getting directly to the site.
For Google, it means that searchers will have performed at least one more search on Google, instead of clicking through to Target.com immediately. And it may mean that it has gained an opportunity to serve up more targeted (no pun intended) search ads that otherwise may not have been served up (as we can see from the other Target focused searches which yielded no ads). Even more subtle here is the fact that many advertisers may not have bid against a big brand name to begin with. Currently, advertisers can use a trademarked brand as a trigger word as long as they don't use it in the ad itself. As much of the legislation in this area continues to be formed and reformed, who knows whether this will always be the case--but it would seem that teleportation search may provide an additional means to serve up ads around another brand without even needing the advertiser to use that brand as a trigger word.
But how might Target feel about this? Well, if it does help get searchers to their destination, then it might be happy with this. But it also might mean that its natural results are competing against paid-listings that it may not have been competing against under the other Target related searches. It also means that it may not be able to cull additional search information from its own site-search. While the quality of on-site search may vary from excellent to completely worthless, some sites invest heavily in their on-site search to not only deliver good results, but also to serve as insight into what their visitors are looking for. Being able to follow the search path, which they may be losing because of teleportation, may help improve the site experience.
Needless to say, Target might prefer to get people directly to its site and have people search on-site, which at least in this example allows it to serve up a richer experience.
Target.com on-site search for "plasma tv."
Good, bad or otherwise, what this means to site owners is that SEO may be more important than ever. Now, getting to the top listing may not be enough. Defending your brand may not be enough. Securing multiple listings through blended search may not be enough. What happens to the site that has excellent search, but terrible indexation in Google? Now more than ever, site owners need to focus on creating the most search-friendly site as they can to make sure that Google and other search engines can spider and index the site as completely as possible. For some sites, this is a huge challenge, trying to overcome legacy CMS and e-commerce systems. Fortunately, there are solutions like Netconcepts' own GravityStream proxy optimization that can help many sites overcome these obstacles, but GravityStream isn't for everyone.
One thing this clearly means is that site optimization is more important than ever. Optimization will help to make sure that the teleportation results for your site are highly relevant and speak to the searcher, hopefully gaining the click-through from the searcher. If you are like Target and experience millions of searches a year just on your brand name, then you don't want to leave your optimization to chance when it comes to teleportation.
A variety of new models and model updates are on display at the 2008 New York auto show, from a sporty new coupe by Hyundai to a clean diesel Mercedes-Benz SUV and a minivan with a Volkswagen badge.
Click here for photos of new models from the New York auto show.
A number of companies showed off design concepts at the 2008 New York auto show, including the third in the Kizashi series from Suzuki, a rare one from Scion, and a coupe from Kia.
Click here for photos of concepts from the New York auto show.
It may look like a British milk truck but it's really a lithium ion battery powered vehicle concept from Nissan that might be a Scion xB alternative. Brian Cooley gives us a first look at the 2008 New York International auto show.
At the 2008 New York International auto show, Brian Cooley takes a look at the newly redesigned Mercedes M-Class. It not only got a refreshed design outside, but also the inside has been updated with a richer media interface and a new voice-control system.
At the 2008 New York auto show, Subaru announced the addition of Harman/Kardon audio systems to its Legacy and Outback models. We take a look at, and a listen to, the new stereos at the show.
Click here for photos of the Harman/Kardon audio system in the Subaru Legacy and Outback.
