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Skyhook Wireless announced Monday that it is integrating GPS into its geolocation service to get an even more accurate fix for location-based services.

Up until now, Skyhook's geolocation service, which is used on Apple's iPhone, among other services and devices, has used Wi-Fi hot spots to get a fix on location. The service works very well in densely populated areas where there are a lot of Wi-Fi radios transmitting signals. And it's great for locating places indoors or in cities with a lot of tall buildings, all places where satellite-based GPS, or Global Positioning System, technology has difficulty getting a location fix.

But for all of the benefits of Wi-Fi, it doesn't work in rural areas where hot spots are few and far between. This is where the GPS technology comes in.

"Our technology works great in populated areas," said Ted Morgan, co-founder and CEO of Skyhook. "But on the open road it's more difficult. Now with GPS integrated, iPhone users, for example, can get turn-by-turn navigation anywhere they go."

The way the Skyhook service originally worked is that it would triangulate and get a fix on location-based data on known Wi-Fi hot spots. The company has a database of where Wi-Fi hot spots all over the country are located. Specifically, it uses the Mac address, a unique identifier that every piece of hardware on the Internet must have, to identify the router, and it matches that identifier with the location. Using multiple signals in the same geographic location, the Skyhook technology is able to pinpoint a location.

Now Skyhook has integrated GPS into its technology, which it is putting in chipsets that go into mobile phones and other devices that also have GPS recievers. GPS will allow Skyhook to cover more ground with its geolocation technology. The Wi-Fi/GPS technology should also help services that used GPS only to get information about location more quickly. Because GPS uses three or four low-orbiting satellites to pinpoint a location, it can take a few seconds before it's able to calculate a location. Skyhook's Wi-Fi technology can get location information much faster.

So where might we see this new technology? The original Wi-Fi-based Skyhook technology is already on the iPhone. Morgan couldn't say for sure that the new "hybrid" Wi-Fi/GPS technology will be used on the iPhone 3G that comes out next week. But one of the upgrades in the new iPhone 3G is the addition of a GPS chip, so it would make sense that the Skyhook technology would be used on it. Morgan did say that Apple has access to all of its technology.

It will cost you north of the border.

(Credit: Apple)

If you think AT&T's iPhone 3G service plans are expensive, just consider what Rogers is forcing on our Canadian friends.

Friday, the carrier announced its service plans for the iPhone 3G, none of which include unlimited data use. Instead, Rogers will cap data each month at a certain amount, which will range from 400MB for the cheapest service plan ($60 Canadian or $59.23 U.S.) to 2GB for the most expensive plan ($115 Canadian or $113.64 U.S.).

Though 2GB is a lot of data, we're not sure how a customer is supposed to know what 2GB even means in real-world use. True, you can track your data use on the iPhone, but it's not like tracking calling minutes.

In its press release, Rogers does provide a convenient chart to gauge your data usage--apparently, 2G amounts to 16,000 Web pages (who knew?)--but we don't approve of such an arrangement at all. The iPhone's Web browser is one of its top attractions, particularly on a 3G network, and asking users to limit their data certainly isn't putting the "Internet in your pocket." Rogers is offering unlimited Wi-Fi access at all Rogers and Fido hotspots, but that in itself is limiting if you have to be in one place.

What's more, the data restrictions aren't the half of it. While AT&T's cheapest iPhone 3G service plan ($69 per month) includes 450 anytime minutes, the cheapest Rogers plan (the one with 400MB of data) only gets 150 anytime minutes. Ouch. Similarly Rogers' most expensive plan includes only 800 anytime minutes while AT&T's priciest plan ($129 per month) includes unlimited anytime minutes. Double ouch.

Come on, Rogers, you have to give your customers a little more. Especially when your contracts run three years.

The city of Los Angeles' lawsuit against Time Warner Cable has prompted a neighboring community to look at suing the cable provider.

Now the city of Costa Mesa, Calif., is also considering suing Time Warner, claiming that its residents have gotten poor service, too. Complaints had gotten so out of hand, that earlier this year the city council called a public hearing to question a Time Warner representative about the issue.

