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Posts Tagged ‘Contact’

FCC National Broadband Plan: some of your favorite ISPs respond

Yesterday, the FCC submitted its National Broadband Plan to Congress, essentially requesting that six goals be met over the next decade, including sizzlers like access for “every American” to “robust broadband services,”which apparently equals a minimum of 100 million US homes with “affordable” access to at least 100MBps down / 50Mbps up speeds. Pretty heady stuff, we know. We thought we’d contact a few of your friendly ISPs for comment, and we’ve got Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon going on record here — all in all, they’re rather predictable ‘rah rahs’ for the plan, especially considering that whole “affordable” bit. We also threw in part of Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s response. The statements are after the break, and hit the source links for the fuller, long-winded versions.

Continue reading FCC National Broadband Plan: some of your favorite ISPs respond

FCC National Broadband Plan: some of your favorite ISPs respond originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Amazon kills affiliate program in Colorado thanks to taxes

Amazon has pulled the plug on its affiliate program in Colorado thanks to a new state regulation on sales tax collection. The company sent a notice to its Colorado-based affiliates Monday morning to let them know about the decision, urging residents who depend on the affiliate program to contact their lawmakers if they want the program back.

Most states only require retailers to collect sales tax if they have a sufficient enough brick-and-mortar presence thanks to a 1992 Supreme Court decision on Quill Corp. v. North Dakota. Despite this, a handful of states have tried to pass laws in recent years (often dubbed the “Amazon Tax”) that would force Amazon to start collecting sales tax if their affiliates—that is, those who use Amazon’s affiliate links on their own sites or blogs in order to earn a return on referrals—are based in those states.

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iBuyPower Battalion Touch laptop lid draws blood, prompts replacement

iBuyPower Battalion Touch laptop lid draws blood, prompts replacement originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Yelp facing class-action lawsuit over extortive "ad sales"

Last year, business review site Yelp was the target of a scathing exposé that accused the company of promoting or even fabricating negative reviews in order to get businesses to pay to have them hidden or removed. Now, the company is facing a class action lawsuit over those practices, which attorney Jared Beck said amounted to “high-tech extortion.”

In an in-depth article that appeared in East Bay Express last year, business owners said that Yelp sales agents would contact them whenever negative reviews appeared for their business. Representatives allegedly would offer to remove or hide the reviews in exchange for agreeing to buy an advertising contract with the site.

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Engadget Podcast 184: MWC 2010 Roundup – 02.19.2010

MASHUP CULTURE INVADES THE ENGADGET PODCAST as we STEAL BLATANTLY from Engadget Mobile’s podcasts during MWC. Tune in for all the big news and depravity that comes when people who normally only communicate from lairs in their parents’ basments get together in meatspace and hang out with Jim Beam.

Hosts: Chris Ziegler, Sean Cooper, Joshua Topolsky
Guest: Thomas Ricker
Producer: Trent Wolbe
Music: Daestro – Light Powered (Ghostly International)

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Engadget Podcast 184: MWC 2010 Roundup – 02.19.2010 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 21:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Facebook Now Bulk Exports Phone Numbers

Facebook released an upgrade of its excellent iPhone app today and there were two very big changes. Push notifications will now notify you whenever people send you messages, tag you in a photo or comment on your messages – whether you’re looking at your phone at the time or not. That is going to change the Facebook user experience dramatically, increasing sychronous conversation and engagement on the site.

More importantly, Facebook added the ability to sync your phone’s local contacts with your Facebook contacts list. Remember when Facebook kicked blogger Robert Scoble off of the site for exporting his contacts’ emails in bulk? The company said it was important that users maintain control over their contact info. Apparently it doesn’t feel that way about phone numbers any more.

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The syncing feature is very useful and sends to your iPhone peoples’ profile photos, phone numbers when available and a link to load a contact’s profile in the Facebook app. It does not export email addresses though, oddly enough. Emails have been obscured as an image to prevent machine export from Facebook, but phone numbers haven’t. Now that Facebook itself exports the numbers, anyone could take them off of a phone and do anything with them.

This Summer when the slick new Facebook iPhone app was launched, developer Joe Hewitt told us that Facebook to iPhone contact syncing was coming – but said it was “a Terms of Service thing more than a technical thing.” Hewitt has since stopped working on the app due to frustration with Apple. But what happened to the Terms of Service objections?

The funniest part? When you’re doing the bulk export to sync, the Facebook app requires that you agree to the following text: “if you enable this feature, contacts from your device will be sent to Facebook and your friends’ names, phots, and other info from Facebook will be added to your iPhone adress book. Please make sure your friends are comfortable with any use you make of their information.” (Emphasis added.)

Ha! Is that all it takes to make export of Facebook users’ info ok? Well let’s apply this to some other forms of data while we’re at it, shall we?

A number of theories could explain what’s going on:
1. Facebook has changed its mind about user data privacy and control. The company is certainly pushing users towards being more open than ever before.
2. Facebook was never really serious about privacy, the ban against exporting friends’ information was just a matter of corporate control and privacy was a ruse to justify it.
3. Something else is happening that we don’t know about yet. We’ve contacted Facebook for a response, we’ll update this post if we get one.

That said – this is a really convenient feature. It’s very handy to take a quick gander at someone’s Facebook Wall before calling them on the phone. The ability to do that is going to make Facebook much more important in my every day life. In other words, you should add me as a friend on Facebook so I can put you in my iPhone. (You should also become a fan of ReadWriteWeb on Facebook, while you’re at it.)

