The crux of AT&T's recent complaint to the FCC regarding Google Voice was that Google -- not being subject to the common carrier rules that help facilitate fair, open telephone networks -- was blocking customers from accessing numbers managed by rural carriers that charged higher connection fees, thereby giving it a leg up on its Old Guard competition by saving cash in ways AT&T and others are legally barred from doing. Google's hitting back today, not by agreeing to submit to common carrier rules (come on now, don't be ridiculous) but by saying in a statement to the FCC that it's now blocking calls to "fewer than 100" numbers in total now that it has finished implementing new back-end capabilities that allow it to single out specific numbers rather than entire exchanges. Google complains that calls to the top ten exchanges accounted for 26 percent of its entire connection fee outlay -- but yeah, that's pretty much what telcos have been dealing with since time immemorial, so the bellyaching's likely to fall on a lot of deaf ears. For what it's worth, the company is still asking the FCC to make sweeping changes to connection fee policy, but whether this ends up getting them out of AT&T's more immediate concerns remains to be seen.
[Via Phone Scoop]
Filed under: Cellphones
Google says it's now blocking 'fewer than 100' numbers in Google Voice originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Oct 2009 02:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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I was sorting through my notes and video footage of the Google press event around the launch of Google Maps Navigation for Android 2.0 and saw this gem. It’s a minute or so of footage of Google CEO Eric Schmidt talking about the potential of today’s mobile platforms when combined with the cloud.
The mobile platforms, Android and the others, are so powerful now that you can build client apps that do magical things that are connected with the cloud. This is I think the most visually obvious example of that…don’t limit your imagination to this set of problems. Anything where you can produce this phenomenal customer benefit when you have a mobile device broadly defined connected to the cloud….Obviously we like the price of free because the consumers like that as well and we can figure out ways to use advertising to pay for it.
His words echo Arthur C. Clarke’s famous quote “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Schmidt says that today’s mobile platforms are so powerful that when combined with a robust cloud service they can do “magical things.” And he encourages people not to limit their imaginations when thinking of new applications to serve people.
Inspiring stuff for people out there thinking up the future.
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We're not sure who's winning the ratings war in Houston, but we're going to give the upper-hand to KHOU based on these shots alone. As you can clearly see in the image above (and the enlarged versions there in the gallery), this newscaster is wielding a Wiimote. It's hard to say if the news station actually has their slide transitions setup to change with a swing of the controller, or if weather map zooming is handled with something typically used for gaming, but one thing's for darn sure -- lightning rounds of Wii bowling during commercial breaks are definitely happening.
[Thanks, Edmar]
Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals
Houston newscaster dictates slide transitions, goes bowling with Wiimote originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Google released a new mobile navigation app today and GPS navigation companies such as Garmin And TomTom saw their shares take a plunge. The announcement shaved $1.2 billion off of Garmin’s market cap alone. It’s shares are down more than 16 percent so far today to $31.60. TomTom’s shares are down 21 percent to $8.11.
And this is just for an Android app. But Google could very well make it available to other phones as well, and that is what has investors worried. GPS navigation apps are among the most expensive, and most lucrative, of all mobile apps. TomTom sells its iPhone apps for $50 to $100, with a different app per country.
Google just cut the traditional GPS navigation companies at the knees by releasing what may be a far superior product for free. It is not a standalone navigation app. Rather it taps into a lot of the resources Google makes available on the Web, including Google Maps, Streetview, voice recognition, and sophisticated search. You can use voice search just as you would look for something on Google’s search engine. “Where is the Pizza Hut in downtown Palo Alto”? If Google’s search engine can find it, then so can Google’s navigation app. Garmin and TomTom can’t compete with that kind of Web-scale computing power.
And Google is happy to give its navigation app away for free because it leverages many existing technologies it has already built for the Web, and it encourages more people to use Web-capable phones and do local searches on them. It’s strategy is to give the software away for free, and make money on the search ads.
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