Even though service has improved over the past few months, the city's attorney said that residents have experienced similar issues as those outlined in the Los Angeles complaint, according to the Daily Pilot, the local newspaper's Web site.

Late last week, the city attorney for Los Angeles filed a suit against Time Warner alleging the company broke multiple laws by providing poor service to its citizens. The city is seeking to collect tens of millions of dollars in fines.

The suit is linked to problems Time Warner experienced after it took over cable systems from bankrupt cable operator Adelphia. Time Warner also picked up some systems through a swap with Comcast, its co-buyer in the Adelphia transaction.

Time Warner increased its subscribers in the Los Angeles region from 350,000 to 1.9 million literally overnight. The company was overwhelmed as it migrated e-mail accounts, resolved billing issues, and transitioned other video and broadband systems to its own systems. The result was allegedly poor service and a doubling in complaints.

Specifically, the suit alleges the company failed to live up to its part of the franchise cable agreement, which requires the company to answer subscribers' calls within 30 seconds and begin repairs of service interruptions within 24 hours of notification in 90 percent of its service calls. The suit claims that less than 60 percent of calls for service were answered on time and that broadband and TV "was so intermittent and inferior in quality that it was not much better than no service at all."

Time Warner says that it's working to improve customer service in the region, but it disagrees with the suit's allegations.

"We're proud of the service we provide to the L.A. area," a spokesman wrote in an e-mail. "We've made great strides in customer service, evidenced by the fact that call volumes are now lower than pre-acquisition levels, despite being apporximately five times larger."

Improving customer service is a big deal for cable operators, especially as they face increased competition from phone companies. Time Warner is one of many companies with several initiatives in the works to improve its service. But will it be too late? Many customers are already ditching Time Warner in the L.A. area and switching to satellite providers. AT&T also provides its U-verse TV and broadband service in parts of the area, which could give some residents another choice.

These availability charts from Keynote Systems show Amazon's U.K. site, top, dropping largely off the Net, then gradually recovering. The U.S. site, the lower chart, showed more intermittent problems.

(Credit: Keynote Systems)

Amazon.com's Web site was offline again Monday, another significant interruption of services after a two-hour outage Friday.

As of 10:08 PDT on Friday, Amazon's main Web site showed the "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" error message that also showed on Friday.

The e-commerce giant's Friday outage affected its Amazon.com site used by U.S. visitors. Monday's outage appeared to affect its U.K. site as well.

Pages on Amazon's U.S. and U.K. Web sites sporadically showed an error message like this Monday, as well one saying Http/1.1 Service Unavailable.

(Credit: Amazon.com)

Update 10:26 a.m. PDT: Amazon.com is back, though the U.K. site still appears down to me. On Friday, the site was intermittently available, though, so it does not appear to be out of the woods yet.

Update 10:40 a.m. PDT: The "We're sorry!" error page that showed up Friday also is appearing on some other pages. The site is working for me, but not for an East Coast colleague.

Update 10:47 a.m. PDT: Amazon.co.uk now works for me again, though with sporadic errors on product pages.

Update 10:59 a.m. PDT: The company still hasn't responded to my requests for comment, but Amazon acknowledged problems on a forum for those who sell goods at the site: "We are currently experiencing an issue that is causing site performance issues. Our engineers are actively engaged on resolving this issue, and we will continue to provide updates until service has been restored," the company said.

Update 11:07 a.m. PDT: I'm getting intermittent errors again at the main pages, and some product pages of Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. So it's clear that as with Friday, recovery is a fits-and-starts affair, even an hour after the problem began.

Update 11:58 a.m. PDT: Amazon.com and most of Amazon.co.uk are working for me. One curiosity: when the site was really struggling, it was rare to even get the "Sorry!" error page.

Outages are bad, but as eBay learned nearly a decade ago, multiple outages are worse. Over its history so far, though, Amazon generally has a reputation for reliability.

Update 12:28 p.m. PDT: Amazon has posted an "issue resolved" update to its seller community forum on Monday--but it's not about Monday's problem. Instead, it's just got old news, saying that on Friday, Amazon resolved the problem it was having on Friday. Still no word from the company about the second glitch.

