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 Despite an onslaught of hype this month, Bing's performance is ringing hollow.
The new Microsoft search engine increased its share of the search market by just four-tenths of a percentage point, according to an unreleased survey by Web ratings firm ComScore Inc., rising to 8.4% from 8.0% in May. Any expectation that the service was siphoning traffic from leader Google (65% of market share, unchanged from May), would appear to be unfounded. If anything, Bing sliced off a fraction of the traffic from second-place Yahoo, whose share dropped half a percentage point to 19.6%. The lack of any major uptick by Bing has been cited by other Web analytics companies. In its numbers, Compete.com found that Bing helped Microsoft increase its market share by three-tenths of a percentage point, pegging it at 6.5% (still less than the 7.2% Microsoft had in June of 2008). And HitWise observed a slight drop in Microsoft's market share in June. Analysts at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. sprinkled a few more raindrops over Bing's parade, noting in a preview of Google's second-quarter earnings that, "we estimate that Google lost up to 120bps [1.2%] of US search query share to Bing, but expect these losses to be temporary." -- David Sarno
A bottom up view of a cell tower. Credit: Locomotive8/ Flickr.
If Pali Research were to pick its favorite wireless carrier, it wouldn't be AT&T.
The market research firm believes that despite the huge success of Apple Inc's iPhone, for which AT&T is still the exclusive carrier, its monopoly on the iPhone won't last forever, and as soon as it expires, the beleaguered telco should prepare for slowed growth and even defections.
Customers will head to faster, more reliable networks, said Pali head researcher Walter Piecyk in a blog post, and that means Verizon.
"A basic premise of our recently initiated buy rating on Verizon and sell rating on AT&T is our belief that as the iPhone exclusivity period rolls off between AT&T Wireless and Apple, a material number of AT&T customers will flock to Verizon’s superior network."
"We expect AT&T Wireless net subscriber additions to fall to less than 1 million in 2010 from more than 4 million in 2008," he noted.
Piecyk cited a recent reader survey by Wired, in which the magazine asked users to register their locations along with the speed of their 3G service. Though unscientific, the survey did generate 12,000 responses from customers across the spectrum of major wireless providers. Verizon won handily with an average download speed of 1,940 kilobits per second, while AT&T took fourth behind T-Mobile and Sprint, with an average speed of only 900 kbps.
A recent story in The Times raised the possibility that AT&T's 3G networking infrastructure may be lacking, and that a sparse 3G network could be contributing to substantial battery drain among many iPhone 3G and 3GS users. When towers are farther away, the phone requires more power to communicate with them.
AT&T acknowledged that the density of the network was a factor in the power drain on 3G phones, and is in the process of building thousands of new cell sites around the country to buttress its network. Updated, 12:01 p.m.: The expiration date of the exclusive iPhone deal between Apple and AT&T has not been officially released, but in April the Wall Street Journal cited anonymous sources saying AT&T is hoping to extend the deal into 2011. -- David Sarno
 Netflix Inc. shares closed at a near 10-week high today as rumors swirled that online commerce giant Amazon.com Inc. was looking to buy the 12-year-old online movie rental company.
Netflix rose $2.12 to $42.19 with a trading volume of 4.2 million, one of the highest in months.
A Bloomberg report quoted an analyst attributing the trading activity to "renewed takeover talk" surrounding Netflix, with Amazon at the center of the conversation.
But other analysts were skeptical.
"Adding another business that would essentially cannibalize from the moves they’re already trying to make just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense," said Steve Weinstein of Pacific Crest Securities.
"Amazon is ramping up digital distribution very quickly," he said. "They’ve obviously done a good job with e-books, and they’re making some progress with music. So I don’t think anyone’s that much farther down the road than they are."
Neither Amazon nor Netflix would comment, saying that they don't respond to rumors and speculation.
Today's buyout rumor resembled whispers from June 2007 that spiked Netflix's stock price by 5% with one analyst predicting Netflix could fetch $1.5 billion if acquired by Amazon.
Both companies are big players in the online streaming business, where consumers can watch movies through special set-top boxes like those made by TiVo and Roku. Amazon, which charges for each viewing, tends to have newer, more popular films available for download, while Netflix streams a more limited selection of older films to its subscribers.
