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How Does IBM’s New, Hosted Email Stack Up to Gmail?

Following Om’s report on the new iNotes email service from Lotus, a division of IBM, we decided to reach out to Google and see how that company feels the new service compares to Gmail. Like Gmail, iNotes is a hosted service, one that supports webmail POP3, IMAP and IMAP IDLE for mobile devices. Lotus is charging $3.75 a month, competitive with the cost of a Gmail Pro account, but a Gmail Pro account comes with 25GB of storage while iNotes’ storage is a mere 1 GB. Google spokesman Andrew Kovacs gave us some thoughts on other differences between the two services.

“First, at a high level, we’re excited by this news because it’s further validation that things are moving toward the cloud,” Kovacs said. “But it’s not on par with Google Apps. [iNotes is] designed to supplement office email instead of replace it, which doesn’t bring the reduction in cost and complexity and other full benefits of cloud computing. [IBM’s] data sheet says that it is for users who do not need full-fledged collaboration.”

Kovacs also pointed to what he said were Gmail’s adjunct and mobile advantages compared to Lotus iNotes, among them integrated voice and video chat, robust support for mobile devices, platforms and applications, and more.

IBM’s Lotus Notes, the company’s enterprise, non-cloud-based email platform,  has a high number of paid mailboxes — some 145 million — in use. It’s possible that IBM intends iNotes to be more of a cloud-based adjunct to Notes than a competitor for Gmail.  At this point, for most users of hosted email, I’d say that Gmail has a number of advantages over it.

Man Allegedly Shows Gun After iPhone Trouble

CINCINNATI — A frustrated customer at the Kenwood Towne Centre Apple store Thursday afternoon ended up going to jail after police say he showed an employee a gun.
According court records, Donald Goodrich, 38, of Westwood, was frustrated his iPhone was not working properly.
He told the employee he was, "So mad, I could pop a 9mm at it."
The employee allegedly told Goodrich there was no need for that, then Goodrich allegedly told the employee, "I’ll do it right now. Look!"
Goodrich then allegedly opened the right side of his shirt, displaying a black, 9mm handgun.
Goodrich had a concealed weapon permit.
The employee told Goodrich she’d get his phone fixed and walked him over to a technician in the store, then told her manager, who called police.
Goodrich is charged with aggravated menacing, causing fear of harm to an Apple employee.
He also faces a carrying concealed weapons charge for not telling the deputy he had a gun.
Goodrich is scheduled for arraignment Friday morning.

 

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U.S. September auto sales plunge; GM, Chrysler hit hard

DETROIT (Reuters) – U.S. auto sales tumbled by 23 percent in September as showrooms emptied after the government-funded boom from the "cash for clunkers" program, with General Motors Co and Chrysler hardest-hit.

Sales for General Motors Co and Chrysler — the two U.S. automakers struggling to regain momentum after emerging from bankruptcy — dropped by 45 percent and 42 percent, respectively.

Ford — the only U.S. automaker to have avoided bankruptcy — managed to hold its sales decline to 5 percent from a year earlier despite low inventories and reduced incentives for car shoppers.

Automakers had braced for a sharp pullback in September after the clunkers program and taxpayer-funded credits of up to $4,500 drove sales sharply higher the month before.

The overall result was in line with those forecasts as industry-wide U.S. auto sales dropped 41 percent from August, according to Autodata Corp.

On the annualized basis tracked by analysts, industry-wide U.S. auto sales dropped to 9.2 million vehicles in September, the weakest sales rate since April.

In a reversal of fortune that underscores how deep the decline in U.S. auto sales has cut over the four-year-long slump, China’s overall vehicle sales for September were almost twice as large as the industry-wide U.S. tally, according to an estimate provided by GM.

Meanwhile, U.S. sales for the three major Japanese automakers were also lower in September after gains in August during the short-lived cash-for-clunkers boom.

Honda Motor Co sales were down 20 percent in the month. Toyota Motor Co sales fell almost 13 percent. Nissan Motor Co sales were down 7 percent.

"The auto sales data is not so worrisome. Rather, the market is concerned about the health of the U.S. economy and for Japanese automakers, the yen’s moves," said Kazuyuki Terao, chief investment officer at RCM Japan in Tokyo.

Shares of Japanese automakers fell on Friday in a sell-off of exporters following weak U.S. economic data, with Toyota losing 3.1 percent, Honda dropping 2.7 percent and Nissan down 3.8 percent.

"Consumer traffic at dealerships evaporated in the absence of the incentive program, which ended in August," Standard & Poor’s equity analyst Efraim Levy said in a note. "However, we expect the September lull to be temporary, as the comparisons get easier and we see the economy improving."

