Items tagged with AOL
If you're a Verizon Wireless customer looking to purchase a Galaxy S9 or Galaxy S9+ in the near future, we've got some bad news for you. America's largest wireless carrier has just signed deal with Samsung that will see Verizon’s Oath subsidiary install bloatware across devices that are Bixby-enabled. We don't know of many (or rather, any) people that enjoy having their mobile devices preloaded with unnecessary apps, but Verizon sees this as another way to drive revenue from customers that are increasingly turning away from traditional ways to view content. In this case, Samsung devices bought through Verizon Wireless will come preloaded with Yahoo Sports, Oath Newsroom,...
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"So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, goodbye." Back in October, it was announced that AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) would be shutting down for good later this year. Well, that December 15th execution date has arrived, and it's time to say goodbye to what was once an extremely popular way for friends and families to communicate at the dawn of the internet age. AIM managed to stick around for two decades, but it hasn't really been relevant for half of those years. The rise of smartphones and text messaging left AIM by the wayside. In addition, modern alternatives like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Snapchat have flourished thanks to constant innovation. "If you were a 90’s kid, chances are...
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Let's pour one out for one of the first instant messaging applications that many of us ever knew. As a freshman in college, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) became a quick way for me to keep in contact with friends across campus, setup study groups or just chat for hours on end. And you couldn't walk down any dorm hall in the evening without hearing the distinctive sounds of messages being sent and received. Well, after a twenty-year run, AOL has announced that AIM will go offline permanently on December 15th, 2017. You can blame the death of AIM on the rise of text messages and messaging apps like WhatsApp and Snapchat. Our social interactions are also dominated by the likes of Twitter and Facebook...
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Once Verizon completes its acquisition of Yahoo and merges it with AOL, it will create a new "value" division called "Oath." Tim Armstrong, the longtime CEO of AOL, tweeted out the new name and it did not take long for the Internet to start mocking it. That is to be expected when snark seems to rule the web, though Verizon certainly didn't do itself any favors by settling on the name "Oath" without any explanation to how it arrived at that brand.Here is a look at the original Twitter post and some of the comments that followed: Billion+ Consumers, 20+ Brands, Unstoppable Team. #TakeTheOath. Summer 2017. pic.twitter.com/tM3Ac1Wi36 — Tim Armstrong (@timarmstrongaol) April 3, 2017 Tribune Publishing:...
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AOL has a reputation that precedes it, and that's not necessarily a good thing. When most people think of AOL, they remember the dial-up service from years ago. Heck, some of you reading this might even still have those trial CDs that AOL flooded the market with. But there's more to AOL than that -- much more -- and for that reason, a brand change could be in AOL's future. Verizon owns AOL these days, having acquired the company last year in a deal worth about $4.4 billion. The sum takes into account AOL's various media properties, such as The Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Autoblog, Moviefone, Engadget, and others. It even owns MapQuest. The AOL of today is very much a media giant. Image Source:...
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It appears that Verizon's supercookie is indeed "super", as we're still unable to escape it. Earlier this year, Verizon came under fire for making use of a cookie that works even when offline, and was impossible to disable. After a bit of prodding, the company decided to let users disable it, but not without getting them to jump through some hoops. The reason this "cookie" is so notable is because it can send back a wealth of information to Verizon and its partners. This goes as far as being able to identify which apps you're using on your mobile phone, and where you use them. Simply put, the amount of information that can be gathered on you is quite outrageous, and the fact that it can...
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I guess you could say that nothing surprises us anymore. After all, we learned this weekend that AOL’s dial-up business still has over 2 million customers who pay on average just under $21 per month for service. Unbelievable in this day of broadband Internet, right? Regardless of how strange that seems to those of us that salivate over the prospects of gigabit Internet, these folks clinging to 56k modems are adding millions to AOL’s bottom line. But we also have to recall that AOL has a massive digital advertising platform with a heavy focus on the mobile sector. And we also can’t forget AOL owns a wealth of popular web destinations including Engadget, TechCrunch, and The Huffington Post. With...
