Comcast Kills Its 250GB...

Comcast announced today that it is doing away with its 250 GB data cap , and will be moving to test out new plans will charge customers based on usage, rather than cutting them off. Since 2008, Comcast has had a data usage cap of 250GB for all its broadband plans. At that time, the cap was mainly meant to deter users from abusing the network, largely by downloading or distributing pirated video files. But times have changed, streaming media is now a thing, and services like Netflix, Hulu Plus, and TV Everywhere services like Xfinity TV and HBO Go are using up massive amounts of data for some customers. “Four years after we put it in place, we don’t think a static, non-flexible data cap is the best approach,” David Cohen, EVP of Comcast, said on a call with press. Comcast’s response is to cancel its 250 GB data cap and to test out different approaches to dealing with broadband data management. That starts with increasing everyone’s data plan to 300 GB, and putting into effect two new plans in test markets. The first test will start its minimum broadband plan — Internet essentials, which is priced at $9.95 a month — at 300GB and will gradually increase the amount of data available to customers who buy higher-speed broadband plans. The second test will provide all broadband customers with 300 GB, regardless of data plan, and charge them more — say, $10 per 50 GB — on an incremental basis for data used over and above that. For those who don’t live in the test markets, the 250 GB threshold will disappear completely, and customers will no longer be cut off if they hit the old cap. Comcast will still contact those who come close, if only to ensure that customers aren’t getting hit by botnets or other malware. The goal for Comcast is to make sure it’s not cutting customers off who are reaching that 250 GB limit — and to also make sure that customers who are using a huge amount of data pay their fair share. The company is also hoping to allay concerns from customer concerns that they might hit those caps due to using services like Netflix, or even TV Everywhere services. Comcast wouldn’t get into specifics about what percentage of customers bump up against the current threshold, but said that median broadband usage is around 8-10 GB per month. That gives most customers a lot of leeway with 300 GB, but the new plans remove any hypothetical threat of disconnection due to usage. At the same time, one of the main reasons that the data cap discussion came about was due to criticism Comcast received over its Xbox Live streaming VOD service . That service, while delivered via IP, wasn’t being counted toward its cap. That won’t change going forward, and Xbox streams still won’t count against its customer broadband usage. [Image via Flickr/Kevin Burkett ]

Time Warner Cable Custo...

Time Warner Cable is on a roll with this whole TV Everywhere thing. Just a day after adding Viacom channels to its live streaming iPad app, the cable provider has announced support for HBO Go on the Xbox, Roku streaming boxes, and Samsung connected TVs. It’s been a long time coming: Time Warner Cable was one of the last holdouts to even hook up with HBO Go, the on-demand video service which gives subscribers access to every piece of HBO original programming ever… But it’s catching up fast. By supporting HBO Go on game consoles and connected TVs, Time Warner Cable joins the likes of Verizon, AT&T, and Dish Network in offering access to the service. And it even comes out ahead of some providers, like Comcast, which still doesn’t authenticate with HBO Go on Roku. For Time Warner Cable’s HBO subscribers, that’s great news, as they’re no longer tied to watching HBO shows as they air on Sunday night, or reliant on crappy cable VOD services to get access on demand. For everyone else who loves HBO but doesn’t want to pay $100 for cable, though, they’re stuck waiting and hoping that maybe, some day, HBO Go will be available a la carte.

3,997 Models: Android F...

