Items tagged with Data
Suddenly, mobile carriers are falling all over each other to woo customers, promising better and better deals and offering increasingly lucrative incentives to switch carriers. The latest shot in the volley is from AT&T, which is now promising a 10GB family data plan with unlimited talk and text with its AT&T Mobile Share Value Plans. Prices start $130 for two lines; five lines will run you a total of $175, and you can add more lines beyond that for $15 per month per line. The plan also works for small business that have up to 10 lines. For a limited time, both new and existing customers can get a $100 bill credit towards any new line added. If you need a clearer example of the mindset...
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Google has shamed the likes of Dropbox by offering many gigabytes of storage to every user for $0.00, but as cloud storage becomes cheaper, more accessible, and more demanded, new entrants are pushing the envelope. Tencent, a huge company in China, is looking to make a major splash in North America. How? By giving out more free cloud storage space than any other company in the world. A new report suggests that Tencent is planning to offer up 10TB of free cloud storage -- yes, you read that correctly. The new offering is slated to land next year, and it'll no doubt put the squeeze on companies such as Box.net, Dropbox, and Google. Cloud storage as a business model is changing rapidly. It's quickly...
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The years haven't been kind to brick-and-mortar generalist stores. Kmart, Sears, Roses -- just a few of the names that were booming a decade ago, and now, can't seem to lure a customer in regardless of tactic. Rather than just throwing in the towel and cursing Amazon, Sears is thinking outside of the box a bit. A new report suggests that Sears Auto Center locations may re-invent themselves for the digital generation by converting into data centers. With cloud services on the rise, monolithic companies such as Google and Apple have been building data centers all over the place in order to house and manage the incredible amount of information now being tapped by their customer bases. Ubiquity Critical...
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Earlier this month, T-Mobile drastically shook up the wireless market yet again. In the latest of its almost-too-good-to-be-true moves in a bid to become known as the Uncarrier, the company announced that it would be giving tablet users 200MB of free data per month for life. During the initial start-up process, however, a number of to-be customers were dinged for activations, and questions began to arise. In atypical fashion, T-Mobile has issued a detailed statement that clearly lays out what went wrong, and what you can expect going forward. Bottom line? "Anybody who wants to use a tablet on T-Mobile's 4G LTE network gets 200MB free data for as long as you own the device, whether you pay for...
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A lot of companies in the technology realm make a lot of promises, but few live up to their claims. T-Mobile is not one of those companies. After changing its stance and coming out as the "Uncarrier," T-Mobile has made one groundbreaking move after another. First, by enabling phone swaps every six months in its JUMP program; next, by making international roaming free; and now, it's giving any user who snaps up a T-Mobile tablet free LTE data every single month. Yes, free. For years, tablets sold through carriers have been terrible deals. You usually have to buy an expensive data plan, perhaps even on contract, that you won't use all that often if you also have a phone. T-Mobile recognizes that,...
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AT&T rolled out Mobile Share plans last year, which allowed multiple users on one account to pay for and use a single “bucket” of data. It’s a nice option for many consumers, as typically one family member may use more data than another, and it’s not a great deal if they’re each paying for the same amount of monthly data. The company is simplifying things a bit with some new Mobile Share options. Plans start at $50 per month, which gets you service for a basic phone with 300MB of data; you can get service for a smartphone with 300MB of data for $70 per month. The most expensive option is $500 per month for 50GB of data and $30 for each smartphone on the plan,...
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Hopefully you've never had to experience "bill shock" before, but if you're curious what it feels like, a trip overseas followed by liberal use of your smartphone's texting, data, and voice will do the trick. International roaming rates are obscenely high, and if you're not careful, you can come home to a bill that's several thousand dollars, if not tens of thousands of dollars. T-Mobile wants to help eliminate those kind of scenarios. The nation's 4th largest wireless carrier is pitching new plans that offer unlimited data and texting at no extra charge in over 100 countries. By doing so, T-Mobile can (and does) claim that its home data coverage is larger than AT&T's and Verizon's combined....
