Human rights reporter Mac McClelland takes an in-depth look at the often “demoralizing and dehumanizing” work environment of online shipping facilities.
McClelland details the hiring process, training procedures, low wages, employee competition, warehouse culture, management techniques, the many reasons that can lead to being fired and much more.
“They need you to work as fast as possible to push out as much as they can as fast as they can,” writes McClelland for Mother Jones. “So they’re gonna give you goals, and then you know what? If you make those goals, they’re gonna increase the goals. But they’ll be yelling at you all the time. It’s like the military. They have to break you down so they can turn you into what they want you to be. So they’re going to tell you, ‘You’re not good enough, you’re not good enough, you’re not good enough,’ to make you work harder.”
“Don’t say, ‘This is the best I can do,'” she adds. “Say, ‘I’ll try,’ even if you know you can’t do it. Because if you say, ‘This is the best I can do,’ they’ll let you go. They hire and fire constantly, every day. You’ll see people dropping all around you. But don’t take it personally and break down or start crying when they yell at you.”
Leaked screenshots suggest that Nokia’s new Lumia phone with Windows Phone 7 may feature a TV app.
The app may provide access to content from local network archives, Wi-Fi streaming of shows, the ability to download programs for offline viewing, or the possible streaming of live TV.
Initial rumors indicate the app will first launch with three local stations in Finland.
“Nokia has already made it clear that it’s aiming for Windows Phone customization both on the hardware and software side, so there’s every reason to think this is real,” reports The Verge. “Whether a self-branded TV app would move the sales needle, though, remains to be seen.”
Unconfirmed rumors suggest the next generation PlayStation will run an AMD x86 with an AMD “Southern Islands” GPU. Similarly, the next Xbox 360 may also run an AMD GPU.
While these chips are top performers, they do not represent a new state-of-the-art system as their predecessors did when they debuted six years ago.
This may disappoint gamers but game consoles are increasingly being used for viewing of streaming media, which does not require the highest performance. Xbox Live Gold subscribers, for example, actually spend more time viewing streaming video than playing games.
This approach also allows Sony and Microsoft to build less costly media consoles appealing to a larger market rather than expensive game units that sell below cost.
Further, developers will be more familiar with these PC architectures, encouraging faster game development.
Spotify announced it has extended its unlimited listening period for early adopters from the original six months to an indefinite amount of time.
According to the Spotify blog: “Well, it’s now been 9 months since we launched in the U.S. Time sure flies when you’re having fun! To celebrate, here’s some great news… We’ve been so overwhelmed by the U.S. response to Spotify that we’ve extended the honeymoon for unlimited free listening.”
“After Spotify integrated Facebook’s frictionless sharing tool with the music service, new people are discovering Spotify as music is being shared within the Facebook news feed and ticker,” reports Digital Trends.
The company suggests Facebook has been instrumental in the service’s growth. “Users who are exposing their listening on Facebook are three times as likely to become paid subscribers,” says Spotify chief content officer Ken Parks.
“Spotify is still offering 30 days of free Spotify Premium service to users,” indicates the post. “The cost of the service is $9.99 a month after the free-trial offer and it allows users to listen to music on mobile devices, access music encoded at a higher quality bitrate and download music for listening when offline.”
LG plans to launch a flexible e-paper display later this month in Europe.
“The 6-inch EPD (e-paper display) is the same size as the screen on the Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader and many other e-book readers,” reports CNET. “It’s about a third thinner though, and because it’s made of plastic rather than glass, is only half the weight.”
Although it cannot be folded or rolled up, the display can reportedly bend up to 40 degrees. “That should make it more tactile for reading, as well as more durable when slung into a bag or pocket,” adds the article.
Maximum resolution of the display is 1,024 x 768 pixels. LG has yet to announce any ebook readers using the display, or whether the company plans to license the technology to others or develop its own reader.
“Earlier this week, Amazon announced the Kindle Touch would finally be coming to the UK at the end of April. It’s a touchscreen version that has so far been unavailable on these shores, and lets you flick through pages like leafing through a book,” according to CNET. “The prospect of a bendable Kindle sounds great to me. Much as I like my Sony Reader, it is a bit like reading off a piece of slate. Though LG’s screen could be used in advertising as well, just like 3D TVs are.”
