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Amazon's checkout-free tech is heading to other retailers
Checkout-free, cashless supermarkets -- a novelty shopping experience or the future of bricks and mortar retail? According to Amazon -- which turned the concept into a 10,400-square-foot reality -- it's the latter. After announcing its plans to license its automated checkout technology to other retailers, the company has revealed it has "several" signed deals with customers, and has launched a new website inviting inquiries from others interested in the "Just Walk Out" experience.
Epic Games Store will keep offering free games throughout 2020
The Epic Games Store has faced something of a challenge in capturing the hearts and minds of gamers since its launch in 2018. Its continued insistence on exclusives, plus its relative immaturity compared to the likes of Steam, has seen complaints from all sides. But its hard graft is paying off, and the platform is sharing its good fortune with its fans. Today, it announced it will be continuing its weekly free game program throughout 2020 -- claim a game for free, and it's yours to keep forever.
Verizon is giving Unlimited customers 12 months of Disney+ for free
Verizon (Engadget's parent company) is offering 12 months of Disney+ to all of its new and existing 4G LTE and 5G Unlimited wireless customers. New Verizon Fios Home Internet and 5G Home Internet customers will get 12 months of the new streaming service too. The offer begins November 12th, the same day Disney+ launches.
US government payment site leaks 14 million customer records
Government Payment Service Inc -- the company thousands of local governments in the US use to accept online payments for everything from court-ordered fines and licensing fees -- has compromised more than 14 million customer records dating back to 2012, KrebsOnSecurity reports. According to the security investigation site, the leaked information includes names, addresses, phone numbers and the last four digits of credit cards.
RIFT shows off its customer service department
What's it like working a day in customer service? Most of you probably don't have to speculate, since the odds of you having worked retail at some point hover right around almost certainty. But have you worked customer service for a game before? If you have, then you probably don't have any need to look at RIFT's new post about the perils of working in the game's CS team. If you haven't, maybe you'd like to know a bit more about the people you're cursing about as you try to get your character bugs resolved. Aside from showing off some anecdotes and company-wide teamwork for the team, the post also contains the helpful reminder for players of every games that things which seem to be exploits are probably better off reported rather than, well, exploited. If you want a peek behind the curtain to see how the service team operates within games in general and RIFT in particular, take a look at the full article.
EE hits one million 4G customers four months ahead of goal
EE said it wanted to have a million 4G customers by the end of the year, but it won't have to wait nearly that long. The UK carrier just topped that mark four months ahead of its stated deadline while its competitors are just getting off the starting blocks. O2 and Vodafone both fired up their respective LTE networks less than two weeks ago, while Three's won't launch until December. Despite having been the only game in town until recently, EE claims the UK's adoption of 4G has been one of the world's fastest so far. It seems like there's a lot more technofreaks out there than Vodafone imagined.
T-Mobile gains 1.1 million customers in Q2 2013, ups revenue 20 percent to $6.3 billion
It looks like T-Mobile was onto something with its UnCarrier remake, as the US wireless outfit picked up 1.1 million customers in Q2 2013 and saw a major boost in revenue. It also managed to keep postpaid churn (turnover of customers on contract) to its lowest level ever at 1.58 percent. The carrier said the numbers were helped by its Jump upgrade program and Simple Choice family plans, launched just last month. Despite a recent price bump in the iPhone, T-Mob said the model accounted for 29 percent of its handset sales, but added that other models, like Samsung's Galaxy S 4, also moved well. In all, it sold 4.3 million total smartphones, making up 86 percent of total phone sales -- up from 71 percent over last quarter. Meanwhile, its 4G LTE network has rolled out to 116 metro areas so far, a more rapid pace than it promised, and now covers 157 million people. That was helped along with the rapid transition of freshly acquired MetroPCS, which T-Mobile said would expand to 15 new markets. It'll get a further boost from its US Cellular spectrum acquisition, expected to be completed soon. The result of all that was a 20 percent boost in revenue to $6.3 billion over $4.4 billion last year, albeit with a year-over-year drop in net income from $207 million to a loss of $16 million. Still if T-Mobile keeps up its highly energetic marketing and new program additions, it should get back in the black soon.