Update 1:20 p.m. PDT: Keynote Systems, which monitors the availability of Web sites browsed from PCs and mobile devices, confirmed that Monday's outage hit the U.S. and U.K. sites.

The U.S. outage was a double whammy, said Shawn White, Keynote's director of external operations. The first problem showed from 10:03 a.m. to 10:23 a.m. PDT, with site availability dropping to about 30 percent. A second, less severe problem occurred from 10:56 a.m. to 11:09 a.m. PDT, he said.

The U.K. glitch was a single, longer-lasting outage that began at 10:06 a.m. and dropped the site to about 30 percent availability. The site gradually recovered over a period of about two hours to 50 percent, 70 percent, and now 98 percent.

"It stills look like some type of user error or configuration glitch," he said. "The data just doesn't demonstrate any kind of network-level attack."

Update 1:40 p.m. PDT: Amazon confirmed the problem, though it didn't share much detail: "Some customers reported intermittent problems accessing Amazon retail Web sites on Monday morning. However, we are working to resolve the issues, and Amazon's Web services are not affected."

Update 2:50 p.m. PDT: A reader and I just got more timeouts on the U.S. site, with not even an error message showing. Things still aren't totally up to snuff, apparently.

Also, I added some nicer graphs from Keynote.

Update 3:22 p.m. Amazon has declared the outage over. For details, check our follow-up posting. Updated 12:43 p.m. PDT with further details, including partial site recovery.

Keynote Systems showed Amazon.com's availability drop from nearly 100 percent down to 10 percent or lower at 10:21 a.m. PDT Friday.

(Credit: Keynote Systems)

Amazon.com was inaccessible to many U.S. visitors for more than an hour and a half Friday.

The site went offline completely by 10:21 a.m. PDT, but efforts to restore the site appeared to be taking effect about noon, said Keynote Systems, which monitors Web site responsiveness. As of 12:45 p.m., the site was working intermittently, with many product pages functioning but others still broken.

"At noon PDT, we started to see the site getting better," said Shawn White, director of external operations for Keynote. "We are seeing about 70 percent availability."

One-off outages are no fun, but sustained problems can be a serious problem. eBay suffered outages in 1999 that outraged users and sent the stock down, and even a backup system didn't ward off more problems in 2002.

And for major commerce sites, the problem can have ripple effects. Both Amazon and eBay provide a commercial foundation used by many partners and entrepreneurs.

Expensive problems
Based on last quarter's revenue of $4.13 billion globally, a full-scale global outage would cost Amazon more than $31,000 per minute on average. For North America, it would be more than $16,000 per minute. (To be fair, those figures don't include revenue from other sources such as search or contextual advertisements or Amazon Web Services.)

Of course, money lost can be money gained for a competitor. A Sony PlayStation 3 promotion with the Metal Gear Solid 4 game went on sale at 10 a.m. PDT, according to some CNET News.com readers. Another reader went to BuyDig.com to buy a birthday present.

"Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" was the message that appeared when Amazon customers across the country attempted to use the site.

Amazon posted an apology placeholder page for broken links.

(Credit: Amazon.com)

Representatives of the company haven't responded to requests for comment.

Amazon sites outside the United States appear to be working, including those in China, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany.

Amazon Web Services unaffected
It appears Amazon Web Services such as the S3 storage and EC2 computing services still are functioning, at least for some customers, though the AWS page at Amazon.com isn't working.

"S3 and EC2 continue to function for us as normal," said Don MacAskill, chief executive of photo-sharing site Smugmug. Mashery.com CEO Oren Michels, who uses AWS for several functions and who has several customers who use AWS, reported no problems Friday.

Customers who need to get to their AWS pages can follow a direct link, Amazon said.

The security group WebSense concluded the Amazon problems are "not security related" as far as it's aware. Arbor Networks Chief Technology Officer Jose Nazario was more cautious, though: "I've got nothing on it as to why or what happened. I'm not sure if it's an attack or service outage via failures on their end or what."

What's your theory on the cause of the Amazon.com outage?

News.com staff writers Greg Sandoval, Rafe Needleman, and Robert Vamosi contributed to this report.

