Marketplace Tech Report^®

Dutch Airline, KLM has recently started a program that lets you upload your Facebook and LinkedIn profiles when you purchase a ticket. You can also view other people’s social profiles and, in theory, find a compatible seatmate.

From the New York Times:

On a flight from Amsterdam to São Paulo this week, for example, you could have chosen the director of a British answering service, who has a passion for reggae and jazz; an Italian chemical engineer fluent in Dutch, English, Spanish and Portuguese; or a Norwegian alternative-rock fan en route to visit family in Argentina.

Who knows, maybe this will lead to new sections in your social profiles: “I enjoy gabbing incessantly when I’m nervous, I smack my gum, and frequent user of airsickness bags.”  That profile actually might get me a row all to myself.

Data throttling is the new norm for wireless carriers. If you’re in the top five percent of data consumers on AT&T unlimited data plan, for example, you might find your connection speeds severely slowed after you reached a certain limit. According to a recent study by wireless bill analytics firm, Validas, the bar that’s being set for that limit doesn’t have a set place.

The New York Times reports:

For Verizon bills, the top 5 percent of data customers on unlimited plans  used nearly the same amount of data as those on tiered plans. And for AT&T, the top 5 percent of customers on unlimited data plans used only slightly more data than those on limited plans.

What’s seems to be happening is that, if you have an unlimited plan and you reach data amounts equal to that of limited plans, your carrier starts to apply the throttle. And then there’s this riddle of the Sphinx, as the Times again reports:

Validas raises the question of whether the carriers were throttling simply because they want unlimited data customers to switch to limited, tiered plans. It is a befuddling question because it could potentially cost customers more over time. After all, how can a network be out of capacity if it can serve a customer on a limited plan without throttling if the heaviest data users on both limited and unlimited plans are consuming roughly the same amount of data?

Expect this topic to bubble to the surface as the Mobile World Congress conference gets underway in Barcelona next week.

Yesterday, a Chinese court in Shanghai has temporarily lifted the sales ban on iPads. Apple persuaded the court to suspend the ban until a hearing in a higher court is heard February 29th (that’s probably somewhere in the millions of dollars in iPad sales). Anyway, the saga will continue next week.

Meanwhile, the same company, Proview Technologies, that filed the suit in China, has now filed one in the U.S. Proview claims that Apple used deceptive practices when it bought the iPad name back in 2009. Allegedly when Apple approached Proview for the rights to the name, it was because there was a division of Apple called “IP Application Development Ltd.” (IPAD), and there was never any mention of touch screens or apps or total world domination.

Both parties have good reason to settle the dispute quickly, which might end in an out-of-court settlement.

From Reuters:

At stake for Apple is its sales and shipments in China, where its CEO Tim Cook said it was merely scratching the surface. Debt-laden Proview International, meanwhile, needs to come up with a viable rescue plan before mid-2012 or else it faces delisting from the Hong Kong stock exchange.

It might not have been just the name that got the video game app known as Joustin’ Beaver in trouble. It might be the fact that the titular character, the beaver in question, bears an uncanny resemblance to Canadian pop star Justin Bieber. The fact that Biebs rarely jousts and is not a beaver was not enough to prevent his management from sending A STRONGLY WORDED LETTER to the app developers telling them to take it down. The developer is holding its ground though.

From TechCrunch:

RC3 has responded: “The game is a parody and is protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution. Nowhere in the game is Justin Bieber’s name, photo, image, or life story mentioned.”

I’ll admit my bias upfront. Whenever I see a generation of people characterized using only a letter, I get prohibitively dubious. People are people, you know, and have disparate interests and tendencies. But I’ll report the news here even while I ridicule it,
Nielsen is out with a new report on people and how online they are. I read about the report online, where evidently my letter of generation (X) spends a lot of time.

From USA Today:

- The Internet generation is living up to its billing. Those ages 18-34, dubbed "Generation C" by Nielsen because they are constantly connected, make up 23% of the U.S. population but account for 39% of smartphone owners and 33% of tablet owners.
- Generation X slightly nudges out the younger Gen C netizens on social networks, blogs and online video. Those ages 35-49 make up 28% of social networks and blog visitors and online video watchers, while the 18-34 age group comes in next, making up 27%.

Also, men and women are 50-50 on smartphone ownership, men own slightly more tablets, and women spend more time on social networks.