EE adding shared 4G, PAYG data-only plans this summer, now boasts 500k subscribers
After adding monthly SIM-only plans to its product line-up last week, EE's announced a few new subscriptions that people will have access to at some point this summer. One is a shared option, which'll allow patrons to use their plan "across phones and tablets, or with other people." The other is a PAYG data-only option, so you'll be able to buy gigabytes without signing up for anything long-term, and gobble them up on your tablet, laptop, MiFi device or anything else with a SIM slot. We don't have any firm launch dates or pricing for either of these plans, but more is expected "in the coming weeks." In other news, the number of customers on EE's LTE network has exceeded the half a million mark, meaning around 200,000 new subscribers have come on board since April.
EE has lured 318,000 customers to 4G since launching five months ago (updated)
EE's just released its Q1 2013 earnings, giving us a look at its first full quarter with 4G services. The carrier says it's on track to its goal of a million 4G customers by the end of the year, thanks to the addition or migration of 318,000 LTE customers since the service launched.. Despite those more profitable clients, however, total service revenue (excluding hardware sales) was down 1.5 percent for the period over last quarter, to £1.42 billion. On one hand, the number of 4G additions could be seen as disappointing considering the company's strong marketing push of the service -- though on the other, the company's only just activated numerous regions, making that one million 4G subscriber goal seem more likely than not. We'll just have to wait a bit longer to see if Brits are really in love with LTE's extra zip -- and willing to pay for it. Update: This article originally stated that EE added 318,000 4G customers in Q1 this year, but that figure actually represents the number of users the carrier has added since launching its 4G service five months ago.
T-Mobile reports 'first positive branded (customer) growth in four years'
Right on the heels of its announcement of becoming the "UnCarrier", T-Mobile has dropped an early update on customer count for Q1. While its full earnings won't be announced until May 8th, it noted a net increase of 579,000 customers for the period, compared to a net loss of 349,000 in Q4 of 2012. It claims the increase was primarily due to continued focus on growing its MVNO customers base. Postpaid customer losses for Q1 are 199,000, far better than Q4's drop of 515,000, and 510,000 in the same period last year. President and CEO John Legere is certainly looking at the bright side (and keeping his language clean this time) claiming the data represents "positive momentum and the first positive branded growth in four years." We'll wait until the dollars and cents are counted -- and results from after its switch to no-contract plans and unsubsidized phone pricing are in -- before flying the magenta victory flag.
Tim Cook joined Apple because even 'when customers got mad at Apple, they'd continue to buy'
It's epic storytelling time at AllThingsD 10 as audience Q&A has begun, with Apple CEO Tim Cook opening up on why he came to join the company in the first place in response to a question from Lance Ulanoff of Mashable. To hear him tell it, an executive search firm came calling and he wasn't pressed -- until five minutes into his meeting with Steve Jobs. We'll let him tell it: It was a very interesting meeting. Steve had hired an executive search firm to find someone to run operations. They kept calling, and eventually I said 'Okay, I'll talk.' I flew out Friday on a redeye for a Saturday morning meeting with Steve. The honest-to-God truth, five minutes into the conversation I wanted to join Apple. I was shocked. Why did I want to do it? He painted a story and a strategy that he was taking Apple deep into consumer when I knew others were doing the exact opposite. I never thought following the herd was brilliant. He told me a bit about what would late be named the iMac, and I saw brilliance in that. I saw someone unaffected with money, and that has always impressed me when people do indeed have it. Those three things to me to throw caution to the wind and do it. I went back, and resigned immediately. Did I see the iPad and iPhone? No. What I saw was this: Apple was the only technology company that I knew of, including the one I was currently at, that when a customer got mad at a company, they'd continue to buy. If people got mad at Compaq, they'd buy Dell. If you were mad at Dell, you'd buy IBM. But an Apple customer was a unique breed; there's this emotion that you just don't see in technology in general. You could see it and feel it at Apple. When I looked at the balance sheet of the company, I thought I could do something in turning around a great American company. Whether you call it the reality distortion field or simply a strong brand attachment, it was enough, along with Steve Jobs' vision, to lure Tim Cook to work at Apple even when things weren't going so well back in 1998. Can he keep the shield generators running as CEO? Time will tell.
