The Origin of Email
I have a surprise for you. The inventor of email did not invent email. Email was actually invented by the Bell System and was in commercial operation long before the Arpanet even existed. This is an interesting story… False The invention of email is widely credited to be Ray Tomlinson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Tomlinson) in 1971. In one especially [...]
How the Bell System Missed the Internet – Part 1 of 8
One of the more fascinating twists and turns in corporate history is how the Bell System missed developing the internet. What follows is the story of ACS in 8 parts (in 8 days). It could have owned the internet, except for NIH (Not Invented Here.) In the mid 1970s I worked at Bell Laboratories in Holmdel New [...]
Emerging LTE and the iPad
I have been using the new iPad with Retina display for almost a year now. It’s great. But I have noticed an interesting problem: once you use Retina resolution you simply cannot go back. Traditional LCD displays look grainy and give me a headache to look at for any duration. The human brain is an [...]
On Not Forgetting to be 10x Better
I was struggling what to make of the news that now, AT&T too was jumping into the cloud storage-as-a-commodity business offering 5GB of free online storage. Just like DropBox. And Google Drive. And Box, if you use it that way. And iCloud. And SkyDrive. And. And. And. You could make fun of it, but it [...]
Quick Take: AT&T Joins OpenStack
OpenStack (previous CloudAve coverage) got a big boost today with the announcement that AT&T is joining the OpenStack community. According to a blog post by AT&T, they are becoming the first US Telco to join OpenStack community. We also announced today that AT&T has become the first U.S. telecom services provider to join the OpenStack [...]
New From AT&T: A Fee For No Fees
When touch-tone dialing was new, the Bell System charged a small fee for the service. It was actually cheaper to provide touch-tone (the registers that hear dialing were freed-up much quicker). The Bell system figured out that customers liked the faster dialing, and were willing to pay a premium to get it. Extra fees are [...]
Thought of the Day: Carriers!
Remember what hotels taught us? They taught us to never make a long distance call from the room. The hotels discovered that long distance wasn’t just a service, but a money maker and charged us through the nose on long distance usage. It sorta worked w…
The Tethering / Hotspot Debate: No, You’re Not a Thief. But Somebody Else is a Highway Robber.
Interesting debate at ZDNet over wireless data plans: James Kendrick claims that unpaid tethering makes you a thief. Thankfully his fellow ZDNet-er Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has the common sense to dispute this tethering thief nonsense. Yes, technically if your wireless contract includes an anti-hotspot clause and you turn this feature on, you are in violation. Of [...]
Ungrateful iBozos, Stop the Whining. Get a (i)Life. Part# 2.
<sarcasm> What’s wrong with the iPhone? – asks Mashable. They even created this useful (?) infographic: Well, let’s see: Yellow dots or band – So what? Have you not heard of personalization? Why would you all want the same boring screen? Reception – That’s your $ saver, dummy. Besides, do you really want to fry [...]
Ungrateful iBozos, Stop the Whining. Get a (i)Life.
<sarcasm> I’m sick of all this whining within the iFamily. These iBozos just don’t appreciate all the goodness they have. iPhone preorder systems failed. So what? You’ve just saved a boatload of money, be happy, get a life! Yet another At&T security breach. What’s the big deal? All your data is public anyway, has been [...]
iPhone iPen iPaper
What’s iPen? Not this. What’s iPaper? Not this (although Scribd has a strong case). It’s AT&T taking iPhone orders on paper and pen. In 2010. Well, at least paper won’t leak customer data like AT&T’s systems are.
AT&T’s Tiered Plans: Killing Of Mobile Innovation Or Opportunity For Others
Image by Getty Images via @daylife AT&T shocked the iPad users this week with an announcement that it will eliminate the unlimited data plan they offer now. In fact, this unlimited, no contract plan was one of the reasons many people, including me, bought iPad 3G in the first place. Even though many will not [...]
iPhone? Android? It’s All Irrelevant when you Can’t Get a Signal
Will iPhone users move to Verizon? – goes the speculation, based on a study published @ Fortune showing AT&T drop calls 3 times as frequently as Verizon. From my vantage point even dropped calls would be a luxury – meaning you can get a strong enough signal to place calls in the first place. Apparently [...]
Telecoms unite against Apple
Apple faces the combined ire of 24 of the worlds telecom companies who want to start their own application store so that people that download applications to their phones and make more money off the applications that they are currently trying to support. Apple should buy T-Mobile or some other telecom, much like Google is [...]
Time for Device Independent Data Plans
The Apple iPad event is still on, and the Internet is crumbling… Twitter barely crawls, CoveritLive isn’t exactly live, the major sites providing blog coverage are barely accessible… this is iKill – the day Apple Killed The Net. But I want to talk about something more important: It’s a screenshot from Engadget’s coverage. Yes, reasonable [...]
