Affiliate Programs and Affiliate Reviews
Even when his cell phone offered no bars on Sunday and he had no other way to get a dial tone, Carlton Smith did not second-guess his 21st Century decision to cancel traditional landline phone service in his house. Smith was one of the many victims of a service outage that affected AT&T Wireless customers across the Midwest all day Sunday.
Dan Hassenplug’s monthly expenses used to include around $300 for lunch and three or four books bought from Amazon.com. Now he’s plugged into a new breed of social network that helps him manage his finances. “When you see a graph that says you averaged $10 a day for lunch — about $300 for the month — well, that’s a lot of money,” said the 24-year-old design manager from Geneva, Ill.
There have been some subtle shifts in digital music this year, trends that will accelerate over the next few months as the holidays near. I’m not talking about MP3 players and the new models to tempt you. Rather, there is an increasing amount of music available that does not require the downloading of songs to a portable device.
The 2008 Summer Games will not go down in history as a watershed online event, even though it drew a record number of viewers on the Web. That’s because NBC could have gone further, putting content on more devices, making it easier to access and providing more live coverage. That’s the view of several executives from content and technology companies whom I asked to comment on NBC’s online coverage.
As someone who is familiar with the coverage that surrounds the iPhone, I was puzzled by Tuesday’s announcement from AT&T about a new way to buy the gadget. My first reaction: Something must be missing. Second reaction: Why would anyone pay more for the iPhone if there’s no additional benefit?