In 2010, Google unsuccessfully attempted to sell co-branded smartphones on its own. Now, the company is at it again, this time with tablets.
According to insiders, the Internet giant is working on an online store like Apple’s and Amazon’s through which it will sell Android tablets directly to consumers.
“By selling tablets directly to consumers, Google is upping the ante against Apple, which debuted its market-leading iPad two years ago. Android-based tablets made by Samsung and others have been slow sellers by comparison. Last fall research firm Gartner estimated Apple would capture 73 percent of the tablet market versus 17 percent for Android,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
A co-branded tablet from Asus is expected to be released later this year and might be sold on Google’s online site. Google will also be manufacturing its own tablets once its acquisition of Motorola Mobility is approved by Chinese authorities.
“Google is seeking to increase adoption of its Android software so that its search, maps and other services — which generate the vast majority of its mobile revenue through the sale of ads — become mainstays in the mobile-device world,” the article states.
The company has considered various ways to successfully launch the online store, including subsidizing the cost of future tablets like Amazon’s Kindle Fire or lending its wealth of mass-marketing skills to promote the site.
According to South Korean business publication Maeil, LG will launch its first 55-inch OLED TV in May for about $8,000. The unit was originally slated for availability during the second half of 2012.
New OLED TVs from LG and Samsung drew a great deal of attention at CES in January.
If Maeil is correct, LG’s launch will beat competitor Samsung to market while capitalizing on the timing of the upcoming summer Olympic games.
“What TV manufacturers desperately need right now is a luxury product with some big-time margin,” suggests Digital Trends. “The price erosion that has taken place with TVs over the past few years has brought the public to expect bargain prices, even on top-tier plasma and edge-lit LED displays. In order to justify charging big-time bucks again, the performance margin needs to grow proportionately. OLED provides that opportunity.”
In spite of larger and faster hard drives, digital tape has not gone away. In fact, next generation tape drives are capable of 525MB/sec and a price of $25/terabyte, which is less than one quarter the cost of a hard drive.
The Ultrium Linear Tape Open specification will ultimately have 32TB cartridges and 1.2GB/sec throughput.
LT0-5, which currently supports up to 3GB compressed data, and the Linear Tape File System (LTFS) together allow tape to handle demanding new applications, such as cloud storage, Big Data and streaming media. LTFS allows partitioning of the tape so one can quickly find the tape’s contents on partition 0 and locate the data on partition 1. This allows one to keep data in a near-line environment.
Tapes are increasingly being used by media companies to efficiently store master quality video. Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, National Geographic, The New York Times and the NCAA are using Thought Equity, a cloud-based storage service whose system uses an LTO-5 tape library with LTFS to handle more than 10 petabytes of data.
The Amazon Appstore is upgrading to version 2.3 after having reached the one year marker.
“The update raises the filesize cap on APK application bundles from 20MB to 50MB — a welcome increase that matches what’s available from Google’s own Play store,” reports The Verge. “Unlike Play, however, Amazon’s Appstore doesn’t support secondary downloads, which bring the actual maximum Play download size to a much higher 4GB.”
The update also resolves the problem previously experienced of app update notifications popping up even after being disabled.
The Amazon Appstore is only available in the U.S. and has far fewer apps than Play, but “the frequent sales and free apps of the day definitely make it worth checking out,” the post states.
In 2011, Google made $38 billion in total revenue, mostly from its advertising on PCs which earns the company about $30 per PC annually. In contrast, the company’s mobile OS, Android has made less than $550 million for Google since 2008, coming out to around $10 per handset.
The Internet giant offers the OS free to smartphone manufacturers and makes money from advertisements and app sales (a 30 percent cut on all Android devices).
Google has said that mobile will be central in its future and reported “seeing a huge positive revenue impact from mobile, which has grown 2.5 times in the last 12 months to a run rate of over $2.5 billion,” said CEO Larry Page in an October earnings call. Ironically, Google made more than four times as much revenue from Apple devices that employ its Maps and Google Search than it did from Android in the same time period.
These figures became public in a damages offer with Oracle in anticipation of a patent and copyright infringement trial. Google has offered to pay Oracle a percentage of revenues from Android amounting to $2.8 million.
Netflix has faced a lot of ups and downs in recent months and is often viewed by studios as “the service that killed their cash cow named DVD,” Mobiledia reports.
