The Top Moments Of 2010

As I sit here on New Years Eve, I look back on 2010 and several things pop to mind:

• Biggest Fail Of 2010: Skype almost took this title at the last minute. But Apple has this title locked up with their iPhone 4 antenna fiasco. This was handled so poorly on a variety of levels including Steve-O’s insistence that users are just holding the phone wrong, their rather lame explanations, and the whole free bumper thing when things got too hot for Apple. Of course that included some shots at some of their competition which were ill advised as the competition shot back. This will be studied in MBA programs for years to come as an example of how not to handle a crisis.
• Biggest Disruptive Tech Of 2010: Quite simply, it’s the iPad. It’s scared the crap out of the tech world and forced competitors into the tablet space with anything that will even seem like a competitor to the iPad. For as much as Apple screwed up the iPhone 4, they hit a home run with the iPad.
• Biggest Fall From Grace of 2010: RIM. They are in free fall having lost market share to the iPhone and Android phones after being kings of the wolds for so long. Now their only hope is the Playbook. On paper it looks like it may compete with the iPad. We’ll see if that pans out early in 2011. In the meantime, that sucking sound that you are hearing will continue to be coming from Waterloo Ontario.
• Biggest Tech Industry Personality of 2010: Mark Zuckerburg. He’s everywhere. He’s Time’s Man Of The Year. He’s a billionaire because of Facebook. And despite what he says, the movie “The Social Network” has made him more famous. He should be asking for royalties.
• Biggest Tech Story Of 2010: The circus that surrounded that lost iPhone and Gizmodo buying it. Which then resulted in the cops raiding the house of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen. It’s a story that didn’t stop, much like that really bad case of diarrhea that you got from Mexico.
• Biggest Irritant Of 2010: The patent lawsuit. Everybody from Apple, Microsoft, Motorola, HTC, and Nokia are suing each other as well as others for patent infringement as a means to gain marketshare. Uber lame. The good news is that the kids of a lot of lawyers are going to be able to have excellent university educations.
• Biggest Tech Sleaze Of 2010: Mark Hurd. The dude faked expense reports to cover up his “activities.” That led to him leaving HP. But even that became a circus when he went to work for Oracle. Even Oracle CEO Larry Ellison had something to say about this. After a while, hearing about this story seemed like I was reading TMZ as it got more and more sleazy by the day.

That’s the stuff that jumps out at me. What do you have your list? Please post a comment and share your thoughts.

Happy new year!

RIM Says Playbook Battery Issues Are Bogus…. And So Are Rumors Of A Deal With India

Yesterday, I reported that a rumor was circulating around the Interwebs that the Blackberry Playbook might be delayed due to battery life issues. For a change, RIM decided to take the bull by the horns and shot down that rumor:

Any testing or observation of battery life to date by anyone outside of RIM would have been performed using pre-beta units that were built without power management implemented. RIM is on track with its schedule to optimize the BlackBerry PlayBook’s battery life and looks forward to providing customers with a professional grade tablet that offers superior performance with comparable battery life.

And there you have it. The Playbook is on schedule with decent battery life. Do you believe them? I don’t. Until they put out some units for the media to test, I doubt anyone will fully believe them. So how about it RIM? Want to prove me wrong?

Since RIM has appeared to grow a pair, they also took the time to clarify another rumor. Remember the India vs RIM circus? Last I heard, they had a deal. According to RIM, that deal doesn’t include corporate data:

The Economic Times quoted the Indian government note as saying that: “In the final solution proposed by RIM, the decoding will be automatic. Intercepted and decoded data will not travel out of India. RIM has proposed to install [network data analysis systems] in India. In the final solution, intercepted and decoded data will travel between service providers and RIM India.”

RIM, however, called the claim “both false and technologically unfeasible. There will be no change to the security model of BlackBerry Enterprise Service,” the statement said.

Clearly, this statement was meant to keep business customers from running to their local telco to buy iPhones en-masse. But there’s a secondary effect that this statement generates. This statement confirms that all the terrorists need to do is use a Blackberry Enterprise server to evade the snooping of the Indian government, just as I said in this posting. Great going India. You’ve made it easier than ever for the bad guys to drop under the radar.

Still feel secure?

