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T-Mobile is in a tough spot when it comes to competing with these big carriers, largely because its footprint is not as big and because it’s just now getting into the 3G game. It only started rolling out its 3G network this summer. And on Wednesday it just announced it had activated 3G in its second city, Las Vegas. The service launched in New York City.

T-Mobile USA is adding new subscribers, but the No. 4 wireless operator can’t seem to catch much ground on its larger competitors.

In total, T-Mobile has 31.5 million customers, putting it in a distant fourth place. Meanwhile, bigger players, such as AT&T added 1.3 million subscribers in the quarter for a total of 72.9 million subscribers. Verizon Wireless added 1.5 million new subscribers in the second quarter for a total of 68.7 million subscribers. And Sprint Nextel, which lost 901,000 subscribers, still has about 51.9 subscribers.

So far it doesn’t look like the company has been able to pick off many of the frustrated Sprint customers. But if Sprint continues to have problems, T-Mobile might be able to win some of those customers to its service if it can increase coverage and do well with its value services, such as HotSpot@Home and the MyFaves calling circle.

Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile USA’s parent company, reported second quarter earnings on Thursday and gave some detail on its U.S. operations. While T-Mobile USA increased revenue for the quarter by about 14.3 percent compared to a year ago, the company is not adding as many new customers as it has in the past. Total revenues rose to $5.47 billion from $4.78 billion in the prior-year quarter.

Management blamed the decline in net additions on the fact that some customers were not renewing their two-year fixed contracts, which started back in April 2006.

In the second quarter, T-Mobile USA reported it had added 525,000 new subscribers. This isn’t bad considering Sprint Nextel lost about 901,000 subscribers in the quarter. But T-Mobile’s net additions were about 22.1 percent less than what it added in the same quarter a year ago. In 2007, the company added 857,000 new subscribers.

Some of BuddyMedia’s clients have included FedEx, Microsoft, Reebok, and Anheuser-Busch.

BuddyMedia, a New York-based start-up that develops social-network games as well as branded applications for clients, has launched a new product that tackles one of the challenges of social advertising: that it’s just plain difficult to tell how successful it is.

“Many advertisers and marketers are becoming aware of the value in advertising through social media channels, but have yet to do so because of an inaccurate perception that no methods or tools exist to sufficiently measure the reach and success of a campaign,” CEO Michael Lazerow said in a statement. “We’ve spent the past few months developing the BuddyBrain to combat these very fears to both entice more brands to make the leap into social advertising and to better service our existing clientele.”

Facebook and other social networks typically provide a less extensive array of analytics to developers who have created applications on their platforms.

Early BuddyBrain stats, the company says, have come up with some numbers that conveniently support BuddyMedia’s own cause: that consumers are 75 times more likely to “interact” with a widget ad than a banner ad, that “appvertisements” average 140,000 installs in the first month of a campaign, and that 85 percent of social-network users who install a branded application will use it more than once.

The company calls the creation “BuddyBrain,” and is gearing it toward clients who turn to BuddyMedia for “appvertising,” or branded apps designed specifically for product marketing. The data provided to clients–yes, arranged in the shape of a brain–provides statistics on installs, usage, and time spent per user; a feed of news and blog reports relevant to the brand and campaign; and documentation resources.

In addition to better financial incentives, Kruse is also advocating that federal dollars are spent on better renewable energy software and Internet connectivity in rural areas.

As part of smart grid program, utilities could use that Internet connectivity to change the voltage of wind turbines in an area to reduce the load on the grid, Kruse explained.

Internet access, too, is important to Southwest Windpower because some of its turbines have built-in local-area networking.

The difference between a suboptimal site and one with a good wind resource can be dramatic, said Kruse. With good wind and high electricity rates, a homeowner could recoup the upfront investment of a small wind turbine in five or six years. But with low electricity rates and marginal wind could mean 15 or 20 years, he said.

Better site assessment software, coupled with lots of computing power, would help consumers and installers get more detailed information on the available wind or sun resource at a particular location.

Changes in the stimulus package will lift the $4,000 cap on the federal tax credit for small wind purchases and other forms of clean-energy generation, according to Kruse. That means that consumers or businesses can get a tax credit worth 30 percent of the purchase price for a small wind turbine, geothermal heat pump, or solar hot water installation.

Kruse is in Washington this week lobbying to improve the subsidies for installing small wind turbines, one of the fastest growing segments in wind energy. Southwest Windpower makes a line of small wind turbines including the Skystream, which is sized for individual homes.

(Credit:
Southwest Wind)

“You really needed Cray (supercomputers) before to generate maps,” he said. “We’re at the point now where we can look at this and use cheaper horsepower to create better maps.”

Start-up 3Tier offers a wind and sun resource map but more detail will help optimize the installation and avoid dissatisfied customers. Southwest Windpower estimates that about 13 million locations in the U.S. are suitable for its small wind turbine which is typically mounted on a pole.