As cable and phone companies slug it out in markets across the U.S., improving customer care is becoming a core part of their strategies.

For the past few years, cable and phone companies have been neck and neck in many markets. Cable companies have introduced new phone services to compete with phone companies, and phone companies have started offering competing TV services.

On the broadband front, cable and phone companies now offer similar speeds in feeds in many markets. While cable has historically been priced slightly higher than services offered from phone companies, these too are evening out in many markets with various promotional service offerings.

Now, more than ever, consumers seem to be influenced by their perception of a particular company and their own experience with customer care. What's more, the Internet has changed things. It used to be that a single disgruntled customer would influence only a few friends and neighbors. But with the advent of blogs and forums all over the Web, unhappy consumers can find a much wider audience, potentially reaching thousands or even millions.

"Customers are making choices every day," said Rick Germano, senior vice president of Customer Operations for Comcast. "They are trying to figure out which company to go with to get TV, high-speed Internet service, and now phone service. And their perception of who is offering those services is a big driver in who they choose."

Unfortunately for Comcast, its customer service has taken a beating recently. Just last month, the company got the lowest score it's ever gotten on the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, a major customer satisfaction study conducted by the University of Michigan. And last week, it ranked as the second worst company in terms of customer care in an MSN Money customer survey.

These results follow publicized tales of a technician sleeping while on the job and a hammer-wielding grandmother going crazy due to poor service. And it also follows accusations that the company throttled BitTorrent peer-to-peer traffic.

Germano acknowledged the company needs to improve its service and perception.

"Comcast takes full responsibility for what these surveys are saying," he said. "We don't disagree with the results. And we're listening. We get it. But we look at this an opportunity for us to improve. As a business we have to do it."

Comcast's main competitors, AT&T and Verizon Communications, have faired better in these surveys than Comcast. But that doesn't mean that there aren't pockets of dissatisfied customers.

In fact, my sister who recently moved to a suburb near Boston chose to get her Internet and TV service from Comcast even though Verizon's new Fios service was available in her town. Why? The reason was simple. The Verizon technician who was scheduled to set up her basic phone service didn't show up twice for his appointment.

"I knew from the phone incident that there was no way I was going to get Verizon's Fios service, no matter how good or fast the service was supposed to be," she said.

My sister isn't the only dissatisfied Verizon customer I've heard from. Several readers have sent e-mails and commented on the "Talk Back" of some of my blogs saying they have had similarly bad experiences when trying to get Fios service installed. Verizon executives acknowledge the company has experienced some growing pains, especially as it rolls out its new Fios service. But Tom Maguire, the company's customer service czar, says the company is making improvements.

"I don't think anyone wants to be known for providing terrible customer service," he said. "Everyone wants to do the right thing for the customer. So we have to figure out how to remove obstacles that are preventing us from delivering great customer service every time. If we can't deliver the best product with the best service, the customer will go somewhere else."

Winning customers over
So what are these companies doing to improve?

Comcast has hired 15,000 new customer service agents and technicians over the past 18 months to help the company answer calls and provide service to customers. It has also rolled out new high-tech diagnostic tools for agents in the field and at call centers to help better assess problems. Comcast has also started re-dispatching field technicians if it looks like a certain technician may not be able to get to his next appointment.

Customer service agents are also starting to work on Saturdays and Sundays to schedule and serve customers when it's most convenient for them. And it's offering real time online chat services so that customers can talk live with a customer account executive.

Germano said the company is trying to listen to customers more, and that includes establishing a special team within the company to follow blogs, like the Consumerist.com and online forums where many problems are often reported by customers.

Verizon's Maguire said that his company is doing something similar. Like Comcast, Verizon has a team that monitors blogs. And Maguire himself often answers e-mails from customers with complaints as part of what the company calls a "you touch it, you own it" philosophy.

The phone company is also starting to roll out a new text-messaging system that automatically alerts customers when a technician has been dispatched to a location. It will alert customers if the technician is running late.

In addition, Verizon has made big improvements in its customer care centers. One major change is that it has been staffing the fiber solutions centers, which handle technical issues with the fiber-to-the-home Fios service, with customer care representatives who can resolve billing and enrollment issues.

