Friday, November 6, 2009
Is Verizon’s New Early-Termination Fee Anti-Consumer?
Beginning Nov. 15, Verizon subscribers looking to get out of their smart-phone contracts early will pay $350 for the privilege. That early-termination fee is double the current one, but Verizon insists it’s justified because of the higher prices of today’s phones. An interesting move for a carrier that just last year agreed to pay $21 million to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by California consumers over the very early-termination fees it is now increasing.
Her dreams of heading up the World Bank dashed, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, the architect of one of the worst tech mergers in history, has turned her attention to California politics. After months of speculation, she officially announced her candidacy for the U.S. Senate today.
Longtime Intel general counsel Bruce Sewell, who left the company without explanation yesterday, evidently had good reason for doing so: He has taken a new job at Apple. That would certainly explain the “surprise” Intel expressed over his departure. And also why the company was so quick to remove his corporate bio from its Web site. 
Before the Federal Communications Commission begins doling out the $7.4 billion in federal grants up for grabs through national broadband stimulus programs, the agency must answer an important question: What is broadband? And so, in a public notice issued today, the Commission is requesting “tailored” public comment on what the definition of broadband should be.
Add another voice to the chorus of analysts claiming that sales of the Palm Pre have been on the decline these past few weeks. In a research note published this morning, CL King analyst Lawrence Harris, speaking to the controversy over sell-though numbers for the Pre, cast his lot with those who feel sales are slowing. 
The Palm Pre officially went on sale this morning, and judging from initial reports–and my experience at a local northern California Sprint store–neither demand or supply was particularly overwhelming. Certainly, lines for the device were far shorter than those that extended from Apple stores for the launches of the iPhone and the iPhone 3G. Arriving outside my local Sprint store about an hour after they first opened, I found not a queue of eager Pre-buyers, but two kids making forts out of a few Pre shipping boxes left outside the store.
Apple rolled out updates to QuickTime and iTunes on Monday, presumably as preface to iPhone 3.0. Included in iTunes 8.2 are “many accessibility improvements and bug fixes.” Just what Apple means by that is unclear, although one wonders if it might be a clever euphemism for the Palm Pre’s recently disclosed Media Sync feature, which allows the device to synchronize seamlessly with iTunes, essentially by masquerading as an iPod.
In advance of its shareholder meeting today, Google is holding a press event at its Mountain View, Calif., campus with CEO Eric Schmidt presiding. Also on hand: Dave Drummond, senior vice president of corporate development; Susan Wojcicki, vice president for product management, and Marissa Mayer, vice president, search products and user experience. Hot topics of the day: Google’s and Apple’s interlocking boards, YouTube and the company’s thoughts on the econalypse, AOL and netbooks.
Looking over the latest unemployment figures, Silicon Valley’s technology bust early this decade no longer seems such a distant memory. In another unsettling economic sign, the unemployment rate in Silicon Valley rose for its fourth consecutive month in August to reach a four-year high. 
Now that the Justice Department has asked a hotshot litigator to review the proposed search-advertising partnership between Google and Yahoo, everyone seems to be getting into the act. California Attorney General Jerry Brown is reportedly looking askance at the deal, apparently with an eye toward an investigation.
It’s taken nearly a year, but the inevitable class-action fallout from Facebook’s ill-starred Beacon advertising system has finally begun. Filed in California, the suit claims Facebook and its ad partners violated online privacy and computer fraud laws by collecting and publicly disclosing information about users’ online activities without proper consent.
