The Russian Federation has an ambitious goal to have all their school systems running FOSS based operating systems in 2 years. As much as I have scoffed at the timeline the Russians seem to be making it a reality —

[Via Google Translate: An interesting experiment decided to meet in Vladivostok State University of Economics and services - instead of traditional paper notes and account statements visits all the work of high school is available in electronic form. And teachers and students (without exception) are currently free netbuki Asus Eee PC 900 to work with electronic resources in university classrooms or at home. Total until December 4, only 997 students will be transferred netbukov.]

The Vladivostok State University of Economics and Services is providing eePC 900’s to the students. All the courseware is now downloadable here. Great if you know Russian.

If the Russian Federation pulls this off it will be a IT event of mammoth proportions. It will be shown that one need not be beholden to the M$ cartel. FOSS will be shown to have come of age in an academic environment. That conversion costs can be mitigated through volunteers and only doing a rolling conversion of content. [Open Office can read native MS Office files.]

Linky.

Time’s dead tree media business is running out of time, or stated another way is dying. Even the world’s biggest magazine business is not immune to marketplace change as readership continues to migrate to online, interactive media. The company’s magazine unit is following the newspaper industry’s lead in shedding staff in response to sliding copy sales and the corresponding decline in ad revenues.

The cuts are the first steps toward what Time Inc., the nation’s largest magazine publisher, has said will be the elimination of about 600 jobs worldwide, most of them at its 24 magazines in the United States. They apply to some of the biggest and most prominent publications in the business, underscoring the magazine industry’s steep financial decline this year.

More layoffs are expected in the next few days.

The company, a unit of Time Warner, said on Monday that it would eliminate 92 jobs in consumer marketing — the divisions that try to bolster sales of the magazines. The consumer marketing departments of individual magazines will be folded into a central operation. (New York Times)

At least that’s how i’m reading between the lines. Moto anmnouced they would delay the spin of of their devices unit while at the same time dumping the Sybian OS and developing Andriod handsets. We may very well see $99 smart phones with the big M on them very soon.

The world’s third largest phone vendor has been expected to introduce an Android phone in 2009 for a while. (See Motorola Preps Android Phone.) On the company’s third-quarter earnings call this morning, Motorola’s new co-CEO and handset unit head, Sanjay Jha, clarified that the firm intends to focus on just two platforms in the higher-tier market next year in a bid to further reduce costs and simplify its labyrinthine cellphone offerings. (See Motorola Delays Devices Unit Spinoff and Moto Reports Q3.)(Unstrung)

AT&T is on a roll. If memory serves this is the 3rd quarter in a row that they have show considerable increase in subscribers. I suspect that most of it at the expense of Sprint. –

AT&T Mobility’s third-quarter results break its own records. The carrier added more customers in one quarter than it ever has before. AT&T Mobility reported 1.7 million net subscriber additions, a 40% increase from third-quarter 2007. A big chunk of that growth is due to the 3G iPhone launch during the timeframe. The carrier posted 2.4 million iPhone activations and 40% of them were new customers. The carrier also said having the iPhone in its ranks brings in more higher-value customers with a 1.6 times higher average monthly revenues per user (ARPU). During its conference call, AT&T Mobility said devices such as the iPhone and other smartphones are key to growth and success at this point. More than two-thirds of the carrier’s net adds came from customers choosing an integrated device.

Having the iPhone in the stable is a big boost to them on the subscriber score. It will be interesting to see the numbers in 1Q09 as the introduction of Android takes hold in the marketplace.

Linky

Netflix releasing an API can only mean one thing folks. NetFlix is preparing to offer associate commissions. From their presser: –

Announcing the Netflix API
We’re pleased to announce the availability of the Netflix API. The team has been hard at work on this and we’re glad we can finally let people see what we’ve built. The Netflix API allows access to data for over 100,000 movie and TV episode titles on DVD as well Netflix account access on a member’s behalf. The Netflix API gives developers the ability to create new and novel applications using Netflix data for Netflix members or movie fans in general. This API is free to developers and commercial uses are allowed.

Why are we doing this? Because we have limited resources and we can only work on so many items at once. We hope that by opening up our APIs we will enable the creative desires of other developers to make a variety of wonderful applications. We expect to see different movie finding approaches, queue management tools, mobile phone applications, social network applications, the integration of Netflix information and capabilities into a variety of other applications, and more. And that, in the end, will further delight our members and other movie watchers in their quest to find and watch movies they’ll love. For more detailed information, see Michael Hart’s API blog post on the new Netflix API Developer Portal. You can always reach the developer portal by clicking on the “Developers” link in the footer of any Netflix page or by going directly to http://developer.netflix.com.

Could be wrong, but considering NetFlix’s business it would stand to reason they will be considering some sort of third party associates arrangement. Like Amazon renting NetFlix for example.

Linky.

If you have received a large wireless billing for services not rendered or the fruit of your loins did the nasty deed and you have not been able to reverse the charge…. Well you might be in luck. A recent class action judgement has been settled against Mobile Messenger a clearing house provider. Copy of the settlement is here. Claim forms are here.

There are particular active dates. There are also certain restrictions that are listed in the class action notice.

Good luck!

Naysayers aside, at least in Baltimore, WiMax is up and running. A real review by an actual user is in the ether. No earth shattering benchmarks and a few hiccups, but at $50 for a combined mobile/base account (which we did not fully understand in our earlier report), It’s a deal I’d dump AT&T DSL for in a heartbeat here in the Fort Worth/Dallas area.

