Phone co customer satisfaction evens out

Phone co customer satisfaction evens out — Improvements in customer satisfaction at Sprint Nextel Corp. and AT&T Inc. have narrowed differences among the Big 4 wireless carriers to the point that they're basically even in terms of pleasing their subscribers, according to a study released Tuesday.

The American Customer Satisfaction Index puts Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless within two points of each other on a 100-point scale of customer satisfaction.

That's the smallest spread since the survey started looking at all four companies in 2005. It's also within the margin of error at plus or minus three points.

Last year, AT&T clearly trailed the pack, while Sprint and Verizon led. That was a surprising development for Sprint, which was last as recently as four years ago. Sprint CEO Dan Hesse has made improvement in customer service central to his tenure.

AT&T recovered this year, with a three-point increase to 69. It shares that score with T-Mobile USA, the No. 4 carrier by size. Verizon and Sprint are at 70 and 71, respectively.

The survey was developed by the University of Michigan, but is now run by a private company, ACSI LLC. It surveyed about 6,000 households in the first quarter for the annual report.

For the phone companies, the satisfaction index has a limited relevance to actual customer loyalty, which the companies report quarterly. For instance, T-Mobile customers are far more likely to leave the carrier than AT&T's are, even though they have the same score.

T-Mobile is the only company among the Big 4 that doesn't sell the iPhone. That probably matters to customers. The ACSI for the first time published a score for Apple Inc. as a phone manufacturer. At 83 points, it handily outranks other manufacturers measured, including Samsung Electronics Co., HTC Corp. and Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. ( Associated Press )

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Super Secret Hypersonic Aircraft Flew Out of Its Skin

Super Secret Hypersonic Aircraft Flew Out of Its Skin - It turns out that tearing through the atmosphere at 20 times the speed of sound is bad for the skin, even if you're a super high-tech aircraft developed by the government's best engineers at its far-out research agency.

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, has made public its best guess about what might have caused its unmanned arrowhead-shaped Hypersonic Technology Vehicle (HTV-2) to suddenly lose contact and crash in the Pacific just a few minutes after slicing through the sky at Mach 20 last August: it was going so fast its skin peeled off.

Super Secret Hypersonic Aircraft Flew Out of Its Skin (ABC News)

After an eight-month investigation, DARPA concluded that even though the HTV-2 was expected to lose some of its skin mid-flight, "larger than anticipated portions of the vehicle's skin peeled from the aerostructure," the agency said in a statement Friday.

The agency said it expected the HTV-2, which goes so fast it can make the commute from New York to Los Angeles in 12 minutes, to experience "impulsive shock waves" at such speeds, but shocks it experienced last August were "more than 100 times what the vehicle was designed to withstand."

While the test was very public, the details of the HTV-2's design, stability system and potential purpose remain highly classified.

Two months after DARPA's test, the Army tested its own hypersonic aircraft - this one a long-range weapon system called the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon (AHW) designed to strike any target in the world in just a couple hours. ( ABC News )

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Is there room for revival for the former darling of social networks?

Is there room for revival for the former darling of social networks? - Before being squashed by Facebook, it was once the darling of social networking. But after a few years in the doldrums, Myspace is beginning to find its feet again. Louis Pattison finds out how.

Rupert Murdoch, as we have learned by now, is not a man accustomed to admitting when he is in the wrong.

In the case of Myspace however, which Murdoch’s News Corp acquired for £330million in 2005, and offloaded six years later for a rather more modest £22million, he spoke with uncharacteristic candour.

‘Simple answer,’ he tweeted in January, ‘we screwed up in every way possible, learned lots of valuable expensive lessons.’

With Myspace, News Corp thought they were getting a prime piece of web real estate, one offering a direct route to the lucrative but elusive teen/young adult demographic. As it turned out, Myspace was not a safe route to go down. Next to the crisp design of Facebook, Myspace’s user-customised profiles began to look tacky and garish, and a wealth of new, nimble web start-ups – the likes of Spotify, Soundcloud and Tumblr – showed it up to be a cumbersome beast.

By the time Murdoch sold the ailing site, Myspace was haemorrhaging users, down to 33million unique views a month from a 75.9million peak in 2008.

This was a decline so steep it looked terminal – but last year’s buyers of the site – Specific Media – had a plan.

Competing with Facebook was clearly no longer an option, as Dan Stephenson, vice president at Myspace Studios, freely admits.

‘Will we see 10million people come back and start sharing photos of what they did last night with their friends? I don’t think we will. That is now Facebook’s territory. With 35million people signed up in Britain, it’s almost an internet within the internet.’

Instead, Specific’s plan is to reinvent Myspace as a sort of music and video hub – as Mr Stephenson puts it: ‘A place where artists and audiences can connect’.

