Comment on Verizon: Here’s the Truth About Sprint 4G by super smart

Roger A is right about the different generations, and I am a geek who spends an unbelievable amount of time researching stuff like this out of curiosity and because I have relatives on Sprint service.

Comment on Verizon: Here’s the Truth About Sprint 4G by super smart

Backlink: http://gigaom.com/mobile/verizon-heres-the-truth-about-sprint-4g/#comment-524646

Comment on Verizon: Here’s the Truth About Sprint 4G by Beaugrand

Or, you could have simply called customer service (800) 922-0204 and asked to be disconnected "because the service was too expensive" or "because (other carrier) offered me a better deal." Of course, disconnected numbers can't be ported, so (other carrier) will have to give you a new number. Sure, they'll give some "save" offers, like changing plans, discounts on equipment, converting to a mobile broadband plan, but those are part of the metrics that determine how much they paid- as are percentage of disconnects. Or, as mentioned previously, just set up service with (other carrier) and port the VZW number- and follow up to make sure your VZW line is actually disconnected- and don't wait weeks or months to follow through (that's called "C your own A"). Picking a fight with a sales person is always a pointless exercise, be it cell phones or used cars or microwave ovens.

Comment on Verizon: Here’s the Truth About Sprint 4G by Beaugrand

Backlink: http://gigaom.com/mobile/verizon-heres-the-truth-about-sprint-4g/#comment-524643

THE APPLE INVESTOR: AAPL Will Be About 15% Higher In A Year, Traders Say (AAPL)

The Apple Investor is a daily report from SAI. Sign up here to receive it by email.

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AAPL Up On Black Friday As Market Dives
The market is down today on speculations that China's slowing its economy. But shoppers flock to retail stores on Black Friday, including to some Apple's 300 stores. Shares are up over $2 today as a result. Upcoming catalysts for Apple include monthly NPD data (Mac / iPod business); holiday iPhone and iPad sales updates and carrier expansion (Verizon); new content revenue streams such as video, books, newspapers and social (Ping); moving iTunes into the cloud; and the uptake of refreshed Apple TV. AAPL trades at 15x Enterprise Value / Trailing Twelve Months Free Cash Flow (incl. long-term marketable securities).

Where Will Shares Of AAPL Be This Time Next Year? Greater Than Where It Is Now (CNBC)

Apple shares have taken off year-to-date (not to mention over the last decade). Fast Money traders discuss where the stock will be at this time next year:

• Guy Adami of Drakon Capital believes shares of Apple could fall to $285.
• Joe Terranova of Virtus Investment Partners anticipates Apple to be at $413 a share.
• Metropolitan Capital Advisors of Karen Finerman puts Apple at $360
• Tim Seymour at EmergingMoney.com guesses the stock will climb to $361.
• Patty Edwards of Trutina Financial guesstimates slightly higher at $375.

Overall, general consensus believes the stock will be about 15% higher than where it currently trades.

Apple Ponies Up $300 Million For Old HP Campus (Mercury News)

Apple‘s takeover of the old HP campus is complete. According to real estate experts, the company has allegedly ponied up $300 million dollars to acquire the 98-acre lot. The old HP campus is double the size of Apple’s current lot. No one knows what Apple plans on doing with the new space they’ve acquired, but they now own quite a large chunk of land in Cupertino.

MacBook Air Super-Charging Apple's Laptop Business (ChangeWave Research)

Apple is going to sell a lot of laptops in the next month and a half, according to a new report from ChangeWave Research. The company is seeing an "explosive leap" in interest for Apple laptops; "the highest level of planned buying ever for Apple in a ChangeWave Survey." The uptick in interest is likely attributable to the new MacBook Air. Interest, not surprisingly, is greater than Dell or HP laptops as well. See Business Insider's Chart Of The Day.