Hyundai Motor Co, which has taken market share through the U.S. recession on a growing reputation for low-cost and high-quality vehicles, was the only big winner. Its sales jumped 27 percent in September.

Combined with its affiliate Kia, Hyundai now ranks as the sixth-largest automaker in the U.S. market, having outstripped Nissan over the first nine months of the year.

del.icio.us Tags: U.S.,USA,Auto,Cars,GM

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10 worst ways to spend your time in a game

When games just forget to be fun

Outside of games there’s this thing called work.

Work tends to be done in the form of a job and it can often be menial, demanding, dangerous and a hundred other kinds of no fun whatsoever.

It is perhaps a sad reflection on the progress of games towards simulating reality that this drudgery is no longer confined to our working hours.

Here are some of the worst offenders for when games just forget to be fun.

10. Living in the Zone

Though buggy it is hard to deny the quality of both STALKER games, Shadow of Chernobyl and Clear Sky, although both offer a somewhat unique gaming experience; that of eking a living in a miserable and hostile radioactive wasteland.

There is no happiness in the Zone. No joy. Soon you get so used to the misery and squalor that the moment after a kill when you get to rummage through your foe’s meagre possessions feels like Christmas morning.

MISERY: Home sweet Zone. Don’t worry, if the monsters don’t get you the radiation sickness will

9. Social networking

Although GTA 4 brought with it some excellent characters they are a needy bunch if ever there was one. Want to go for a beer? Can you take me to a show? Want to play darts?

It seems ironic that in a game where you can kill practically everybody you encounter the people you can’t kill are the ones you most want to.

WHAT NOW? Ah, Cousin Roman, please, be more needy

8. Building a base

The staple of real time strategy games for so long was base building. Thankfully it has fallen somewhat out of favour recently, but the history of the genre is littered with rubbish bases.

Build this rectangular thing so you can create that, upgrade that so you can get this bonus, build a generator of some sort and so on.

This is not a problem in some games where the decision of what to build in what order can determine strategy, but for many, when base building is just an arbitrary process that does nothing but delay a good scrap, it’s a chore.

BASE BUILDING: Woo! I’ve built a base. That was a lot more fun than killing bad guys

7. Level grinding

A great many games have a level based character advancement process without diminishing the fun – usually these games are single player RPGs where the completion of the story is the goal. Online RPGs, particularly MMORPGs, tend to focus on the character as the goal.

A good MMORPG will give you a story, quests, plots and other players to kill and by the time you have exhausted these you find yourself at maximum level, a bad MMORPG will make you stand in a field clubbing monsters while the minutes turn to hours, the hours turn to days and your soul withers and dies like a prune.

THE GRIND: Levelling up was so much fun in Hellgate London they had to shut the game down

6. Harvesting

This is another staple of the MMO genre; running around the countryside gathering things to use for crafting. This is pretty much the sort of thing that so often in the real world gets done by illegal immigrants because most people consider it demeaning. Done for free, in a video game, it’s all part of the fun.

Technorati Tags: worst,game

The Smartest Man in Baseball Is an Idiot

layoff baseball is a matter of very big fish and very small barrels. How often can you mock Alex Rodriguez — noted for his work in the video for Madonna’s hit single, "Justify My Starfucking" — for approaching October the way that Sarah Palin approaches a dependent clause? Okay, maybe a few hundred more times, but you can’t keep it up forever. So maybe you point out that Billy Beane’s breakthrough theories about running a small-market team — the ones that loosed upon baseball a distressful exaltation of math nerds — managed to cobble together a whole sevent-five wins this year for Beane’s team, which hasn’t made the playoffs in five years. You can always land on the Red Sox and their celebrity fans, who were once insufferable losers and who are now simply not losers. Then there’s Derek Jeter, who can still, you know, bite me. And that goes double for anyone who celebrates the grandeur that is The Ballpark at Big Kickback there in the Bronx.

Your mileage on most of these may vary, but my favorite fish of them all is Tony La Russa, the career savant (just ask him) who’s managed the St. Louis Cardinals into the playoffs again this season. Somewhere in there he sued Twitter and had an MVP bestowed upon his lineup card, but ninety-one wins — including a 13-0 shutout yesterday and No. twenty-five hundred for the career back in June — is enough to get the chorus of cherubim singing once more in Peter Gammons’s head.