Netflix has a catalog of over 100,000 movies and television shows available by mail -- its primary delivery mechanism -- but streams only about 12,000 of those shows via its set-top software. Amazon has made at least 40,000 movies available for streaming.
-- David Sarno
 The U.S. Department of Justice said today that it has launched a formal investigation into the proposed agreement between Google and book publishers and authors.
"The United States has reviewed public comments expressing concern that aspects of the settlement agreement may violate the Sherman Act," wrote William F. Cavanaugh, the Justice Department's deputy assistant attorney general, in a letter to Federal District Court Judge Denny Chin, the judge overseeing Google's settlement.
The letter goes on to say that although the department has "no conclusions as to the merit of those concerns," it did see issues that "warranted further inquiry."
Google emphasized that it is cooperating with the Justice Department investigation and maintains that the settlement would be good for consumers.
"The Department of Justice and several state attorneys general have contacted us to learn more about the impact of the settlement, and we are happy to answer their questions," said Google Spokesman Gabriel Stricker. "It’s important to note that this agreement is non-exclusive and if approved by the court, stands to expand access to millions of books in the U.S."
The settlement reached last fall between Google and the Authors Guild and the Assn. of American Publishers stemmed from the search giant's project to scan millions of books and create a searchable digital library of works that would potentially become the basis of a digital book market.
Paul Aiken, executive director of The Authors Guild, downplayed the significance of today's move by the Department of Justice. "It appears to be just an official acknowledgement to the court of an investigation that we have known about for weeks," Aiken said. "It’s no indication that anything has changed."
Reports surfaced in late April that Justice Department regulators had questioned Google and several advocacy groups that have spoken out against the settlement. Weeks later, publishers and The Authors Guild also confirmed receiving civil subpeonas from Justice seeking more information on the settlement. But until today, the Justice Department has not said whether those inquiries constituted a formal antitrust investigation.
In recent months, a number of parties have objected to the agreement, including a group of libraries, a consumer rights group and the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization that seeks to digitize public domain books and make them freely available online to all readers. Many of the objections involve concerns that Google would create a monopoly for millions of "orphan" books whose rights holders cannot be located.
The Justice Department did not immediately return calls for comment.
Updated 4:25 p.m.: This post has been updated to include comments from Google and the Author's Guild.
-- Alex Pham and David Sarno
 Twitter has applied with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for dibs on the word "tweet."
The San Francisco micro-messaging pioneer's action raises the perennially tricky question of whether a company can own the rights to a word that has so penetrated the English lexicon that, some argue, trying to own it is like trying to own the ocean or the atmosphere.
That's what happens when a trademark is "genericized." Think Xerox, Kleenex, Jacuzzi, Q-Tip and, of course, Google. All are silly words that became synonymous with their products, often to the chagrin of the owner, whose legal claim to the much-beloved mark becomes increasingly slippery as the word burrows into the vernacular. CollegeHumor.com offered a funny-because-it's-true take on the issue last week with a video called "Googling with Bing."
Twitter's pending trademark application is accessible by searching "tweet" through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The request (a portion of which as it appears on the U.S.P.T.O website is displayed above) was filed in April and, like most applications, will have to wait four to six months before a trademark examiner in the patent office evaluates it. A search reveals that the application is one of many across the decades for the word "tweet," including everything from sheets and pillowcases to a record company to a hydraulic system.
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone explained the move this morning in a blog post, saying no harm was meant to the many applications that have grown up alongside the core service. Many of the services -- Tweetdeck, Tweetmeme and Tweetie, to name a few -- use "tweet" in their names.
"We have applied to trademark Tweet because it is clearly attached to Twitter from a brand perspective," Stone wrote. "But we have no intention of 'going after' the wonderful applications and services that use the word in their name when associated with Twitter."
Still, in six month's time, Twitter may find that a lot of the tweet-birds have taken flight before there's a legal basis for protecting the mark.
-- David Sarno
 Traffic to news sites in North America saw a massive spike as the Michael Jackson story unfolded. Times are EST. Credit: Akamai.
