It’s just after 12 o’clock here on the left coast, which means Operation Chokehold should now be in full effect. What that means (if anything at all) is still up in the air — which is why we’re turning to you for a status report.

For the uninitiated: Operation Chokehold is a sort of cyber-protest against AT&T, as conjured up by some dude playing a dude disguised as another dude. For one solid hour between 12 and 1 Pacific, angry iPhone owners are supposed to gobble up as much data as they can in an “attempt to overwhelm the AT&T data network and bring it to its knees.”

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Subject: Operation Chokehold On Friday, December 18, at noon Pacific time, we will attempt to overwhelm the AT&T data network and bring it to its knees. The goal is to have every iPhone user (or as many as we can) turn on a data intensive app and run that app for one solid hour. Send the message to AT&T that we are sick of their substandard network and sick of their abusive comments. THe idea is we’ll create a digital flash mob. We’re calling it in Operation Chokehold. Join us and speak truth to power!

Today started out like any other, which is to say, the AT&T connection on my cellphone was somewhat working, depending on where I was positioned in my apartment. It sucks, but things like this are a fact of life that AT&T customers have grown accustomed to in cities like San Francisco and New York. But this afternoon I started getting an abnormal number of messages from friends over email, IM, and Twitter because they apparently couldn’t text or call me. I tried to use my phone, and sure enough, no dice.

Calls are working sporadically, but the AT&T data network in San Francisco seems to be completely borked right now. There is obviously a lot of talk on Twitter about this right now. Everyone, it seems, has the same problem, “Could not activate cellular data network.” I should mention that it’s raining in San Fracisco today, so perhaps that’s to blame. I know how hard it is for AT&T to be reliable on a regular day, so rain is apparently completely out of the question.

This outage comes just a couple days after AT&T CEO Ralph de la Vega made comments that the company was hard at work on improving the service in cities like San Francisco and New York. Talk about bad timing. His comments were also controversial as he said things like, “What’s driving usage on the network and driving these high usage situations are things like video, or audio that keeps playing around the clock. And so we’ve got to get to those customers and have them recognize that they need to change their pattern, or there will be other things that they are going to have to do to reduce their usage.” The emphasis is mine there.

To be blunt, as paying customers, with contracts, we don’t need to change shit. What we need is a reliable network. We’re all paying around $100 or more a month for a service that remains unbelievably unreliable. Blame the iPhone, blame whatever — that doesn’t change the fact that we’re still paying for a service, and all-too-often, you’re not delivering. It’s unacceptable.

Speaking of timing, Fake Steve picked a perfect day to take his shots at AT&T, it seems.

I’ve reached out to AT&T for comment on this, and will update if and when I hear back. Though it clearly won’t be over the phone.

Update: You know the situation is bad if AT&T has yet to respond (normally they are very quick with that). Here’s something that someone in San Francisco (who apparently has phone service to make a call) was able to get:

Just got off the phone with AT&T — data + SMS in San Francisco is down. It will take 24 to 48 hours (!!!) to fix.

A day to two days of no data or SMS. Fuck you very much AT&T.

Update 2: Okay, an AT&T rep has finally gotten back to me, here’s what they had to say:

We are seeing a hardware issue in downtown San Francisco that is causing some degradation in service. GSM and EDGE voice and data services are still accessible.  Our experts are aware and working to resolve as quickly as possible.

Update 3: AT&T has just reached out again to say that services should be restored shortly:

AT&T has fixed the hardware issue and data services are quickly returning to normal. Speeds should be back to normal within about a half hour.

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In the Steven Spielberg movie Minority Report (yes, I make some reference to it about once a week), there’s a scene in which John Anderton (Tom Cruise’s character) is walking through an urban retail center and his eyes are getting scanned as he moves, which is serving up custom greetings and deals from retailers. It’s both creepy and cool. But that movie is set in 2054, we’re not there yet. But AT&T had a demo at its Tech Showcase today that is inching closer to that.

As you can see in the video below, the idea behind AT&T’s system is that you can walk around a city with a phone in your pocket and get alerted when a nearby retailer has a deal for you. Users of Foursquare and soon Loopt will recognize this concept, but AT&T’s idea is a bit different. By using AT&T’s network as the bridge to be constantly updating your location (assuming, of course, you opt-in to such a feature), these retailers are able to push these coupons to your phone via SMS. Currently, something like Foursquare requires that you “check-in” to a place to see that there is a deal there or nearby.

Naturally, this could get very annoying to a consumer if they don’t like the place offering the deal, but customization is the key to this. A user could, for example, say they like Mexican food, and those types of coupons would pop-up when they were in the vicinity.

Obviously, a system like this could be very lucrative for retailers and restaurants who want to entice the impulse buy or just increased foot traffic in stores. It could also be lucrative for AT&T if they were to strike deal with these retailers to serve these up — or even just charge SMS fees.

This is just a proof of concept at this point, but you can probably bet something like this is coming soon. And the next logical step after that is the Minority Report system. “John Anderton, you could use a Guinness right about now!”

[image: Dreamworks & 20th Century Fox]

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AT&T, the major U.S. phone operator, will launch a Nokia Symbian phone with a Qualcomm chip in the U.S. market, an industry source close to Nokia has told VentureBeat. It’s just the latest in a wide front of attack the giant Finnish company is making on the U.S market.

For years now, the world’s largest phone maker Nokia has been in cold decline in the U.S. market. Right now, it seems left with a few trial phones and no serious attempt to distribute here. Nokia has a 5 percent market share in the US, well below its 38 percent global share.