I first became aware of this particular blight when he worked in Oakland a decade or two ago, back in the days before Beane turned the A’s into a mirror with which to show himself his true genius. First thing you heard was that La Russa had a law degree. This was meant to portray him as something of a baseball intellectual, which heretofore had been defined as someone who spit tobacco on his own shoes and not yours. I was fascinated by the fascination with this; I mean, the world is full of lawyers. (So, for that matter, are various low-security prisons, but that’s another story.) I wondered how many of his acolytes would hire Tony La Russa and his law degree to defend them on a capital-murder charge. Not many, I reckoned.

Then there was the ballet school T-shirt. La Russa used to wear this all the time in his post-game interviews. This was meant to portray him as something of a baseball aesthete, which heretofore had been defined as someone who put something larger than a $1 bill into the stripper’s G-string. This particular bluff worked until the night when, while wearing the ballet-school T-shirt, La Russa bum-rushed an elderly reporter from his clubhouse. This is not something Diaghilev would have done — not even to people throwing apples at his head.

But the truly remarkable thing about La Russa is his rather unspectacular record at winning anything that counts. Eugene McCarthy once said of Walter Mondale that the latter "had the soul of a vice-president." Tony La Russa has the soul of a semifinalist.

Yes, he’s won a couple World Series — the same number as have Cito Gaston and Terry Francona. In 1989, he won when an earthquake screwed up the schedule and then, in 2006, he won when the Detroit Tigers began throwing the ball all over the field. (One Detroit double-play relay has yet to land.) What more ably limns La Russa’s career, however, is his remarkable inability to win with talent. He had the best team in baseball at least twice more in Oakland; in 1988, the team won 104 games and, in 1990, it won 103. Those two teams had a combined World Series record of 1-8. In 1988, Orel Hershiser of the Dodgers beat them all by himself, and the 1990 A’s got outscored 22-8 and swept by a Cincinnati team that had struggled that season to win ninety-one games. (Peter Gammons was still humming.)

Of course, these were the McGwire-Canseco A’s, so it’s possible that neither team ever got the dosages quite right. (The Oakland Triple-A affiliate should have relocated to Medellin during that period.) But since moving his law degree and (as far as I know) his ballet school T-shirt to St. Louis, La Russa holds the distinction of bringing into the 2004 World Series against the Red Sox perhaps the least well-prepared 105-win team in baseball history.

Now the lawyer is back in the playoffs, so watch it happen again. At some critical juncture — or at several critical junctures — La Russa will feel compelled to exercise his superior intellect, probably as regards to a pitcher. The TBS broadcast crew undoubtedly will point out the subtle brilliance of this maneuvering, and then the whole game will blow up in his face. If he brings in a reliever, the next pitch will be picked up by NORAD. If he leaves in his starter, the guy will petrify right there on the mound. And, by Game Three, say, La Russa will have absolutely nobody left to come in to pitch the eighth or ninth inning in a tight game. He will outsmart himself again. The wonder will be why anyone thinks outsmarting Tony La Russa is all that hard.

Is the iPhone hurting AT&T’s brand?

The Apple iPhone has boosted AT&T’s subscriber numbers, but network problems and a bevy of complaints from frustrated customers are likely hurting the company’s reputation.

While a recent survey by the consulting firm CFI Group found that iPhone users are the most loyal smartphone users with 90 percent saying they’d recommend the device to a friend, half of all iPhone owners surveyed said they would like to jump ship to another provider if given the chance.

And for the first time, AT&T has scored worse than all four major U.S. wireless operators in terms of overall customer satisfaction for smartphones. According to the survey, AT&T scored 69 out of 100 among users, and 73 among non-iPhone owners. Verizon Wireless was the most satisfying carrier with a score or 79 out of 100 among smartphone users. Even Sprint Nextel, which has struggled to retain customers due to its poor reputation, scored better than AT&T among smartphone users. It got a 74 out of 100 in terms of customer satisfaction.

The figures are among the first to quantify growing dissatisfaction with AT&T’s network.

"AT&T has never fared great in customer satisfaction surveys," said Doug Helmreich, program director with CFI Group. "But they’ve never been last. Now AT&T is coming up last among smartphone users. The iPhone has been a cash cow for AT&T, but that cash comes at a cost in terms of overall satisfaction."

Public relations and brand experts warn that if AT&T doesn’t take steps now to correct its image that it could come back to haunt the company in the future. The main issue for customers is that many users, especially those in urban areas, report poor network coverage and service. Problems with AT&T’s 3G wireless have been widely reported on blogs, Twitter feeds, and even in published reports from BusinessWeek and The New York Times.

Customers all over the country have complained about dropped calls and the inability to connect to the 3G network. CNET News writer Elinor Mills documented her frustrating experience with her iPhone in a blog post recently. The story hit a nerve among fellow iPhone users, and more than 400 comments were left on the story. Most of the comments corroborated the writer’s plight. And the follow-up story on the same issue garnered at least another 300 comments from readers.