Apple's Patent Suit Could Ban Motorola Touchscreens In The U.S. (The Wall Street Journal)

The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) will review Apple's patent (touchscreen and multitouch technology) claims against Motorola, an action that could lead to an eventual ban of Motorola's smartphones in the U.S. Although at this point, not likely, would be a huge win for Apple. Some of the patents involve technology used in Motorola's popular Droid lineup of phones, which use Google's Android operating system. Touch-screens have now become a common feature in mobile devices, raising the stakes in ownership of the technology.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• THE APPLE INVESTOR: Apple Channel And Supply Checks Investigated In Insider Trading Bust
• THE APPLE INVESTOR: Apple Hasn't Bought Back A Single Share Since 2003. What Gives?
• THE APPLE INVESTOR: Only 10 Companies In The World Are Worth More Than The iPhone

THE APPLE INVESTOR: AAPL Will Be About 15% Higher In A Year, Traders Say (AAPL)

Backlink: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~3/bcQFdbqpOi0/the-apple-investor-nov-26-2010-11

A Talk About Designing the New York Subway Map on Dec. 7

Eddie Jabbour writes to let us know about an event at the Museum of the City of New York on December 7 about designing New York subway maps “for the riding public.” Featuring John Tauranac and Massimo Vignelli in addition to Jabbour — subway map designers all. Reservations required; tickets run from $6 to $12.

A Talk About Designing the New York Subway Map on Dec. 7

Backlink: http://www.mcwetboy.net/maproom/2010/11/a_talk_about_de.php

Talking About Waledac Botnet Takedown [Video]

In this video below, Keith Combs interview Richard Boscovich, Senior Attorney and T.J. Campana, Senior Program Manager both from Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit. Richard and T.J. discuss Microsoft's legal and technical involvement in the Waledac botnet takedown.

Location Based Networks need to "show us the money" as soon as possible (All About Symbian)

... there is an answer, and some companies are pushing towards it. Don’t get me wrong. Foursquare and Gowalla have done really well building ecosystems that attract early adopters. Unfortunately, the evidence indicates that they only attract early adopters. If they want to reach the majority who don’t care about making it to Mayor, they need to abandon their pretence of fun, stop...

Source : All About Symbian

Explore : Nokia, Phone, Social Network, TechCrunch

Post originale: http://wik.io/info/US/228788213

iPAD SURVEY RESULTS: Everything You Need To Know About How People Use The iPad (AAPL)

We recently surveyed Apple iPad owners to find out how they use their tablets.

The answers have implications for web publishers, app designers, and other gadget makers.

Based on responses from more than 500 iPad owners, here's what we've learned:

• Safari, the web browser, is the iPad's most important app. But iPad owners download, pay for, and regularly use many apps, on average.

• Most people say they are using the iPad MORE now than when they first got it. So perhaps it's not just a novel toy that people will throw away once they get bored.

• Almost half of the iPad owners surveyed have the 3G model, which lets them connect from anywhere. But only about half of those are on a data plan.

Click here to flip through the results (with charts!) of the 18 questions we asked iPad owners →

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• The Truth About The iPad, Day 100
• 10 Ways People Are Using The iPad To Create Content, Not Just Consume It
• Here's What Next Year's iPad Will Look Like

Post originale: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~3/N362vscLc7U/ipad-survey-results-2010-11

Webcast: BinaryDads Talk About Building Applications for Windows Phone 7

In the videolearn how, Jeff and Vineet got up to speed on Windows Phone 7 development and to also learn the meaning behind the mysterious binary message on their t-shirts.

The Doomsday Scenario You Haven’t Heard About

Remember the Y2K scare? Another crisis with the potential to close off the Internet is imminent. The Daily Beast’s Tom Weber on the doomsday scenario you haven’t heard about.

There’s a crisis brewing on the Internet, but because it involves the arcane inner workings of the Web, chances are you haven’t heard about it. It’s quite real, and it’s hotly debated at obscure conferences and among those whose job it is to keep the networks running smoothly.
  

 Here’s the predicament: The Internet is running out of room. Fast.
 

Imagine that sometime soon, you were to move to a new house and call up the cable company to sign up for broadband Internet access, and they were to respond, “Sorry, we can’t right now, we’re sold out.” Or that an entrepreneur trying to get their new employees online is put on a waiting list.
 

The problem boils down to a real-estate shortage. Specifically, there’s a scarcity of Internet addresses, the critical and unique numbers that are used to distinguish one computer from another. These special numbers are called Internet Protocol, or IP, addresses. 
 