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Payback? Perhaps. With the National Security Agency in the wrong kind of spotlight of late, this is probably sweet for many to read. What's being described as "chronic electrical surges" at an NSA data-storage facility have "hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of machinery and delayed the center's opening for a year." Yes, a full year. In what has to be one of the most bizarre stories to come out of this whole NSA saga, there have reportedly been ten meltdowns in just the past 13 months at the Utah center, with arc fault failures causing all sorts of havok for engineers. The actual cause of the continued issue remains unsolved, with an NSA spokesperson suggesting that "the failures that occurred...
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On Friday, we learned that the mobile industry has developed a short-form notice for mobile apps that tells users if the app is collecting their data and in what areas (i.e., phone call and text logs, location data, and so on) that would appear before app download begins. The program is currently voluntary and being tested, and although on the surface it seems like a step forward for consumer protection, some industry consumer rights groups are opposed to it. Jeffrey Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) told us that, with respect to all the work that the industry put into the plan, he doesn’t believe the new code of conduct will actually do much for consumers. “The process...
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Well, it's pretty easy to tell which U.S. carriers are doing well, and which aren't. Verizon and AT&T recently extended the length of time required for its customers to get a subsidy on a new phone, while T-Mobile and Sprint are both making some pretty consumer-friendly moves. Clearly, those first two are raking in the cash. Sprint, however, has been slipping for years. The carrier has trumpeted its unlimited data option for some time now, but that's seemingly not enough. This week, it's introducing a wild new unlimited guaranteed plan for those who are ready to tie the knot with an operator. The Sprint Unlimited Guarantee guarantees customers unlimited talk (calls to any wireline or mobile...
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If you ignored Facebook’s Graph Search when it was first announced at the beginning of the year, it’s time to give the controversial new search engine another look, because it’s rolling out to all U.S. accounts over the next few weeks. Whether you like the search engine will depend on how much you want to find out about your friends and what they like – and how comfortable you are with your own info turning up in people’s search results. A Facebook server room. Image Credit: Facebook With more than a billion users, Facebook has a treasure trove of personal data: what restaurants users frequent, what stores they shop at, what they like to buy, where they’ve...
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Perhaps some users were unaware of this capability, but you can actually download your Facebook data, including all of your wall posts, photos, videos, and so on. According to blogger Damian Yerrick of Angry Math, Facebook has now removed the ability to download your own posts. There are three areas where Facebook stores the data that’s posted, shared, or uploaded to your profile: Downloaded Info (including posts, messages, and photos), Expanded Archive (items such as login info and cookies), and Activity Log (which includes a history of all of your activity. You can download and save a copy of your Downloaded Info and Expanded Archive data, while only Facebook has access to the whole of...
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AT&T this week introduced new shared data tiers (again) that it claims will help businesses "raise the productivity bar" by offering expanded choices, but not without raising the phone bill, too. By a lot. The new plans aren't just for business customers, either; home consumers are welcome to pony up for a 30GB, 40GB, or 50GB Mobile Share with Unlimited Talk & Text plan. Let's talk cost. The 30GB tier runs $300 per month, while the 40GB and 50GB tiers are $400 and $500, respectively. What's more, paying these hefty prices won't earn you immunity from per-device charges; phones are still an additional $30 each per month, laptops, LaptopConnect cards, and netbooks are $20 earch, and tablets...
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Facebook is a huge, now-public company. With around a billion users, it has become far more than a social network. It's a bona fide destination on the Internet, for a variety of people, brands, companies, and marketers. It has evolved into something deeper than a place to share your most prominent feelings. It has become a place for small businesses to get started, for far-flung relatives to stay in touch, and for people with oodles of photos and videos to store and share their memories. You probably knew all of that, but have you ever stopped to consider what's happening behind the scenes to make it all happen? Storing petabytes upon petabytes of data is no easy task, and maintaining uptime...
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