The Mog Log: The Legacy rewards and what they mean
So, who here remembers the Final Fantasy XIV launch? I certainly do; I was there and I've been here since, after all. And who here remembers how the game launched to critical acclaim and overwhelming popularity? Yeah, okay. I liked the game at launch, but that was more because of the underlying philosophies and approaches, not because the whole thing was polished to a fine shine. It was almost two years ago now, and the game has had to go through a lot of growing pains in that time, fixing a lot of elements that didn't work and adjusting stuff that was almost there but not quite. It's been a long process of hammering out fixes and improvements, one that included a long stretch of no subscription fee as the game cleaned itself up. We're nearly at the end of that process now, but Square-Enix is trying to show everyone that the company appreciates players who have been around during the game's teething troubles. That's the Legacy program in a nutshell -- a chance for players to signify having been around for an extended period of time. A badge of honor, a show of loyalty, and arguably another little bit of bait to get people to subscribe now instead of later.
iPhone waltzes into top spot of US phone satisfaction index, small carriers trump the giants
We know almost too well how smartphones perform in US market share; what we don't usually see is how happy customers are once the shrink wrap's off. Going by a newly-expanded American Customer Satisfaction Index, it's the iPhone that most scratches the itch at a score of 83. Despite having just been added, Apple was noticeably ahead of a three-way tie between HTC, LG and Nokia at 75. You might not want to look if you're a freshly-minted RIM executive: the BlackBerry made its freshman debut on the charts at the bottom, or 69. Big carriers have their own reasons to wince, too, knowing that smaller carriers like US Cellular and TracFone scored higher on the happiness meter than incumbents hiking service fees. While there's definitely some wiggle room for your own experience to have been better or worse, if you were an iPhone owner on a regional carrier in the past few months, you were statistically the most likely to be on Cloud Nine.
Sprint: iPhone customers are "more profitable" than others
In an interview with Mobile World Live, Sprint's CEO Dan Hesse says that iPhone users are some of the best cellphone users to have around. Not only are iPhone customers "more profitable" (in that they just plain spend more money, given the price of the iPhone itself), but Hesse says iPhone users are also more loyal to Sprint (with "a lower level of churn"), and they actually use "less data on average than a high-end 4G Android device." That combination of more money coming in with fewer services going out means that iPhone customers are apparently just as premium as Sprint as the devices those customers use. That's probably why Hesse spent $15 billion last year to get the phone on his network in the first place. Given how happy he seems to be about the whole situation, it must have been worth it. [via Ars Technica & BGR]
AT&T urging customers to upgrade to 3G, possibly killing off 2G
In a move that is sure to surprise no one, it appears AT&T is getting ready to send its trusty 2G GSM network riding off into the sunset. MarketWatch is reporting that some Ma Bell customers have received letters, urging them to upgrade to a 3G or (gasp) 4G device and warning that service may degrade in some areas as spectrum is repurposed. While the letter stops short of saying the 2G network is being shut down, it seems the writing is on the wall. With the collapse of the T-Mobile acquisition and Verizon's sizable lead in the race to acquire spectrum, AT&T is left with little choice but to use its GSM channels for HSPA+ and LTE service. So far the notices have only gone out to customers in the New York metro area, but it seems safe to assume other locales will follow. The only question is whether the carrier will lean on hold-outs the same way it did when the time came to kill off TDMA -- with a tax on primitive technology.