Remember that book, Everything Bad Is Good For You? There may be something to that, at least if we are to believe a flood of recent stories. In the last several days, we’ve heard how eating dessert for breakfast makes you lose weight, how posting party pictures for public display on Facebook can help you land a job, and today brings news that playing World of Warcraft can make you smarter. But only if you’re older and not very smart to begin with.

From the LA Times:

Researchers asked 39 adults ages 60 to 77 to play World of Warcraft for roughly two hours a day over a two-week period. They gave the test group a cognitive exam before the two-week period began, and again after the two weeks were up. They also had a control group of adults who did not play the game.
The researchers found that two weeks of playing World of Warcraft didn't have much effect on the cognitive abilities of the people who had scored well on the baseline test, but there was significant improvement in both spatial ability and focus for the participants who scored low on the initial test.

The researchers tried to get funding from Blizzard, the company that makes the online roll playing game but was unsuccessful.

For as incredible and game changing and amazing as the Apple app platform is, there’s no getting around that navigation for the thing just sucks. You can generally find the top ten in a number of categories, and some “featured” apps that seem sort of arbitraty, but after that things fall off pretty rapidly. You can’t, for instance, go to the Angry Birds app and then find other apps that are similar or were bought by the same customers the way you might at Amazon.
That may change. Apple has acquired a company called Chomp, which is a search startup.

From Bloomberg:

Chomp’s software lets people search through the hundreds of thousands of downloadable applications available for Apple’s iPad and iPhone, as well as gadgets running Google Inc.’s Android operating system. Users can enter queries such as “tip calculator” or “kids games” to get different options of apps that fit those descriptions.

Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.), the Starsky and Hutch of online privacy legislation, say they will keep plugging on their Do Not Track Kids legislation, despite the recently announced initiative by several web companies to block tracking on the web. Barton said that he welcomes the new initiative from the Digital Advertising Alliance, supported by Google, Microsoft, and others, but “without the adoption of this list of ‘best practices’ by Internet companies, the new guidelines will not be enforceable. The absence of an enforcement mechanism means consumers remain unprotected. That is why I feel Congress must act to ensure transparency among Internet companies that engage in data collection and usage.”

Do Not Track Kids would offer an erase button that parents could hit to erase information gathered about kids.

I think Barton and Markey’s persistence here is interesting and points to what was likely a strategy by the DAA coming out of President Obama’s announced Privacy Bill of Rights. If industry can demonstrate that it can self-regulate, it makes for an argument against being regulated by congress. Seems like it might not be working.

Everyone was kind of amazed last September when scientists at CERN identified neutrinos that appeared to travel faster than the speed of light and jump about 30 nanoseconds into the future. There was a lot of talk about how this kind of blew up a lot of what we thought we knew about the fundamental laws of physics. A second test in November appeared to more or less agree with the earlier finding.

While it’s hard to grasp the ramifications of what that all means, it’s somewhat easier to grasp what might actually be the problem: screwy computer equipment. CERN now says there were two possible defects.

According to ZDNet:

"The first possible effect concerns an oscillator used to provide the time stamps for GPS synchronisations. It could have led to an overestimate of the neutrino's time of flight," CERN said in a statement.

"The second concerns the optical fibre connector that brings the external GPS signal to the OPERA master clock, which may not have been functioning correctly when the measurements were taken. If this is the case, it could have led to an underestimate of the time of flight of the neutrinos," the research facility added

George Harrison’s son, Dhani, inherited a pretty cool collection of guitars from his Beatle-dad, and now, so did you (kind of). The younger Harrison is releasing an app for iPads today that showcases, in great detail, seven of his dad’s guitars. 360 degree, detailed pictures of the instruments accompany audio clips of the quiet Beatle talking about playing the guitars and how he acquired them. The app also features clips of songs on which the instruments were used. For the Beatle-maniac or guitar geek, the app’s $9.99 price tag is a drop in the bucket.

Speaking with the New York Times, Dhani Harrison says, “Paintings should be in museums and should be able to be seen. Instruments should have to be played every once in a while. Otherwise they’ll perish.” He plans to update the app with more of his father’s guitars, and he’s thinking about stepping outside the Fab-Four box and giving the same app treatment to Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townshend, and Angus Young. Rock on!

It’s not always easy for the good people of Kansas City. The Chiefs don’t win much, the Royals barely win at all, and you can only eat so much barbecue before you feel a little puny. But at least they might be getting TV service from, of all places, Google. The company has applied for permission to offer Kansas Citians (Citizens?) a video service that would more or less replace traditional cable TV and package it up with internet access that it already plans to offer later this year.