Over the past six months, the folks at OpenSignalMaps have been keeping tabs on the devices that have been downloading their network monitoring app, and so far they’ve recorded downloads onto 681,900 separate Android devices in 195 countries. Now they’ve taken all that data and splayed it out for all to see, and it highlights rather nicely how big a headache fragmentation can be for developers. For the most part, the results are as you’d expect — runaway hits like Samsung’s Galaxy S II was the most represented device among the 3,997 distinct models they spotted, and Samsung Android devices were far and away the most widely used. What really gets me is how many other devices and brands fill up the rest of that list. Seriously, if you haven’t yet, go look at it . Mouse-over some of the smaller blocks, see if there are any brands or devices that ring a bell. It’s pretty crazy to see just how many players are in the field, and nothing against OpenSignalMaps — their app is actually pretty damned useful — but it’s not an immediate must-download for every user. That there are gobs of Android devices floating around out there isn’t exactly a shocker, but data like this really drives home the issue. With so many devices running so many versions of Android with who knows many carrier- and manufacturer-mandated tweaks onboard, how is a developer supposed to make sure that all of their users gets a consistent experience? They can’t, unless they’re willing to test like crazy . Google chairman Eric Schmidt famously downplayed the term “fragmentation” at this year’s CES, suggesting instead that people call it “differentiation.” It’s hard not to agree with sentiment on some level — after all, one of Android’s key strengths is how easily it fits into different niches and price points. But according to him, as long as every Android user is able to use the same apps, there’s no problem here. That strikes me as a rather shortsighted way of looking at it. Downloading and installing apps is one thing, but what I think really counts — the user experience — can still vary from hardware configuration to hardware configuration. Not a day goes by without new Android hardware (or rumors of new Android hardware) making the rounds — hell, just an hour or so ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google will soon be filling out the new Devices section in the Google Play Store with new, unlocked “Nexus” hardware thanks to cooperation from up to five hardware manufacturers. That’s why developers like Animoca have invested what I can only imagine is a sizable amount of money and effort testing their apps with something like 400 Android devices before pushing them out into the world. And of course, fragmentation isn’t just a hardware issue — the OSM post points out that the two most used versions of Android now only account for 75% of the devices they surveyed, down from 90% last year, yet another issue for developers to grapple with. Does every developer need to go through a process that outlandish? Certainly not — OpenSignalMaps seems to test on a tiny fraction of that, and smaller developers can cover most of their bases with a handful of carefully chosen devices. At the end of the day though, despite the sheer amount of choice and flexibility that Android has provided users, those developers still have a choice to make — do they want to strive for perfection, or do they want to keep their sanity?

Service As A SKU

Editor’s note:  This post was written by  Alex Rampell , the CEO of  TrialPay . Rampell is a regular contributor to TechCrunch – see his previous guest posts  here. The biggest ecommerce opportunity today involves taking offline services and offering them for sale online (O2O commerce) . The first generation of O2O commerce was driven by discounting, push-based engagements , and artificial scarcity. The still-unfulfilled opportunity in O2O today is tantamount to tacking barcodes onto un-warehousable services by standardizing and normalizing the units being sold, something I call “Service as a SKU.” Just as Amazon figured out how to build the best warehouses and technology in the world for delivering boxes, somebody will do this for “unboxed” services, with customers driven not by discounts or scarcity, but rather by the Internet’s hallmarks of customer experience and convenience. And unlike how “ship stuff in a box” ecommerce seems to be gravitating towards a few winners , Service as a SKU is still a wide open playing field. The idea is to turn every service, or unit of commerce, into what retailers typically call a SKU (Stock Keeping Unit). Imagine the following as “items” you can buy, and have “delivered,” with a simple click or tap: “1 Unit of Plumber-Fixes-Your-Leaking-Toilet” “1 Unit of Dentist Fixes Your Crown” “1 Unit of 12-Inch Hole-in-Roof-Is-Fixed” “1 Unit of Piano Tuner Tunes Your Piano” “1 Unit of Set Up a Home WiFi Network” Groupon and LivingSocial, early leaders in O2O commerce, started a wave I wrote about a few years ago, but have historically focused on discounting and creating demand by artificial time or quantity scarcity. There are two main problems here: -Adverse selection: Groupon et al tend to attract customers looking for deals. This is not what Amazon does, and not how most consumers shop for necessities (e.g., fix my toilet!). - Push v Pull : Groupon et al tend to rely on “push” (e.g., email) to drive a tremendous amount of sales. Unlike Google, eBay, Yelp, or Amazon, people don’t tend to go to Groupon “unprompted.” To successfully create a SKU for every service, you need to normalize both the service provider (price/quality) and the service being rendered. It’s more like buying produce than buying something mass-produced in a factory. Or, perhaps more accurately, it’s more like booking a hotel reservation, where the rooms are anything but identical, there exist varying degrees of quality, but there are also quite a few commonalities. The company that pulls this off will need to have the following: -A seamless scheduling system, deployed at various service providers, to allow real-time inventory management. OpenTable does this for restaurants, and hence can provide a marketplace for “tables” at opentable.com. You can’t sell boxes without knowing how many items are in your warehouse; you can’t SKU-ify a Service without knowing how many hours are available. -A trusted ratings system to allow for normalization of services and parsing of consumer feedback. How do I compare a $100 “fix my toilet” plumber to a $175 “fix my toilet” plumber? Ideally this will work like hotels: every service provider has a “star rating” and an associated cost. Hotel rooms are reasonably similar; consumers can choose between a 5 star hotel or a 2 star hotel, and even different star levels have significant variance. Yelp and Angie’s List have tremendous assets in their community-based feedback, although payment companies like PayPal and Square have perhaps an even better potential asset on their hands (chargeback rates are a good proxy for merchant quality, every completed transaction can solicit quality feedback and not just from aggrieved/fanatical customers, etc). -A no-discounts, no-push site. OpenTable gets people looking for restaurants, and needs neither emails nor discounts to make that happen. Yelp, Google, eBay, Angie’s List, and Amazon are all contenders as they all have consumers “coming back” unprompted. If the product and site are sufficiently convenient, this often happens organically; having a well-designed and convenient search, shopping, payments, and redemption experience avoids the need for push marketing. -Relationships with offline service providers. Despite the flash nature of Groupon and LivingSocial, their merchant relationships are significant. Yelp has virtually every business profiled but perhaps not every business engaged in an economic relationship. It’s important to note that Service-as-a-SKU is not lead generation for offline services, nor is it just a glorified scheduling platform. “Leadgen” has been around since the beginning of the internet, but there is no standardization or normalization, not to mention the convenience of “one-click” purchase. There are leadgen services for housing relocation, laser eye surgery, insurance, etc, but none let you actually make a purchase online. The hard part is in “normalizing” to create a single “service item” that can be scheduled, paid for, and “delivered” with a mouse click or smartphone tap. As an example, Uber has done this for black cars, and EXEC is fixing hourly prices and limiting SKUs to low-wage labor services. At 8:01 AM on June 26, 1974, a shopper named Clyde Dawson bought the first item — a 10-pack of Juicy Fruit gum — to ever be scanned with a UPC (universal product code). Today, barcodes are a part of every mass-market product bought and sold throughout the world. You won’t see plumbers, dentists, limo drivers, or gardeners walking around with UPCs on their backs, but we are poised for another shopping revolution of equal magnitude.

