WiredPen

• Adobe Releases Three Public Betas (sorta): Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Soundbooth are available to test ONLY for 48 hours unless you already own CS3. So Adobe really only wants feedback from current customers, not potential customers.
• Randstad USA reports that the four components of the US workforce — Gen X, Gen Y, Baby Boomers and Matures — “rarely interact with one another and often do not recognize each other’s skills or work ethic.” Interesting words in the “Top Ranked Terms Used to Describe Coworkers in Same Generational Cohort” table.
• Gorilla Nation, the world’s largest online ad rep firm, is now representing the
  online ad inventory for Horseland.com, a multiplayer game and community set in a virtual world targeting girls ages 8-18.
• Frost & Sullivan champion pre-paid and “credit-challenged” (ahem) market segments due to the “mobile communications market … fast approaching saturation.”

Well, yeah, it can. That’s a “doh.”

The NYT’s headline writer asks this question to promo a short article in Sunday’s business section … as though this were something novel. Or hard to do. It’s neither and is common in Japan. In 2006 about 6-in-10 mobile customers in Japan used mobile coupons more than once a month.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’m giving two presentations on Saturday at a Washington state high school, where I’ve been told the firewall will block my access not only to YouTube but to news sites like the Seattle PI and Times. So I thought I’d check into laptop data plans: surprise, they’re all* priced (basically) at the same exorbitant rate: 5GB throughout is $60 a month; all “smaller” rates are $40 per month and are 40 or 50 MB. I suppose that’s where they are arguing that they aren’t colluding?

* AT&T, Nextel/Sprint, Verizon. T-Mobile doesn’t offer this. Screenshots below the fold.

The eyebrow-raising part isn’t just the apparent price collusion: it’s the order-of-magnitude difference in some European prices, coupled with Europe’s much faster data networks.

Let’s compare, shall we, with Vodaphone UK: £15 a month (aka about $7.50 $30.00) for 3 GB usage when bundled. And it gets better (or worse, you choose). Speeds in the UK? “download speeds up to 7.2Mbps.” Speeds in the US? AT&T doesn’t tell you:

Read the rest of this entry »

The Khaleej Times reports that there are now five Middle East undersea cable that have been cut. The first, only now reported, was the Flag Telcom FALCON cable on 23 January, one week before the latest round. (tip)

Here they are:

• SeaMeWe-4 (South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4) near Penang, Malaysia (nd)
• FLAG near the Dubai coast (1 Feb)
• FLAG Europe-Asia near Alexandria, Egypt (30 Jan)
• SeaMeWe-4, near Alexandria, Egypt (30 Jan)
• Flag FALCON near Bandar Abbas in Iran and (23 Jan)

Mahesh Jaishanker, executive director, Business Development and Marketing, du, said, “The submarine cable cuts in FLAG Europe-Asia cable 8.3km away from Alexandria, Egypt and SeaMeWe-4 affected at least 60 million users in India, 12 million in Pakistan, six million in Egypt and 4.7 million in Saudi Arabia.”

Powered by ScribeFire.

From Yahoo! News: AT&T has a green light to buy 60 percent of the 12MHz spectrum, part of the 700MHz spectrum band that “carries wireless signals three to four times farther than some higher spectrum bands.” In October, the announced terms of sale were US$2.5 billion. The purchase “covers 196 million of the 303 million U.S. residents and includes 72 of the top 100 media markets in the country.” This is separate from the FCC auction in progress. FCC Commissioner Michael Copps voted no.

Powered by ScribeFire.