Wal-Mart Gets its Own Geek Squad

Wal-Mart and Dell are testing the Solution Station by Dell in 15 Dallas stores, creating a service and support operation along the lines of the Best Buy Geek Squad, the Circuit City Firedog or AT&T Tech Support 360. Solution Station will repair PCs and set up home entertainment and wireless networking gear sold by Wal-Mart.

The move shows the increasing need for end user support, in the small business and consumer markets, as more complex digital technology sales now require more set-up, training and configuration services.

The AT&T service allows customers to receive live help for everything from setting up and configuring their computer to setting up Wi-Fi networks and hooking up printers, scanners and routers via the Internet. Subscription plans range from $19 to $28 a month, per computer, with an $89 initial setup cost.

As IP technology becomes the dominant way service providers deliver services to customers, it no longer is possible to terminate services cleanly at some demarcation point. Increasingly, support must be provided for end user devices as an integral part of the customer experience. 

T-Mobile Sells out G1 Stock

T-Mobile USA apparently has sold out all of their pre-sale stock of the Android-powered G1 smart phone, according to TmoNews.com. Current T-Mobile customers were offered a chance to buy the device early, before the actual mass market launch on October 22. The site says T-Mobile planned on offering 60,000 pre-sale devices.

Bandwidth Caps Inevitable

T-Mobile USA's swift retraction of a 1 Gbyte monthly cap on 3G data access to G1 Android phones was wise. The cap was paltry, compared to competing offers available from Verizon, AT&T and Sprint. Granted, T-Mobile probably wanted to avoid taxing its brand-new 3G network, and likely was aware that five class action lawsuits filed against AT&T for misrepresentation suggest legal liability if 3G performance was compromised by excessive demand. 

That said, bandwidth caps are inevitable for mobile users, and likely inevitable for fixed broadband access as well, as video becomes a more-common application. The reason is simple: video consumes an order of magnitude, or in some cases two orders of magnitude, more bandwidth than anything Internet service providers yet have encountered.

Anybody who has followed the cost of fiber-to-home construction knows how expensive access to core bandwidth actually is. In fact, the business case is quite difficult, under nearly all circumstances. 

User expectations aside, when demand jumps that much, one can expect either bandwidth caps, or metered usage or new higher-priced tiers of service that better match the underlying cost of providing service. For some of us, Internet access, using broadband, is as much a utility as water, electricity, wastewater services, heating or cooling. 

And it simply does not make, long term, to provide most of those services on a "flat fee, irrespective of usage." There are real costs (carbon footprint, drilling, refining, construction, maintenance) for providing clean water, water removal or electrrical services. It would not make sense to provide them on a flat rate basis for all customers, as well as that might work for most customers, most of the time. 

At Work Social Media Overblown?

Researchers at the Pew Internet & American Life Project recently found that very few workers actually create or read blogs while at work. About 11 percent of respondents who have Internet access at work say they have read blogs while at work.

Reading is most prevalent among younger generations of employed Internet users. About 33 percent of Iinternet-using employees say they have read someone else’s blog or online journal, either at home or at work.

Among young working adults, 46 percent are blog readers, compared with 33 percent of 30-49 year olds and

25 percent of employed Internet users ages 50-64. At-work blog reading is equally prevalent among all of these groups, though. 

Some might seize on that finding as an example of workers not taking advantage of all the information-bathering and communication tools they now have at their disposal.

Some will leap to the conclusion that workers are doing themselves a disservice by avoiding blog readership or creation while they are at work. That might be true. But there is another way to look at matters. 

Those of us who have done journalism for any length of time sometimes believe--apparently incorrectly--that most people in a business or profession "need" to read news and other information sources to do their jobs. But hang around in the mailroom at any organization. What you will find is that after the "C" titles, very few people who work in organizations actually read publications of any kind related to their industry verticals or horizontal job responsibilities.

It simply is not true that most people "need" to know what is happening at a high level in their industries to do their actual jobs. If it were true, then almost everybody would be reading and acquiring such information at work. But most people do not. 

One can argue that "most" people thereby are harming their careers. To be sure, there is no way to prove or disprove such a thesis. But it has not been my experience, as somebody who has picked up mail in the mailroom, that most people actually think they "must" know what is happening in an industry at a high level, in order to do their actual jobs. "C" titles obviously have greater incentive to monitor industry trends, as they must raise and allocate capital. Marketing staffs often have higher incentive to know what's going on because they must create and manage a wide variety of sales-related and product development tasks. 

Information technology managers typically spend more time than most staying "up to date" on technology trends. But most people simply do not, because they don't have to. 

Media publishers and content providers of all sorts have a vested interest in persuading people that a particular product is a "must read" for most people who "matter." That just isn't true, in most cases. Most people not only have no such need, they have no such habit, either.

Ping Patent, Ding Providers

Google has filed a patent application that essentially would allow end users of communications services to conduct real-time auctions and then select the best deal. 

Think of it as an application of "on demand" bandwidth to virtually any voice, video or data session a user wants to create "right now."

Customers like this sort of thing, carriers typically don't, as prices tend to drop when there is real-time transparency into cost and quality parameters of available access and transport options. 

Cisco Makes Big Move into Cloud Computing

Cisco has undertaken a major new initiative in the unified communications space, introducing a new architecture for its former WebEx Connect service, making Cisco a provider of Web-based productivity applications including email, instant messaging, voice, calendaring and virtual whiteboards.

The offering is part of Cisco’s Software as a Service (SaaS) platform and is part of a vision Cisco now has for "everything as a service." Predictably, the initiative has pundits touting Cisco's new move to compete with the likes of Google and Microsoft in Web-based services and applications. The strategy has elements of that, to be sure. But that's almost a by-product of the larger move towards cloud computing services that use a browser front end as the portal to services and applications of all sorts that once were delivered using physical media and local storage. 

Cisco says Verizon Communications is an initial partner, and that further deals are expected with European and Asia-based service providers as well. Cisco executives say business models might vary from carrier to carrier, but that subscription fees will drive the retail offerings and carriers will share in that revenue. 

Though initially services are expected to be consumed by PC users, the service also will be made available to "most" mobile platforms by the first quarter of 2009, including support for Symbian, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile

operating systems.

EC Wants to Slash Texting Rates 60%

The European Commission, as expected, has proposed a new law slashing international text messaging rates by 60 percent by the summer of 2009. Specifically, the EC has proposed a retail cap of €0.11 (about 16 cents), excluding value-added tax, on roaming text messages, combined with a €0.04 cap at wholesale level, to be introduced by July 1, 2009.