Want to find out why you suddenly don’t have Internetaccess or cell phone service? You might want to check out the social-networking site Twitter. Want to find out why you suddenly don’t have Internet access or cell phone service? You might want to check out the social-networking site Twitter.
It seems that Twitter was one of the main ways that phone company AT&T has been communicating with customers and updating the public about the fiber cut that caused thousands of people in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area to go without broadband, phone, and wireless service for most of Thursday.
Janine Popick, CEO of VerticalResponse, whose company has been affected by the outage, said the only way she has stayed on top of the situation has been through Twitter.
“All of my real time updates have been coming from the AT&T Twitter feed,” she said.
Indeed, she isn’t alone. Nearly 2,400 people have been keeping tabs on the situation via AT&T’s Twitter feed.
Twitter is a Web-based social-networking service that lets people send messages to a group of followers in 140 characters or less. It’s been around for a couple of years now. I have to admit when I first heard about it, I thought it seemed like a service only narcissists would be interested in. After all, who really cares what I am doing or where I am going or even what I decide to eat for lunch. But the service has taken off in the past year, and it’s now hitting the mainstream as everyone from doctors to restaurants are using the service to update patients and patrons.
And it appears that large companies, such as AT&T, are using the service to keep their customers and anyone interested in the company, informed in real time about a crisis.
AT&T began “tweeting” updates about the massive service outage in California around 7 a.m. PDT. With the first message saying:
“CA customers: We are aware of a cable cut situation impacting services in Santa Clara and San Jose areas.”
From then on the company has sent about eight more “tweets” or messages informing customers that technicians have been on the scene and service would be restored as quickly as possible. The company apologized for the outage and also informed its followers that the outage was likely caused by vandals who had cut the fiber cables.
The company’s most recent “tweet” actually notified its Twitter followers that AT&T is offering a reward for anyone responsible for vandalizing the company’s infrastructure:
“AT&T offering $100,000 reward for info leading to arrest/conviction of those responsible for CA vandalism. Call 408-947-STOP.”
The outage has affected thousands of people throughout the Bay Area, even non-AT&T customers. Because AT&T provides the fiber connections that link cell phone towers to their respective networks, wireless subscribers from almost every carrier were also affected by the outage. Some Verizon Communications DSL customers also saw service disrupted, because their service uses the AT&T fiber-optic cables to send its data traffic to its own nationwide network.
Sprint Nextel, whose wireless customers experienced service interruption, hasn’t provided official updates via Twitter, but the company’s spokeswoman Crystal Davis has also been updating customers and reporters via her Twitter feed. Davis’ most recent tweet indicated the company still had no idea when service would be restored.
“Still working w/ our network and disaster recovery team on fiber cut issue in CA.”
An earlier message tried to offer encouragement to those affected:
“Assessing fibercut issue in CA w/ network + emergency response team. We’re all in this together folks. Let’s have a day of peace in telecom.”
Jeffrey Nelson, a spokesman for Verizon Wireless, has also sent updates with links to news stories about the outage. He even sent a message to AT&T’s media relations representatives asking who reporters should call for updates.
“@ATTNews Understand spokesperson has been tough for reporters to reach at AT&T on Silicon Valley outage. Who should they call for info?”
While hundreds of messages were sent back and forth on Twitter throughout the day among angry customers looking for more information on what has been happening, some affected business customers were also using Twitter and other social-networking forums to keep their customers updated on the outage.
For example San Francisco-based VerticalResponse has been following AT&T’s updates via Twitter, and it’s also been updating its own customers using Twitter. VerticalResponse works with roughly 56,000 small-business customers to distribute direct email marketing campaigns. And even though the company is based in San Francisco, its servers are collocated in Palo Alto, which was affected by the outage.
For most of the day, VerticalResponse was unable to send marketing campaigns on behalf of its customers. And because the company was disconnected from the Net, it also had no way to communicate with its customers through its corporate e-mail system.
So instead the company leveraged several social-networking platforms, including Twitter, to get the word out to its customers about what was happening. Instead of coming into the office, most of the company’s employees stayed home, or went to coffee shops in San Francisco where they could get Internet access.
“Our clients are pretty pissed,” said VerticalResponse’s CEO Janine Popick. “And rightly so. When something like happens you just have to throw your hands up. There’s nothing you can do. But the good news is we have been building up a Twitter base, and we have nearly 4,000 people as part of our online community, so we can communicate directly with them through Twitter or Facebook or some other social networking medium.”
Amen for Twitter. But the big question still remains, “When will AT&T fix this mess?” I guess you’ll have to check Twitter to know exactly when. VerticalResponse’s most recent tweet indicates that its servers are up and running. And the company has sent all its email campaigns for the day.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – The Associated Press is reporting that the nonprofit foundation that runs Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia of user-contributed articles, said Friday it has met its $6 million fundraising goal for fiscal 2008.
With about six months left in this year’s campaign, the Wikimedia Foundation said it has raised $6.2 million. A flood of donations came in after the site’s founder, Jimmy Wales, posted an appeal for support in late December.
