Satisfaction with online shopping dips
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Amazon and Netflix are among the top online retailers in a survey of customer satisfaction this past holiday season.
Research firm ForeSee Results looked at the 40 largest Web sites by revenue and ranked them according to consumer satisfaction. Overall, consumers were a little less happy with their online experience compared to last year. Larry Freed of ForeSee Results says, however, that online sales were up by some 20 percent.
Apple scored high in the survey, but not every online customer has a good experience. Phil Yanov of South Carolina wrote to tell us that his wife ordered an iPod Nano recently, but all that arrived on Dec. 21 inside a FedEx mailer was an empty iPod box.
Apple sent a replacement, but that box, too was void of a Nano.
The third time was a charm, however. Apple sent yet another replacement red Nano, this time by air instead of ground. We put in a call to Apple to inquire about missing Nanos, but the company did not respond.
The worst of gadgetry in 2007
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An ultralightweight computer that never made it to market is tops on Erik Sofge's list of the worst gadgets of 2007. The Popular Mechanics magazine contributing editor says the Palm Foleo, with its 10-inch screen could have been a successful product if Palm hadn't killed it after a ton of negative pre-release Internet buzz, and before a single unit could be sold.
Many top tech stories of 2007 involve Apple, Inc.
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Three of the top technology stories for 2007 will likely remain prominent in the coming year, according to Future Tense commentator Dwight Silverman. All three stories have a common player: Apple.
Broken Macs read 'Twas the Night Before Christmas
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Carl Malamud has spent the last 15 years or so fighting for greater public access to information on the Internet. But he recently took a short break from such serious work by assembling what he calls the Crippled Macintosh Rehabilitation Choir. It's basically a bunch Mac Powerbook computers that are broken but retain at least one ability - to read text aloud. And so as a holiday gift to the Internet he recorded them reading the classic poem 'Twas the Night Before Christmas.
The death of Think Secret
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Apple and a popular Web site that published corporate secrets about Macs, iPods and other Apple products have reached a settlement that shuts the site down.
Apple sued ThinkSecret.com about three years ago, attempting to force the publisher, a Harvard student, to reveal his sources inside Apple who leaked information about the Mac Mini computer weeks before the product was officially launched.
Guests: Bloggers Rex Hammock and Cynthia Brumfield
Teens creating more Internet content but abandoning e-mail
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A new study classifies more than a quarter of online teens as "supercommunicators," meaning they use all available electronic tools available to them, from the land line to text messaging to social networks.
The report from the Pew Internet and American Life project also finds an increase in the number of American teens who create content on the Internet, such as blogs, videos, photos and Myspace profiles.
Five great disappointments in tech for 2007
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Windows Vista is the most disappointing technology of 2007, according to Dan Tynan, contributing editor at PC World.
Other tech-related developments that left Tynan cold include Apple's Leopard OS and iPhone, Facebook Beacon, the next-gen DVD format war, and Yahoo's ethically-challenged executives.
Report: 95% of email is spam
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Back in 2004, Bill Gates said, "Two years from now, spam will be solved." Here it is, almost 2008, and we're still dealing with the spam problem. In some ways, it's worse than ever. A new study from security firm Barracuda Networks - one of the companies that's supposed to be putting an end to the plague - finds that 95 percent of all e-mail sent this year was spam. That compares to 70 percent at the time Congress passed the US CAN-SPAM act.
Technology in 2008
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What digital technology will make a leap in this coming year? How about video games you control with your mind, cell phones that serve ads based on your location, and billboards that know when you'ree looking at them?
Those are some of the concepts in the annual look-ahead in Popular Mechanics magazine.
Software industry wants consumers to rat on software pirates who sell on eBay
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A software industry trade group is trying to encourage buyers of pirated software on auctions sites such as eBay to tattle on the counterfeiters. The Software & Information Industry Alliance, which represents companies like Adobe, Symantec and McAfee, is offering rewards of up to $500 to whistle blowers. The money is to be used to buy legitimate replacement software.