As the news of Michael Jackson's fate unfolded, sites around the Web felt the strain of spiking interest. On Twitter, the volume of Jackson-related messages – up to 5,000 per minute at peak – put such a demand on the site that it slowed considerably. “We saw an instant doubling of tweets per second the moment the story broke,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote in an e-mail response to our inquiry. “This particular news about the passing of such a global icon is the biggest jump in tweets per second since the U.S. presidential election.” "Regarding performance," he added, "there were reports of slowness following the spike in activity. It highlighted an opportunity for improvement which we'll be acting on right away." Online chatterers reported slowness at other social hubs, including AOL’s popular instant message system and at the blog site LiveJournal. The Los Angeles Times website creaked beneath the weight of the story as well, with nearly 2.3 million page views in one hour, more traffic than during any single hour last Nov. 5, the site’s highest-traffic day. Facebook saw a frenzy of activity, too. A spokeswoman for the company said the number of status updates during the hour after the Jackson news emerged was triple the average. She said Facebook remained free of performance issues. Traffic to the leading online news sites throughout North America was at least 20% above average, according to Akamai’s Net Usage Index, which monitors online news consumption around the world. The intense interest among Web users was evident on sites that track which terms are most popular among users. Phrases such as “Rip MJ,” “King of Pop” and “Thriller” were among the most frequently used on Twitter, and on Google.com, “Michael Jackson died” became the most popular query. Updated, 7:27 p.m.: A statement from AOL noted the following: “At AOL our AIM instant messaging service was undergoing a previously scheduled software update which should normally prove routine. It proved not to be. There was a significant increase in traffic due to today’s news and AIM was down for approximately 40 minutes this afternoon." The statement also noted that, "Today was a seminal moment in Internet history. We've never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth." Updated, Friday June 26th, 1:24 p.m.: Yahoo is reporting record traffic too: "Yahoo! News set a record in unique visitors with 16.4 million UV's in a day. Our previous record was on election day when we had 15.1 million visitors.Yahoo! News had 4 million visitors come to the site between 3-4 pm, setting an hourly record." -- David Sarno
The myTouch 3G, running Sherpa. Image: T-Mobile
T-Mobile today announced its new myTouch 3G smart phone, the next generation of its G1 handset, which was the first to deploy Google's Android operating system.
But where the homely G1 found a limited home among tech-savvy early-adopter types, T-mobile is aiming the sleeker, more colorful myTouch squarely at the mainstream -- as well as at its well-hyped new opponents, the Palm Preand iPhone 3G S.
The company is emphasizing the various ways consumers can customize or "personalize" their phones: from the menu options to the array of available Android applications, to the inclusion of a program called Sherpa that learns about users' real-world preferences as they visit various restaurants and businesses in their towns.
"Most of the other products are really built as one-size-fits-all,” said T-Mobile's chief technical officer, Cole Brodman. For the myTouch, he said, the company's focus is "going to be around individualization -- how we allow consumers to make it theirs. No two are really ever alike."
Leapfrogging the G1, the myTouch device will come with a 3.2-inch touchscreen display as well as an accelerometer and compass to boost the phone's ability to know where it is and which way it's pointing -- the better for location-based applications.
The phone, which will become available for pre-sale on July 8 and is expected to ship on July 29 will retail for $199 for new T-Mobile customers who sign up for a two-year contract. The price may be different for existing in-contract customers, depending on how much time remains on their contract. T-Mobile said the pricing ladder will not be finalized until closer to the pre-sale date.
The Sherpa application, which T-Mobile co-developed with Santa Monica-based mobile technology company Geodelic, uses a "learning engine" to determine mobile users' preferences and behavior, the better to recommend places and services in a given location. Geodelic calls Sherpa a "geobrowser" because it searches the Web to pull appropriate recommendation data from sites such as Yelp and CitySearch.
The emergence of the myTouch, coupled with the recent launch of the Pre and IPhone 3G S, clearly cements this as the summer of smart phones.