China Bans Non-Chinese Internet Phone Services

In the interest of protecting the domestic phone services, China has pretty much banned Skype and any other Internet phone service that isn’t owned by the Chinese:

The ministry’s move, however, also has business in mind. China has said only state-owned telecoms China Telecom and China Unicom have the right to offer Internet phone services for calls that link telephones and computers.

But few do. The country’s major telecoms have been offering Internet phone services only on a trial basis in four cities, according to Kan Kaili, a director of China VoIP & Digital Telecom Inc., a company that has offered Internet phone services. That leaves the market to the hundreds of small-scale companies have sprung up.

“This notice is actually protecting the telecoms’ traditional voice services,” said Mr. Kan, who is also a professor at the Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications. It’s “obviously a wrong thing, absolutely wrong.”

Lovely. One thing that crossed my mind is that their might be another reason for this. The Chinese might be afraid of VoIP services like Skype because they likely would have difficulty snooping on users.

Thoughts?

Privacy Lawsuits Hit Apple And App Makers

If you use an iPhone, iPad, or an iPod Touch, you may want to pay attention to this. A lawsuit that was filed in U.S. District Court in California says that certain app makers have been sending private information t0 to third-party advertising networks:

The suits said personal information at risk included users’ ages, gender and location along with a unique device identifying number, or UDID, that Apple assigns to all iPhones and iPads. The complaint mirrors the findings of an investigation published this month by the Wall Street Journal that found many of the most popular apps distributed such data to third-party advertising networks without consumers’ knowledge or consent – and at times in violation of Apple’s privacy policy.

“Consumers are engaged in a marketplace, but it’s not a fully informed market,” said Dave Stampley, a lawyer with KamberLaw. “They’re paying with their information and not realizing that.”

Besides Apple, the creators of Backflip, Dictionary.com, Pandora and the Weather Channel have been named in the lawsuits. It’s a safe bet that a lot of other app makers might be doing the same thing. This is one lawsuit that I’ll be watching as users of smartphones really need to be protected from nonsense like this. It would be nice if we could trust the app makers and the smartphone companies. But if they can’t or won’t do the right thing, then governments need to step in. But that doesn’t seem to be the case:

Washington policymakers have struggled to keep pace with the overflowing stream of information transmitted online, and mobile devices such as the iPhone represent the latest frontier. A Senate subcommittee held a hearing on the issue over the summer, and Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) has sought privacy legislation for consumers. Then, in a report this month, the Federal Trade Commission criticized the industry as “too slow” in establishing privacy standards and said it has “failed to provide adequate and meaningful protection.”

The agency also found that consumers are shouldering too much of the burden in protecting themselves, particularly when privacy disclosures, if they exist, can be difficult to find and understand. It suggested allowing consumers to choose how much of their personal information to share by creating a do-not-track system similar to its popular do-not-call list.

Meanwhile, the Commerce Department issued guidelines for balancing consumer privacy with mobile innovation. The report called for a “Privacy Bill of Rights” for consumers and codes of conduct for businesses – and consequences for violating them.

So since government won’t protect consumers, it’s up to consumers to sue. Not the best thing in the world. But if it gets the desired result, then it’s not a bad thing.

Blackberry Playbook Delayed Because Of Battery Life Issues?

Rumor has it that RIM’s iPad killer which is known as the Blackberry Playbook has horrible battery life. Thus it might have to be delayed to fix that:

Sources tell him the tablet currently lasts just a few hours per charge, compared with rivals like Samsung’s Galaxy Tab, which lasts about six, and the iPad, which lasts upward of 10. If true, that’s an untenable situation for RIM, which really needs to hit the mark with the PlayBook, and it may cause a delay of the launch–if only for a bit.

“From our understanding, this [is] likely why RIMM pushed out its launch to the May 2011 quarter,” Wu writes. “Keep in mind that QNX (the OS on which PlayBook runs) wasn’t originally designed for mobile environments but rather for devices like network equipment and automobiles where battery life isn’t as much a constraint.”

That has to be bad news for RIM. They missed the party when it came to the iPhone. In fact, the word is that RIM was in complete and utter disbelief about what the iPhone could do which deliver to customers back in 2007. That delayed it’s response and led to crappy efforts like the Storm. You have to believe that RIM doesn’t want history to repeat itself. If this rumor is true, then this is not going to help on that front.

