iPhone News Updated

Readers weigh in on ATT, ad networks and the iPhone

ADOTAS — In our weekly poll, readers overwhelmingly said that Apple should not get rid of ATT, just add more carriers. Readers (some correctly, others not so much) also pointed out mistakes.

Karen Garcia:
“Just to clarify your final paragraph and your earlier statement that “The Legislature recently passed a bill forcing companies to collect taxes from online-marketing affiliates” this isn’t accurate. Neither affiliates nor merchants are the source of sales tax revenue. Affiliates collect no payments from the consumer and merchants merely collect and remit sales tax when required. Payment of taxes falls entirely to the consumer, which is in fact the crux of the problem. If you as a consumer make an online purchase from ANY retailer (not just Amazon) and you are not charged sales tax, you are required by law to keep track of how much you should have paid and remit the proper amount, called use tax, to the state with your income taxes. Although most states have had use tax laws on the books for a very long time, most consumers have no idea the law even exists, so the use tax goes unpaid and uncollected. States believe that by changing the definition of ‘nexus’ to force out of state merchants to collect the tax will solve the problem.

The main issue with that is two fold. First, nexus has already been defined by the Supreme Court in the case Quill v. North Dakota as requiring a “physical presence” within a state. Affiliates are merely advertisers. They are not sale reps or employees of the companies they place banners for on their sites. States want to redefine nexus to include this sort of commission based advertising, despite the fact that it goes against the pre-established definition. Second, affiliate relationships are at-will and most programs can remove all of their affiliates in a particular state with a few clicks. Without affiliates in a state with one of these new laws passed, there is no legal need for them to collect and remit the sales tax and for many merchants, a much simpler soultion than trying to implement sales tax across multiple zones. (Nationwide, there are more than 12500 sales tax zones according to Avalara.)

The Supreme Court in its findings noted that “Congress is now free to decide whether, when, and to what extent the States mayburden interstate mail order concerns with a duty to collect use taxes” which has led to the formation of the Streamlined Sales Tax Project, or SSTP. This push for a more uniform sales and use tax system may be the answer to the problem as twenty-two states have already adopted the simplifications measures needed for enactment. Amazon has stated its support of the SSTP in a letter to California legislators.

No one is arguing that the use tax should not be collected, but it is unfair to target only the affiliate marketing community through these bills, especially when a more fair, equitable solution is at hand.”

someguy:
“Ad networks are such a frequent cause of slow loading. Doesnt take unusual traffic conditions, its an every day problem. Site owners need to monitor ad network performance and construct pages so that they will load without the ads.”

Fef:
“I prefer using IFrames over JS for this very reason — however, this causes problems for many contextual ad networks (realtime scraping page) and rich media, like Dart Motif.

Dart Motif offers a reference file to allow ads to ‘jump out of the iframe’, but that doesn’t work with all ad servers (curiously, it doesn’t work with Google Ad Manager, which owns Dart).”

uwspstar:
“Thanks for your post, here is what I thought
1) Telling what you can do for you customer is better than waiting for your customers to ask what you can do for them.
2) Leading your customer to consume is better than waiting your customer seeking what you have.”

Kevin Kerner:
“Exciting news from Redmond… and I have to admit that I was scratching my head (along with several Razorfish collegues that I know) about the need for Microsoft to step into the digital agency space. Aside from any technology and associated process that Microsoft was able to gleen from the Razorfish folks, I never could really figure this thing out.

Bigger question will be, “who has $700 million to spend?”… Will the holding companies step up to add another big digital agency to compete with their current rosters? Suppose it depends on their client lists and Razorfish bottom line. Will be fun to watch!”

Curios George:
“One analyst valued Razorfish at $600m-$700m, based on sales of about $400m last year and profit margins for similar businesses of 12-13 per cent.

So are we talking about $60M in revenue, is the margin is, let say 15%?

Do they pay their employees with peanuts?”

Shane Lundy:
“I agree that crowd sourcing in under leveraged in the ad space and the typical cycle for any disruptive paradigm to reach maturity is about 15 years. For example, SponsorSelect is 8 years into that cycle. SponsorSelect is a premium ad network that is reinventing behavioral targeting. Built atop a robust ad server that has already been deployed with numerous publishers, SponsorSelect was the first solution that allowed Internet users to choose the advertising they wish to see in exchange for getting access to content. This concept is a kissing cousin of crowd sourcing and taps into consumers desire to have two way interaction with the advertising content.
SponsorSelect was developed by AWS and integrated into its flagship property, WeatherBug, in 2002. From 2007 to 2008, AWS built a network of 3rd party sites leveraging SponsorSelect. Seeing the huge potential for SponsorSelect, AWS spun the company out. SponsorSelect works through a wide network of advertisers and publishers and acts as a micropayment to access free content. By allowing users to self-select advertising, SponsorSelect delivers performance without privacy concerns. When advertising is more relevant and performs better for advertisers, publishers make more money and can provide better content and services to users for free.