The foundation said about 50,000 contributors chipped in a total of $2 million in the space of eight days, bringing the total number of donors to more than 125,000.
The money will go toward improving the software Wikipedia runs on as well as upgrading the servers and Internetbandwidth that accommodate the site’s traffic. Wikipedia consistently ranks among the 10 most visited Web sites in the world.
The foundation operates the site without advertising as a matter of principle, making donations critical.
Since its founding in 2001, Wikipedia’s fundraising prowess has expanded quickly. The foundation hauled in $1.3 million two years ago and $2.2 million last year.
In March 2008, the site received a $3 million gift from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, to be dispensed in $1 million annual installments. Last month the Stanton Foundation gave $890,000 to make Wikipedia’s editing process more user-friendly.
The Wikimedia Foundation hopes the growth in big-name donors will help improve the encyclopedia’s uneven reputation for accuracy, both by showing that civic-minded institutions are willing to make an investment and by funding programs that increase outreach to new contributors.
Wikimedia spokesman Jay Walsh said expanding the foundation’s Wikipedia Academies will be a major goal in the coming year. The program sends Wikimedia staff to institutions around the world for discussions with experts in different fields, partly in hopes of drawing more academics and professionals to the site.
“There’s work to do in getting the word out about how Wikipedia works,” Walsh said.
In a thank-you note posted on the site Friday, Wales told donors, “You have proven that Wikipedia matters to you, and that you support our mission: to bring free knowledge to the planet, free of charge and free of advertising.”
AFP – SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) – A pair of US inventors are bringing to market a computerized car key that prevents people from chatting on mobile telephones or sending text messages while driving.
Key2SafeDriving adds to a trend of using technology to thwart speeding, drunken driving, and other risky behavior proven to ramp-up the odds of crashing.
Once slipped into a car’s ignition, the key created by US university researcher Xuesong Zhou and Dr. Wallace Curry sends a wireless signal to a driver’s mobile phone blocking calls or texting.
“If you’re in driving mode, you can’t talk or text — period,” a character tells a friend trying in vain to send a text message while driving a car in a YouTube video demonstrating how the keys work.
The keys are being pitched as a way for parents to stop teenage children from focusing attention on beloved mobile telephones instead of traffic.
A growing number US states are enacting laws against teenagers using mobile telephones while driving.
Traffic statistics support arguments that mobile telephones are on par with alcohol use when it comes to hurting judgment and reaction times of drivers.
In October, Ford Motor Co. unveiled a “MyKey” device which allows parents to control how fast their teenagers drive, limits the volume on the car radio and makes sure their seat belts are fastened.
Ford said that it will be a standard feature starting next year on the 2010 Ford Focus and other Ford, Lincoln and Mercury models.
Global Positioning System devices have been on the market for some time which allow parents to monitor the every move of their teenage driver.
Technology used to thwart drunken driving includes preventing car engines from starting until aspiring motorists have passed dashboard breath-alcohol tests or reaction-time tests on mobile phones.
AFP – SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) – US videogame sales were a bright spot on November’s bleak economic landscape, climbing to nearly three billion dollars, according to market research firm NPD Thursday.
Videogame sales so far in 2008 topped 16 billion dollars at the end of November and are on pace to crest 22 billion dollars for all of 2008, according to the industry tracking group.
Sales in November were 10 percent higher than the same month last year, before a financial storm slammed the economy.
“The video games industry continues to set a blistering sales pace,” NPD analyst Anita Frazier said, citing research that showed videogames were “the category consumers are least likely to cut back on this holiday.”
Videogame sales are up 31 percent for the year, driven by demand for titles such as “Gears of War 2″ and “Call of Duty: World at War,” according to NPD.
Videogames crafted for Nintendo’s coveted Wii consoles made up half the top 10 best selling titles.
Wii sales in November were more than double those of Microsoft Xbox 360 consoles and more than five times those of Sony’s PlayStation 3 systems.
Still, each of the rival videogame console makers “had something to brag about” in the robust sales figures, Frazier said.
Videogame sales are being bolstered by an industry trend of expanding the audience beyond “hardcore gamers” by designing offerings for families, girls, seniors, and others aside from young-male fans of shooter titles.
“Economic factors are also at play given that a video game is a relatively inexpensive form of entertainment for the hours of value it provides,” said Frazier.
A freshly released “Fallout 3″ videogame from Bethesda Softworks lets people immerse themselves in the roles of heroes or outlaws in a vivid post-apocalyptic Washington for scores of hours.
At a price of 60 dollars for a copy of the videogame, the cost breaks down to less than a dollar an hour for entertainment as compared with five or so dollars an hour to go to a film.
“It’s clear there can be more multiple victors this generation (of consoles),” Frazier said.
“While price is certainly a strong factor, particularly as the current economic situation continues to prevail, the most important factor that will drive success in 2009 will be the line-up of compelling games that will keep consumers involved in the industry.”
