Starwood’s Preferred Guest (SPG) program is offering members room entry via a Bluetooth-enabled smartphone app, the chain said in an email to members Tuesday. The SPG Keyless app allows SPG members to check in, get an assigned room number and unlock their doors at participating hotels. The app is available for iPads and generation 4s and later iPhones running iOS 8 and for Android devices running version 4.3 or later, Starwood said. After downloading the app, users are directed to register their device. To be eligible to use the features, users must have an spg.com account and login set up; have a valid email address, credit card and registered device; have a single room registered and booked through a Starwood channel; a device set to accept push notifications and have Bluetooth set to on, it said. Ten hotels were participating as of Tuesday, including W, Element and Aloft venues in Beijing; Cancun; Cupertino and West Hollywood, California; Hong Kong; New York; Qatar; and Singapore. Members were urged to check back often for additions to the list. Qualifiers include local regulations and rate plans, according to a FAQ section.
Broadcasters’ court challenge of the FCC incentive auction order is an “unfortunate reaction to an expansive and progressive undertaking,” said FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler in a speech Tuesday to the Mid-Atlantic Venture Association, according to a copy of his remarks on the FCC website. Wheeler also said a lack of access to broadcaster and cable company controlled content was responsible for causing online video services to falter, which he intends to address with a draft NPRM on broadening what the FCC defines as a multichannel video programming distributor (see 1410290064). “Competitors should be able to negotiate in good faith for video content, even if it is owned by cable companies and broadcasters,” Wheeler said. “The old rules of the FCC” let broadcasters stop Aereo in court, said the chairman. “Aereo wasn’t the reason for the new rules, but the idea that entrepreneurs should be able to assemble programs to offer consumers choices is something that shouldn’t be hindered by the FCC.”
The FCC should let all of current rules for closed captions for online video clips take effect before imposing new ones, said NCTA, NAB, and the Digital Media Association in reply comments posted Monday in docket 11-154. In a joint filing, a host of consumer groups representing the hearing impaired disagree. Despite objections to the additional rules, “no commenter seriously disputes the immense public benefits of ensuring that consumers who are deaf or hard of hearing can access IP-delivered video clips on equal terms,” said the filing by National Association for the Deaf, Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing and other groups. To make sure IP clip caption rules don’t have unintended consequences, the FCC “must allow its recently appointed rules to take effect and study their impact before considering expanding the scope,” NAB said. Proposed additional rules requiring captioning for third party clips would be a “vast expansion” and extremely challenging, NAB said, echoing comments from NCTA. “In contrast to the relatively limited number of distribution channels for full-length programming, the number of potential online outlets for clips is virtually unlimited,” NCTA said, saying that within a few hours of last weeks Antares rocket explosion, a Google search for footage of the explosion returned 3.6 million hits on a wide variety of websites. No individual third-party providers have filed comments opposing the proposed clip caption rules, the consumer groups said. “The lack of apparent concern by affected providers should assuage any concerns over the impact of a nominal requirement to render captions for video clips owned by an entity other than the third-party provider itself."
Vexigo, which bills itself as a global leader in "content visualization," has released the Visualizr, a tool that enables publishers to instantly turn website content into a "personalized magazine" for mobile devices, including smart watches, the company said Tuesday. Each time the Visualizr is triggered, it scans every component on a website and builds a magazine based on a reader's areas of interest, it said. Vexigo's "contextual analysis engine" performs a real-time analysis of a reader’s navigation behavior to "populate" the magazine, it said. "Global mobile data traffic grew by more than 80 percent last year," it said. "Users want to quickly read the stories that matter most and the Visualizr delivers exactly that -- a personalized, mobile-optimized experience."