-- David Sarno
 An iPhone 3G S waiting for "some time" to become activated on the AT&T Network. Credit: David Sarno / Los Angeles Times
The iPhone 3G S certainly arrived on time, but some owners of the new phone eager to start voice controlling, video recording and just enjoying their new gadgetry had their instant gratification put on hold. In some parts of the U.S., AT&T's activation systems were experiencing delays on newly purchased iPhones, including the older 3G model, whose price was lowered to $99 recently. A message on the screen of phones straining to be recognized by the network read: "Waiting for activation. This may take some time." We called an Apple iPhone customer service representative to help us with our own activation (see picture above). She cautioned that, after the initial online setup, consumers might have to wait hours for their phone to find the network. "We just got an e-mail saying, ‘Please advise customers that there could be 2-3 hour delay in activation' of the phones," she said, explaining that the glitch was "due to an absolutely huge volume of phones that went out today." "Evidently we’ve sold more phones than we thought we were going to sell," she said. "It’s taking AT&T longer than we thought it would take them to get all these phones set up." Apple's media relations team did not return an e-mail seeking comment. CNET reported that some users are receiving a message noting that activation could take "up to 48 hours." The activation delays closely resembled a similar source of user frustration from last summer's launch of Apple's 3G model. However, an AT&T service representative suggested that repeatedly cycling the power on a new phone might speed the activation process. We used this method and, whether it made a difference or not, our phone finally jacked into the network. And it took only two hours. -- David Sarno
Credit: Abedin Taherkenareh / EPA
For a service that limits users to 140 characters, Twitter is finding its influence growing worldwide. The San Francisco company Monday delayed a crucial maintenance operation to accommodate the high volume of information flowing about the explosive election protests in Iran.
People both inside and outside Iran have been sending short text messages about the violence and civil disobedience that has engulfed the nation's capital, Tehran, for the last two days. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has defended his reelection last week, but the protests have grown more intense.
In a blog post Monday afternoon, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said his site's scheduled maintenance would be delayed from overnight -- daytime in Iran -- to 2 to 3 p.m. Pacific time Tuesday, which would be the middle of the night in Iran.
The work was "a critical network upgrade [that] must be performed to ensure continued operation of Twitter," Stone wrote. The servers that undergird the micromessaging site are run by NTT America, a division of Japanese telecommunications giant Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Co.
Stone noted that NTT America recognized "the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran" and was "taking a huge risk not just for Twitter but also the other services they support worldwide."
Twitter traffic about the situation in Iran has been dominating the service for the last several days, with topics such as IranElection, Tehran and Iranians among the most actively discussed on Twitter. News tidbits, photos and chatter about the protests have flowed around the world, becoming a key medium for news from the scene.
Twitter users worried that shutting down the service could cut off yet another information channel for those in Iran, where the government had reportedly blocked access to social media sites, such as YouTube and Facebook, in addition to cutting off mobile phone service.
-- David Sarno
 Grabbed from Twitpocalypse.com. Are we in for a massive Twitpocalypse that will destroy the fabric of our fragile 140-character universe? Not likely, says the guy who originated the semi-hoax. Martin Dufort, CEO of Canadian application developer Wherecloud, says he put up the fear-mongering Twitpocalypse.com page as "a viral marketing move." The page tongue-in-cheekily predicts that when the absolute number of Tweets hits 2,147,483,647 (the highest number a 32-bit signed integer variable can store), Twitter applications using the faulty variable type will be "very likely to malfunction or crash." But actually Dufort started the page, mostly as a joke, after he found the weakness in his own software. He had no idea it would blow up into a case of Web hysteria. When pressed for details about how widespread he thought the cataclysm would be, Dufort admitted, "We have no clue which other third-party apps are going to be affected." He noted that his company's own Twitter iPhone application -- or, more specifically, the bug in one third-party code library (MGTwitterEngine) that his application employed -- had been fixed months ago. Dufort said his Twitpocalypse page, as well as the Wherecloud homepage, were seeing a heavy traffic spike. "The secondary hits are very good for us; in some sense, it's kind of a viral marketing move on our side." He added that he found it very doubtful that many apps would be affected, particularly because the Twitter API development community has known about the problem for a while and has had plenty of time to make the small changes necessary to avoid the problem. "Twitter will definitely be up tomorrow," Dufort said. -- David Sarno
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