When both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates announce something separately but simultaneously, you know it ought to be important. And so it was with the “digital home” and especially the idea that computers would be the “digital hub” of the home, which – weirdly, because I don’t think they rang each other up to coordinate it – both Jobs and Gates did in January 2001 at their respective speeches at Macworld in San Francisco and the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. And around about now, that vision is coming true. Except that it’s not the computer they thought which is at the hub. It’s a rather different one that hadn’t even been considered at the time, using a technology that had only just begun to get traction. That would be the iPod Touch, and Wi-Fi. (an Apple employee) as an example. Here’s what he was doing last night: “Enforcing kids’ bedtime by VNCing into their Mac from my iPhone and closing their windows. Modern tough Dad.” (VNC is a remote access program: you tell it the IP address of the machine you want to go to, and if it’s set up to allow you in, you can control it right there.)/ppOK, so to many that’s a method that’s beyond geeky – is it so much trouble to talk? – but it’s indicative. I think Wi-Fi-enabled devices, plus Wi-Fi, are the real home hubs that Gates and Jobs had begun to imagine. But they couldn’t really describe them then without sounding too futuristic.Take another product: earlier this week I was stunned by the quality and ease of the iPhone/iPod Touch controller for the Sonos multi-room music system. A free software download can transform your iPhone or Touch into a controller for the wireless system, which can play different tracks (or internet radio, or stuff from a line in, such as your TV set) all around your house. Very impressive when you consider that the stand-alone controller costs £279. (The software to control the system is also a free download for your computer, but who wants to be jumping up and down twiddling their computer rather than listening to music?) And another: the latest release of Keyboard Maestro, a key-capture-macro-launcher program for the Mac: it “adds to the macro utility a Keyboard Maestro Control app for the iPhone and iPod touch that enables users to execute any macro from your iPhone or iPod touch, just as though you were sitting at your Mac. Possible uses include launching or quitting applications, restarting or shutting down the Mac… iTunes song rating capabilities for the current track, iTunes volume controls, and a variety of interface refinements.” To me, that sounds worth the price of the upgrade (I’ve got an ancient version) on its own./ppTogether these technologies are creating an environment where you can control all sorts of devices around the house from that small handheld device. A growing number of homes use Wi-Fi – it’s the only connection the Wii comes with, and wireless routers are being pushed for all they’re worth by BT and other broadband providers. (About time; those USB broadband modems are beneath useless.)/ppTo be honest, I’ve been expecting something like this for ages. When the rumours began flying in October 2001 of some “revolutionary” product Apple was going to introduce, I thought that the obvious thing was a Wi-Fi tablet that would connect to your computer and network and do things. (I’d already discovered the joys of Wi-Fi in January 2001.) So when Jobs announced a digital music player – the same sort of thing Rio had been doing for years – I was, to say the least, disappointed. Which is why I kept expecting the iPod to be turned into a platform. Which now, of course, it is./pp And Wi-Fi is really making inroads at home. Almost 30% of homes have it, according to research by Forrester, against only 12% with a wired home network. Even in 2003, nearly a third of US broadband users at home used Wi-Fi. (Feel free to be amused by the phrase in that story which talks of “lean economic times”, by the way.) Even a drive-by test by Peter Cochrane, plus a bit of figure-wrangling, suggests at least 7% of homes using it in early 2007. These things cascade./ppThe mistake that other companies have made is in thinking that you want to have their remote control to do these things. You don’t, any more than you want a remote control for every single gadget in your house (even though that’s how it ends up). Universal Remote Controls tend to sell well (even though Stephen Fry swears he’s never found a good one)./ppNone of this precludes other companies from making their own machine that you can use to control your network-aware devices. The problem is, they won’t have the penetration. The iPod has driven all before it, and the iPhone shows signs of doing precisely the same in the smartphone market. I’d advise companies like Microsoft (with Windows Mobile) and Google (with Android) to start cosying up to companies like Sonos pronto. Not, of course, that they need much encouragement from me./ppBut now, the universal remote is on the way. Network-connected devices just need to listen for their orders over the network, and with Wi-Fi you’ve got a way in. (So if you update your favourite radio stations or playlists for the Sonos gear on your iPod Touch, that’s transmitted to the related devices, including the dedicated controller, if you have one.)/ppBut this is only the first step. Think bigger. Do you know what the temperature is in all the rooms of your house? Is the hot water on? As it gets easier to make sensors that can talk to the network as well, it becomes easier to control your home via a real home hub. Turn the radiators down in rooms you aren’t in. Turn off the hot water. Let your home tell you how it is. (An example: Andy Stafford-Clark of IBM has a home with a Twitter feed. How’s his hot water doing? And you can read more at this page.)/ppAnd if that weren’t enough to convince you that this is all coming down the rails like a train without brakes, there’s Bill Thompson, who describes his connected home to the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones: /p “We watched as Bill and his 16-year-old son Max put the system through its paces – selecting iPlayer programmes to stream onto the wall, watching YouTube videos, and using the Xbox 360 – not just to play games, but to store and play video previously downloaded to Bill’s desktop computer.” Yup, it’s all coming. Hell, it’s about time that we could see some gleams of light amidst all this depressing talk. Let’s build ourselves out of the recession. Technology seems as good a way as any.
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