Posts tagged drops
A Case Of The Drops: Is Third-Party Smartphone Insurance Necessary?
Oct 17th
The danger with carrying a smartphone in your pocket is that it is essentially a piece of glass held together with metal and plastic with sophisticated electrical innards. Warranties from original equipment manufacturers tend to not cover a phone if it is broken or has water damage. What if you drop your brand new iPhone 4S into a puddle? The glass is going to break and it is going to get water inside. When that happens, you are in trouble like a half-plucked turkey the day before Thanksgiving.
The folks at SquareTrade like to break things. SquareTrade is a third-party device warranty company that basically offers insurance for what Apple or the other OEMs will not cover in warranties. The company posted a video positing a Samsung Galaxy S II against an iPhone 4S. The results are not for the fanboy faint of heart.
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For most of us, the idea of third-party device insurance feels like a scam. Isn’t that the way it always feels with insurance? You do not trust the provider, and things never seem to be covered when you want them to and the deductible is too high. The carriers offer additional warranties on the devices they sell, but the carriers are even worse than the average door-to-door salesman. It is also expensive, with either a flat rate that costs as much as the phone or a monthly fee attached to your bill.
SquareTrade’s iPhone 4S policy
The big retail stores offer the same type of services. What do you think the Geek Squad is but device insurance and warranty protection? In addition to SquareTrade, there is also Securranty, a company that offers the same functionality and pricing as SquareTrade. What these companies will not cover is data or device loss. There are other ways to find lost phones though, with mobile device management solutions (if your phone is tied to your business) or “find my phone” services through Apple or security companies like 3LM, Lookout and Norton.
What do you think about a third-party $99 warranty for your iPhone 4S, Android or other device? Is it worth it? Maybe, if you have a serious case of the drops. Let us know in the comments.
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Google Plus Traffic Drops, 1269% Gains Erased
Oct 10th
Remember when Google Plus traffic went up 1269% in one week? Well, you can scratch that. New traffic data from analytics firm Chitika show that the insurgent social network has erased those gains entirely, now down by over 60% since the peak.
Google Plus opened to the public on September 20, leading to the huge spike in interest that we reported, peaking around two days later. But just in the four days that followed, traffic sunk back down to where it was.
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Chitika didn’t label the Y axis on its chart, but its “traffic index” shows the big peak over the same time period as the Experian Hitwise numbers we reported. The public launch generated tons of interest, but that interest wasn’t sustained for long.
We at RWW can informally corroborate Chitika’s findings that interest in Google Plus is on the wane. Our monthly referrals from there are down 38% since their peak, while Facebook referrals are up 67% and Twitter referrals up 51% over the same period.
As we reported last week, the +1 button isn’t gaining much traction, either. Despite all the new features and responsiveness to user feedback, Google Plus just doesn’t seem to be catching on. There’s only so much time in a day for social networking, and this newcomer isn’t converting many users.
We’ve reported some sneak previews of upcoming Google Plus features, like Google Voice integration and a Quora-like Q&A service. Maybe those will help Plus stand out.
Why aren’t you using Google Plus?
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Rdio Drops Music Streaming Fee, Following MOG and Spotify
Oct 6th
It hasn’t even been three months since Spotify launched in the United States, but the freemium music streaming service is certainly having an impact on its competition. Rdio, one of those competitors, announced today that it’s taking down the paywall around its Web-based streaming service.
The move comes three weeks after MOG, another popular music service, did the same. Both Rdio and MOG still charge for unlimited access and for the ability to stream music from one’s smartphone or tablet. Listening to music in the browser, however, is free.
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Rdio’s Web listening experience doesn’t include advertisements, but there are some limitations to the new free account tier. Listeners can only a stream a limited amount of music each month. A meter located at the top of free users’ profiles will show much free music is left.
Spotify, which has been hugely popular in Europe for a few years, made a big splash when it launched in the United States in July. At that time, Rdio and MOG were both pay services, starting at $5 per month. Spotify, on the other hand, launched with a free, albeit somewhat limited, version of its service, forcing existing competitors to rethink their pricing plans.
The move also comes just two weeks before the release of Apple’s iCloud content sycning feature and iTunes Match, a “cloud locker” for music similar to initiatives launched by Amazon and Google. Although Apple’s new initiatives are somewhat different from the all-you-can-stream subscription services like Rdio and Spotify, the prospect of a tech giant launching a music service is something worth keeping an eye on for smaller startups, especially when that tech giant has already had a substantial impact on the music industry.
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Google Search Share Plateaus, BingHoo Gains, AOL Drops
Sep 13th
The comScore search market share numbers for August are out. What they show is Google seeming to hit a kind of plateau. Over the past year it seems to be bumping up against a market share ceiling of around 65-66 percent. By contrast Yahoo and Bing gained slightly and now have a combined 31 percent…
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Starz Drops Netflix Just as Subscription Rate Hike Takes Effect
Sep 1st
Netflix learned today that it may lose a significant source of its content when Starz Entertainment announced it would not renew its distribution deal with the popular streaming service for next year.
It’s this contract with Starz that gives Netflix the ability to legally stream a trove of movies from the likes of Walt Disney, Touchstone, Columbia and Sony, among others. If talks don’t resume, that’s a sizable chunk of content that will be missing from the service. In response to the news, Netflix’s stock price dropped 9 percent in after hours trading.
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“This decision is a result of our strategy to protect the premium nature of our brand by preserving the appropriate pricing and packaging of our exclusive and highly valuable content,” Starz CEO Chris Albrecht said in a statement. “With our current studio rights and growing original programming presence, the network is in an excellent position to evaluate new opportunities and expand its overall business.”