The S&IIA says eBay is not doing enough to fight software piracy. eBay decline an invitation to speak on Future Tense, but sent the following statement:
The sale of counterfeits is an industry wide problem both offline and online. eBay doesn’t like counterfeits any more than brands do. We strive to continually improve the eBay experience for our buyers. eBay pioneered fighting counterfeits on the internet, launching our first anti-counterfeiting initiative, the VeRO program, back in 1998. This enables eBay to partner and collaborate with over 18,000 rights owners that help us remove counterfeits from the site.
We take action against reported counterfeit and fraudulent sellers, and have a dedicated team of VeRO representatives, the FIT team (Fraud investigation), and others, who work with rights owners and law enforcement around the globe to enable them to protect rights and take action against criminal behavior.
"Counterfeit software is illegal and not welcome on eBay, as it reduces trust between our buyers and sellers," said Matt Halprin, vice president of Trust & Safety for eBay Inc. "As our business has grown and the challenges of global counterfeiting have become more complex, cooperation with law enforcement and rights owners has become more critical — we need to fight the sale of counterfeit goods together."
Further to the SIIA's demands for eBay to ban the BIN (Buy It Now) functionality, since we introduced the specific seller restrictions - requiring PayPal Verification, placing volume restrictions on the number of items they can sell, elimination of 1 day and most 3 day auctions and limits on cross border sales), focusing on items and categories most favored by counterfeiters, our expectations are that this will significantly reduce the opportunity of potential counterfeiters to abuse BIN.
For example, one of the restrictions is around volume limits so this obviously reduces the amount of items for sale an individual seller can list within a set time period. This limits the amount of sales activity before a rights owner, or eBay, detects and removes the suspected counterfeit item.
A home for broken, unwanted iPods
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iPods are small, somewhat fragile and become outdated when Apple introduces new models. What to do with your broken and unwanted players? You can keep them out of the waste stream and perhaps get a little money for them at BuyMyTronics.com.
The privacy question at Ask.com
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Hoping to grab a little of the limelight from the attention-hog that is Google, search engine Ask.com has added a feature that empowers users to prevent their searches from being stored in company computers.
When turned on, the "AskEraser" feature purges a users search requests within a few hours. Ask.com normally keeps a record of your searches, tied to your computer's unique IP address, for 18 months.
New Internet tools: Future Scanner & Mister Wong
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Flying cars ready to take off. Robot medics will deploy by 2009. The British plan to harness wind for 50 percent of energy needs. These are a few of the stories you will find linked to on Future Scanner, a new Web service that highlights forward-looking news stories and blog posts recommended by its users.
Users also play a big part in a site called Mister Wong. It allows users to bookmark their favorite sites and share them with others. It uses those bookmarks as the raw material for a search engine. It's the top social bookmarking site in Germany, and is trying to crack the U.S. market.
Aanalysts expect big season for Mac computers
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Today on Future Tense, analyst Roger Kay talks about the growing market share for Apple Macintosh.
Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Canada-style
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The Canadian government is under pressure from American interests to revamp its digital age copyright laws. A bill expected to be introduced in the next few days will likely look a lot like the United States' controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. That law has been widely criticized for trampling fair use rights and stifling technological innovation.
Opposition to the Canadian DMCA has sprung up. Leading the way is Michael Geist, research chair of Internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa.
The state of the Internet in Africa
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The Internet Society is giving its annual Jonathan B. Postel Service Award to engineer Nii Quaynor for his work in advancing the Internet on the African continent.
Quaynor is a professor of computer science at University of Cape-Coast in Ghana and chairman the first Internet service provider in West Africa.
Consumers still dissatisfied with cell phone service, but signs of improvement emerge
Lamenting the decline of email
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In a recent edition of the online magazine Slate copy editor and contributor Chad Lorenz wrote that email is "looking obsolete". Lorenz cites studies on the decline of e-mail use by young people, and the concomitant rise in alternative electronic communication, from mobile phone texting to Facebook messages.
Lorenz article was one of the most widely discussed on technology blogs for a few days last month.
Lorenz says he mourns the apparent decline of email.
The Universal Digital Library's audacious goal
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A book-scanning project backed by major libraries of the world has finished digitizing 1.5 million books, and has made them publicly available on the 'Net.
Users can download texts in the public domain, or by books by authors who've given permission.
Michael Shamos, director of intellectual property of the Universal Digital Library, says the project's goal is to digitize all published works since the beginning of time and make them available to anyone in the world over the 'net.
