Kids Use Mobile Phones Too Much? Send 'Em To A Mental Hospital
from the seems-a-bit-extreme dept
We've noted in the past the, well, addiction some people have to calling any sort of regular usage of something an "addiction." It's quite common with all sorts of technologies. Often there doesn't seem to be any actual evidence of an addiction -- or, if there is, it usually becomes clear that the problem is somewhere else, and the people simply turn to technology to avoid that other issue in their lives. Either way, it still seems a bit extreme to hear that, in Spain, parents have sent two children, aged 12 and 13, to a mental hospital to try to help "cure them" of their mobile phone "addiction." As parents, what was wrong with just taking away their mobile phone?Filed Under: addiction, mental hospital, mobile phones, uk
Microsoft Seeks Patent On Virtual Graffiti Years After The Idea Is In Use
from the a-little-late-to-the-party dept
theodp points us to a new patent application from Microsoft for the concept of "virtual graffiti" that someone could leave for mobile devices connected to a real geographic area. As theodp notes: "Here's what passes for inventive these days in Redmond: 'Mary, while at Tom's house, may create graffiti on her cell FVG-enabled phone that says, 'Party Here Friday Night!' and make the graffiti available to all her friends. Then any of Mary's friends (with their FVG-enabled devices) passing by Tom's house would become aware of the graffiti associated with the house and be able to view it, thus becoming aware of the planned party.' Microsoft proudly boasts that the technology can also be used to shout 'Subscriber!' to newspaper boys as they pass customers' houses and exclaim 'Great lunch joint!' to those passing by a restaurant."If that doesn't sound particularly new or non-obvious that's because it's not. We wrote about nearly an identical system that was already in use at Cornell University in August of 2003, more than three years before this Microsoft patent application was filed. Even in writing about that story, we noted that there were a few similar systems already out there and that "people have been talking about such things for ages"). How this could possibly be considered new or non-obvious seems like a reasonable question. Hopefully the patent examiner agrees and rejects this application.
Filed Under: patents, prior art, virtual graffiti
Companies: microsoft
Forget DRM, Microsoft Looks To Build Digital Manners Management
from the mind-your-manners dept
If there's one thing companies should understand by now, it's the idea that restricting people from doing stuff that they want to do tends to backfire, badly. Just look at every attempt to create "DRM." Well, apparently Microsoft is trying to create a different sort of digital restrictions policy: one based on hard-coded "manners." A few folks sent in notice that Microsoft has applied for a patent on a system for "device manner policy" (DMP). Basically, such a DMP system would restrict the use of certain features in certain locations. So, for example, a mobile phone that has the DMP technology might not be able to ring in a movie theater, but would instead shift to vibrate. Or a digital camera or cameraphone would automatically disable the ability to take photos in a museum. Really, this is just another form of DRM, restricting what people can do with the technology they own. While it's nice to think that technology could somehow block out rude uses of devices, the opportunity for problems and abuse seems quite high. Wouldn't we be better off focusing on social norms to get people to learn when it is and is not appropriate to use certain technologies?Filed Under: digital manner policy, manners, patents
Companies: microsoft
iPhone Pricing Details: Getting iPhones To Unlock Just Got A Whole Lot Trickier
from the can't-play-that-game-any-more dept
When we wrote about the iPhone pricing immediately after the Steve Jobs keynote, it wasn't entirely clear what the details were, and if AT&T/Apple had shifted to a typical carrier-subsidized model. However, the details quickly became clear. Indeed, Apple and AT&T ditched the deal they had last year, whereby Apple actually received a cut of AT&T's service fees. Instead, AT&T is buying the devices directly from Apple and then selling them (at a loss) to customers who will need to sign up for a more expensive service and a two-year contract (rather than the old one-year contract). Basically, this is back to the traditional model of mobile phone sales -- which Apple had suggested was a thing of a past just a year ago.Either way, though, the deal works out fine for Apple. It still gets the full price it needs to get on the iPhones and doesn't have to worry about recouping service fees from folks who unlock iPhones. AT&T, on the other hand, now becomes a lot more reliant on service fees, first to make up for the loss on the device sale, and then to show growth in its 3G network usage. To that end, it appears that AT&T has totally ditched the old model where you could buy an iPhone and "activate" it on your own. No more. Now you have to both buy and activate the phone in stores. You can't order the phones online and have them delivered to be self-activated. In Engadget's post, the writer seems confused by this, and quotes AT&T's bogus claim that it did away with self-activation because the company "found that many others wanted to complete purchase and activation in one step so they could walk out of the AT&T store with their iPhone up and running." If that were the case, they could have just added in-store activation, without removing the option for self-activation.