A Skystream wind turbine at the Botanitic Gardens near the Mall in Washington D.C.

Broadband Internet connectivity, particularly in rural areas with good wind, would give Southwest Windpower the ability to spot problems remotely.

“Our wind turbines are Zigbee wireless controlled so we can monitor it and give it an IP address at the router and from there we can look at the performance and can upload new software,” he said.

If you ask Andy Kruse, the CEO of wind turbine maker Southwest Windpower, about technology, he’s more likely to talk about software and WiMax than turbine blades or inverters.

“This is a huge step with our machines. No longer is it just an alternator that makes electricity but it’s also a machine that you can communicate and interact with,” he said.

One thing to note is that the site is running pretty slow with
Firefox 3 for some reason. If you have an earlier version or are using another popular browser it’s wicked fast.

[via The AWS blog]

If you’re not one of the cool kids with a Kindle, the good news is that paper books are still quite popular and less likely to be taken at gunpoint by muggers. The sad truth is that browsing through them on the Web is not nearly as fun as loitering in a bookstore (or on the Kindle), which is why Zoomii was created.

Zoomii is a virtual bookstore with simple bookshelves that highlight Amazon.com’s massive collection. It’s set up to work just like Google Maps. You can zoom in and out, and simply drag your mouse around from shelf to shelf. Included are best sellers, sci-fi, and every other conceivable book genre. When you find something that looks attractive you simply click on it and it’ll grab all of the info it can through Amazon’s API. To actually read the reviews you’ll have to click off-site and back to Amazon; the same goes for payments.

Zoomii reminds me a little bit of Shelfari, a bookmarking tool to show other people what you’re reading. The difference is that Zoomii skips your friends and goes straight for the wisdom of the crowds–aka the estimated 15 percent of the book-buying public who go to Amazon to get their reading material.

(Credit:
Xantrex )

Going off grid with solar–and batteries.

“It’s a market that that a lot of people don’t focus on it but from a business point of view, you get an opportunity to earn some good money,” he said. “Those markets don’t require government incentives because the solution to the problem you are addressing is ‘you don’t have power.’”

The Trace Series Inverter/Charger replaces its existing DR line that the company has sold since the 1990s which is most used in countries that don’t have reliable power supply.

Many people assume that purchasing solar panels for a home includes a stack of batteries to run when the power goes out. That’s typically not the case for customers in the U.S. unless they are willing to pay extra for back-up power.

When a house’s panels are generating more electricity than the house is consumer, a “grid-tied” inverter will feed power back to the grid and make the meter runs backwards, subtracting from a customer’s monthly bill.

(Credit:
Xantrex )

Xantrex participates in both the grid-tied and off-grid market but Gomm said that the off-grid market is still appealing even though it isn’t growing as fast.

Inverter maker Xantrex on Monday announced an overhaul to its inverters that let people combine a renewable energy source with some back-up power.

Inverters convert direct current generated by solar panels or a wind turbine to household alternating current. When the power goes out, the Xantrex inverter draws on batteries to meet the household’s load.

The Xantrex Trace Series Inverter/Charger is designed to charge batteries from solar panels or wind turbine when there is a power failure.

The updated Trace Series is more user friendly to operate and is more efficient in converting electricity to battery power and back, said Lloyd Gomm, director of marketing and product management for Xantrex.

A few weeks later, I purchased a product online for in-store pickup, and when I got to the store, it had a record of my purchase but couldn’t find the item. One last time (in the name of research), I did everything the way it should be done through the site, only to find that it was sold out when I got to the store.

Explaining my issue and the fact that the Best Buy Web site told me the device was in-stock and that I had already bought it, I was told to come back in “a couple of days,” and they should have one for me.

You don’t typically save money over retail, but you do ideally get the product in your hands right away. You don’t have to deal with looking for it at the store or standing in the register lines, since you’ve paid online already. Plus, you guarantee that when you get to the store, the item will be there for you, not sold out. In theory, at least.

I’m not alone.

In practice, it’s a disaster. I’ve used in-store pickup at Best Buy more than once, and it hasn’t worked. The first time, the site said my item (a camera) was available for in-store pickup, so I paid online, selected the in-store pickup option, and ran down to the store a couple hours later.

Looking for some sort of defense–or at the very least, justification for these issues–I contacted Best Buy and explained to them that at least three technology writers faced issues with the company’s in-store pickup service, and my editor’s anecdotal research turned up less than rosy reports about the consistency of its service. I also sent the company questions asking representatives to discuss their vision for in-store pickup and how they plan to improve it in the future. All I received was a two-sentence response.

The reality is that even 90 percent satisfaction isn’t good enough. The point of using in-store pickup is to give the customer a predictable shopping experience. If they want to roll the dice, after all, they could just head to the store without doing any online research on product availability ahead of time.

