Blockbuster Challenges Netflix Service
Blockbuster is offering lower-priced plans for online movie rentals as it competes with Netflix in a market that some analysts believe could grow more than 40% this year. Blockbuster said Tuesday that it would cut prices $1 a month for customers who order movies only online and not at stores. Only a month ago, Blockbuster’s chief executive talked about raising prices. Analysts said Netflix could be forced to drop prices, which would reduce its profits. Blockbuster said it would offer a plan letting customers place online orders to rent three movies at a time for $16.99, a dollar cheaper than its most popular offering, called Total Access. The movies are mailed to the customer. The difference is that customers on the cheaper plan, called Blockbuster by Mail, won’t get a free rental by returning DVDs to a store instead of mailing them back. They will, however, get a coupon for one free in-store rental a month. Blockbuster said it would offer more limited plans, such as two movies a month, for $4.99 a month. Netflix charges $17.99 for a three-out-at-one-time plan, and it has begun throwing in movies streamed over the Internet for customers with high-speed access and a Windows-based computer. It also has a $4.99 plan for up to two rentals a month.

Planet broadband: Population 300 million
Broadband is now being piped to some 300 million people around the globe. And although the US is still the fat pipe king of the world, China is closing the gap. According to research company Point Topic, there were 298 million broadband subscribers globally as of the end of March 2007 - meaning that figure is likely to have exceeded the 300 million mark by now. The country data shows the US is still top dog for fast web access - with 60.4 million lines as of the end of March. But China is gaining ground and has reduced the gap by more than a million subscribers since the end of 2006, hitting 56 million lines. France was the country with the highest%age growth rate in subscriber numbers - at nearly 10% - taking it to fifth place in the top 10 fat pipe nations, with 15.3 million lines. In third place, behind the US and China, is Japan (26.5 million subscribers), with Germany in fourth (16 million). The UK is just lagging South Korea, with almost 14 million lines.

Verizon's copper cable network collapsing
Verizon's front-line employees say its old copper network in Virginia that much of the state's population relies on is "deteriorating badly" and "stretched to the limits." The workers say they are being told to apply Band-Aid repairs to major problems or can't get them fixed at all. The preventative maintenance program has been abandoned. All the investment is going into a new fiber optics system going into select areas in Hampton Roads and elsewhere. The testimony in a case before state regulators by Verizon's union is a blow to the company's quest to free itself from some state price controls. The criticism also comes as Verizon is arguing in a separate case that the state should lower its standards on restoring lost phone service. Verizon has complained for years that competition has drastically changed the communications playing field. Even as the state's largest phone company is losing customers in droves, it still faces much more stringent regulations than its competitors who are taking the customers. In response to losing consumers, especially to cable companies, Verizon is building an expensive new fiber network. But diverting that investment from the old copper system to deal with its competitors is putting Verizon into a vise where it is now drawing new regulatory attention just as it is trying to shed the oversight. If Verizon isn't held to the historic regulatory standards, the customers still relying on the old copper phone network will face serious problems, the union said in written testimony. "The condition to which it has deteriorated is no accident but a conscious business decision, since the examples we have given are not isolated problems, but hold true all over the commonwealth," testified Charles Buttiglieri, who runs the Communications Workers of America region that includes Virginia. The union represents 7,000 Verizon employees in Virginia who do maintenance work on the system and deal with customers. The union asked its members in May to pass along information about the current state of the Virginia network. The CWA supports the new fiber efforts and is involved, said the union, but it doesn't want to abandon its customers on the old network and fears losing them to competitors. The union also objects to Verizon's strategy of only building fiber in certain profitable areas in each locality. One Fredericksburg technician said that Verizon won't fix lines in some areas that have chronic problems, and permanently have noise on their line. The technicians say that fixes that were meant to be temporary in the past are now becoming permanent. In some cases, the actual tools or cable needed to fix problems aren't even available, nor is the equipment to diagnose or prevent problems. The workers say the lack of supplies is because of the fiber optic initiative.