Like it or not, honest or not, this is going to make Facebook much more useful for those of us who operate in the public sphere. Even most of us though, and certainly the bulk of the hundreds of millions of people who signed up for Facebook-the-private-social-network, do have some use for a degree of privacy. Each time another bit of that is taken away, it makes you wonder how long the rest of it will last for.

Next: What’s coming next to the Facebook iPhone app? This Summer developer Joe Hewitt named 3 things that were coming soon and this update includes 2 of them. What’s still on the list? Read on to find out.

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Vanity Apps: The Next Big Thing For the iPhone?

Thanks to the recent proliferation of do-it-yourself iPhone app services, the next big thing in Apple’s App Store might just be vanity apps. Take, for example, Appsfire’s Ouriel Ohayon, who just announced the launch of his own iPhone app. Ohayon used Odiogo Apps to create this personalized app. Odiogo, which mostly focuses on providing text-to-speech services for news sites and blogs, allows users to add RSS feeds, Twitter updates and photos from Flickr to its apps.

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Odiogo’s apps also feature the company’s text-to-speech services, offline access and advertising support. For now, though, potential users still have to contact the company’s sales department to get their own apps and the price of these customized apps isn’t clear.

More Clutter or a Great Opportunity?

As the barrier of entry for creating customized iPhone apps continues to fall, chances are that we will see more and more vanity apps in the App Store. On the one hand, this could clutter the store with relatively useless apps. On the other hand, it could also provide a new source of income for independent bloggers who could use the apps to sell more advertising inventory or even charge a small fee for the app itself. Even bloggers with a small fanbase could reap the benefits of having their own iPhone apps.

The question, however, is if users are actually interested in installing a single-purpose iPhone app that only gives them access to the content of one blogger. In the end, these apps are less flexible than a good mobile RSS reader.

Apps like this probably make more sense for large multi-author blogs that publish a lot of content every day. On the other hand, the idea of being able to point their friends to their iPhone apps will surely prove to be irresistible for many people.

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LinkedIn’s New iPhone App: The 3 Worst Things About It

Business social network LinkedIn made a major upgrade to its iPhone app tonight but coming from a service with such incredible potential, there remain some major disappointments.

The new app looks a lot like a less elegant, less customizable version of the Facebook iPhone app. There are a variety of useful new features, from faster invite sending to importing contact info to your phone, but the app remains based on the company’s mistaken desire of late to be your all-in-one social media messaging platform. It also fails to deliver the features that would make it most useful. If you’re looking for good news about new features, you can find it in the self-flattering company blog post. Here are the three things that disappoint me most about this new app; hopefully it’s a work in progress and will improve soon.

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What’s The Most Important Kind of LinkedIn Update? People Getting New Jobs!

For some reason LinkedIn will not deliver you a simple feed of the new jobs that contacts of yours have taken. Not by email, not by RSS, not through its fancy new API and not on this new iPhone app. Update feeds are cluttered with imported ephemera from Twitter and all too often job changes are obscured behind the phrase “contact X has updated their profile.” They have? How did they update it? It’s maddening.

LinkedIn says it’s working on solving this problem, but it doesn’t seem to be a very high priority. Prompting users to click more and engage with a wider variety of message types seem more in line with LinkedIn’s strategy. The company clearly wants to be Facebook and Twitter for the business world – not just a place where we all go to find out essential work information that we use while doing other forms of social networking on other sites better suited for things like short, trivial messages.

Importing Contacts to Your Phone is Rudimentary

Perhaps LinkedIn isn’t to blame for this, but the ability to import LinkedIn contacts’ info onto your phone is rendered a whole lot less useful by the inability to merge that info with existing contacts. Say you’ve got someone’s name and phone number on your phone already – it’s a headache to pull in a person’s LinkedIn profile info and then merge the two manually.

Of course your phone number isn’t an optional field you can fill out on LinkedIn, so all those imported contacts will be people you’re unable to call. You won’t even be able to look them up on LinkedIn again from your phone’s contact list – peoples’ LinkedIn profile page URLs aren’t included in the contact info that gets imported.

There’s No Push Notifications

This is a professional application that people use on the iPhone – shouldn’t it include push notifications? LinkedIn is used by tons of sales people, for example – you know they’d like to get some of these updates pushed to them. As a writer, I would too.

Look at it this way. Last month my LinkedIn contact Tara Hunt changed her profile to show that she’s founded a new company called Shwowp. I want to know that, preferably right away. But I don’t know about it until a month later because I didn’t want to fish through a bunch of cross-posted Twitter updates inside LinkedIn to catch Tara’s news and I didn’t want to click through 3 screens starting with the bland “Tara Hunt has updated her profile” in order to see if she’s happened to change jobs or just noted a new personal interest on her profile page.

When someone who has accepted my contact request changes jobs, I want a push notification about what the new job is and the option to call them on the phone immediately to discuss it. That doesn’t seem like too much to ask and that’s when I’ll know that LinkedIn is really serving my professional life.

Update: LinkedIn’s Adam Nash, author of the company’s announcement blog post, responded on Twitter saying: “we’ve discussed all three of these enhancements internally. Some are harder than others. All in the queue…Rest assured, we wouldn’t have broken out profile updates into its own module if we didn’t have big plans for it. ”

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