This move is just the latest example of tension between traditional content providers and the Internet companies who seek to revolutionize the way entertainment, news and other media are consumed. With Netflix, legacy players have long been nervous that the service’s all-you-can-eat media consumption model would erode DVD sales, cable subscriptions and other traditional sources of revenue.
The Starz announcement happened to come on the same day Netflix officially rolled out its controversial new pricing plans. The company is eliminating its $9.99 plan that enables customers to both stream content and recieve DVDs by mail. To continue to do both, customers will have to pay $15.98 per month, an increase that was wildly unpopular when it was first announced in July.
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After Six Years, Google Drops Support For Toolbar On Firefox
Jul 21st
Google has announced the end of supporting the Google Toolbar for Firefox. Google said the Google Toolbar works in versions of Firefox 4 or younger, but not the new version 5 of Firefox. Google explained, “many features that were once offered by Google Toolbar for Firefox are now already…
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Update: The Shoe Drops: Google Receives Formal Notification Of Review By FTC
Jun 24th
As expected, the Federal Trade Commission has begun its formal investigation of Google’s business practices. In a blog post today, Google fellow Amit Singhal wrote that the company yesterday received formal notification from the agency that it would be conducting an inquiry. Though Singhal…
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Google Drops Numerous APIs, Including Translate
May 30th
If one year ago I had come in with an announcement that “Google dropped X product,” it would mean that Google had seriously messed up, miscalculated, or determined that a service couldn’t survive in the market. Google dropping a project no longer means the same thing, however. Since the April management shuffle (which occurred immediately after Larry Page re-took the reigns of Google), Google has been relentlessly dropping projects – including ones that are viable. This trend continues this month with Google dropping 11 developer APIs, including the popular Google Translate API.
To clarify, that doesn’t mean Google is dropping these services in their own outlets (such as the Google Translate website). Translate, as well as the other services related to the soon-to-be abandoned APIs, will continue as normal in the Google web and mobile apps. But developers who want to integrate the Google services, such as Translate, into their own web or mobile app rely on these developer APIs; the API is the medium by which developers access the Google data.
“Deprecating the Translate API was the hardest choice for us to make,” said Google representative Adam Feldman. But in the end it was a simple matter of how the popular API was being used. “The Translate API was subject to extensive abuse – the vast majority of usage was in clear violation of our terms.” He did not specify exactly what terms of service violations were taking place.
Developers who were using the API will continue to have access to the Translate data until December 1st of this year. Prior to that date developers will be limited on the number of inquiries made per day. The ten additional APIs being shut down are the Blog Search, Books Data, Books JavaScript, Image Search, News Search, Patent Search, Safe Browsing, Transliterate, Video Search, and Virtual Keyboard. Additionally, the Code Search, Diacritize, Feedburner, Finance, Power Meter, Sidewiki, and WaveAPIs have ceased active development but there is no plan to shut down the APIs themselves.
[via PCMag]
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Google Drops Numerous APIs, Including Translate
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Fate of Data.gov Revealed; US Gov Almost Completely Drops the Ball
May 24th
When the annual budgets for e-government initiatives including Data.gov were slashed by 75% last month, it didn’t look good for the tech side of transparency. Today federal CIO Vivek Kundra has adressed the fate of these e-government programs in a letter to congress: “No project will go unaffected” he said.
Data.gov, the repository for publicly available data that was promised as a platform to power software and analysis created by and for the public, will remain open. But “there will be no enhancements or other development to address needs for improvement.” According to an analysis of Kundra’s letter by the watchdog Sunlight Foundation, Data.gov may slow drastically in its efforts to both offer more data and ensure the quality of that data. Other programs, specifically the Fedspace social network for collaboration between federal employees and the Citizen Services Dashboard for reviewing the quality of federal services, will be shut down.
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Data.gov Needs Improvement
Leading social data scientist (and friend of ReadWriteWeb) Pete Warden says he’s cheering for Data.gov, but it needs work to serve him as well as some particular agencies do.
“I’m a massive fan of the US government’s data release policy, and my work relies heavily on data they’ve released such as the Tiger/Line coordinates of every single street in the country. I really want the data.gov site to succeed, but as a developer I’ve found myself still heading to the individual departments’ websites instead. The data sets are often in a more convenient form, and have better documentation. Search for “Tiger line” on data.gov for instance, and you won’t see the full data set that most people need, or a proper explanation of what it is.
“By contrast, the official US Census site has a great summary page for the data set, giving a quick overview of it as well as links to older versions and related tools.”
It’s amazing that a time when the private sector is growing fully aware of the huge potential in Big Data, the US Federal Government can barely maintain its own minimal projects on the topic.
Global consulting firm McKinsey published a major new report this week on the topic of big data, saying it “will become a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth, innovation, and consumer surplus as long as the right policies and enablers are in place.”
Discussing that report, leading data visualization blogger Nathan Yau writes:
“I’ve said it before, but if digging into data is your idea of fun, there’s a whole mess of excitement and adventure headed your way. There are lots of opportunities already out there in marketing, journalism, tech, the Web, government, and pretty much everywhere you look. And more importantly, there are lots of opportunities that you can make for yourself. This is a great time for data heads.”
It’s heartbreaking that the Federal Government’s engagement with this historic meta-opportunity appears to be waning already.
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E Jiah drops 5.5 billion won lawsuit against Seo – JoongAng Daily
May 1st
 AsiaOne |
E Jiah drops 5.5 billion won lawsuit against Seo
JoongAng Daily Eleven days after admitting she had been married to legendary rock star Seo Taiji for years, actress E Jiah dropped a 5.5 billion won ($5.1 million) lawsuit for alimony and division of property, saying the publicity was too much for her. … E drops lawsuit against Seo E Ji-ah drops suit, Seo Tai-ji speaks up Lee Ji Ah & Seo Taiji agree to a settlement of $1 million USD + α |
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