Myspace would no longer compete with Facebook, Twitter and Spotify, but work alongside and integrate, in line with Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of ‘frictionless sharing’.

Advising Specific as they overhauled the site was a man who is no stranger to the murky world of the social network – Justin Timberlake – who came on board as an investor-cum-ideas-man. ‘Justin certainly has a hands-on role,’ said Mr Stephenson. ‘He and his team have been instrumental in guiding things.’

Last December, Myspace launched a new music player, featuring enhanced music recommendations and built-in search engines. In February, they announced the site had signed up 1million new users.

And who are these new users? ‘I think they’re people passionate about music,’ said Mr Stephenson. ‘They’ve come back and seen there are 42million tracks on Myspace, many from new and unsigned bands. A lot of acts – Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen, Calvin Harris – they were able to build a fanbase using Myspace. And this is where a lot of people had their first experience of social networking – I think the warmth is still there.’

F Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that ‘there are no second acts in American life’. In the world of web enterprise, where companies float on the stock exchange for astronomical sums, never make a profit, and are superseded by younger, hungrier companies in a matter of a few short years, the idea of a company turning around such a steep decline seems unthinkable.

‘There’s a sense in the industry that the boat has left for poor old Myspace,’ said Eamonn Forde, a writer for Q and Word magazines. ‘Obviously, it still has a lot of traffic, but if you speak to people at a record company about signing a band, the litmus test used to be “How many followers have they got on Myspace?” The analytics they look at now is Twitter followers, Facebook likes, Soundcloud plays.

‘Facebook is now the default social network. The deal it did with Spotify was crucial because now firms have to work through Facebook to reach an audience.’

Still, Mr Stephenson suggests Myspace have some ambitious plans afoot. A new platform is due this summer, they’re building relationships with major and indie record labels and have plans for live shows and exclusive recordings.

If Myspace does remain with us, though, it will certainly be a more modest proposition than the megabrand of the mid-2000s.

‘I would like to see it live because it changed the industry,’ said Mr Forde.

‘Maybe Myspace will be the site of the next Dalston-style hipster revival. Stranger things have happened.’ ( metro.co.uk )

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Is photo-sharing website Pinterest the next Facebook or Twitter?

Is photo-sharing website Pinterest the next Facebook or Twitter? - Not a week goes by without a new website being proclaimed as 'the new Facebook' or 'the next Twitter', but photo-sharing network Pinterest could have genuine staying power - as long as some copyright concerns don't scupper its popularity. Metro wades through tonnes of images of knitwear and cupcakes to find out what it's all about.

‘What really matters is what you like, not what you are like.’ It may sound like the mantra of today’s social networking generation but it’s really a quote from a novel written in the dark ages… 1995.

Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity has proved highly prophetic when it comes to internet habits, both in our love of making online lists and our desire to tell the world what we like.

These two trends are encapsulated in the latest website generating a buzz – Pinterest.

As its name suggests, Pinterest.com is an online and social pinboard that allows users to grab their favourite photos and share them with followers. If the site was a song, it would be My Favourite Things from The Sound Of Music – and, like the song, ‘whiskers on kittens’ and ‘crisp apple strudel’ feature heavily.

If there’s one thing you can be sure of on Pinterest, it is pictures of cats and desserts.

Pinterest is quite simple. Users ‘pin’ a picture of something they like to their page. This can be done by adding a ‘pin it’ button to your favourites bar. These pins are then grouped into themed boards. To register on the site, you must be invited by either a friend or sending a request directly to Pinterest.

Users must also link their Facebook or Twitter account to Pinterest.

Metro's own Andy Blackmore shares a bowl with Jack the dog on it with his pals

The first encounter with Pinterest can be quite daunting. Its constantly evolving homepage bombards you with images of shoes, interior design and Ryan Gosling.

It is no surprise to learn, then, that most of its users are American women. In Britain, however, that trend is not replicated, with more than half of Pinterest users here men.

Katherine Hannaford, editor of tech website Gizmodo UK, said: ‘In under a year, Pinterest has amassed around 12million users, most of which appear to be cash-rich and click-hungry women.’

Brands love it, too. Mecca Ibrahim, head of social media at Great British Chefs, said Pinterest has been a healthy source of new traffic for the company.

‘It works very effectively for us as people not only love looking at attractive photographs of food but are also keen to find out how to make them, so they will click on the pictures and not just share them,’ she said.

The site was started two years ago by Yale University graduates Ben Silbermann and Paul Sciarra and their friend, designer Evan Sharp. It is also based in California’s Palo Alto – the hub of web activity. An account in the name of Mr Silbermann’s mother, Jane Wang, is the site’s most popular, with 2.5million followers.

There is even an account in the name of Mark Zuckerberg, which may indicate the Facebook founder is keeping a close eye on the competition.

Like Facebook, however, Pinterest has attracted concern over the question of ownership.