Unless you work in IT, your best chance of having encountered an IP address has probably been setting up your home Wi-Fi network. You might recognize them from their characteristic format: four numbers, each from 0 to 255, separated by period. For example: “74.125.227.19” identifies a Google server. (Few people ever type in those numbers; instead, the Internet’s address-book system converts familiar labels like “www.google.com ” to the appropriate IP number for you.)
 

If you do the math, you quickly find out that system offers roughly 4.3 billion possible IP addresses. That’s a lot of addresses. But we’ve also been hooking up a lot of things to the Internet, all over the world. IP addresses are distributed by an unsurprisingly arcane (but surprisingly political) system of regional “registries” all drawing from a central pool. For companies in the U.S., IP addresses are parceled out by the American Registry for Internet Numbers. 
 

And the end is near, says John Curran, the CEO of ARIN. “We expect that sometime in the first half of next year, the central pool will run out,” he says. “We expect we’ll have three to six months of address space thereafter, which means that at some point later in the year, ARIN will run out.” Translation: at some point in 2011, Curran expects that companies asking ARIN for IP addresses—such as broadband providers that want to connect new customers—will be told there are none to be had. Estimates now put the remaining addresses available at less than 5 percent of the total address space.

So what can be done? As you might expect, the technical wizards have a solution. (In fact, they’ve had it for more than a decade.) The answer is longer addresses with more characters. The new, longer addresses are known as IPv6 (versus IPv4 for the old addresses, and they look like this: “fe80:43e3:9095:02e5:0216:cbff:feb2:7474.” That approach makes possible some 340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 addresses—plenty for everyone.

The hitch is that rolling out IPv6 isn’t easy. Most modern hardware can support IPv6 (PCs and Macs alike), but if you’re an Internet service provider, it’s not like flipping a switch. It can mean upgrading all kinds of internal systems and support procedures. That not only costs time and money, but raises the possibility of screwups that interfere with the network’s operation. “I don’t think we know enough to know whether it will go smoothly or not,” says David Farber, professor of computer science and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, and one of the pioneers of computer networking.
 

So, much like the Y2K bug (remember that?), companies have a lot of incentive to put off dealing with IPv6 until they absolutely need to. And to be sure, the real-estate shortage may turn out to be less dire than it appears, if many companies have been routinely hoarding unused addresses. Companies are also stretching the IPv4 addresses they do have with technical workarounds that let one address stand in for multiple machines. (Your own home Wi-Fi network typically does this, appearing to the world as a single IP address even if you have 10 PCs, iPad, Tivos and whatever hooked up.) 
 

Who needs to care about the address crisis, then? If you’re a consumer and you’ve already got Internet service, you’re probably OK. If you’re likely to move or switch providers, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to find out in advance if they’re up and running with IPv6. 
 

If you’re in business, things are more complicated. Just to get online, companies can always shop different providers if one runs out of addresses and can’t handle IPv6. But more broadly, those who do business on the Internet—and these days, who doesn’t?—will need to make sure their systems can talk properly to the users who will eventually come calling over IPv6. 
 

Perversely, some businesses need to worry about the opposite problem, too. Slow rollouts of IPv6 may see more service providers turn to those workarounds to stretch their IPv4 addresses, which can have the side effect of disguising computers’ real locations. Sites that sell advertising, for instance, often employ targeting based on IP addresses. Information that content providers and retailers depend on could become scarcer. (Memo to stockbrokers: Check out investments for exposure to IPv6 issues.)
 

Eventually, all of this will be solved. There’s too much at stake for too many organizations not to solve it. Even the U.S. government is pushing the agenda, with a mandate this fall that requires agencies to enable IPv6 on publicly accessible servers by October 2012.
 

The question is, how much pain will there be along the way? But there may be payoffs, too—and not just from solving the address crisis. Bob Frankston, a co-creator of the original VisiCalc spreadsheet and all-around technology trailblazer, says we’ve been saddled too long with a system that makes it too complicated for one machine to talk to another. From sending a document to your home printer from the road to getting something like a glucose monitor to automatically update your doctor, it’s a mess. 
 

IPv6 will help but doesn’t go far enough, Frankston says. “The ultimate thing is, we shouldn’t think of networks, we should think about relationships between devices,” he says. It’s up to big companies like Microsoft and Google—those powerful enough to influence everyone else—to develop those technologies, and open up all the possibilities of having truly connected gadgets.