However, a new report from IHS predicts online video viewing will surpass DVD consumption, taking over 57 percent of all movie watching in 2012. The transition suggests that studios may want to reconsider their aversion to Netflix, at least for TV.
Recent Nielsen ratings found that shows like “How I Met Your Mother” and “Mad Men” saw a sizable boost in ratings after having been available on Netflix. “How I Met Your Mother” is in its seventh season, so a jump in ratings is typically rare.
“Netflix’s ability to increase the ratings of shows that have been on for years makes it much more attractive for studios to strike licensing deals with the company. A show with higher ratings makes the program much more valuable to networks, putting more money into studios’ pockets,” the article states.
“Netflix is not raking in the money for studios the way DVDs once did, but the number of people flocking to it and similar services is going up, while the number of people buying movies at their local retailers is falling,” Mobiledia reports. “Consumers’ rising interest in watching movies online makes it clear that studios will not be able to cling to DVD and Blu-ray sales forever. At some point they’ll at least have to consider the question, ‘Is Netflix the answer?'”
A new patent filed by Apple suggests Siri could be coming to MacBooks or even third party devices.
The “Voice Control System” patent has the iPhone 4S connecting wirelessly to notebooks, laptops and third party devices such as cameras.
Siri’s popularity on the iPhone 4S has led to many asking when the functionality will be available for Mac computers. If the patent filing is any indication, Siri will at least be able to control a Mac via the iPhone.
“Apple may well use this system with the iPhone 5, but judging by the patent image… they could bring it to the iPhone 4S before the next level iPhone is released later this year,” reports SlashGear. “This type of generational jump in functionality is generally reserved for new device releases, so perhaps it’s going to come with the next version of the Mac computer instead. Perhaps look to the MacBook Air-thin MacBook Pros of this mid-2012 instead.”
Nuance Communications has become a leader in voice technology. Already in use for Apple’s Siri, the company is developing voice technology to command televisions, cars, computers, and smart devices such as coffee makers, refrigerators, thermostats, alarm systems and appliances.
Nuance’s Dragon Go voice assistant app for Android and iPhone, which has been downloaded several million times, listens to voice commands regarding mobile entertainment, streaming media, social networking, and shopping.
It is actively working directly with websites like Spotify, Yelp, YouTube, AccuWeather, ESPN, Facebook, Fandango, LiveNation, Pandora, Twitter, Wikipedia and others. The app bypasses search engines like Google and Bing, which are both developing their own voice command systems.
Nuance is also working with major corporations to develop voice-enabled information systems. In healthcare, a Nuance system can scan dictated doctor’s notes for key information. US Airways has created “Wally,” a voice operated customer service that can anticipate and respond to requests for flight information.
LG will soon introduce a Dragon TV-enabled voice-command system that can find programs, make calls via Skype, shop on Amazon and even allow viewers to update their Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Smartphones have had a significant impact on Internet radio usage, which has increased more than 30 percent in the past year.
“The weekly usage of Internet radio (which includes both the online streams of terrestrial broadcasters and streams from pure-play streamers such as Pandora) has increased from 22 percent of Americans 12+ in 2011 to 29 percent in 2012,” Tom Webster of Edison Research wrote on his blog.
“This is a number that we are accustomed to seeing grow bit by bit each year, but this is the largest year-over-year increase we’ve seen since we began tracking this stat in 1998,” he added.
More specifics will be available when Edison and Arbitron release the 20th edition of “The Infinite Dial: Navigating Digital Platforms” in April.
“Smartphones have changed the game here from music as active entertainment choice to music as the quite literal soundtrack to your life,” says Webster.
A new CNBC survey suggests that more than half of all U.S. households own at least one Apple product.
“Of the households that own Apple products, they own an average of three, making the overall ownership rate of the American public 1.6 Apple products per household. About 25 percent plan to buy another Apple product in the next year,” reports Mashable.
“The survey shows Apple buyers tend to skew male, young, with higher education and incomes (77 percent of households making $75,000 or more have an Apple product),” adds the post. “If you have kids, the likelihood of being an Apple household grows — 61 percent compared with 48 percent if you don’t.”
CNBC polled 836 Americans during three days in March to conduct the study, and suggests the margin of error is plus or minus 3.4 percent.