You’ll then receive directions on when to get to the store and where to pick up your product. You drive to the store, go to the pickup counter, tell them who you are and what you bought, they find it within seconds because it’s there, and you walk out with your new purchase. The pitch is that it works just like that every time and brings the predictability of online purchasing into the otherwise variable world of in-store purchasing. But it just doesn’t.

How have your in-store pickup experiences been?
( polls)

Check out Don’s Digital Home podcast, Twitter stream, and FriendFeed.

(Credit:
Don Reisinger/CNET)

Check stores? Will it be there?

CNET editor Rafe Needleman experienced a similar issue and vowed to “never use Best Buy in-store pickup again.” Technologizer blogger Harry McCracken told Rafe via Twitter when Rafe first mentioned his issue with Best Buy that “the first (and last?) time” he used Best Buy’s service, he was forced to “wait for eons, then discovered it wasn’t in stock, after all.”

Rafe asked his readers and Twitter followers to tell him about their experiences with in-store pickup. While many respondents said they liked the service, plenty also said they had significant problems.

I realize that 100 percent consistency in any retail operation is nearly impossible, but because consumers are expecting predictability, one bad experience will make them wonder if in-store pickup is really worth it. In-store pickup cannot work unless customer satisfaction with it begins to approach the reliability of online purchasing (which, to be fair, isn’t perfect, either). One bad experience, and the chances of that customer using that service again are slim. Worse, they tell their friends.

That response is a joke, right? That is Best Buy’s justification for a poor customer experience? What about those customers who weren’t “happy” with their experiences? I hate to say it, but I think the fall of Circuit City has gone to the heads of some of Best Buy’s executives, and they think their company is bulletproof. Reality check: it’s not.

I went to the pick-up counter, explained why I was there, and waited a good 10 minutes before the representative came back and told me that the store had no record of me purchasing that product with in-store pickup.

I like the idea of in-store pickup that Best Buy and other retailers offer. When you’re in a hurry to get a product that’s available at a retail location near you, you can go online, buy the product just as you normally would, if it was getting shipped to you, but opt instead to pick it up at your local retail outlet.

In-store pickup is supposed to eliminate the variability. With in-store pickup, you will, in theory, enjoy a predictable experience: you surf to the company’s Web site, use the search box to find the product you want, add it to your shopping cart, select in-store pickup, and pay for it.

Predictability is paramount with in-store pickup, but based on my experiences and others’ over the past few months (at least using Best Buy), it is anything but. What’s stopping me from buying products online from Amazon, knowing from experience that the service will be the same every time? Given the state of Best Buy’s in-store pickup, nothing.

“We are sorry you and your editor had poor experiences with our in-store pickup,” a company representative wrote. “Last quarter alone, 36 percent of our total online sales came from in-store pickup, and overall, our customers told us they were happy with their experiences.”

For the graphics problem, I see a couple of possible explanations.

Intel could have discovered a design flaw in the first production units severe enough to prevent them from being shipped, which would have caused a substantial delay while a new run of production units was completed. (See my earlier blog post, “Design flaws, defects, and faults”, for an explanation of how design flaws are related to product defects and faults.) This delay would have been largely hidden by the usual rounds of testing, but perhaps it just used up a little more time than the slack that was available in the schedule.

Or perhaps there was a design or manufacturing flaw that didn’t require trashing the first production run, but which did require some additional testing and qualification to reject specific problematic parts. This could be caused by slower or hotter operation than expected, for example. Such a problem would cause a shorter delay– just the extra testing time. A statement from Intel in the Crothers post referring to “re-screening” suggests this is the situation here, although potentially that statement could also describe testing a second production run to ensure the problem has been solved.

As has been widely reported (for example, by EDN Magazine and both Brooke Crothers and Dan Ackerman here at CNET), Intel has delayed the first customer shipments (FCS) of its “Montevina” chipsets, part of the new Centrino 2 platform.

Graphics engines are very complicated, and getting more complicated every year. Intel started out well enough in the graphics business when it worked with Real3D (now defunct) to develop the Intel740, a discrete graphics chip, but 18 months later it found itself already 18 months behind ATI and NVIDIA, and fell back to selling only integrated-graphics chipsets, where the graphics component is worth only a few dollars in incremental revenue.

Intel plans to get back into the market for discrete graphics chips in 2009 or (more likely) 2010 with “Larrabee”, a multi-core CPU in which some cores are optimized for graphics processing. I think Larrabee will turn out to be a technical disaster, but Intel has leveraged its market domination to turn previous technical disasters into financial windfalls. Think of the Pentium 4’s “Hyper-Pipelined” design, for example, which was too hot and too inefficient, ultimately forcing Intel to bring its predecessor, the P6 design, back from the grave several years later. Intel’s current graphics engines, however, are barely worth selling today, and they won’t be worth reviving after Larrabee has run its course.