Skype Explains It’s Recent Outage…. Blame The Buggy Software

In a blog posting today, Skype Chief Information Officer Lars Rabbe explained what happened in regards to that outage that hit the VoIP service recently. Apparently, it was due to a particular version of Skype for Windows that was to blame:

On Wednesday, December 22, a cluster of support servers responsible for offline instant messaging became overloaded. As a result of this overload, some Skype clients received delayed responses from the overloaded servers. In a version of the Skype for Windows client (version 5.0.0152), the delayed responses from the overloaded servers were not properly processed, causing Windows clients running the affected version to crash.

Users running either the latest Skype for Windows (version 5.0.0.156), older versions of Skype for Windows (4.0 versions), Skype for Mac, Skype for iPhone, Skype on your TV, and Skype Connect or Skype Manager for enterprises were not affected by this initial problem.

However, around 50% of all Skype users globally were running the 5.0.0.152 version of Skype for Windows, and the crashes caused approximately 40% of those clients to fail. These clients included 25–30% of the publicly available supernodes, also failed as a result of this problem.

Lovely. He also explained how they would avoid this in the future:

First, we will continue to examine our software for potential issues, and provide ‘hotfixes’ where appropriate, for download or automatic delivery to our users. Since a bug was identified in Skype for Windows (version 5.0.0.152), we had provided a fix to v5.0 of our Windows software prior to the incident, and we will provide further updates for download this week. We will also be reviewing our processes for providing ‘automatic’ updates to our users so that we can help keep everyone on the latest Skype software. We believe these measures will reduce the possibility of this type of failure occurring again.

Second, we are learning the lessons we can from this incident and reviewing our processes and procedures, looking in particular for ways in which we can detect problems more quickly to potentially avoid such outages altogether, and ways to recover the system more rapidly after a failure.

Third, while our Windows v5 software release was subject to extensive internal testing and months of Beta testing with hundreds of thousands of users, we will be reviewing our testing processes to determine better ways of detecting and avoiding bugs which could affect the system.

Finally, as we continue to grow, we will keep under constant review the capacity of our core systems that support the Skype user base, and continue to invest in both capacity and resilience of these systems. An investment program we initiated a year ago has significantly increased our capacity already and more investment is planned for 2011 both to support the ongoing roll out of our paid and enterprise products, and to continue to support the growth of our core Skype software that we know millions of users rely on every day.

We’ll see if that pans out. If that isn’t enough to keep you happy, a credit of $1 is being e-mailed to Skype users. I know this because I got one of these e-mails. Now $1 doesn’t sound like a lot. But in Skype terms, it’s a big credit. This is what the e-mail said:

To our valued customers:

As 2010 draws to a close, I would like to take a moment to thank each of you for your patience, understanding, and support during Skype’s recent outage.

We know how important your Skype conversations are to you and we take any disruption to our service very seriously. We are pleased to confirm that Skype is back to normal allowing you to connect with friends, co-workers, family and loved ones.

As a valued customer of Skype, we would like to offer you a sincere apology and offer you our gratitude with a credit voucher worth a call of more than 30 minutes to a landline in some of our most popular countries, such as USA, UK, Germany, China, Japan. Or spend it however you like on Skype…

Thank you for allowing us at Skype to be a part of your life. May your holidays and the New Year be a time of joy, peace, and health for you and your family.

At least they realize how important Skype is for many people worldwide. Let’s hope this never happens again.

Paul Allen Sues World + Dog…. Again

Remember that rather vague lawsuit that Paul Allen filed against pretty much everyone in the tech world that was tossed out of court for lacking specifics. It’s back. This time it’s got specifics:

In the suit, Mr. Allen’s firm claims four of its patents – chiefly related to the way Web data is sorted and presented – have been infringed by a number of successful companies.

The first patent concerns the generation of data related to information being browsed. Interval claims Google uses this technology to match advertisements from third parties to content being displayed, while AOL’s sites use it to suggest items related to news stories.

Interval claims Apple’s iTunes service uses the technology to suggest music based on a user’s searches, and that eBay Inc., Facebook, Netflix, Yahoo Inc. and Office Depot’s sites have also infringed the patent in the way they direct users to related content.

The second and third patents concern relaying information on a computer screen in a peripheral, unobtrusive manner, such as in an instant messaging box or overlay.

Interval claims its patent has been infringed by features in AOL’s Instant Messenger, Apple’s Dashboard, Google Talk and Gmail Notifier, Google’s Android phone system and Yahoo Widgets.