Intel and Google go Bono over power supplies
Intel and Google have taken it upon themselves to lead yet another "green computing" project. Executives from the two companies unveiled the Climate Savers Computing Initiative at the Gulag in Mountain View, California. At its most basic level, the program will focus on encouraging consumers and businesses to buy computers with more efficient power supplies. A wide range of hardware and software manufactures have agreed to back the effort, including IBM, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, AMD, Canonical, Yahoo, EDS and PG&E. The computing industry has long shipped very inefficient power supplies to fuel PCs and servers. In many cases, close to 50% of the power is lost while traveling from a wall socket to the actual machine. Computer makers have opted to ship less efficient power supplies, aiming to lessen the costs of their hardware. With energy costs soaring and it being hip to be green, the hardware crowd now wants you to pay more for better equipment. For example, members of the Climate Savers Computing Initiative have pledged to produce and purchase PCs with 80% efficient power supplies between July 2007 and 2008. That efficiency requirement increases to 85% through June 2009, 88% through June 2010 and 90% through June 2011. The server crowd must meet a target of 85% efficient power supplies between July 2007 and 2008, 89% between July 2008 and June 2009 and 92% between July 2009 and June 2010.

'Widgets' May Snag More Ads
New data on viewing photos, videos and music on the Web may have an impact on the way advertisers and social networking sites perceive firms that help create this content. Nearly 177.8 million people world-wide viewed Web content made with online tools from companies that let people post photos, videos and music on other Web sites. The data is among the first to measure the reach of companies such as Slide, RockYou and PictureTrail, which create applications known as widgets that consumers can use to produce videos, photo slideshows and music playlists. These individual pieces of content can then be posted on blogs and social-networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. So far, Slide and other widget makers have earned money mostly by selling ads on their own sites, but have found it difficult to generate revenue from the content created using their services and displayed on other sites. To use Slide, consumers first upload photos to the Slide site. Slide turns the photos into a slideshow that can be customized with special effects. Users can then automatically place that slideshow on an outside site, such as MySpace, by clicking a few buttons or copying and pasting a piece of code. Slide is the top provider of widgets, seen by 117.1 million Web users. Content such as slideshows posted on other sites has "emerged more as a form of self-expression, but now that we have data that talk about how big the audience really is. One big hurdle: These widget makers depend largely on MySpace and Facebook for their audience, and those two sites have so far been reluctant to let third-party companies include ads on their content in "profile" pages, where people post personal details, leave messages for friends and display photos.

Apple iPhone Users Will Need iTunes Account
Apple said iPhone users will be required to have an account with Apple's iTunes store to set up the eagerly anticipated new cellphone from Apple. In an email the company sent yesterday to people who had previously expressed interest in the iPhone, Apple encouraged prospective customers to set up an account with iTunes, if they don't already have one, ahead of the product's expected U.S. introduction on June 29. Users must submit a credit-card number and personal information to establish an iTunes account, though they aren't required as part of the process to make a purchase.

Bluetooth goes ultra low-power with Wibree
Handset maker Nokia's ultra low-power short-range wireless technology, Wibree, is to be developed as a new version of Bluetooth to connect devices such as watches and heart monitors. Nokia's agreement to offer the technology as the basis for an ultra low-power Bluetooth standard should help speed its adoption and encourage acceptance rather than be a competing technology, the Bluetooth special interest group said. Nokia's Wibree short-range radio link uses a fraction of the power of previous systems and can hook up devices with small batteries or power capacity. The agreement could mean wireless links for toys, sports monitors and watches, as well as sensors used in health monitoring, which have not been able to use Bluetooth until now because of its power demands. Nokia has worked since 2001 on Wibree, which provides a radio link of up to 30 feet between devices.