Set-up should be simple (just place the modem next to a window, plug things in and get going), but I had a few problems at first. When you first plug in the modem, it upgrades its firmware before you can get connected to the Internet, and that takes up to 15 minutes, according to the Computer Harbor sales guy. I guess I didn’t wait long enough for that, and my first attempt at installing the CD that comes with the hardware and then connecting to the service didn’t get me all the way to the public Internet.

The second attempt, a few minutes later, went smoother. After installing some software, new users are automatically taken to Sprint’s Xohm Website to select a service level and sign up. There are four options: home service, mobile service, a combination of those two and some pay-by-the-day service. I signed up for the combo service, which will set me back $50 per month with a promise of no hidden fees, a price Sprint says will be good for life since I’m an early customer. Otherwise, it will eventually cost $65 per month for the combo deal. Home service costs $25 for the first six months and $35 thereafter, while mobile service starts at $30 and will increase to $45 in six months. (Information Week)

Darth V’s shiny new customer satisfaction survey system could be a creating more probelms that it is solving. The robot is designed to repeatedly call until it gets an answer. By itself that’s annoying, but what if it keeps calling even if you bend to its will and talk?

Nine robo-calls in 24 hours, all from Verizon: Nothing could make them stop; not my wife’s increasingly urgent pleas (I was away); not the hapless customer service reps who promised relief; not the “in-charge supervisor” who wasn’t in charge; and, not even the ever-so-helpful individual who said the barrage was “a national problem” before adding, “We’re suggesting that people just unplug their phones.”

Unplug our phones? How about you unplug your bloody robo-caller first?

And here’s the most amusing part: Verizon’s rogue motor-mouth was calling — nine times — to inquire as to the McNamara family’s satisfaction level with recent Verizon customer service. (If only the options had included, “Press 4 for ‘Stop asking.’ ” (Network World)

What is wrong with duopoly suits thinking? They always put customer service in the cost cutting meat grinder first. It’s more than just the arrogance. Perhaps it’s a lack of competition.

With moves like this by AT&T who the heck would want the cell service that bad? Like would YOU read a 2500 page ‘guidebook’ before you pick up that $99.99 wonder of a phone? If you knew it existed I bet you wouldn’t. —

AT&T has sent customers an 8,000-word service agreement that, among other things, says people will be given 30-day notice of price increases only when “commercially reasonable” and that you can’t sue the company.

Oh, and if you don’t like AT&T’s terms — providing you can make your way through the company’s 2,500-page “guidebook” — your only recourse is to cancel service.

State regulators aren’t happy about this and are looking into whether the AT&T service agreement violates the law and unfairly limits the rights of customers.

Meanwhile, the California Public Utilities Commission’s Division of Ratepayer Advocates is preparing to protest an attempt by AT&T to remove numerous services from regulatory scrutiny before they’re offered to customers.

The developments are contained in commission documents and e-mails that made their way to my hands.
Chris Witteman, a staff attorney for the PUC who also represents the Division of Ratepayer Advocates, confirmed that staffers recently reviewed AT&T’s service agreement and that some believe regulatory action is needed to protect consumers.

“We want AT&T to be required to revisit and reformulate the agreement so it doesn’t violate the law,” he said.

H. Gordon Diamond, an AT&T spokesman, defended the agreement, saying it “provides customers with more direct information on their rights and . . . information on the services they purchase from us.”

Sure thing there Mr. Diamond, sure…..

Linky.

Well we have pointed to pulp press and other dead tree purveyors being at the end of their rope. Have we left anybody out? Yes we have — book publishers. To be more specific, textbook publishers. Those mavens of the captive buyers market. One enterprising professor saw the rip that textbooks are and decided to do something about it –

SQUINT hard, and textbook publishers can look a lot like drug makers. They both make money from doing obvious good — healing, educating — and they both have customers who may be willing to sacrifice their last pennies to buy what these companies are selling.

It is that fact that can suddenly turn the good guys into bad guys, especially when the prices they charge are compared with generic drugs or ordinary books. A final similarity, in the words of R. Preston McAfee, an economics professor at Cal Tech, is that both textbook publishers and drug makers benefit from the problem of “moral hazards” — that is, the doctor who prescribes medication and the professor who requires a textbook don’t have to bear the cost and thus usually don’t think twice about it.

“The person who pays for the book, the parent or the student, doesn’t choose it,” he said. “There is this sort of creep. It’s always O.K. to add $5.”

In protest of what he says are textbooks’ intolerably high prices — and the dumbing down of their content to appeal to the widest possible market — Professor McAfee has put his introductory economics textbook online free. He says he most likely could have earned a $100,000 advance on the book had he gone the traditional publishing route, and it would have had a list price approaching $200.

When the next generation digital book (reader) that makes Kindle look quaint the likes of the major textbook publishers are toast. This country could have the best electronic learning aids on the planet. Stick the 5 best teaching professors on any topic on a interactive platform. Let them work their magic of know what to teach and how to deliver it. Bring in the grahic artist and the digital simulator team. Bundle it all together and publish it Sell it for anything under $10. The providers can now afford a sabbatical and the students get a excellent learning aide delivered cheaply.

This is what the digital world can provide in a way that is a win for all concerned.

Linky