A natural extension of our unique ad model will be to enable crowd sourcing.”

Massimo Martinotti:
“There are incredible opportunities in the field of crowd-sourcing. Groups (fans or spoilers groups and ideas communities) are excellent tools not only to evaluate concepts and ideas but also to co-create the ideas.
Especially in the field on transmedia projects (stories that unfold through several platforms and with many different entry points) co-creation is a must.”

Roy Moskowitz:
“Bing needs to allow users the option of setting the results per page at 100. The current max of 50 per page makes sifting through several pages of results cumbersome.”

Erick:
“Bing is “better”? Sure there are a couple of silly little trinkets on the site such as the max of 100 that another commenter points to. But–

(1) All of these, and many more, are available to those who care in the form of browser plugins even with Google. Notably, the group “those who care” forms about 0.1% of the Internet audience.

(2) More importantly, Bing search results, while certainly better than Live before it, are still tragically off mark in comparison to Google or Clusty.

Sorry MS. No cigar.”

John Connor:
“Another pointless and ignorant article. iPhone is a device, it cannot chose its carrier. Apple is the company that produces and makes decision about the iPhone. Well let’s just forgive this lack of intelligence and briefly touch on the catalyst of the article, international roaming. If the author thinks that having multiple carrier partners will solve this problem, he is as ignorant about the topic as he present himself. If he’s just writing this article for web hits, then he needs a new job.”

no apples please:
‘“ Adam Savage, the co-host of the popular TV show MythBusters, got the unfathomable $11,000 cellphone bill he got while travelling Canada. Not liking that disconnected feeling, he used a mobile modem — a thumb-sized device that plugs into a USB port on a laptop — from his U.S.-based AT&T carrier to connect to the Internet in Montreal. On Friday, after he returned back to the United States, he discovered his cellphone had stopped working. When he called AT&T to find out the problem, his jaw dropped. He was slapped with an $11,000 bill for data usage during his five-day stay in La Belle Province. With his Canadian roaming rates at $0.015 cents per kilobyte, he would have had to use about 750,000 kilobytes — or about 750 megabytes — worth of data transfers. About 750 minutes watching YouTube ”

Quebec to end automatic cell phone contract renewals, surprise fees and what about the Internet service providers, who are the same firms doing the same bad things there too to the customers, well?

“Quebec to end automatic cellphone contract renewals, surprise fees CBC.ca - The Quebec government has tabled legislation to better protect consumers in the province when they sign cellphone contracts. Justice Minister Kathleen Weil said laws aimed at protecting cellphone users were written in the early 1970s and don’t address current consumer habits. She said Bill 60, introduced Tuesday, would revise outdated rules. There can be “very onerous penalty fees” to pull out of a contract once a service provider automatically renews it — usually for a period lasting three years, Weil said. The bill would prohibit the renewal of cellphone contracts without a customer’s written approval, she said. It would also force merchants to disclose the total cost of the goods and services offered, a move Weil said should prevent customers from being caught off guard by hefty fees for services they don’t want, such as text messaging. In addition, companies won’t be able to suddenly increase fees during the life of the contract. “Consumers often don’t understand everything that they have agreed to when they’ve signed that contract,” the minister said. “The contracts are a little vague, and there are services that are added over time without their knowledge and without their consent.” “The first thing that [merchants] do is offer you a free cellphone, and it’s sort of the lure that gets you into that relationship,” Weil told reporters. Merchants will have to explain existing warranty protection Weil said the new law would make it illegal for merchants to sell extended warranties before telling customers what the manufacturer already offers for warranty protection. It would also put an end to expiry dates on prepaid cellphone gift cards. The minister said the bill, amending the province’s Consumer Protection Act, would correct an imbalance in an evolving industry. “In consumer protection you often have an imbalance that happens over time and in the whole field of telecommunications. There is not a jurisdiction in North America that hasn’t noticed this imbalance.” Michel Arnold, head of the non-profit consumer rights group Option consommateurs, said Quebec is the first jurisdiction in the country to introduce this kind of consumer protection. Weil said officials in the province receive nearly 700 formal complaints about cellphone contracts each year — about 10 per cent of all consumer complaints — as well as thousands of inquiries. Bill 60 is expected to be adopted before the end of the year.”

and what about in the rest of Canada too?