Consumers Aren't Happy With Your Call Centers
When customers call, marketers aren't doing a very good job addressing their concerns. That's the conclusion of a new call-center-satisfaction study, which found one-fifth of callers hang up with unresolved issues. Callers to personal-computer companies were most unhappy, with a satisfaction score of 64 out of a possible 100. Insurance companies and cable and satellite TV companies came in with scores of 68, with cellphone companies close behind, at 69. Catalog call centers and banking companies had the best scores: 80 and 77, respectively. Instead, call centers need to have staffers who are not only knowledgeable about the products or services but able to solve problems. They also need to be able to direct consumers to a place where their issues can be resolved, such as the company's website or a retail location. Customers who thought an offshore call center was handling their problems rated their experience 26 points lower -- and were twice as likely to leave the company they were calling -- than those who thought the center was in the U.S. The study found that marketers in certain industries, such as cellphones, are trying to upsell unhappy consumers -- that is, trying to offer new products to generate more revenue from callers. Almost a third, or 31%, of callers were given sales pitches, she said, and those customers were less satisfied than those who were not approached.

Apple iTunes to be sold through Bebo
Apple is to open its iTunes music store to users of the Bebo social networking site. The companies plan to allow visitors to Bebo Band sites to buy music and provide young people with an alternative to pirating tracks via peer-to-peer software or BitTorrent streams. The technology is being built into the Bebo pages and the initial roll-out will cover Bebo's 8.8 million users in Britain and Ireland, although it may be rolled out worldwide later. Bebo has 500,000 musicians on its site from established acts to garage bands trying to make it into the big time. Bebo now ranks behind Google UK, eBay UK, Windows Live Hotmail, Google.com and MSN UK.

Europe must embrace more R&D
A lack of investment into research and innovation in European business could threaten the competitiveness of the region's knowledge economy, the European Commission has warned. The Key figures 2007 on Science, Technology and Innovation report shows the perctage of GDP spent on research and development in Europe has stagnated since the mid-1990s. On average, just 1.84% of GDP is spent on R&D in the 27 EU countries and if current trends continue China will catch up by 2008. In contrast, Japan, China and South Korea have all increased their R&D intensity in recent years, which the Commission says has seen a more even distribution of knowledge than ever before. The R&D intensity deficit with the US has remained, despite efforts by the EU to catch up. A major cause of the intensity gap is the low level of private R&D spending due to differences in industrial structure. The report suggests this is due to Europe having a smaller high-tech industry - normally the biggest source of R&D spending – than other regions. There are some exceptions to the low R&D spending with several EU countries, including Austria, Germany and Finland having R&D intensity levels of 2% and above. Another key point in the report is that the EU needs to adapt to increased competition from other economies such as China.

China runs out of surnames
China has been forced to mull the possibility of allowing double-barrelled surnames - a break with the ancient tradition that citizens adopt one of a hundred single character surnames. The majority of Chinese take their surnames from the list, considered "part of the country's cultural heritage". So embedded is this tradition that "ordinary" Chinese people are referred to as laobaixing, or "old hundred names", and schoolkids have to learn the lot by heart. In fact, other less common surnames bring the official total of permitted surnames to 161, but this doesn't do much to offset the fact that there are now 93 million Wangs in China - closely followed by 92 million Lis - something which is causing the authorities a bit of a problem. The solution is, to allow double-barrelled combinations. Example of some possible solutions; a baby whose dad's surname was Zhou, the mother's Zhu, and who could therefore be called Zhou, Zhu, Zhouzhu or Zhuzhou. Another proposal to expand the surname roster is "lifting restrictions on what counts as a surname to allow a greater variety of characters, including from ethnic minority languages where currently the closest sounding Chinese surname is commonly used". However, parents will still not be able to use the "unsimplified, old-fashioned characters still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong" or Chinglish surnames. Furthermore, the western alphabet is strictly off-limits, meaning no Fleur de Lis or Brooklyn Zhous in the foreseeable future.

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