The real reason seems pretty obvious: if you have to both buy and activate the phones at the same time and they require a two year contract, it's a lot trickier to get your hands on an iPhone for unlocking purposes. Since the full process is supposed to happen at once, it seems unlikely that stores will be letting people walk out the door with an iPhone that doesn't also have a contract. Those hundreds of thousands of unactivated iPhones that disappeared into China? Not so easy this time around (of course, you'll also note that the new iPhone will be available in 70 countries, so they're trying to stamp out the issue from the supply side too). Yes, there will still be 3G iPhones out there that can be unlocked, but that market is going to dry up significantly and cost a lot more.
Filed Under: iphone, pricing, subsidies, unlocking
Companies: apple, at&t
The Meaningless WiMax Patent Pool
from the somebody's-missing.... dept
There are some folks who believe that the solution to patent problems is to just have everyone who claims to have a patent on a certain technology throw it into a "patent pool" and then those who use the technology pay up a fee that gets divided up among pool members. It sounds nice, but in practice, it almost never works. Setting up a patent pool actually encourages the wrong behavior: it encourages plenty of other patent holders to claim they deserve to be a part of the pool, and if they're not included, they start suing like crazy. Also, it encourages companies to try to get any kind of patent that might get them included in a pool, leading to all sorts of crazy claims. It's the exact opposite of the type of behavior that should be encouraged.So, don't read too much into the fact that a bunch of companies in the WiMax space have agreed to put together a patent pool under the amusingly inaccurately named "Open Patent Alliance." The companies involved, Cisco, Intel, Samsung, Sprint, Alcatel-Lucent, and Clearwire are all betting big on WiMax deployments, so they know it's in their best interest to get the licensing out of the way. But you'll notice that there are a lot of companies missing -- including Wi-LAN who has been claiming that it owns all the key patents over WiMax technology for years. The patent pool sounds nice, but it's certainly not going to diminish the number of patent lawsuits that arise over WiMax technology. If anything, it's just going to make all those other companies even angrier.
Filed Under: patent pools, wimax
Companies: alcatel-lucent, cisco, clearwire, intel, samsung, sprint, wi-lan
iPhone Shows That Cheaper Phones Are Still Important
from the price-is-important dept
The iPhone has received plenty of well-deserved (and plenty of not-so-well-deserved) hype and press over the past year or so, but one of the key points that Apple tried to make when it launched was that a premium phone deserved a premium price -- and people would pay for it, even without a massive subsidy from a mobile operator, as is typical of other phones. And, while there definitely was a huge crush of Apple fans who had to buy the iPhone early, the fact that Steve Jobs quickly lopped $200 off the price, just months after it was introduced, suggested that the number of people willing to pay that kind of premium wasn't as much as expected. In today's keynote, as was widely predicted, Jobs launched the new 3G iPhones with another $200 cut off the price, so the base model with 8gigs is now $199 -- down into the range of your typical subsidized smartphone.While the iPhone has done plenty to get people to rethink mobile interfaces, it seems clear that Apple may have initially misjudged how people would respond to premium-priced phones. Jobs had promised 10 million iPhones sold in the first 18 months, and has reached about 5 million in the first 12 months (nothing to sneeze at, obviously). However, to get up to that 10 million number, he had to drop the price to be competitive with other phones. It's a smart move (though, it's not clear if the $199 is subsidized or not), given the market conditions, but beyond the lessons that everyone will talk about concerning Steve Jobs' strategy in launching the iPhone, the most interesting of all may be how the initial pricing structure backfired -- but was changed so quickly.
