BLOGGER: JEFF BARAK Are you fed up of friends spoiling your favorite TV show by letting you know how the series ends before you’ve managed to see the final episode? Well, help might be at hand if a solution currently in the Amdocs incubation lab actually makes it to market. Under a scenario demonstrated at [...]
BLOGGER: NAOMI WEISER Be honest – who hasn’t had one of those “Did I lock the door?” moments when you can’t quite remember whether or not you actually turned off the heater/left all the lights on/locked the door properly behind you? I admit that it’s happened to me more than once. But the scope [...]
BLOGGER: GAYLE RINOT Did you know that “naughty” texting (also known as “sexting”) has changed the way we flirt? Or that the idea of instant messaging was invented while eating a pizza? These are two of ten astounding facts about the humble SMS whose technology has remained pretty much the same for the past 20 [...]
BLOGGER: JEFF BARAK I wouldn’t recommend throwing away your passports just yet, but it’s certainly worth scanning them and storing them on your iPad. A Canadian, heading for the US border last month to drop off some Christmas presents for his friend’s children, realized he had forgotten his passport. Rather than make the two-hour journey [...]
BLOGGER: NAOMI WEISER If you ever needed an example that 2011 is the year of mobile commerce, look no further than the two shoppers who recently bought a £70,000 Ferrari and a new home via eBay subsidiary PayPal’s mobile app on Cyber Monday, the peak day for online Christmas shopping in the US. And while [...]
BLOGGER: JEFF BARAK Afraid of somehow losing your beloved pet dog? Not to worry – that’ll soon become a thing of the past. The tracking devices that fleet managers use for their trucks and cars are on their way to becoming embedded in household pets (or to be more precise, in their collars) as new [...]
BLOGGER: JEFF BARAK Imagine receiving a bill for $18,000 dollars. That’s what happened to one retiree in Dover, Mass, after a promotional no-limit data plan expired without warning. It’s just one of many stories about subscribers suffering from bill shock, which have damaged service provider reputations. However, the new landmark agreement between US carriers and [...]
BLOGGER: JEFF BARAK In the past, television was seen as recession proof. People would cut back on entertainment outside the home, but would continue taking their TV package as they hunkered down to see out the downturn. That’s why it’s surprising that the news on the Pay TV front in North America isn’t better than [...]
BLOGGER: ERIC DANIS While some analysts are praising Netflix for aggressively outbidding HBO for the rights to DreamWorks Animation movies, others are already saying that Netflix executives must be dreaming if they think the new deal is going to provide significant damage control after the company alienated its customer base so spectacularly. For one thing, [...]
BLOGGER: ERIC M. DANIS Sadly, it’s time to say goodbye to another brand. But while Borders might be gone, it shouldn’t be forgotten because I think service providers can learn some important lessons from Borders’ demise: Don’t miss the connected world revolution… “Borders was investing in physical real estate at the same time that shoppers [...]
BLOGGER: JEFF BARAK As a child, a few minutes after leaving the house with my mother, she’d often send me back down the street to check that she’d locked the front door. Other people worry about whether they’ve locked their car – one friend recently called me from the airport saying she couldn’t remember if [...]
BLOGGER: ERIC M. DANIS Los Angeles is known for more than just movies – the traffic jams are infamous. Perhaps that’s why Los Angelenos are so dreading next weekend’s (July 15-17) partial shutdown of the 405 Freeway, which has been dubbed “Car-mageddon.” But perhaps it’s the mobile network providers who should really be concerned. Here’s why: the local ABC [...]
BLOGGER: DAVID JACOBS I was a little surprised by what was left off the packed agenda at The Cable Show, which took place in Chicago last week. As expected, there was a lot of talk around TV Anywhere, the impact of OTT video services from the likes of Netflix and Apple, and how the cable [...]
BLOGGER: JEFF BARAK Success in the future isn’t just about the technology, according to futurist Dr. Graeme Codrington, from TomorrowToday, in his guest keynote speech at the Amdocs InTouch Business Forum 2011 in Miami – it’s about understanding people better. And this is the way that service providers will be able to fully monetize the [...]
BLOGGER: NAOMI WEISER I tend to have a knee-jerk reaction to mobile ads, which is to basically ignore them almost automatically. But according to a recent Google-commissioned survey, I’m apparently an anomaly – the report states that most users do actually pay attention to and engage with mobile advertising, with 82% of smartphone users noticing [...]
BLOGGER: NAOMI WEISER Hats off to Amazon again for adopting yet another new innovative business model with this week’s launch of the Amazon Cloud Player and Cloud Driver software and services – and in doing so, it has managed to beat Apple and Google to the punch by being the first to launch online music [...]
BLOGGER: JEFF BARAK We’re already getting used to data caps on our mobile Internet usage, so AT&T’s decision to put a cap on data usage for its DSL and U-verse broadband services should not come as too much of a surprise. In fact, Comcast capped its broadband service way back in 2008. As in the [...]
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