Says the Wall Street Journal:

Google could launch its TV service as soon as a month or two from now, according to a media executive currently involved in negotiations to license channels to the service. The service would offer subscribers live TV, as well as on-demand and online access to TV channels, similar to services from major cable operators, this person said.

While the plan for now is restricted to Kansas City, this person said Google had discussed expanding it to other markets that Verizon Communications Inc. hasn't entered with its FiOS fiber-optic TV service. It remains unclear whether Google intends to do so, but it would have that right under at least some of the deals it is currently negotiating with TV channels, this person said.

Now, let’s think about what might be happening here. Google getting into home Internet AND what would essentially be cable TV but without that cable coming out of your wall. Suddenly, all those frustrating efforts to make Google TV don’t sound entirely as stupid.

Or so some speculation might lead you to believe. Twilio is a cloud communications platform and it has a new software developers kit available to app makers. The kit lets an app run Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) calls out of any app.

GigaOm says:

This should help give rise to even more VoIP apps that can offer free or cheap Wi-Fi calling and even replace traditional phones. But it can also can help transform existing apps that want to add voice interactivity.

GigaOm interviewed Twilio product manager Thomas Schiavone:

Schiavone said the SDK could be used in gaming apps to help competing players communicate in real time or through voice messages. Or a commerce company could use it to add customer service support to their shopping apps. Perhaps, a developer could build a social phone connected to Facebook and Twitter that allows people to just dial using names. A call center could just arm its workers with an app and an iPad to handle calls. Twilio Client for iOS offers support for presence detection and also has tap-to-call features within apps that can feed information to CRM, advertising or analytic partners.

In more mysterious and less functional iPad news, the Air Force abruptly canceled plans to buy up a whole mess of iPads for pilots. 3000 iPad 2’s were on order and were meant to replace the 40 pound flight bag of charts and graphs that pilots normally carry. No reason was given although the Air Force says it’s still interested in using the iPads down the line somehow, somewhere.

Now, this is all fine, stuff happens, whatever. BUT! What about all those iPads being used as flight bags on commercial flights right now? Did the Air Force need the pads to do something that commercial jets don’t do? Or are all of those commercial pilots flying with faulty equipment? Could my pilot get lost? 

The other day, we told you about how Microsoft Office may be coming to the iPad. But why stop there? Why not drag the whole dang Windows on over to iPad? Someone’s doing it. OnLive is an app for iPad. You subscribe for five bucks a month, and, according to the New York Times’ David Pogue, you get speeds of 1000 times faster than normal and a fully functional Windows desk top.

He’s gone bananas for this thing, look:

It’s a tiny app — about 5 megabytes. When you open it, you see a standard Windows 7 desktop, right there on your iPad. The full, latest versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Internet Explorer and Adobe Reader are set up and ready to use — no installation, no serial numbers, no pop-up balloons nagging you to update this or that. It may be the least annoying version of Windows you’ve ever used.

If you subscribe (rather than just download), you get Adobe Flash. On an iPad. Mortal enemies joined as friends! I mean, David Lee Roth is recording with Van Halen now so who the hell knows, nothing makes any sense any more.

Pogue’s especially whipped up about the back end:

That’s pretty impressive — but not as impressive as what’s going on behind the scenes. The PC that’s driving your iPad Windows experience is, in fact, a “farm” of computers at one of three data centers thousands of miles away. Every time you tap the screen, scroll a list or type on the on-screen keyboard, you’re sending signals to those distant computers. The screen image is blasted back to your iPad with astonishingly little lag.

Other write-ups on the app are a little less effusive but everyone seems to agree that it works. It’s a perfect solution if you somehow hate everything about how Apple works but, possibly in a fit of self-flagellation, bought an iPad. Weirdo.

It’s a big day for privacy. Shhhhhhh! App store proprietors Amazon, Apple, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and Research in Motion (RIM) all agreed to a new privacy deal  in California announced by State Attorney General, Kamala D. Harris. According to the New York Times: “The agreement will force developers to post conspicuous privacy policies detailing what personal information they plan to obtain and how they will  use it. It also compels app store providers like Apple and Google to offer ways for users to report apps that do not comply.” That’s a pretty quick response, considering the Federal Trade Commission issued a report just a week ago asking app makers to step up their privacy policies. The FTC is especially concerned with information about children, who have access to apps, being transmitted to app makers.

Again from the Times: “In a statement, Ms. Harris’s office said that only 5 percent of mobile apps offer a privacy policy, leaving smartphone owners in the dark about what developers, advertisers and analytic services do with their ‘location, contacts, identity, messages and photos.’” Harris will reconvene with the companies mentioned in six months to see whether they are in compliance.