Pinterest allows users to share pictures of the things they love with others (Picture: Pintrest)

Bloggers have been expressed fears that if a user owns a picture, they are effectively handing it over to Pinterest if they pin it on the site.

On top of that, there is concern that many Pinterest users could be breaking copyright law by sharing images they don’t own.

Pinterest has allowed websites to block their picture content by adding a line of code and it also has a notification system to allow copyright holders to request the removal of content.

But Andrew Murray, professor of law at the London School of Economics, worries that the differences between British and American copyright law (Pinterest references the latter) could result in users here being sued for pinning an image without the copyright holder’s permission. ‘Pinterest is acting at the margins of copyright legality,’ he said.

‘They have carefully crafted their copyright policy and terms and conditions to protect themselves from copyright infringement claims.

‘Legally, Pinterest seems to comply with US copyright law – and also UK law, incidentally – by operating a notice and takedown approach.

‘But, morally, it is a lot greyer, especially when they place all liability for infringement claims on the members’ shoulders though their indemnity.

‘It seems to me that Pinterest encourages members to post material without thinking of the copyright implications, monetises this content, and then takes little to no responsibility should copyright holders take action.’

Pinterest has remained fairly tight-lipped about copyright – even refusing to comment for this article – but Mr Silbermann recently insisted the company is not indifferent to the issue.

David Emm, senior security researcher at Kaspersky Lab, said: ‘The obvious issue is who owns the content? It’s essential before you start posting any data in any social network that you read the small print and find out what the provider might do with any content you share.’

Pinterest has also been criticised for generating income by modifying links to products on commercial websites.

‘At the moment, it’s tough seeing how Pinterest is making money or ever intends on making money in the future,’ Ms Hannaford continued.

‘Pinterest provides a novel way to pass the hours – though long-time Tumblr-using people may argue they have a better platform for that so it’s unlikely we’re looking at the next Facebook or even the next big thing.’

A rival site, Fancy, last week started allowing users to post pictures of their favourite items before buying them directly through the site. With 250,000 registered users, Fancy is not as popular as Pinterest but it has a head start on monetising its potential. ( metro.co.uk )

The big question is, how will Pinterest follow suit?

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Steve Jobs and the 7 Rules of Success

Steve Jobs and the 7 Rules of Success - Steve Jobs' impact on your life cannot be underestimated. His innovations have likely touched nearly every aspect -- computers, movies, music and mobile. As a communications coach, I learned from Jobs that a presentation can, indeed, inspire. For entrepreneurs, Jobs' greatest legacy is the set of principles that drove his success.

Over the years, I've become a student of sorts of Jobs' career and life. Here's my take on the rules and values underpinning his success. Any of us can adopt them to unleash our "inner Steve Jobs."

1. Do what you love. Jobs once said, "People with passion can change the world for the better." Asked about the advice he would offer would-be entrepreneurs, he said, "I'd get a job as a busboy or something until I figured out what I was really passionate about." That's how much it meant to him. Passion is everything.

2. Put a dent in the universe. Jobs believed in the power of vision. He once asked then-Pepsi President, John Sculley, "Do you want to spend your life selling sugar water or do you want to change the world?" Don't lose sight of the big vision.

3. Make connections. Jobs once said creativity is connecting things. He meant that people with a broad set of life experiences can often see things that others miss. He took calligraphy classes that didn't have any practical use in his life -- until he built the Macintosh. Jobs traveled to India and Asia. He studied design and hospitality. Don't live in a bubble. Connect ideas from different fields.

4. Say no to 1,000 things. Jobs was as proud of what Apple chose not to do as he was of what Apple did. When he returned in Apple in 1997, he took a company with 350 products and reduced them to 10 products in a two-year period. Why? So he could put the "A-Team" on each product. What are you saying "no" to?

5. Create insanely different experiences. Jobs also sought innovation in the customer-service experience. When he first came up with the concept for the Apple Stores, he said they would be different because instead of just moving boxes, the stores would enrich lives. Everything about the experience you have when you walk into an Apple store is intended to enrich your life and to create an emotional connection between you and the Apple brand. What are you doing to enrich the lives of your customers?

6. Master the message. You can have the greatest idea in the world, but if you can't communicate your ideas, it doesn't matter. Jobs was the world's greatest corporate storyteller. Instead of simply delivering a presentation like most people do, he informed, he educated, he inspired and he entertained, all in one presentation.

7. Sell dreams, not products. Jobs captured our imagination because he really understood his customer. He knew that tablets would not capture our imaginations if they were too complicated. The result? One button on the front of an iPad. It's so simple, a 2-year-old can use it. Your customers don't care about your product. They care about themselves, their hopes, their ambitions. Jobs taught us that if you help your customers reach their dreams, you'll win them over.