Rdio’s Major Redesign G...

There’s currently a heated battle being waged between three of the biggest on-demand music streaming services — MOG, Spotify, and Rdio — each of which is trying to capture our hearts and ears by offering the best mobile experience for tunes on-the-go. You can check out Josh’s in-depth comparison of the battle for mobile supremacy here . While it wasn’t Josh’s top pick for music streaming on the tablet, Rdio is today taking a big step forward, launching a completely redesigned music listening and discovery experience, starting with the web and its desktop apps. While the company initially unveiled its plans for its new listening experience at SXSW, today marks the first time the new Rdio will be available to all. Beginning right this very moment, Rdio says in a blog post, the new look is live for you to test, poke, and prod. The new look and feel, the company believes, will make it faster, more social, and easier to use, with notable features and upgrades including better “Collections,” drag and drop playlist creation, personalized “Heavy Rotation” functionality, and private playlists. The company has been busy extending its service across Europe, launching in Spain and Portugal in February, but all the while, it’s been focused on creating a new, better user experience to keep users engaged in the face of the heightened competition and growing popularity of MOG and Spotify. As Rdio says in its blog post, the site’s new look is meant to transform it into something “more than just a boring spreadsheet of songs.” That starts with making browsing and discovery in one place — i.e. making navigation something that isn’t quite so time consuming. In the new design, music, playlists, and a user’s network are all now under one view. And, speaking of playlists, one of the most requested features, Rdio says, has been the ability to add whole albums to playlists, so today the startup will begin offering this functionality on both the Web and in its desktop apps. The new Rdio also allows users to browse a continuous stream of albums, and easily return to the place where they left off. What’s more, a la Facebook and Spotify, users can now access a “People Sidebar” to see what their network is listening to in realtime, with one-click listening. If you want to know why an album or song is appearing in top charts, or why it’s showing up in the new “Heavy Rotation” category, you can find out simply by hovering over photos to see which of your friends listened to the song, and inspired its being served up for you to see. The new People Sidebar also lets users easily find and follow Rdio’s influencers, like top artists, critics, record labels and brands. Another highlight is Rdio’s new drag and drop functionality, which lets users drop music into playlists or share with their friends on the fly. Of course, with sharing overload becoming the norm, people want to have options beyond their public and collaborative playlists, which is why Rdio is now offering the ability to create private playlists with a few drag-and-drops. And if you feel the need to share those private playlists, you can do that now, too. As on-demand, streaming music options battle for our ears, staying even with competitors is paramount — just as it is to continue iterating on the experience of social listening. We’re only just beginning to play around with Rdio’s new features, but at first look, this is a big step forward for the Rdio experience. For more, check out the new look here , and take a peek at the video below: