Jeff Gelles, Inquirer Business Columnist
Kudos to the Consumer Electronics Association for standing up for technology - even the disruptive kind.
Three weeks after the close of the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the CEA announced today that it was awarding a belated "Best of CES" award to the latest version of Dish Networks' Hopper, a multiroom DVR that makes it easier than ever for views to skip past commercials as they watch recordings of prime-time TV.
As I explained in today's Tech Life column, the Hopper ran into a sticky little problem en route to the best-of-show honors it deserved based on the views of the staff of CNET, the technology website that - until this hoo-ha erupted - was responsible for some of the show's best-known awards.
Jeff Gelles, Inquirer Business Columnist
If you've seen the advertisements for them, or tried them out, you know the attraction of the new single-load laundry packets. "Tide’s reinventing the way you do laundry!" says the marketing for Tide Pods, saying the soft, translucent packets are "a detergent, stain fighter, and brightener all in one."
Unfortunately, the packets are attractive enough that they've also drawn the interest of small children, according to a warning today from the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The CPSC says the packets "are attractive to children as play items because they are soft and colorful and they resemble familiar items like candy, toys and teething products."
It's not just a theoretical risk - for either children or adults.
Jeff Gelles, Inquirer Business Columnist
The Federal Trade Commission says it has shut down five more companies engaged in a widespread scheme: deceptive robocalls, or automated pitches, promising help reducing consumers' credit-card interest rates.
The companies, based in Arizona or Florida, are allegedly responsible for many of the robocalls that have lately generated a huge flood of complaints to the FTC: about 200,000 a month in recent months, according to spokesman Mitch Katz, ahead even of 2011's remarkable pace that topped out at 130,000 a month.
If you've gotten one (or many) of these calls, you'll probably recognize the script. The recording starts by announcing the caller as "Rachel" or as someone else from "Cardholder Services" - plainly designed to trick recipients into believing that their credit-card issuer is calling. The pitch then invites them to speak to a live operator.
Jeff Gelles, Inquirer Business Columnist
I wrote last year about a Bellevue, Wash., company, RootMetrics, that uses both drive-testing and crowd-sourcing to put wireless carriers' performance to the test. A RootMetrics snapshot last fall showed Verizon Wireless as the Philadelphia data king, thanks to its early rollout of a network based on fourth-generation LTE technology.
Back then, I reported based on RootMetrics' data, Verizon's "average download speed was about 10 Mbps - fast enough, RootMetrics says, to download a TV show in 5 to 10 minutes." Second-place Sprint and third-place AT&T Mobility showed average download speeds of about 3 megabits per second, and T-Mobile's averaged about 2 Mbps.
So how are the carriers doing now? Verizon still leads, but not as dramatically as a year ago, according to an update that RootMetrics sent me for today's column about a low-cost, prepaid carrier, MetroPCS, that has been rolling out LTE in the Philadelphia area. Even with non-LTE service, T-Mobile was in second place, lending credence to its promise to become the country's "leading value carrier" once it completes its recently announced merger with MetroPCS. Though they use different technologies now, both plan to end up with LTE.
Jeff Gelles, Inquirer Business Columnist
Counterfeiting always hurts businesses that lose sales of real goods, but often causes only trivial harm to the people who buy the fakes. If you're foolish enough to spend $10 on a fake Rolex watch or sports jersey, your life isn't at risk.
Not this time. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration put out a warning today to anyone who has been in a car crash during the last three years and had someone other than a new-car dealer replace a vehicle's air bags, or who purchased a new air bag online to make such a repair:
NHTSA has become aware of a problem involving the sale of counterfeit air bags for use as replacement parts in vehicles that have been involved in a crash. While these air bags look nearly identical to certified, original equipment parts—including bearing the insignia and branding of major automakers—NHTSA testing showed consistent malfunctioning ranging from non-deployment of the air bag to the expulsion of metal shrapnel during deployment.
Jeff Gelles, Inquirer Business Columnist
The controversial deal involving Verizon, Comcast and other cable companies - under which Verizon and Comcast plan to market each other's services - won approval today from the Justice Department, albeit with conditions aimed at minimizing the damage to competition. Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, quickly signaled that his agency would likely go along.
The approval drew quick and sharp criticism from consumer groups such as Public Knowledge (see below).
Both government agencies said an earlier spectrum swap between Verizon Wireless and fourth-place carrier T-Mobile was crucial to making the deal work to benefit the public interest - a standard the FCC says it must meet to approve any spectrum transaction. The DOJ said:
Jeff Gelles, Inquirer Business Columnist
Google has agreed to pay $22.5 million, a record penalty from the Federal Trade Commission for violating previous promises but a pittance for the multibillion-dollar search behemoth, for fibbing to users of Apple's Safari browser about its online-tracking practices.
But the deal allowed Google - whose informal motto is "Don't be evil" - to deny that it did anything wrong, which was enough to cause one FTC commissioner, J. Thomas Rosch, to dissent.
What did Google do to stir the FTC's (mild) anger? The agency's announcement explains:
Jeff Gelles, Inquirer Business Columnist
I rarely get spam calls or texts on my cell phone, but apparently I'm pretty lucky. A new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which my colleague Sam Wood writes about here, says that two-thirds of cellphone users report having gotten unwanted marketing calls, and that two-thirds of text users have gotten cellphone spam.
Even worse, more than 1 in 4 smartphone owners report getting unwanted sales or marketing calls "at least weekly," and a similar proportion of texters receive spam messages with that same alarming frequency.
The report, which you can read here, also says many cellphone owners experience problems with slow downloads and dropped calls - the latter a complaint that goes back to the early days of cellphone adoption and that, to be fair, is correlated with our increased expectations for service quality. Still, more than a third of smartphone users, and 28 percent of all cellphone owners, report suffering dropped calls "at least weekly." More than 1 in 10 suffer dropped calls at least once a day - which is probably how I'd answer the question regarding my AT&T iPhone service.
Jeff Gelles, Inquirer Business Columnist
Yes, it's far away in the middle of what East and West Coasters supposedly dismiss as "fly-over country." (Not that I actually know any of those people.) But as Rodgers and Hammerstein pointed out in song, everything was once up to date in Kansas City. Now, it promises to again get well ahead of the curve, thanks to Google's ambitious demonstration project: a regional fiber-optic network offering superfast broadband.
The debut is less than 40 days away, and there are some limits on how much the search giant is willing to expend. As its blog post last week pointed out, Google is carving the area into "fiberhoods," starting with Kansas City, Kansas, and then the larger Kansas City, Missouri. To gain connection to the high-speed network, each fiberhood will need a critical mass of preregistered subscribers. (What's a critical mass? It's unclear if there's a firm definition; some fiberhoods' goals are listed online at 10 percent and others at 25 percent.)
But Google's price list tells the real, disruptive story: three tiers, including one at the bottom that offers 5-megabit service for seven years in return for the $300 installation charge, paid up-front or over 12 months, $25 a month. That's right: the superhighway of the 21st century, essentially without tolls.
Jeff Gelles, Inquirer Business Columnist
My colleague Joe DiStefano, writing about Sandy Weill's newfound appreciation for the Glass-Steagall Act's rules that separated staid, old consumer and commercial banking from the casino-style world of investment banking, skewers the former Citigroup CEO for his hypocrisy. Like other bankers who lobbied for the 1999 repeal, Weill made a fortune from the Citi colossus before it nearly collapsed during the 2008 financial crisis - and helped collapse an economy weighted down by too-big-to-fail megabanks. As DiStefano notes, no one is volunteering to give the fortunes back.
But it's fascinating to consider the company Weill now keeps, which you can now do thanks to American Banker's great slide show, "Who Else Wants to Break Up the Big Banks." The Banker's slide show illustrates more than a dozen politicians, regulators and ex-bankers who have called, one way or another, for rolling back the repeal.
Among them:
Reach Jeff at jgelles@phillynews.com.