Data center traffic likely will triple over the next five years, Cisco predicted in its Global Cloud Index. The cloud is expected to represent 76 percent of total data center traffic, it said Tuesday in a news release. In 2013, the cloud accounted for 54 percent of data center traffic, it said. By 2018, 53 percent of all residential Internet users globally will use personal cloud storage, it said. The average consumer cloud storage traffic per user will be 811 MB per month by 2018, “compared to 186 megabytes per month in 2013,” it said. Countries with the best fixed network performance this year include Japan, the Netherlands and Taiwan, it said. Countries with the best mobile network performance this year include China, Denmark and Uruguay.
Deploying open smart home solutions that give consumers a degree of control over their ecosystem choices offers a competitive opportunity for hardware, software and service players if consumers know where to find smart home devices, said Parks Associates CEO Tricia Parks in a news release Tuesday. “Consumers want a group of products that work together,” but they have few choices today beyond a service provider or home control platform, Parks said. Citing a Q2 Parks Associates survey of 10,000 broadband households, Parks said nearly two-thirds of U.S. broadband households are unfamiliar with smart home products or services. Seven in 10 of respondents didn’t know where to buy smart home products, while 20 percent expected to buy one or more smart home devices in the next 12 months, Parks Associates said. Today, consumers largely make only “only one choice -- the service provider,” which controls almost every aspect of the available offerings, said Parks. Only Google has had the market strength to build a partner network of smart home products that work together without a central controller or platform, but many different models are emerging, Parks said. Market adoption is poised to grow as sales channels expand, services are subsidized and partnerships emerge outside the traditional CE hardware and services area, she said. The survey said 13 percent of U.S. broadband households own at least one smart home device; roughly half of consumers who own a smart home device are under 35 years old; and 60 percent of smart home device owners with more than one device find interoperability “very important.” Parks Associates predicts smart home device sales will exceed 20 million units this year and approach 36 million units by 2017.
Amazon gave Prime members another reason to renew their annual membership when it added unlimited photo storage in Amazon’s Cloud Drive as a user benefit. Prime members can store existing photo collections, automatically upload new photos taken and access them "anytime, anywhere," Amazon said on Tuesday. Users can upload photos from iOS and Android devices, Fire tablets, Fire phones, and Mac and Windows computers, and they can access photos from those devices as well as from the Fire TV Stick, PlayStation 3 and 4 game consoles and select LG and Samsung TVs, it said. Images can be stored in the original version, so consumers “never have to worry about losing the full resolution image,” Amazon said.
Sixty-three percent of Amazon’s global workforce is male, said the company’s diversity report released Friday. Whites made up 60 percent of Amazon’s workforce in the U.S.; blacks, 15 percent; Asians, 13 percent; Hispanics, 9 percent; and “other” races made up 3 percent, it said. Amazon said it gathered its employees' gender statistics in September; its racial statistics in July. Amazon’s racial disparities increased when applied to manager positions in the U.S., it said. Blacks and Hispanics each were 4 percent of Amazon's managers, compared with 71 percent for whites and 18 percent for Asians, it said.
Publicis Groupe, a French PR firm, will buy digital marketing company Sapient for $3.7 billion, said a Publicis news release Monday. The buy will let Publicis derive 50 percent of revenue from “digital and technology three years ahead of 2018 plan,” said Maurice Levy, Publicis CEO. “This transaction provides substantial value to our shareholders, offers an ideal cultural match for our people and provides an opportunity to share a wealth of new capabilities with our clients,” said Sapient CEO Alan Herrick. Publicis plans to create Publicis.Sapient, a website focused on “digital transformation and the dynamics of an always-on world across marketing, omni-channel commerce, consulting and technology,” said the release.
Southwest Airlines began offering music service from Beats Music on the airline’s Wi-Fi-enabled aircraft. Passengers can access “hundreds” of playlists via the Southwest entertainment portal and have a playlist customized to their tastes by answering questions about location, activity, surroundings and musical preference, the airline said Monday. The service will be compatible with major mobile devices and operating systems, including iOS and Android, as well as most Web browsers, Southwest said.