Pity poor T-Mobile’s flacks. The company recently launched the commercial availability of its HotSpot@Home mobile voice service, which leverages both traditional cellular and new Wi-Fi technologies. Although the service, available only in Seattle, is now in true commercial service mode, the kinks haven’t been fully worked out of the system and T-Mobile wasn’t looking for any real publicity yet.
That didn’t stop the New York Times’ Glenn Fleishman from walking up to a mall kiosk, signing up for the service and then writing a lengthy review of the quasi-experimental offering. On top of that, one of HotSpot@Home’s earliest customers was Matthew Miller, a columnist for Geek.com and ZDNet.
Fleishman’s review is not good — but it’s not terrible either. He writes that the service “is a reasonable first draft of what could become a reliable alternative to both all-cellular networks and an emerging set of Wi-Fi-only phones.” But first-draft it is, with the biggest problem being frequently dropped calls — the transition from Wi-Fi to cellular and back again hasn’t been worked out that well yet.
But T-Mobile is pulling out all the other stops it can to keep customers on the new service. When Fleishman called to cancel, T-Mobile offered him $350 to cover early-termination penalties he would have incurred from his traditional carrier, plus sweetened the deal with an additional $100 use credit, if only he would stick with the service.
Alas, this kind of bad press can stink up a product’s prospects for a long time. Even when it fixes the technical glitches, which it undoubtedly will, T-Mobile is going to have to rehabilitate HotSpot@Home’s image.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 1:10 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Around 9:30 a.m. this morning I read Andy Beal’s solid overview of a new web video recommendation service provided by StumbleUpon called, prosaically enough, Stumble Video. I decided to check it out and it’s now 11:14 and I’ve wasted far too much time doing nothing but, well, watching TV.
Although the number of video aggregation or recommendation sites grow daily, Stumble Video could prove to be the most addictive of them all. (Right off the bat, Andy warned about this possiblity. “Now I fear I’ll waste many afternoon hours viewing content that matches my interests,” he wrote.) For one thing, the videos offered up upon first visit seem to represent the best of the best in each category — the videos are organized by topics that range from humor to politics to fashion, and, of course, the obligatory “cats.”
I’m assuming, although it’s not clear, that the videos selected to run in each category are those given the highest number of thumbs-up votes by other users, a great way to separate gold from dross. That would explain the high-caliber, addictive nature of the videos.
But, Stumble Video could truly convert a user into a video junkie if, as Andy points out, once the system has gained enough intelligence about viewing preferences it starts serving up videos that more closely match the user’s interest. It’s a good thing that the trademark StumbleUpon toolbar gizmo isn’t yet in place for video. Right now a user has to go to the web interface and start clicking away.
Imagine if the temptation to kill a few minutes (which could turn into a few hours) were satisfied by a mere click on the Google or Yahoo! toolbar. It sounds like a toolbar option is on the way. When it comes out, just say no…
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:06 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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