Digital Zone 246: We Hardly Knew Ye
Posted by Patrick Wiscombe on March 16, 2011 under Tech Podcasts | 
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In this edition of the Digital Zone, we talked about:
- Senate panel to look into Google and Web search
- Google Doles Out Big Bonuses
- Zune’s Dead
- Apple randomizing Web order numbers to veil iPad 2 sales?
- Visa Adds Person-to-Person Payments in U.S.
- Google To Test In-Store Mobile Payment System
- Apple Stops Kids’ Buying Sprees in iTunes
The US senator who chairs the subcommittee on anti-trust issues has announced plans to examine Google’s “dominance” of the Internet search market. Herb Kohl, a Democrat from Wisconsin who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights, put online search on the agenda for the new session of Congress. Kohl said the subcommittee planned to address competition in online markets and Internet search issues. The Justice Department is currently reviewing Google’s proposed $700 million acquisition of flight information company ITA Software, a deal facing opposition from several leading online travel sites. According to comScore, Google remains the leader of the US search market. Yahoo’s share of the US search market was unchanged at 16.1 percent while Microsoft’s share increased to 13.6 percent in February from 13.1 percent in January.
Google granted $8.9 million in bonuses and $50 million in equity to four senior executives for 2010, but Google’s co-founders and its chief executive didn’t receive additional compensation.
Bloomberg is reporting that Microsoft will finally stop introducing new versions of their Zune music player. They will however continue to sell existing versions of the Zune. The Zune never even managed to rank among the Top 5 music players, according to data compiled by NPD Group. The iPod, however, almost completely controls the music player market with a huge 77% market share. The reason behind Microsoft abandoning the Zune likely is related to moving to Windows Phone 7 on devices.
Apple has still not announced how many iPad 2 devices have been sold since going on sale last Friday. Citing sources familiar with Apple’s ordering system, Apple Insider reports that Apple has tweaked its Web ordering tools to randomize order numbers so users can’t figure out how many units the company has moved between two different points in time. During the first iPad launch, forum users on Investor Village’s AAPL Sanity Board shared Web order numbers with one another and put them into a spreadsheet, eventually discovering that they were in a specific order. Putting them in line and with time codes, the group was able to determine that Apple was selling around 25,000 per hour, well ahead of company’s official announcement a day and a half later. Analysts have estimated that on its first day of iPad 2 sales, Apple sold anywhere from half a million of the devices, all the way to 1 million, compared to the 300,000 it sold on the first day of sales for the first-generation iPad. Last year the company revealed its first day sales just two days after the device went on sale.
Visa just announced the ability for U.S. Visa card holders to send and receive funds from other cardholders anywhere in the world. The way it works is pretty simple: If your bank supports the transaction (and Visa’s careful to note this does only apply to “participating financial institutions”), then when you arrange to make a personal payment to someone else from your account, using their 16-digit Visa card number instead of their bank-account number. An email address or phone number will work, too, assuming the client has linked these details to the banks. Visa’s press release notes that this is “the first time a major payment network has introduced a global requirement for account issuers to accept incoming funds and thus enable a new generation of personal payment services.” Visa is quiet about the fees it will charge.
Google is planning to test a service that allows store customers to pay for their purchases at the cash register using their mobile phones. Unnamed sources familiar with the project told Bloomberg that Google’s payment method will be tested at thousands of stores in San Francisco and New York within four months. The checkout option, these sources told Bloomberg, will work with near field communication (NFC)-enabled phones. NFC allows a device, usually a mobile phone, to collect data from another device or NFC tag at close range. In many ways, it’s like a contactless payment card that is integrated into a phone. With Google’s reported system, customers would touch their phones to a tag in order to check out at special cash registers that the sources said Google will buy for test stores.
Apple has changed how purchases inside iPhone and iPad games are authorized after customers complained that their kids were racking up hundreds of dollars worth of charges. The issue was that after a user entered his or her iTunes password on a device, the device didn’t prompt for the password again for 15 minutes. With the iOS 4.3 software update, Apple devices have one 15-minute password-free timer for the App Store and iTunes, and a separate one for in-app purchases.
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