Intel’s probably right about the WiFi certification problem. I’ve been through the FCC certification process (for electromagnetic interference (EMI), at least); there sure is a lot of paperwork involved.

The delays are pretty short, however… a matter of just a few weeks.

Intel attributes the delays to two independent problems: one with FCC certification of the 802.11n WiFi feature in the chips (just “paperwork,” Intel says), and one with the integrated graphics engines in some models.

I find it interesting that this problem is related to Intel’s new graphics engine, which is certainly the most important element of the new chipset. Intel’s previous integrated graphics products have been criticized for not really being up to the challenges of running
Windows Vista, including by Microsoft itself, but due to pressure from Intel, Microsoft certified these chips as “Vista Capable.” That’s technically true– I’ve used integrated-graphics platforms under Vista myself– but the resulting shortfalls in performance and features probably discouraged many new Vista users.

There’s an easy interface for mobiles that lets you tell the service how you’re feeling. On the input site, you feed Me-trics your financial data form Mint, your Twitter feed, and so on, and it will make the connections. Then if you notice that Twittering makes you stressed you, well, you just cut back.

It could be more than cute, if the service would observe your stress other than requiring you to enter it manually. As the presenter said, the implants to feed into that database are not with us yet.

Cute.

Me-trics is a lifestyle service that correlates your stress level with the other things going on in and around your life. You report on your stress, and also feed it your content feeds, and it tells what you’re doing that is causing you stress. Or what you do that reduces it.

(Credit:
Me-trics)

The trend of packing more compute power into small supercomputing enclosures “is really driven by what’s going on in microprocessors. The x86 revolution continues. You see more and more cores. Increased performance. But also without more power required,” he said, speaking during the keynote.

Flash back two years to the Intel Developer Forum when CEO Paul Otellini pledged to deliver an 80-core processor in five years.

In various venues, Intel has spelled out its intention to bring out many-core processors including its upcoming Larrabee graphics chip and future server processors that may reach 32 cores. Currently, Intel’s Dunnington processor gets the prize (at Intel) for the most cores: six. Sun Microsystem’s “Rock” processor
will have 16 cores.

A Dell slide shown Tuesday was a reminder that a future 80-core processor is still in sight.

Otellini said at the time that the chips will be capable of exchanging data at a terabyte a second and that the company hopes to have these chips ready for commercial production within a five-year window.

(Credit:
Dell Computer)

Dell slide shown Tuesday at SC08

Michael Dell referred to a slide showing an 80-core chip Tuesday at SC08, a conference in Austin, Texas, focused on high-performance computing.

It is correct that the reason I did not give the talk was due to various nondisclosure agreements; however, Apple was, to my knowledge, not aware of the talk, and there was no contact between them and myself, nor between them and anyone from my company, 318, in regard to the talk prior to my asking to be removed from consideration.

In comments to CNET News, which have been edited for readability, Edge had a lot to say:

When this story first came to light, it was The Washington Post who contacted me, asking why the talk had been removed from consideration–and not I who contacted them. I had not, in fact, discussed the talk with anyone between the time that I rescinded the talk and the time I received the call from The Washington Post, and…their source (remains unclear).

Last Thursday, researcher Charles Edge told Brian Krebs of The Washington Post that a talk on a previously disclosed flaw within the encryption for Apple FileVault had to be canceled because of a signed agreement with Apple.

The story had the individuals at Black Hat who handle the Call for Papers–the process by which a researcher submits a request to make a presentation and then waits to hear back from the conference–scrambling. Edge, who goes by the nickname “Krypted,” is a well-known Apple security researcher who has previously presented at both Black Hat and its Defcon sister conference.

This post has been updated with Charles Edge’s response.

LAS VEGAS–On the eve of this year’s Black Hat Briefings here, officials disputed a researcher’s claim that his talk had to be canceled. They say the talk never even existed.

Click here for full coverage of Black Hat 2008.

Meanwhile, a Black Hat representative confirmed that a panel discussion titled “Meet the Apple Security Experts” was canceled by its moderator. The panel still appears in the printed schedule for the conference because the cancellation came too late to change the printing. All other references have been removed.

But on Tuesday, two different Black Hat officials told CNET News that Edge never submitted a paper for this year’s conference.

I submitted the talk, and later sent a second submission using the same system to then ask to be removed from consideration. As an alumni speaker, I know from experience that the entire Black Hat organization is run extremely well. Why they cannot find me in their system, I cannot speak to.

If it was by some error on my part that the talk was not submitted properly, then this further underscores why this issue is not a big deal. Submitting and then rescinding it has a similar effect to not having submitted at all. If the abstract never made its way into the CFP system, then it simply narrows down the list of people who I need to touch base with that could have been Brian’s initial source.