Filed Under: iphones, pricing, steve jobs, strategy
Companies: apple
T-Mobile Sues Starbucks For Over Eager Switch To Free WiFi
from the that-wasn't-what-we-bargained-for... dept
Back in February, Starbucks surprised an awful lot of people by signing up to use AT&T's WiFi offering, ending the exclusive deal it had for many, many years with T-Mobile (and Mobilestar before T-Mobile purchased that company). Part of the AT&T deal was that it would offer some amount of free WiFi -- something T-Mobile/Starbucks never did. There was some early confusion about the deal concerning whether T-Mobile would continue offering service and how the two services would overlap. It turns out that it wasn't just confusing to us reading about it -- it was confusing to T-Mobile as well.T-Mobile has now sued Starbucks over the transition, saying that the company has gone well beyond what the two companies had agreed to. The original plan was that T-Mobile would gradually transition the network to AT&T, and the companies would work together to make sure things worked well for customers of each company. However, just recently, Starbucks pushed forward with the plan to offer some number of "free" WiFi hours to AT&T customers -- much to the annoyance of T-Mobile, who says most of the WiFi equipment in use is still T-Mobile's, and the company isn't getting paid at all for the free hours (an interesting question could be whether or not AT&T is getting paid for that usage).
Basically, the infrastructure transition has barely begun, and Starbucks is already acting as though it's complete, shifting over to the business model provided by AT&T, without having that work within the parameters of T-Mobile's model. While the legal result will almost certainly come down to contractual terms, the real issue may be that this suggests the promised "smooth transition" from T-Mobile to AT&T may not be very smooth at all. T-Mobile is going to have less and less incentive to make sure that the network really works all that well, especially if it feels that it's being cheated out of money for the use of its network.
Filed Under: contracts, wifi
Companies: at&t, starbucks, t-mobile
Is It Fair Game To Track People's Movements Via Their Mobile Phones?
from the ethical-questions dept
For many years, there have been efforts under way to use data from mobile phones to determine where people are or how they travel. Often this is used with the idea of getting useful automobile traffic info (if mobile phones are moving slowly, so are their cars). However, this has resulted in some privacy concerns, with people wondering why their data is being used in this way. And stories about how the boss of a big Chinese telco regularly uses the data to spy on people's location probably don't make people any more comfortable.However, some researchers worked with an unnamed mobile phone company to get a ton of this type of data in order to get an idea of how people move around. While the researchers seem to think the results are surprising, they don't seem all that unexpected. Basically, people tend to just go to a few regular places rather than travel randomly around -- and most people don't travel far from home all that often. I'm somewhat surprised that anyone would have expected otherwise.
What may be more interesting, though, is the brewing controversy over how this data was obtained and whether or not it violated privacy rights or ethics rules. The researchers note that the data was totally anonymized, but we've all seen how any anonymized dataset can be unanonymized with a little work. In some ways, this goes back to a post we had last year from Tom Lee, questioning whether we needed new privacy norms when it came to things like mobile phone tracking. What does seem likely, however, is that we're only going to hear of more and more cases where such tracking data is used, and such questions about privacy and morality probably won't hold much weight next to the desire to get and use that kind of data.
Filed Under: ethics, mobile phones, movement studies, privacy, tracking
Verizon Wireless Finally Buying Alltel
from the get-a-room-already dept
It's only been rumored for about four years, but it looks like Verizon Wireless is finally buying Alltel. It's yet another merger in the space, with this one letting Verizon leap over AT&T to declare itself the largest national carrier. Considering the space, I'm sure there will soon be a flurry of "who's next?" articles showing up -- though most of the big obvious mergers are now out of the way. One assumes this should also mean the end of the ridiculous lawsuit Verizon Wireless had filed against Alltel for misleading advertising.Filed Under: mergers, mobile phones
Companies: alltel, verizon wireless
