AT&T, at long last, has recognized the silliness of giving iPhone customers with unlimited data plans a bit-by-bit bill on their usage. Sick of wasting 500,000 sheets of paper each iPhone billing cycle, AT&T is taking measures to stop the wanton murder of trees. Advice to Apple fans: sign up for paperless billing. [Muhammed.Saleem]
TheStreet.com is reporting that AT&T is paying unusually large fees to Apple in exchange for the right to sell the iPhone. The totals? $150 to $200 per phone, plus a $9 per user per month cut of the service fees. The upfront commission, which you can also think of as a discount on the true cost of the phone, is common in the industry and widely predicted; sharing service-fee revenue is something new. For Apple, which already plans to account for its iPhone hardware revenues evenly over the 24 months after a sale, this means that iPhone sales will juice revenues even more than expected. And for AT&T? It's getting a lot of high-tech, early adopter customers who wouldn't have gone to the carrier otherwise, but at the cost of setting a revenue-sharing precedent that will ruffle feathers in the wireless industry. Steve Jobs strikes a hard bargain.
Apple shares are down more than 4 percent to $139.53 right now. And why? Because AT&T has revealed that it only activated 146,000 iPhones in the last two days of the second quarter. Analysts, ludicrously, had expected 500,000, a number seemingly plucked out of thin air. Consider that Apple only has 160 U.S. stores, and consider that, while flagship stores like Apple's Stockton Street palace in San Francisco got as many as 750 iPhones for the Friday, June 29, launch, smaller stores got a much smaller supply. Consider that some of AT&T's 1,800 U.S. stores got as few as 15 iPhones. Even selling their entire stock as fast as they could, could Apple and AT&T's retail outlets really have moved many more phones than they had? (Photo by Dan_H)
Verizon Wireless has a bad case of iPhone envy, starting at the top. COO Jack Plating privately fumed to his minions in a company memo headlined "iWhatever" — of which Valleywag got a copy — that the iPhone is "yet another attempt to stay competitive with us." The problem with Plating's fit of pique? Beyond fuming about the iPhone, he doesn't have much to say. Instead, he counsels store workers to tout Verizon's network and its "18 multimedia devices." Sure, Verizon has 18 music phones. But — how to put it delicately? — they all suck, including the latest LG Chocolate.Granted, I haven't played with the new Chocolate, just the old one. But just from the photos and feature list, I can tell that Verizon and LG haven't changed it enough to make a difference. They haven't fixed the phone's unusable user interface, tiny screen, and annoying numeric keypad. Think sending text messages on the iPhone is annoying? With the Chocolate, you're back to thumbing your way through the alphabet. And then there are the numbers. LG has crowed about selling 6 million phones, worldwide, in its first year. But the iPhone has, according to reports, sold 1 million phones in five days. And that's just in the U.S. Here's how Plating closes his little pep talk, which he asks workers to regurgitate to potential customers not just on the job, but at "backyard barbecues":
"Where do you want to go today?" "Think Different." "No wonder it's number one." The tech world's vague slogans may seem interchangeable, but if they're applied to the wrong product — even within the same company — they could prove disastrous.
The Wall Street Journal examines the disastrous roll-out of Europe's .eu domain, in which one in five domain name applications were rejected for technical errors. It's just a mess. No one agrees on the criteria for winning a domain name. Little companies bought up Hertz.eu, EDS.eu, NBC.eu, and such, with real intentions of hosting their 15-person businesses. GoDaddy says a third of the .eu registrants don't have other web sites, so they're probably speculators. Some landgrabbers set up fake registrars to snap up thousands of domains.
There's an ulterior motive to opening an official backchannel at a tech conference. It pulls all the dissenters into a virtual room, where they disseminate their snide remarks safely away from the real discussion.