That’s what the Obama Administration is purposing in a report released today calling for a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, which in part, asks search engine providers like Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo! to add a “do not track” (DNT) button to their browsers. Those three tech giants have already said they will comply with others sure to follow. We all know, or at least we should, that browsers can track your web surfing habits. That’s how a company like Google makes its billions - it knows that you looked up the price of a new catcher’s mitt, then headed over to update your Thurman Munson fan page, before clicking on the Baseball Hall of Fame site*. And what do you know, up pops an add to buy Yankees season tickets on the sidebar of your GMail.

Adding a button is moot, however, if advertisers don’t sign on, because if you think about it, they are the ones who really want to follow you and find out your browsing habits to sell you more stuff. The report also says that advertisers will comply with DNT within nine months. So I guess we’re having a baby, America, and that baby’s name will be Privacy... or maybe More Control Over Online Privacy, but really that’s kind of long, so lets just call her Sally.

Keep in mind that this is all theoretical right now. The Administration is already working with Congress to draft legislation adopting the Privacy Bill of Rights, but for now companies are free to comply or ignore it.

*Can someone please tell me why Thurman Munson isn’t in the Hall of Fame? That’s kind of ridiculous, if you care about such things.

As mentioned in our story today, Verizon is looking to buy up unused spectrum from cable companies. Critics, including T-Mobile, charge that this would give Verizon an unfair competitive advantage. 

The FCC wants to know what you think. 

I’ve put together so much furniture from IKEA, that I’ve actually had the thought of being one of those guys that helps other people assemble their dressers, chairs, and bookcases. The thing that always stops me is that, if you factor the time it will take me to disassemble that MALM bed because I put one of the baseboards on backwards, I’m really not very good at putting IKEA furniture together. Perhaps help is on the way. IKEA is rolling out a series of how-to assembly videos to replace/compliment its sometimes-confusing, wordless paper instructions. No speaking in the videos, so they’re cross-cultural, and you get to listen to some upbeat piano music.

The MALM makers in this video finish the job in four and a half minutes. Good time, indeed. I think I missed the part where they get in an argument over who’s supposed to be pounding in the wooden dowels and who’s supposed to be reading the instructions. And I don’t think they quite captured the I’m-so-frustrated-I’m-going-to-take-a-two-hour-nap part of the assembly. Maybe I need to watch it again.

When Michael Phelps won his record-breaking eight gold medals at the 2008 Olympic Games, some of the races were decided by 100ths of seconds. Think about that. Athletes are so finely tuned that just one, tiny misstep could cost them the gold. Working towards this year’s games in London, some athletes are turning to technology for an extra edge. The BBC reports that bioscience could be the x-factor: “It allows researchers to get really up close and personal with an athlete's body reactions, providing a much better understanding of physiology and biomechanics.” Stats like heart rate, muscle fatigue, stress levels, and perspiration are wirelessly monitored by coaches and computers to help athletes shave milliseconds and build strength.

Even if you’re not an Olympic athlete, you can still get in on the action. Fans are being increasingly invited to share in their favorite athlete’s stats by getting real-time feeds and comparing heart rates. Now I’ll finally be able to see how similar Phelps is to me. I’m pretty sure filling my mouth with cheese whiz will give my heart a similar shock as splashing out a 200 meter butterfly.

Comcast will begin streaming TV shows and movies this week. It’s the latest in a growing list of Netflix competitors (thinks everyone except Comcast). The service will be free to Comcast Triple Play subscribers; otherwise, it’ll set you back $4.99 a month. And what do you get? TV shows and movies from NBC, ABC, Sony Pictures, Warner Bros., and kids shows like Paddington Bear from Cookie Jar Entertainment. So, nothing mind-blowing, but it’s a start. And if you’re already paying for Comcast, the when, where and how you watch your stories just got a huge lift.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Comcast said the new service isn't a Netflix competitor, but a way to enhance its other offerings to keep viewers from cutting off cable subscriptions, and to sign up for pricier tiers of service.

Let’s see, who’s playing this game now:.. Verizon and Redbox announced a streaming/DVD partnership, then there was Dish Network, which bought Blockbuster’s streaming site, Amazon is still slugging it out, Hulu is a big contender too. All this posturing and competition to Netflix might also be positioning for when Apple comes out with its iTV, or whatever it’s going to be called, which is rumored to happen sometime this year.