AT&T Wireless is part of a new loyalty program called Plenti, said American Express Wednesday. Plenti bills itself as the first U.S.-based coalition loyalty program, and comprises brands including American Express, AT&T Wireless, DirectEnergy, ExxonMobile, Hulu, Macy’s, Nationwide and Rite Aid. Shoppers can earn and use Plenti points for buying a variety of products, regardless of payment method, said the companies. Plenti customers can earn points and discounts using any form of payment accepted by the participating partners including cash, prepaid and debit or credit cards with every 1,000 accrued points translating to at least $10 in savings, said Plenti. Consumers can accumulate Plenti points when signing up for qualifying wireless services at AT&T, or for eligible charges on AT&T wireless bills. The free program launches this spring.
In its latest un-carrier move, T-Mobile is going after the enterprise market, looking to take business customers from AT&T and Verizon with simplified rate cards, said CEO John Legere at an event Wednesday. Legere asked if anyone in the audience was on the Sprint network. When no one raised a hand, Legere said, “You fuckers are lying.” T-Mobile is gunning for Verizon's and AT&T’s business, Legere said. “They think their business is safe, and it’s not.” In 2014, T-Mobile earned 3 percent of the $83 billion spent by businesses on wireless services, so the aggressive pricing -- offering lines with unlimited talk and text and 1 GB of data for $15 each -- is something Legere said he can do because he’s attacking a business that T-Mobile doesn’t have. And customers can add more data per line or in a pool for the whole company at $4.75/GB for a 100 GB minimum, he said. Chief Operating Officer Mike Sievert said today is the beginning of a “major disruption in the business space.” T-Mobile is also partnering with GoDaddy to offer a free .com domain and website optimized for mobile viewing to businesses customers that buy the new plan with at least one line of additional paid data. “I think that’s a big deal, maybe not in mega corporations, but for the businesses that American runs on,” Legere said. T-Mobile also announced the “un-contract” and carrier freedom. Legere said he will sign a contract to his customers that says the rates may go down but they will not go up, making promotional plans permanent. When it comes to getting more customers, Legere is willing to pay early termination fees plus up to $650 for those who are still paying for or renting their phones. He said there's a war analogy to be made in this announcement regarding the business market, saying “we’re bombing their factories.”
Enough Is Enough is partnering with 75 other organizations to lead its “National Porn Free Wi-Fi Campaign,” delivering 46,500 petition signatures to the CEOs of McDonald’s and Starbucks, said a news release from Enough Is Enough. The campaign and petition ask the companies to filter all pornography on their public Wi-Fi services. Organizations that joined the campaign include the American Family Association, Concerned Women for America, Family Research Council, Focus on the Family’s Citizens Link, Home School Legal Defense Association, National Children’s Advocacy Center, Parents Television Council and Salvation Army. Neither McDonald’s nor Starbucks commented Tuesday.
Facebook launched a payment feature for its messenger app, the social media company said in a blog post Tuesday. The feature is being rolled out in the U.S. over the next few months, it said. “We use secure systems that encrypt the connection between you and Facebook as well as your card information when you ask us to store it for you,” Facebook said.
Apple and Samsung’s combined dominant share of the tablet market could plummet to 38 percent by 2019 in a “tectonic shift” to lower-priced tablets, a Juniper report said. Evolving form factors and emerging players such as Lenovo with low-cost alternatives are a threat to today’s dominant tablet vendors, said the industry researcher Monday. It expects Lenovo to lead the movement and increase its shipments by 30 million units per year by 2019. Lenovo announced several Android- and Windows-based models at Mobile World Congress, Juniper noted. Android will remain the dominant tablet platform over the forecast period, with Windows-based devices expected to be close to 10 percent of the market by 2019, Juniper said. Hybrid devices such as two-in-ones will find a place in office environments, but tablets will struggle “due to peripheral compatibility requirements,” it said. Phablets also will have a growing impact on tablet sales, Juniper said. More than 400 million phablets will ship globally in 2019, up from 138 million forecast for this year, it said. The iPhone 6 has been a catalyst for bringing the phablet category “further into the limelight,” but budget-priced devices are the key to driving phablets into the mainstream globally, it said. The phablet emerged out of the transition of the smartphone away from communications and toward multimedia use, Juniper said, although in terms of device hardware, a phablet is “virtually identical” to a smartphone except in screen and battery size. A smartphone can perform most computing tasks, which would suggest that other mobile devices can become increasingly like smartphones, Juniper said. At the hardware level, that would involve integrating modem and cellular functionality within the chipset “rather than as add-ons,” it said. The platform-centric approach would require systems on a chip to be scalable for different products and hardware possibilities, it said.