Thomas E. Weber covers technology for The Daily Beast. This article originally appeared at The Daily Beast and is republished here with permission.

 

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See Also:

• The Meanest Commenters On The Web
• 15 Search Results Google Doesn’t Want You to See
• Cybercriminals Launch New Era of "Geek Terror"

Post originale: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~3/GfyqVVEhdNY/uh-oh-the-internet-is-running-out-of-space-2010-11

Everything You Need To Know About YOU, Our Readers – CHARTS

Finally, we know who you, our readers, really are.

Last month, we posted about a new tool called the Funding Recommendation Engine from research startup ChubbyBrain. The FRE asks you a few quick questions about your company and preferences, then returns a list of VCs and angel investors you should consider.

Apparently, quite a few of you tried it out, and ChubbyBrain just sent us some aggregate stats about the founders we referred. In short: you, dear readers, are a highly educated, experienced bunch.

Click here for detailed statistics about the founders who read SAI →

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Here's Who Gets VC Money: White People In Their Late 30s
• Startups: Find Out Who To Pitch In Just 5 Minutes With This New Tool
• Everything You Need To Know About Who's Getting VC Money

Post originale: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~3/n0Mlb6FQrSo/everything-you-need-to-know-about-you-our-readers-in-charts-2010-11

Twitter Gets Serious About Location Based Services, Businesses Can Claim Locations (The Blog Herald)

In a move that places Twitter in direct competition with other location based services including Foursquare and Gowalla, the social networking company has announced the option for businesses to claim their locations. The new feature, which shows up in the users feed can be seen in the screen capture on this page (located above). The [...]

Source : The Blog Herald

Explore : Blogosphere, Foursquare, Social Network, Technology, Twitter

Post originale: http://wik.io/info/US/227126788

Building A Successful Tech Startup Is All About Timing

I never had the opportunity to invest in YouTube but I have to admit that if I did, I probably would have passed (which of course would have been a huge mistake).

I’d been around the Web long enough to remember the dozens of companies before YouTube that tried to create crowdsourced video sites and failed. Based on “pattern recognition” (a dangerous thing to rely on), I was deeply skeptical of the space.

What I failed to appreciate was that the prior crowdsourced video sites were ahead of their time. YouTube built a great product, but, more importantly, got the market timing just right. By 2005, all the pieces were in place to enable crowdsourced video – the proliferation of home broadband, digital camcorders, a version of Flash where videos “just worked,” copyrighted Web content that could be exported to YouTube, and blogs that wanted to embed videos.

Almost anything you build on the Web has already been tried in one form or another. This should not deter you. Antecedents existed for Google, Facebook, Groupon, and almost every other tech startup that has succeeded since the dot-com bubble.

Entrepreneurs should always ask themselves “why will I succeed where others failed?” If the answer is simply “I’m doing it right” or “I’m smarter,” you are probably underestimating your antecedents, which were probably run by competent or even great entrepreneurs who did everything possible to succeed. Instead, your answer should include an explanation about why the timing is right – about some fundamental changes in the world that enable the idea you are pursuing to finally succeed. If the necessary conditions were in place, say, a year ago, that might still be OK – YouTube happened to nail their product out of the gate, but if they hadn’t, a company started later might have succeeded in their place.

Often the necessary conditions are only beginning to emerge and knowing when they will do so sufficiently is very hard to predict. We all know the Internet will become fully social, personalized, mobile, location-based, interactive, etc. and lots of new, successful startups will be built as a result. What is very hard to know is when these things will happen at scale.

One way to mitigate timing risk is to manage your cash accordingly. If you are trying to ride existing trends you should ramp up aggressively. If you are betting on emerging trends it is better to keep your burn low and runway long. This takes discipline and patience but is also the way you hit it really big.

This post originally appeared at cdixon.org and is republished here with permission.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Stealth Mode Is Back!
• The Small Pool Of Smart VCs In New York Has Expanded
• Trying To Lasso An Angel Investor? Start By Subscribing To Their Blog

Post originale: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~3/XOM7i9fROd0/successfull-tech-startups-are-all-about-timing-2010-11