Tuesday Tech Talk #84

Hello folks and welcome to another edition of Tuesday Tech Talk. Was a light week last week but over the weekend we got some big news that you may have heard about. Let’s see what is going on.

AT&T buying T-Mobile USA

Of course this is the big news announced on Sunday. AT&T is buying T-Mobile for $39 Billion and the deal if approved by regulators, should close in about a year. T-Mobile has posted a webpage that addresses customers most popular questions about the merger. The heart of this merger seems to be about one thing, matching Verizon on a nationwide 4G, or LTE network as it is also known. Time will tell if this is a positive or negative merger.

AT&T brings COW’s to SXSW

I know Texas has a lot of cows but at South By Southwest this year, AT&T brought out their own version of COW’s (Cellular On Wheels). Basically mini cell towers on trucks to create great voice and data connectivity at SXSW. You may recall a few years ago AT&T hit a low with SXSW attendees when their network choked on the demand from users.




AT&T Capping Broadband

Well, the trend in capping in the ISP industry is about to pick up speed once again. AT&T has announced it will cap its DSL customers at 150GB per month and its U-Verse customers at 250GB (same as Comcast). Personally I think this sucks! I pay a handsome sum to my ISP (Comcast) and for my expense I am told I am capped? How about this Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner, etc. How about you take some of that money your customers give you each month and build out your network so it can handle the bandwidth use!

More People read News on Web than Newspaper in 2010

2010 set a new record as it was the first year that more people turned to the web for their news than they do the newspaper according to the Pew Research Firm. I’m actually surprised this hasn’t happened sooner as I have been reading our local paper for years online.

Facebook taking on Groupon

Facebook will begin testing a new Groupon-style service to its customers via its existing Deals service. Test markets will include San Francisco, San Diego, Atlanta, Dallas, and Austin.

FastMac U-Socket

I remember seeing something about this AC outlet several months ago, but it ran into delays. Now it appears the FastMac AC and USB outlet is ready for business. As you can see, it offers 2 USB ports to the side of the standard AC plugs. It is probably more ideal for a new construction than an upgrade install, but I can see this taking off in new hotel construction.





Well, that is going to do it for this week’s Tuesday Tech Talk. Apologies for the AT&T heavy posts this week, but they are becoming very much integrated in tech with all their service offerings. See you all next week for another edition.

Googling Friday #14

Hey everybody and welcome to another edition of Googling Friday. This week I want to talk about Google’s new eBook reader but as always, we have Google news for the week.

Groupon says no to Google

There has been speculation last week and indeed Google made an offer to buy Groupon the daily-deal site. However Groupon declined the offer. I’m guessing they were looking for a higher dollar amount than the $6 billion that Google offered or maybe they see a niche and want to explore it, remember a few years ago Mark Zuckerberg turned down Yahoo’s offer to buy Facebook and I think that turned out well for Facebook.

Google updates Priority Inbox

Earlier this week, Google announced it has updated the algorithm used to determine what is a priority message in your Inbox in Gmail. It will also offer insight in a message as to why it is considered priority. You can find this message by hovering over the yellow arrow above the message. Hopefully this will make Priority Inbox even more accurate.



Google Books

On Monday, Google unveiled its eBook store and ebook reader applications for iOS and Android devices. Upon initial review of both the application and the store it is Ok but missing some key features that people maybe used to in the Amazon Kindle Store. For example, there doesn’t seem to be a way to highlight or make notes on certain lines in the book. From a store perspective, it has a general search box but not a search by option, so if you say search works by Earnest Hemingway, it will display both his books and books about him. These are minor fixes via software update, but it is also missing a key thing, Kindle support. It does support Sony and Nook, but not Kindle as of now. Obviously it is a 1.0 product right now so it will be interesting to see how it evolves. For now, here are some screenshots.



The shot on the far left is the boot up screen on the iPhone, the middle is what your bookshelf looks like, and the third is the online store. Also, Google has a video explaining their eBook reader application and store and its advantages.




Well, that is going to do it for this edition of Googling Friday. Stop by next week for another helping of all things Google! Have a great weekend!