There will be 4.7 million global bitcoin users by the end of 2019, said a Juniper Research report released Tuesday. That’s compared with the more than 1.3 million bitcoin users in 2014, said a separate news release. Bitcoin companies like Bitnet, BitPay and Coinbase were profiled or interviewed for the report, it said. “While a number of high profile retailers are enabling Bitcoin payment, activity levels from both online and offline deployments are extremely low,” it said. “While average daily transaction volumes have increased by around 50 percent since March 2014, the indications are that much of this growth results from higher transaction levels by established users rather from any substantial uplift in consumer adoption,” said Windsor Holden, who wrote the report. “With many Bitcoins being hoarded by early speculators, currency supply could be further restricted with Bitcoin mining profitability threatened by a combination of the cryptocurrency’s volatility, lower Bitcoin yields and rising electricity costs,” said the release.
Sky has invested an additional $5 million in 1 Mainstream, a California-based over-the-top company, Sky said in a Tuesday announcement. Sky regards 1 Mainstream as “a pioneering OTT startup company that operates an automated platform for the distribution of linear and on-demand video to a wide range of internet-connected devices,” it said. Sky invested $2 million about 18 months ago in 1 Mainstream, whose platform Sky said “provides powerful automation technology to enable content companies to launch OTT services across multiple platforms.” Since its first investment in 1 Mainstream, Sky has used 1 Mainstream’s platform to “significantly broaden distribution of its OTT services such as Sky News and NOW TV to its growing digital audience,” Sky said.
Two industry groups seeking to draft device specifications to enable the Internet of Things used the CeBIT show in Hanover, Germany, Tuesday to announce a “strategic liaison agreement” to collaborate on developing open specs and certification programs. Under the agreement, the EEBus Initiative and the Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC) will work to increase device interoperability and ease of use, “while minimizing duplication of effort and fragmentation,” they said. EEBus is working to define “an end-to-end solution for the smart grid and smart home that will increase the efficiency, environmental protection, convenience and security of the energy supply and related Smart Home management,” that group said. OIC’s “connectivity framework simplifies the way application developers and device manufacturers manage common tasks of discovery and connectivity” over multiple interface standards, including Bluetooth, Zigbee and ZWave, OIC said. “This collaboration means both groups will reference or re-purpose work already done in the other organization, all while harmonizing future roadmaps,” they said.
Meridian Audio continues “to work closely with the music industry” on its Master Quality Authenticated (MQA) lossless audio coding platform, and is “progressing detailed conversations with many content and hardware providers” toward the codec's adoption. So said Lisa Sullivan, Meridian strategic projects manager, in an emailed statement Tuesday responding to a Linn executive’s criticism that MQA lacks technological teeth and represents little more than “an announcement right now” (see 1503160030). At Meridian, “we were also delighted to report the recent, successful public demonstration of MQA streaming,” jointly conducted by Meridian and Tidal, the audiophile music streaming service, Sullivan said: More information and announcements will come "over the coming months.”
AT&T will carry the Samsung Galaxy S 5 mini in its retail stores and online beginning March 20, the carrier said Monday. The Galaxy S 5 mini has a 4.5-inch 720 x 1280 display and an 8-megapixel rear camera. AT&T customers can buy the mini in charcoal black for $0 down on an AT&T Next plan at $14.30 per month for 24 months, $17.88 per month for 18 months or $21.48 per month for 12 months, AT&T said. Users can also buy the phone for $99 with a two-year contract or for $428 with no contract, the carrier said.