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Remember the terrible sounds your modem used to make when dialing up access to the Internet? In the early days, you had to monitor your minutes online, practice patience as pictures downloaded at a snail's pace, and tolerate trolls who would try to boot you offline with programs called punters. It was a crappy era for the Internet, and for more than 2.1 million people, they're still tolerating some of those headaches. According to AOL's financial results for the first quarter of its fiscal 2015, over 2.1 million people in the U.S. subscribe to its dial-up Internet service. And for the privilege of connecting to the web the way the rest of us used to do it two decades ago, they're paying on average...
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This story is mind-boggling for so many reasons. A $24,000 charge from AT&T? Someone actually pays $51 a month for dial-up access? People actually still use AOL? We must be living in some bizzaro world when things like this are still taking place, but let’s first start from the beginning with 83-year-old Los Angeles resident Ron Dorff. Dorff is a retiree living off a monthly income of roughly $1,500 per month via his Social Security checks. And he inexplicably is paying AT&T $51 for internet access — but this isn’t your garden variety AT&T DSL or U-Verse connection, it’s **gasp** dial-up. Yes, dial-up Internet in this day and age which is priced higher than some broadband plans that...
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AOL has gone into restructuring mode and is preparing to lay off staff, as well as shut down several of its prominent website properties. At present, it's being reported that AOL is likely to turn out the lights at its primary gaming site Joystiq, and the The Unofficial Apple Weblog, better known as TUAW. However, several others could also get the axe. TechCrunch, another AOL property, seems to have the skinny on much of what's going on, though contends it's "not privy to what happens at a corporate level." Much of the information it's reporting on has come by way of an anonymous tip, which prompted the site to ask around, poking and prodding its own collection of sources. Image Source:...
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AOL has experienced a nasty security breach that exposed a great deal of user information, and the company says that it was the work of criminal hackers, as opposed to some kind of glitch or oversight. “AOL is investigating a security incident that involved unauthorized access to AOL's network and systems. AOL is working with best-in-class external forensic experts and federal authorities to investigate this serious criminal activity,” wrote the AOL Mail Team in a blog post. AOL first noticed that there was a problem when users began seeing an increase in spam in the form of spoofed emails. The mail team has determined that email and postal addresses, contacts, and encrypted passwords...
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Phew, talk about a close call! Winamp's days of whipping the llama's ass came this close (place your index finger and thumb really close to each other) to being over after AOL decided to pull the plug on the media player it acquired in 1999 for $80 million. AOL announced its intentions in November, saying it would dismantle Winamp five days before Christmas, but has now found a buyer instead. Rumors began to surface days after the announcement that Microsoft was interested in acquiring both Winamp and Shoutcast, the latter of which is a free Internet radio service developed by Nullsoft, the same company that built Winamp. Those rumors persisted for a month, but it wasn't Microsoft that ultimately...
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Today was supposed to be Winamp’s last on earth, but some last-minute nerd heroics may save the beloved music player. The rumor that Microsoft might snag both Winamp and ShoutCast from AOL appears to be legit, as TechCrunch reports that a deal is being finalized as you’re reading this. The site’s source didn’t specify that Microsoft is the potential buyer, but it would make sense considering the previous rumor. While the particulars are being nailed down, it’s likely that Winamp will be left alone in the interest of both parties. Spotiamp Regardless whether or not Winamp is the recipient of a holiday miracle, there’s a nifty piece of software called Spotiamp...
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Unfortunately for llamas everywhere, media player Winamp may not be dead after all. Fortunately for longtime Winamp devotees, that’s because Microsoft may be purchasing Winamp and ShoutCast (a media streaming service, like Winamp also formerly a property of Nullsoft) from AOL. This is just a rumor, but TechCrunch (which is owned by AOL, incidentally) says a source indicates that Microsoft is in talks with AOL to buy Winamp. Why Microsoft would want Winamp is a little unclear, but we wonder if Redmond thinks it can get it for a song, since, you know, AOL was planning on shutting it down anyway. Microsoft would also snap up ShoutCast, and with both in hand, it’s possible that the company...
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Consider yourself lucky if you were raised on broadband and nothing else. For us dinosaurs who were born before the Taylor Swift era, we had to suffer through dial-up service, enduring the barbaric screeches and noises of our modems as they literally dialed up a connection with the Internet. Through a mass marketing campaign in which free trial disks and CDs were handed out everywhere like Halloween candy, America On-Line would emerge as one of the most popular dial-up services of the 1990s, giving us reason to run and buy a swank 56.6K modem, which felt fast at the time. Ah, but with the advent of broadband those days are but a distant memory, at least for most of us. For one reason or another,...