There's one story that I think sums up Jobs' career at Apple. An executive who had the job of reinventing the Disney Store once called up Jobs and asked for advice. His counsel? Dream bigger. I think that's the best advice he could leave us with. See genius in your craziness, believe in yourself, believe in your vision, and be constantly prepared to defend those ideas. ( Entrepreneur )

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Microsoft targeting October 2012 for Windows 8 launch

Microsoft targeting October 2012 for Windows 8 launch - According to a report from Bloomberg earlier today, Microsoft plans to finish up all work on Windows 8 by summer 2012 and release the new version of the operating system during October 2012. The official announcement of the release date as well as other information on scheduling will occur during April 2012 at an event for industry partners. The October timing of the release will coincide with the holiday shopping season allowing Microsoft to package Windows 8 with laptops, desktops and tablets from third party manufacturer such as Dell, HP, Gateway, Sony, Asus, Toshiba, Lenovo and Acer.

If Microsoft misses the targeted October 2012 release, Apple may continue to dominate the tablet market with the new iPad. According to Gartner Inc. analyst Michael Gartenberg, he stated “If they (Microsoft) miss the September-October timeframe, they’re going to be stuck without being able to ship anything in 2012. The last thing Microsoft wants to have is a situation where there are no compelling Windows tablets at a time when the new iPad looks like it’s going to be a good seller for the holidays.”

During early March, the same analyst firm predicted that PC shipments would be weak throughout 2012 and grow at a rate of 4.4 percent this year. The firm expects that ultrabooks will start to gain steam over the second half of the year and traditional desktops as well as laptops will continue to suffer due to the increased popularity of tablets. While the economy is a contributing factor to the weakness of PC market growth, Gartner also mentions the Thailand flooding issues as a contributing cause. The floods caused massive destruction and decreased the world’s supply of hard drives and other computer components.

Microsoft recently released the consumer preview of Windows 8 during late February and is encouraging Windows users to take the new user interface for a test drive. The operating system has a greater integration with SkyDrive, Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s iCloud. While SkyDrive has been around for approximately five years, Microsoft is encouraging third party developers to utilize the sharing functions in upcoming applications to take advantage of cloud sharing. Microsoft also integrates the recent Xbox 360 dashboard redesign into Windows 8 and allows a user to log into their Xbox Live account. From the Windows 8 interface, the user can launch Xbox 360 console games in addition to stream content to the gaming console.

In addition to the release of Windows 8, Microsoft is prepping for the launch of Office 15. Similar to the new operating system, Office 15 adopts the Metro-style according to Paul Thurrott at Supersite for Windows. The Start screen of Office 15 is littered with the Metro-style blocks containing recently opened Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. Within Microsoft Word, there’s a new full-screen mode that allows users to simply type a document without the toolbars at the top of the screen; ideal for the tablet where screen space is crucial. Office 15 includes Microsoft ID integration which logs the user into services like Windows Live Messenger and Hotmail. It also includes support for third party applications like Linkedin and Flickr. ( Digital Trends )

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Intel confirms two more ‘reference’ phones

Intel confirms two more ‘reference’ phones - Intel’s smartphone head says that each new mobile chip will be accompanied by a ‘reference design’ smartphone device.

Orange's Santa Clara is closely based on Intel's first 'reference' smartphone

Mike Bell, Intel’s vice president of ultra mobility, said that, with two new mobile chips already on the roadmap confirmed by chief executive Paul Ottelini, then at least two new devices could be expected by 2014. Intel is using 'reference designs' to both test and demonstrate the capabilities of its new chips for smartphones.

Mr Bell, who previously worked at Apple on the original iPhone, agreed that Intel was developing the reference designs to use as ‘calling cards’ with mobile operators and device manufacturers, rather than with the direct intention of marketing them to the public. “If you make a chip and don’t make a phone, then you just have to go in to manufacturers with Powerpoint and tell them making a phone with your chip is a really great idea,” he said. “We make the reference designs to show what our hardware can do."

The current Intel smartphone chip claims higher performance and lower power consumption on Google's Android operating system than its rivals, and future versions are likely to be half the size in less than a year.

Speaking at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Mr Bell said that Intel has “a lot of stuff in play” when it came to devices, but he added that “the really hard part is getting the software and the hardware to line up”. The forthcoming version of Google Android would be an obvious opportunity, he said. “The ‘Jelly Bean’ release is the obvious point of intersection”, he said.

Intel has announced that Orange will ship its first mass market smartphone, while Motorola and ZTE are also known to be involved in making Intel devices. Orange's Santa Clara device is very close to the original smartphone that Intel demonstrated at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, and Mr Bell said that it was "natural" to expect future reference designs to be taken up in some form by manufacturers because Intel would be paying for a large part of the investment. ( telegraph.co.uk )

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