Apple patents new method for water detection
Apple has submitted a patent that describes a better method of detecting water in an electronic device. In other words, Apple has devised a way to know if your iPhone has been in a pool (for example) before you try to return it to an Apple Store as defective. The patent describes a method of covering up an internal electronics sensor with a glob of water-soluble glue, which dissolves and reveals the sensor when exposed to water. The appearance of the sensor would tip off anyone examining the phone to water exposure. There are a number of different methods described in the patent, but they all follow that basic idea. I question this research. Should Apple dedicate so much time and effort into uncovering customers' mistakes? Wouldn't it be better to spend that time making iPhones just more resistant to liquids? Then again, that's easy for me to say, but burdensome for Apple to replace all of the devices that suffer water damage every year. If a patent like this helps Apple avoid some of those costs, maybe that's better for both the company and its customers. [Via Engadget]
Trade skill crusader brings back customer service and sweat equity to crafting
WoW players today tend to consider the deterioration of the in-game community in terms of relatively recent influences like the Dungeon Finder and then the Raid Finder. We sometimes forget that design tweaks and new systems have been chipping away at the paradigm of Azeroth as a place to forge ongoing personal relationships for years now. Take a gander at the beginning of this analysis I wrote on the death of the Azerothian salesman all the way back in the hyper-modern era of The Burning Crusade circa 2007: Forget the endless debate over hardcore versus casual -- there's another moniker that we here at Insider Trader hold dear: salesman. What's that? You don't know any salesmen in WoW these days? You're not alone. Times have changed since craftspeople toiled to build reputations as the go-to traders on their servers ... when Ironforge was the hub of civilization, where a few elite enchanters held court over the entire server with coveted formulae from such exotic locales as Stratholme and Scholomance. It's a brave new world in today's Outland. Most enchanters don't enchant for the general public at all, unless you provide mats and a tip. And in any profession, with so many other players on the servers who have the same patterns (even rare patterns are generally available from more than one player) and so many easy ways to make money (hello, daily quests!), there's little reason to hang around town to build a regular clientele. Components provided or created by other professions are readily available on the Auction House -- there's no need to seek out and nurture relationships with another player from a complementary profession. Have the conveniences Blizzard has developed for today's crafters meant the death of the salesman? Most WoW players would agree that convenience and self-service is the way of today's game. But for one stubborn tradesman on Sentinels (US), life as an Azerothian salesman is anything but obsolete. Daen, a dedicated craftsman and proprietor of Daen's Crafting Emporium, single-handedly maintains what may be one of World of Warcraft's last remaining bastions of personal craftsmanship and trade skill service -- with a twist. This proprietor not only aims to provide personal service, but he does it at no charge, with the insistence that customers devote sweat equity to their mutual creations as well.
Voting now open for Best App Ever awards
Voting has been opened up for the 2011 Best App Ever nominees. These awards have been put on every year for a few years now by our friends over at 148 Apps, and they feature many of the greatest apps you'll find on the iOS store, chosen by users. To vote on this year's awards, head over to the Best Apps Ever page, and choose your favorites from all of the various different categories from Best Overall App to the various technical choices in each category. For the first time I can remember, the awards also talk about Android apps this year, so if you have an Android device and some favorites on that side of the fence, be sure to represent over there as well. But despite the fact that Android is being honored, Best App Ever is still planning to announce the final winners later this month at Macworld, as usual. Voting is open until January 25, and be sure to put your votes in. We're curious to see which of these great apps is crowned with a win.
Dell cuts Mini netbooks for non-business customers, ruins Christmas for laptop lovers
If you needed a good, valid reason to Hulk Out today, this might be it. Dell, which recently retired its Streak 5 and Streak 7 tablets, is apparently axing its Mini line of netbooks as well. According to the MyDellMini forums, conducting a search for a laptop with a 10-inch display on the Dell Shop will yield no results, while a search for specific models brings up a variety of messages confirming the world's loss. Fortunately, the full-sized notebooks appear to be in abundant supply, and the search engine will happily suggest one of Dell's 14-inch laptops for $469 and up. Because, you know, a 14-inch machine will totally serve the same purpose as a 10-inch one.
Cablevision reports Q3 earnings, sees profit fall by 65 percent, drop in video subscribers
It's safe to say that Q3 2011 probably won't be remembered as Cablevision's finest. According to the provider's latest earnings report, profits declined by a full 65 percent over the year, with net income plunging to $39.3 million this quarter, compared with the $112.1 million it raked in during the third quarter of 2010. The company also reported a loss of 19,000 video subscribers during Q3, though it added 17,000 broadband customers and 38,000 telephone subscribers. Total customers, however, declined by 15,000 over the past three months. Revenue, meanwhile, increased by eight percent to $1.7 billion, though the New York-area operator lost about $16 million to Hurricane Irene -- not to mention all those legal fees. Smell that? That's a big platter of PR, sitting right there after the break.