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AOL, a company many probably wrote off as dead a few years ago, is actually doing quite well. The company beat expectations and posted revenue of $541.3 million, which is roughly a triple year-over-year improvement on 2012’s second quarter. The company sold about $1.1 billion worth of patents to Microsoft last year. As part of its aggressive strategy to remake itself and continue life in the black, AOL is also planning to acquire Adap.Tv, a video advertising company, for $405 million. (The deal is for $322 million in cash and $83 million in stock.) This acquisition is in line with previous ones, including 5Min Media, Goviral, and even the Huffington Post, as AOL is looking to...
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Go ahead and add another RSS reader to the growing list of Google Reader replacement candidates. As Google prepares to pull the plug on its popular RSS reader, alternatives (both new and old) have come out of the woodwork, one of the newest being AOL Reader, a rather basic option that's now available to the general public in beta form. There's nothing complicated about AOL Reader. It's lightweight and fast, easy to navigate, and makes adding RSS subscriptions a breeze. You can also tweak the layout to your liking with a variety of viewing options. For example, you can organize headlines in a list format, have them arranged in a visual grid of cards, an infinitely-scrolling page, or in similar...
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Patents seemingly make the world go 'round, particularly in the technology space these days. Android, iOS, Samsung, Google, AOL, Microsoft -- hardly a day goes by without someone's patent portfolio making the (positive or negative) news. Today, Microsoft and Facebook are the ones in the spotlight, announcing an agreement under which Microsoft will assign to Facebook the right to purchase a portion of the patent portfolio it recently agreed to acquire from AOL Inc. Those hundreds of patents were purchased in a bulk buy for around $1 billion from AOL, and now Facebook has agreed to pay for the portion it wants for $550 million in cash. There were rumors that Facebook put in a bid a while back for...
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AOL is planning to sell over 800 patents and their related applications to Microsoft in a deal that is valued at $1.056 billion in cash. AOL has said a "significant" portion of the money from the deal will go to shareholders. The sale is expected to be completed by the end of this year. AOL will keep a patent portfolio of over 300 patents and patent applications in areas such as advertising, search, content generation/management, social networking, mapping, multimedia/streaming and security. In addition, AOL received a perpetual license to the patents being sold to Microsoft. The deal won't come as a big surprise to anyone who's been following AOL closely over the last few months. Last fall,...
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It's been ~10 months since we first covered AOL's desperate plan to reinvent itself and reclaim a strong position in the online industry, but the company's efforts aren't yielding the results it promised. The company announced a major reorganization earlier this month, while recently leaked documents indicate just how bad the situation has become. Much of the company's financial woes are attributable to Patch. Patch is AOL's attempt to create web communities and advertising focused on specific real-world towns and communities. In theory, users in such areas are hungry for online sources that cover their own local news and events. In practice, things don't seem to be working out that way. That...
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Web pioneer and current Web also-ran AOL, Inc., is planning a company-wide restructuring effort beginning in January, according to comments made to Bloomberg by AOL CEO Tim Armstrong (pictured below). The company will combine its dial-up service (people still have that?) with its other Web services to create a single business unit, which includes AOL Instant Messenger, email, photos, and more. The idea is to get more individual users using more of the company’s services and stay on AOL sites longer, which sounds like a page out of the Google playbook. It also happens to make a lot of common sense. In addition to this new combined unit, AOL’s restructuring will include three other...
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Remember that awful sound that would emanate from your dial-up modem every time you hopped onto the Internet? Most of us have since graduated to broadband bliss, at least those of us fortunate to live anywhere but the boonies. As it turns out, dial-up is still mildly popular, and whether that's by necessity or choice, AOL is still the go-to company for such service. To wit, AOL has nearly 3.5 million subscribers who use the company's dial-up service, just like you did back in the 1990s. That's according to AOL's third quarter financial report, and represents a 15 percent drop from the same quarter one year prior. Those remaining dial-up subscribers added $17.49 million to AOL's bottom line in...
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