AT&T’s company line
And yet, AT&T has not admitted any problem with its network. When questioned about potential problems with the AT&T network being overburdened by iPhone users, Mark Siegel, an AT&T spokesman, reiterated the company line: "We have a strong, high-quality mobile broadband network. It is the nation’s fastest 3G network, now in 350 major metropolitan areas."

In fairness to AT&T, the company has acknowledged that it is upgrading its network to deal with increased demand from the iPhone. Siegel said the company plans to spend $17 billion to $18 billion on improving its wireless and wireline broadband networks in 2009. Of course, this is a few billion dollars less than what the company spent in 2008. During that year, AT&T’s annual report indicates it spent $20.1 billion on capital expendituresfor its wireless and wireline networks. Still, $17 billion is nothing to sneeze at.

"The iPhone has been a cash cow for AT&T, but that cash comes at a cost in terms of overall satisfaction."

–Doug Helmreich, program director, CFI Group

Some of these improvements include deploying 850 MHz technology across AT&T’s 3G markets to improve in-building coverage, adding nearly 2,000 new cell sites to improve overall coverage, and increasing capacity in thousands of cell sites with more backhaul infrastructure.

"We are the leader in smartphones in the U.S." Siegel said. "We carry more iPhones than any other carrier in the world and handle more wireless data traffic than other U.S. carrier. Because of smartphones like the iPhone, among many others, people have dramatically changed the way they use the wireless network with data usage exploding."

Indeed, Siegel is correct. iPhone users use the mobile Internet more than other mobile subscribers. So even though Verizon may rank high in terms of customer satisfaction, people are not using the network as much or in the same way as heavy iPhone users.

Still, Siegel said the company will look into the survey results from the CFI Group.

"We welcome and value all feedback from our customers," he said. "We view such feedback as an important opportunity to help us continuously improve our products and services. We will certainly look carefully at the CFI Group survey results to see what we can learn from it."

Of churn and confidence
For now, AT&T’s potential image problems haven’t been hurting the company. In July, it reported that it had reduced its churn rate, or the rate at which customers dump it service, yet again to 1.09 percent for subscribers on a contract. This is one of the lowest churn rates in the industry.

"The surest indication of customer satisfaction is churn," AT&T’s Siegel said. "And ours is at record-low levels. Our own internal data suggests that our iPhone customers are very satisfied with AT&T."

But AT&T’s confidence may be misleading. Currently, AT&T is the only U.S. wireless operator offering the iPhone. Once the exclusivity deal ends, which many believe will happen within a couple of years, dissatisfied customers may flee from AT&T to another carrier.

"I think it’s safe to say that the same percentage of people who switched to AT&T for the iPhone, would likely leave if they believed they could get the same experience on a better network," said Helmreich. "And that could cause huge problems for AT&T since nearly half of its iPhone users switched from another carrier."

Public relations and brand experts such as Rob Adler, vice president at Vantage Communications, a technology public relations firm in San Francisco, say that AT&T must fess up to the reality if it doesn’t want customers to punish it in the long run. Adler, who is an iPhone subscriber living in San Francisco, says there is no question that AT&T’s network has been overwhelmed. Like many people living in a city, he experiences frequent dropped calls and a sluggish wireless Internet connection.

Even though AT&T is trying to fix its network, he said that denying there is a problem won’t win it any points with frustrated customers.

"AT&T can say that there is nothing wrong with their network all they want," he continued. "But when someone is experiencing dropped calls and no access to the 3G network every day, they take it very personally. And it is very frustrating."

Andrew Gilman, CEO of CommCore Consulting Group, which specializes in helping companies manage their brand image, agrees. He said the first thing AT&T needs to do is correct whatever problem it is experiencing. And then it needs to listen to its customers and prove to those customers that the problems have been resolved.

He said that in today’s highly connected online communities, companies that refuse to acknowledge their customers’ complaints do so at their own peril.

"Even if the network is perfectly fine, if several people in a social network complains, they have immediate influence over a large group of people," he said. "So even if people aren’t experiencing the same problem, the negative comments have planted a seed."

Gilman said that the power of social networks has changed the game for companies who find themselves the target of negative customer sentiment.