Now that anytime Internet connections the new order of the new technological age is here the real problem is too many Telecommunication Equipment Customer’s Representatives do either deliberately lie or they even unintentionaly lie because they are incompetent, technically ignorant to try to make a sale, and next you can get the Unexpected iPhone bill wireless data roaming charges, and you also now next finding out that the wireless surfing can come at a staggering cost. Includes any of the customers who mistakenly signed up for the Rogers Rocket mobile service, or Bell’s plans thinking they were getting the equivalent of a no-limits plan.

Don’t now just believe everything you read even if it is in print.. But what about what the fact that most of positive sale spin adds do not tell you in detail the actual functionalities, actual final monthly costs too… The main problem is the often poor service you get from the people, carriers who actually do sell, service the iPhones.. Many people say that the major carriers in Canada have all lost their chance for public credibility years ago and they have no use for any of the four companies, who make massive profits and treat their customers like garbage. They have had it with cell phones in this country. Hopefully one of the new companies will drive the bad incumbents into bankruptcy lile they did to Nortel.. Gouging consumers with high prices, extras tends to backfire with serious repercussions. Grocery chains, Coprorations, ISP, iPhones, “Just like cable and satelite offers where they sign you up and then slowly bleed your services down to test patterns. What I love is their departure gift after cancellation, the “cancellation fee”. These corporations are a joke. They will follow Chrysler into the dumpster as people increasingly must tighten budgets.” History repeats itself often

It costs a cell phone company a mere third of a cent to transmit a text message that it charges customers as much as 15 cents to send, estimates a University of Waterloo professor.

Ever wonder besides viruses that as time goes by you notice that your computer net is slower, and slower, well it is no secret Bell, Rogers, and others cannot handle the continually increasing demands cause by computers and iphones now too. So their thus do next systems break down, do too often have failures, are over used, in over capacity mode.. and these carriers seem to have been to cheap to rectify the problem, update, modernize their communication equipment..

Sadly AT&T for a start is not the only carrier that doesn’t have presently adequate existing bandwidth to support all of their customers, iPhone users using an “unlimited” data plan and that would now include Rogers and Bell? who are clearly already capping their existing customers and others to over come this serious shortcoming, and in spite of what they do all promise now they might have in the future I really rightfully do not believe them. .. why Rogers and Bell, others are always a LOSER. Always looking for some way to SOCK IT TO their customers over and over again and find another excuse to make the customers pay more. If they all knew the whole truth the Lower subscriber usage means smaller revenues for carriers like Rogers , Telus Corp and Bell, BCE Inc

New entrants in Caabada seek to change wireless iphone game, consumers looking for choices beyond the current offerings of Rogers, Bell and Telus,

In today’s technology driven products, markets, a 3 year contract with a phone carrier is eternity, meaning your purchased phone will be quickly obsolete before that.”

Nannette:
“I think it would be a great idea for Apple to break their exlusive with AT&T in reference to their iPhone support. I would love to have an iPhone but am a Verizon customer. I’ve found often that my coverage allowed me to get reception in areas where my coworkers with AT&T can’t. This happened recently in a ground floor basement area during a benefit. I keep hearing rumors that Apple may adapt the iPhone to also work with Verizon by next year. Any truth to that? Sounds like John works for AT&T or just woke up on the wrong side of the bed.”

Sue:
“Ad spending overall is down, but CPA advertising is way up. Advertisers are being extremely frugal with their budgets but they will spend if they know they can get the return they require. Smart marketers use smart advertising during a recession. Clearly the boom market advertising methodologies don’t necessarily apply in leaner times. Smart marketers need to reduce advertising waste, measure twice and cut precisely in the areas which will provide the most ROI. More and more marketers are moving to a pay-for-performance model for their advertising. Cost Per Action, Cost Per Engagement and other specifically measurable performance-based marketing models are the key to efficient and effective marketing in this economy. Don’t stop advertising, just be smarter about how, when,and where you’re advertising.

online advertising is far more able to deliver ROI than any other media. In ROI is guaranteed with this method. Newspapers can’t do that!”

Bill:
“Sue is so, so wrong and so emphatic with simplistic drivel I am almost embarrassed for her arrogance and that of others who do not understand the synergy between New Media and traditional media, as well as the independent strengths (and weaknesses) each has. To the original article’s point, ad spending is falling and the forecast is that it will continue. The first is true, and the latter may be. If it is, however, there will be some bright spots. Smart marketers will continue to test what media (and in what combinations) work for them. My guess is they will find a need for something beyond straight cost per action, and that positioning and branding in traditional media will continue to play an important role.”

[Thanks: http://www.adotas.com]

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