The fourth patent concerns alerting web browsers to new items of interest based on activity of other users. Interval claims AOL uses this technology on its shopping sites, while Apple’s iTunes uses it to recommend music.

Interval claims eBay, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, Staples Inc., Yahoo and Google’s YouTube all have infringed the patent in the way they suggest content to users.

This seriously sounds like a major cash grab. To think that the co-founder of Microsoft has been reduced to a patent troll is really sad. As always, the only winners will be the lawyers. That too is sad.

<sigh>

Skype Goes Down… World + Dog Freak

If you use Skype for VoIP purposes, it is a safe bet that you weren’t using it today as the VoIP service went down. A blog post has the details:

Skype isn’t a network like a conventional phone or IM network – instead, it relies on millions of individual connections between computers and phones to keep things up and running. Some of these computers are what we call ‘supernodes’ – they act a bit like phone directories for Skype. If you want to talk to someone, and your Skype app can’t find them immediately (for example, because they’re connecting from a different location or from a different device) your computer or phone will first try to find a supernode to figure out how to reach them.

Under normal circumstances, there are a large number of supernodes available. Unfortunately, today, many of them were taken offline by a problem affecting some versions of Skype. As Skype relies on being able to maintain contact with supernodes, it may appear offline for some of you.

The problem with this is that Skype is very much a telco. It’s a telco used by hundreds of thousands of people to make long distance calls. For some, it’s their only way to contact loved ones. Shouldn’t they have telco like reliability?

In the meantime, new “supernodes” are being brought online that should solve the problem. Hopefully it also ensures that this doesn’t happen again.

RIM To Offer India A “Cloud Based” Monitoring Solution…. WTF?

The RIM vs. India circus might be finally coming to an end. It’s being reported that there’s a deal at hand:

The Canada-based Research In Motion, the makers of BlackBerry, has agreed to offer monitoring on cloud-based computing instead of setting up a local server. The Ministry of Home Affairs has agreed to this solution from Research In Motion (RIM).

In a letter to the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Vice-President (Government Relations) of RIM, Mr Robert Crow, said, “As per the compliance schedule agreed to by both Research In Motion and the Ministry of Home Affairs, RIM infrastructure is ready to receive and process via the cloud computing-based system lawfully intercepted BlackBerry Messenger data from Indian service providers.”

The Home Ministry had given time till December-end for RIM to come up with a solution that will enable security agencies to snoop into data flowing through BlackBerry devices on a real-time basis. While it is not yet clear how the cloud computing-based monitoring will work, sources said that the Indian authorities were satisfied with the system.

Cloud based computing? Whatever. All I know is that it’s not clear how corporate e-mail will be handled. That’s important because as I’ve said previously, all one has to do if they want to keep security officials from snooping is to fire up your own Blackberry Enterprise Server. If there’s no solution for that then the Indian authorities are wasting their time. Though one could argue that the Indian authorities are wasting their time in any case.

 

Bell Fined Big Time For Telemarketing Violations…. You Have To Love It!

You have to appreciate the irony in this situation. Bell who is in charge of that “Do Not Call” list that I told you about a while ago, got fined by the CRTC to the tune of $1.3 million for telemarketing to people on that list:

The CRTC said Bell hired independent telemarketers to pitch the telecom provider’s TV, wireless, Internet and home phone services to numbers registered with the Do Not Call List, where Canadians sick of telemarketing calls can register their numbers.

That’s pretty dumb. What did Bell have to say about this? Here’s what a statement from the telco said:

In a release, Bell said the telemarketers, working under contract, had not only violated the CRTC’s list, but had also violated Bell’s own internal list of people who did not want to receive calls. The company said it had “terminated its relationships with two telemarketers and suspended several others” after the investigation.

Sure. Right. Here’s what the CRTC had to say:

“All telemarketers must respect the wishes of Canadians who have registered their telephone number on the National [Do Not Call List] or requested that a telemarketer include their number on its internal do not call list,” Andrea Rosen, the CRTC’s chief telecommunications enforcement officer said in a release. “Even though the calls in this instance were made by third parties, Bell Canada must ultimately ensure that the rules are followed.”

Hopefully this has a ripple effect, I’ve registered my number with the do not call but still get telemarketers calling me. Hopefully now when I threaten to report them, they`ll realize the severity of it and take me off their list. That would include Bell.