Verizon also has improved its voice response system to help customers resolve certain issues on their own. And it's given customers who would rather reach a human representative a way to navigate out of the voice response system.

It's implemented a new queue-busting system that monitors the flow of calls into call centers. If a center is getting overloaded with calls, more representatives are added dynamically to handle the overflow calls.

"Our goal is to make it easier for customers to do business with us," Maguire said. "It's more cost effective and better marketing to take care of the customers you already have than to go out and try to acquire new customers. And the magic formula for doing this is really the golden rule. Treat customers how you want to be treated."

Another major trend that seems to be filtering into every major broadband provider is a greater focus on standardizing processes. While local branch offices will continue to handle local service calls and dispatch technicians directly to customers, bigger service providers, such as Comcast, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable, say that it's important to make sure that best practices are shared throughout the company.

"If someone calls with a problem, chances are good that they are talking to someone in their town," said Alex Dudley, a spokesman for Time Warner Cable. "But they will still have the big company experience in that we are sharing what we've learned from our 150 million calls a year to implement best practices that can be shared across the company."

Maguire, who took over as Verizon's head of customer care late last year, said he's already started seeing an improvement.

"Improving customer service is a journey that really has no end point," he said. "We're always striving to do better. But I do think things have gotten better. One indication is there are a lot fewer calls that get escalated to my level than there were when I started."

Updated at 2:30 p.m. PDT to include more details about how location information is displayed and gathered in JuiceCaster, and more specific information about the feature's launch.

First came mobile social networks, then came geotagging. Since location-based features take advantage of your ever-portable mobile phone to pin your activities to a place, we weren't surprised to learn that on Wednesday JuiceCaster (reviewed) added automatic geo-anchors to its multimedia sharing service.

Soon JuiceCaster photos and videos that are auto-posted to Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Blogger, YouTube, and other sites will share the individual's street name and city. Friends who keep a close eye on geotags can use that to gain contextual understanding of the scene or use it to "bump into" friends nearby. In an important distinction, JuiceCaster's location feature is designed to be optional and visible only to confirmed friends.

The city and state appear on the player shown on CEO Nick Desai's JuiceCaster page.

(Credit: Nick Desai)

A final tidbit called "Who was here?" attaches further meaning to a place. Selecting it from the menu will call together a list of photos and videos for that most-wanted location. You'll be able to browse through the content or add your own. You'll also be able to seek out geotagged photos and videos by location, which may muscle up JuiceCaster's searching accuracy.

JuiceCaster's new location-based functionality will become available "shortly" for GPS-enabled cell phones running on the BREW platform before rolling out to other carriers' GPS phones.

A New York State Supreme Court said Tuesday that Dell and its financial services arm misled customers.

Judge Joseph Teresi ruled that the world's second-largest PC maker engaged in fraud, false advertising, deceptive business, and abusive debt collection practices. The company was accused by the state of New York of offering no-interest or no-payment financing options for its products while Dell Financial Services would fail to honor them.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo filed the suit in May 2007, asking for an injunction against the company's business practices and monetary damages for affected customers.

Further court proceedings will need to be held to determine what those damages will be.

Dell told Reuters it "disagrees" with the ruling. "We are confident that when the proceedings are finally completed, the court will determine that only a relatively small number of customers have been affected," according to the company's statement.

Microsoft expects to lose margins as "cloud" competitors start to eat away at its core businesses.

Kudos to Microsoft for calling out the obvious. But the software maker still has a lot to learn, if it thinks it can charge more under its own cloud model because "the customer will pay Microsoft a larger fee, since Microsoft also runs and maintains all the hardware," as Nick Carr notes:

Capossela's assumption that Microsoft will be able to charge companies more under the cloud model seems optimistic, given the different economics of providing software as a Web service and the aggressive pricing strategies of cloud pioneers like Google, Zoho, and Amazon.

Put more bluntly, there's not a chance in Hades that Microsoft will be able to charge more for its cloud-based offerings--not when its competitors are using the cloud to pummel its desktop and server-based offerings. This is something that Microsoft (and everyone else) is simply going to have to get used to. The go-go days of outrageous software margins are over. Done.