Do these companies ever learn? The blogosphere was abuzz Monday with the latest company to try to throttle the bandwidth usage of its users–Sprint’s WiMax venture XOHM. The service launched in Baltimore today, but hidden within its “Acceptable Use Policy” was the fact that it was reserving the right to throttle bandwidth.
Sound familiar? That’s because we’ve been through this drill so many times before.
The battle between Norway and Apple over its Fairplay digital rights management escalated on Monday, with the country’s consumer ombudsman Erik Thon saying he would approach the Norweigian court about intervening in the matter.
The two sides have been at odds since August 2006, when Norway first indicated that Apple’s closed system violated its laws. Thon ruled in January 2007 that the company’s refusal to open up iTunes was illegal. Jobs then called for the end of DRM altogether in an likely effort to save face.
Here’s some news I’m pretty tickled about: Stories from Technologizer now appear in Google News. (Unlike other Google search services, Google News isn’t trying to index everything, just sources it believes to be professional and credible–only 4500 or so sites make the cut, which is a tiny fraction of the world’s news sites when you think about it.)
Technologizer stories will appear on the Google News home page and in searches. And here’s a link that takes you to a list of all of our items on Google News, sorted by date,
We’re Google News fans here, so it’s a kick to see Technologizer there. More important, there are millions of other Google News fans in the world, and we’re delighted that at least some of them will discover Technologizer as they browse around the site.
Ten months ago, TiVo and Nero announced that they were working together to bring the TiVo interface to DVR software you could run on a PC. Then time passed, and I sort of forgot about it. Until today–when Nero announced Liquid TV | TiVo PC (yep, that’s the name, complete with | in the middle). The moniker may be a tad ungainly, but it looks like the product aims to be exactly what you’d want it to be: A version of TiVo that happens to run on a PC rather than TiVo’s own box.
Late last week, I had a brainstorm: Why not set aside coverage of iPhone-related controversies for moment and ask iPhone users what they think of their phones? I launched a little survey on Friday morning, and would have been pleased if a couple of hundred people responded. Instead, more than 2150 iPhone owners took the time to to participate. And hundreds of them not only answered the multiple-choice questions, but used the open-ended question at the survey’s end to share praise, criticism, and ideas.
I’m finishing up our story reporting on the survey as we speak. [UPDATE: I’m done! Here are the results.] But until it’s up–soon, I promise–I thought you might like to see some of these verbatim comments. You’ll find ’em after the jump–divided into Fan Mail, Complaint Department, Feature Requests, and App Store Analysis.
Erick Schonfeld over at TechCrunch is reporting that Motorola is set to expand its team working on Android from 50 to 350, indicating the company may be about get really serious about devices operating on the platform. Word of the expansion comes from a Android developer who apparently has been targeted by the company.
And it doesn’t end with Motorola. Erick’s source also says that Nokia and Verizon made an appearance last week at a conference that was intended for developers who had not seen the G1. While Motorola isn’t a big surprise — it already is a part of the Open Handset Alliance — neither Nokia nor Verizon are officially affiliated with the organization.
It’s not clear when Motorola plans to release its own Android powered devices, although such a ramp-up seems to indicate any announcement may not be too far off. But the fact that Nokia is also showing possible interest may mean the iPhone could face some serious competition very soon.
Then again, Nokia controls Symbian, which has a commanding lead of the market already. Some 65 percent of all smart phones run the OS, nearly six times that of the second place Windows Mobile (11.5 percent). All of this just could be some good old oppo research.
Having Nokia developers familiar with Android does not hurt, however. If the OS suddenly takes off, the company would not be caught off-guard and could release its own phone.
Add this to the news that pre-sale allotments of the G1 are apparently close to being sold out, and the folks at the Googleplex in Mountain View must be smiling ear-to-ear right now.
Don’t declare victory just yet, but Pandora, the really cool, wildly popular online music streaming service, may avoid being driven out of business by dramatically higher licensing fees. The House of Representatives has unanimously passed the Webcaster Settlement Bill, which gives online music services such as Pandora more time to work out a deal with the music industry. It’s now headed for the Senate, where its chances of passing look just fine.
Pandora has done a good job of rallying its legions of fans to support it–I got the following e-mail (after the jump) today from Tim Westergren, the company’s founder:
Nobody can dispute that Nintendo has a true blockbuster on its hands when it comes to the Nintendo DS. The device has sold some 77.5 million units worldwide through June of this year, and continues to sell them at a rapid pace-at least a million per month, if not more. But the device has not been updated since March of 2006, when the company introduced the DS Lite.
That is about to change. According to a story in the Japanese business daily Nikkei, the company will release an updated model later this year. The most notable new features would be an integrated camera, and the capability for music playback.
It’s DRM deja vu all over again. Yet another major purveyor of copy-protected media has alerted the customers that purchased downloads from it that it’s shutting down its DRM servers, thereby crippling the stuff those customers bought. This time it’s Walmart.com and it joins Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo in what’s becoming a really predictable tradition of handling the situation poorly.
Wal-Mart, which has shifted its site’s music store to DRM-free MP3s (good), sent a e-mail to purchasers of its earlier downloads wrapped in Microsoft DRM advising them that it will shut down the DRM server as of October 9th. Once it’s done that, the tunes can no longer be transferred to new computers or devices; Wal-Mart suggests that customers burn CDs to prevent the music from becoming unusable, long-term.
What it apparently isn’t planning to do is give those “buyers” their money back for the songs they “purchased.” Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo all ended up having to do better by their customers than they originally intended; I hope that Wal-Mart, too, will issue refunds or credits. (Actually, I woulda hoped they would have learned from the other companies’ mistake and not replicated it in the first place.)
Remember, Wal-Mart’s music was promoted with Microsoft’s PlaysForSure tagline, one of the hollowest promises ever made in the history of personal technology. I don’t know how much it would have cost Wal-Mart to keep its DRM servers chugging, but I suspect it could have come up with the dough if it had considered PlaysForSure to be an obligation rather than hollow marketing copy.
It’s beyond debate: Any time you pay for music, movies, or other content that’s locked up with DRM that talks to a remote server somewhere, you’re not really buying anything. It can be taken away from you at the whim of the merchant, without you being able to do a thing about it–and the way things have gone so far, there’s every reason to think that most such content will eventually be taken away from the people who thought they bought it,
I still run hot and cold on the prospects for Google’s Android OS. With this week’s launch of the T-Mobile G1, though, I’m feeling fairly upbeat about it. For now, at least… Continue Reading →