"The world has changed over the past couple of years," he said. "A few years ago you might have been able to ignore some customer complaints and get away with it. But not anymore. With social media things spiral out of control very quickly. "

He cited the example of how Johnson & Johnson was forced last year to pull an online advertisement for its over-the-counter pain pill Motrin after it triggered protest on the Internet from consumers who thought an ad that depicted mothers with back pain carrying babies in a sling as being insensitive toward mothers. Angry consumers viewing the ads took to blogs, YouTube and Twitter to call for people to boycott Motrin, arguing the ad trivialized women’s pain and the method of carrying babies.

Switchers as "satisfaction saboteurs"
Experts have said that AT&T’s image problems likely go beyond its network troubles. Helmreich said that AT&T has invited trouble through its exclusive deal to carry the iPhone. About 40 percent of iPhone users dropped their carrier to get the iPhone. These customers weren’t switching carriers because they wanted to be on AT&T’s network; they wanted the iPhone. As a result, Helmreich argues that these customers are more likely to be dissatisfied with AT&T’s service. And they are more likely to complain and to share their complaints with friends.

Helmreich points out that people with one of T-Mobile’s exclusive Google Android phones or Sprint’s Palm Pre are also more likely to be dissatisfied with their service if they switched providers for those phones.

"In effect, switchers can be satisfaction saboteurs if they were not already inclined to choose AT&T," he said.

"It seems crazy to me that AT&T hasn’t done anything to throw customers a bone to say, ‘We love you as a customer."

–Rob Adler, vice president, Vantage Communications

Adler also points out that AT&T’s marketing and public relations strategy for the iPhone also helped create animosity toward the company. He said that from the start, Apple has established itself as the more valuable brand in the relationship with an iPhone customer. Even though AT&T is making the device more affordable by subsidizing each device by at least $300 to $400 a pop, it doesn’t highlight this fact to consumers. But Apple is the company that has designed the device. It sells it for $200. And it also offers the cool applications, which are either free or are relatively low cost.

"iPhone users love Apple," Adler said. "They are loyal to the brand and they love the device and all the great applications. All they associate AT&T with is dropped calls, a hard-to-access 3G network, and high network fees. They even make iPhone users pay extra for SMS. It seems crazy to me that AT&T hasn’t done anything to throw customers a bone to say, ‘We love you as a customer.’"

Adler said that AT&T’s exclusivity deal with Apple is a gift, which AT&T should be taking advantage of to create customer loyalty. He said that AT&T likely has plenty of time to redeem itself, but the company must take steps now.

He suggested it does three things: for one, he said that AT&T must admit its network has problems and then fix those problems. The challenge from a marketing standpoint is convincing its customers that the network has been fixed. And to do that, brand expert Gilman suggests that the company use specific examples.

"Once they fix whatever problems they have, they have to get testimonials to back up those claims," he said. "Maybe they could drive through neighborhoods and show people that calls aren’t dropping and that the dead zones don’t exist anymore."

The second thing AT&T needs to do is to more overtly market and explain its value to the consumer.

"AT&T needs to be more aggressive in promoting what they offer the customer," he said. "All they do is say they have the fastest 3G network, which everyone who owns an iPhone knows is absolutely not true in the real world. It may be true in a lab, but not on the street."

And the third thing AT&T must do is make goodwill gestures to its loyal iPhone customers. Gilman suggests the company give out coupons or anything that shows how AT&T values its customers. Adler thinks that AT&T needs to offer customers, who are already spending a lot of money on their service, more features and services for free. But he said that free Wi-Fi at AT&T hot spots is likely not enough of a perk, since it only highlights deficiencies in the 3G network. Instead, he thinks that AT&T could offer free SMS to iPhone users renewing their contracts.

"Customers remember small gestures like that," he said. "And they tell their friends."

Check These Out: High Res New Na’vi Photos from Avatar!

I’m probably way more excited than I should be for these new photos from James Cameron’s Avatar because I just saw another 20 minutes of footage, include two new never-before-seen scenes, at Fantastic Fest earlier tonight. This movie still looks absolutely breathtaking and I wish everyone could see the same footage I saw in glorious 3D as well, as I think more of you might be converted into supporters. Anyway, Spoiler TV has a small batch (six photos in total) of new photos from Avatar in very high res. Everyone definitely needs to see these. And don’t forget that almost all of these are completely CGI shots (at least the first four). Enjoy!

Avatar is the story of an ex-Marine on the planet Pandora who, as an Avatar – a human mind in an alien body – finds himself in a desperate fight for his survival and that of the indigenous beings called Na’vi.

Avatar is both written and directed by Oscar winning visionary filmmaker James Cameron, of Piranha II, The Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, True Lies, and Titanic previously. He has been developing the technology to make this movie for the last 10 years. 20th Century Fox is bringing James Cameron’s Avatar to both IMAX and regular theaters in 3D around the world on December 18th.