After a five hour installation job – apparently, many are longer — I am now among the first in San Diego County to have AT&T U-Verse, a new fiber-based service with a node down the street. They are definitely not calling it “IPTV.”
The service provides cable modem-like speeds for Internet, a wireless router, and 400 channels of video, including 25 HD channels. A free Digital Video Recorder is also thrown in. After one day, I can report that the picture looks great on my new HDTV, and the Internet speeds are good, too.
For AT&T, U-Verse is considered critical to its future in media and communications. Accordingly, the company’s vision isn’t just confined to TV and Internet. This spring, for instance, AT&T showed off a TV version of Yellow Pages.com (although it isn’t expected to be widely deployed for several years).
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We can argue somewhere else whether the U.S. Patent Office is helping to foster innovation in 2007, or hinder it. But the bottom line is that yet another wide ranging, fairly obvious patent has been issued – this time to Local.com – and local media and local search companies can ignore it only at their own peril.
Local.com’s patent basically covers all crawling of local businesses on the Web It was written by Xiagwu Xia in January 2005. Xiagwu now runs Local.com’s R&D.
In recent years, many companies have made it a policy to basically ignore such wide- ranging patents. Google, in particular, seems to strong-arm anyone who hits them with a patent violation. But as Research in Motion (i.e. Blackberry) found out when it was sued by a so-called “patent bandit” firm in Washington D.C., patent violations come with major consequences.
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Following in the footsteps of Jingle Nets’ 1(800)Free411 (and failed services, like inFreeDA), Verizon LiveSource has launched a trial of a free DA service in Boston and Denver. The ad supported service boasts the catchy number: 800-THE-INFO. It uses CallGenie’s automated DA system, like YPG and Telus in Canada, and Jingle in the U.S. It […]
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You learn a lot from talking to local advertisers. Occasionally, I get to leave my Ivory Tower, and give a speech or appear on a panel in front of local advertisers.
Generally, I’m talking “Local Local.” A couple of weeks ago. I was in Atlanta to address the Buck Rogers society of the Photo Marketers Association (i.e. photo stores). What I found is that these prototypical small business owners – in their 50s, all male and mostly bearded — are pretty much up-to-speed with their Websites. They’ve also done a good job assembling email lists. But they aren’t necessarily doing much with either of them.
In addition, they’ve just started thinking about using the Web to get found outside of their existing customer base (i.e. SEO/SEM). And they haven’t really thought of themselves as a hub for photo knowledge in their community with e-newsletters, blogs or Wikis.
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Sprint has formed a “4 G Local Content Group” that will handle “local news, weather, sports, traffic, directories, user reviews and other User Generated Content.” All this from a recruitment ad it placed for “an innovative and creative Product Manager to leverage the network’s location and presence capabilities to build new utility and value […]
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