Meanwhile, wildly successful new smart mobile phone platforms have launched from the U.S. — including the iPhone and Android — inspiring users with new interfaces and features that now seriously threaten Nokia’s stature as world market leader. These smartphones are showing robust growth, not only in the U.S., but across the world.

Nokia has finally admitted its mistake, and is now aggressively pursuing deals to attempt to at least double its market share in the U.S. over the next year. “Mea culpa, mea culpa, ” Mary McDowell, Nokia’s executive vice president and chief development officer, told me last week. After years of ignoring U.S. carriers, upset at their insistence to exert control over phones and customers, Nokia is working closely with Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile to work with them after all. There was a good story in the New York times about this a few days ago.

In the latest sign of that about-face, VentureBeat has heard from sources close to Nokia that the company has agreed even agreed to launch a phone in the U.S. market with AT&T using a Qualcomm chip. While details are slim (the final details are still being negotiated, we here), and the launch date is unknown, this is surprising for a number of reasons. For years, Nokia and the San Diego chip company squabbled over Qualcomm’s ownership of a patent governing the chip that runs on CDMA networks. Nokia and Qualcomm finally declared a truce earlier this year.

Now they’ve done more than make up; they’ve jumped into bed with each other: Qualcomm was a gold sponsor here at the SEE event here in London, hosted by the Symbian Foundation, the group that manages the operating system behind most Nokia phones. And Qualcomm today announced it has joined the Symbian Foundation board, meaning it will support Symbian-Nokia phones (see Q&A with Rob Chandhok, Senior Vice President, Software Strategy, Qualcomm). Qualcomm also appears willing to develop chips for AT&T’s phones, even though the carrier has used a GSM network, not supported until now by Qualcomm. Qualcomm, already a member of Open Handset Alliance which is behind the Android phones, seems to be interested in hedging its bets. Chandhok told us in the interview: “We want relationships with all platform players. We want an influence on Android, Windows, Symbian phones… There are different demands from our customers, depending on their geography. Yet, we are not picking a winner. That’s not our role .” (Nokia just launched a phone with China Mobile’s TD-SCDMA networks, China’s proprietary standard that is an off-shoot of CDMA.)

Nokia plans to launch a number of other phones in U.S. market. It plans to launch the high-end N900 next month (see video links below). This is the touch-phone which runs multiple applications at the same time (something the iPhone can’t do), and does so in a way that doesn’t drain battery power within a few hours (something the Android phones has been criticized for). The reason is that Nokia has worked hard on optimizing integration between its phone hardware and software layers. I had a chance to try it out, and it’s a step up on previous Nokia phones. The N900 has a full slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and uses a Maemo operating system (Nokia’s Linux version, as opposed to Nokia’s traditional Symbian operating system). It replicates a lot of the iPhone’s features, and thus that big “UI experience” gap with the iPhone has been closed. I wouldn’t yet say yet that the N900 phone is better. There are pros and cons to each. iPhone users won’t like the course-ness of the N900 touch technology; its edit features lack the touch-induced magnifying glass and things like pinch and expand, for example.

More here:
Getting started with N900
See what else the N900 can do
Maemo browser tips and tricks
Behind the scenes
N900 interaction
The new nokia N900

Nokia will also launch its x6 phone (see video) in eight weeks. The lower-end phone (pictured at top of this article) again replicates much of the iPhone’s interface (kinetic scrolling, touch screen, landscape-capable technology), but will launch at a much lower price point: Free, if bought with a contract. This phone will run on Symbian, and is cheaper because Symbian performs well when running on smaller, lower power processors (the iPhone and Android need higher-power processors). It’s new for Nokia, but at the same time, the sophisticated touch interface features of the iPhone (including pinch, expand and slide features) won’t be replicated by Symbian’s operating system until the second half of next year, with the release of Symbian version 4.

Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation, says Nokia will double its market share next year in the U.S, and predicts most of the headway will come from stealing customers from RIM phones. He says the iPhone’s momentum is still too strong to stop within a year, but hopes to curb the iPhone’s gains after that. The Android phones, meanwhile, show signs of splintering, because of Google Android’s willingness to allow manufacturers to dictate interface decisions — something that Symbian will exert more control over.

Matthaus Krzykowski contributed to this piece.

The back-and-forth between AT&T, Google, and the FCC over Google Voice’s blocking of some rural telephone numbers continues, and it’s getting even nastier. AT&T’s latest letter to the FCC attempts to undermine Google’s recent argument that it’s blocking exorbitantly expensive calls to some numbers in part because they are associated with sex lines. In fact, AT&T says, some of the numbers being blocked include an ambulance service, church, Benedictine nuns, doctors, and more. Oh, and that’s not AT&T’s only problem with Google — it also thinks that the FCC should consider regulating the search giant on the web as well.

The letter (which we’ve embedded below) is long, first detailing in depth AT&T’s problems with Google Voice, which it says should be held to the same rules as AT&T and other tradional carriers are. The letter then goes on a lengthy argument making the case that if the FCC fails to regulate Google now, the search giant could use its “gatekeeper control” over the Internet to block access to applications:

But Google’s call blocking begs an even more important question that the Commission must consider as it evaluates whether to adopt rules regarding Internet openness. If the Commission is going to be a “smart cop on the beat preserving a free and open Internet,” then shouldn’t its “beat” necessarily cover the entire Internet neighborhood, including Google? Indeed, if the Commission cannot stop Google from blocking disfavored telephone calls as Google contends, then how could the Commission ever stop Google from also blocking disfavored websites from appearing in the results of its search engine; or prohibit Google from blocking access to applications that compete with its own email, text messaging, cloud computing and other services; or otherwise prevent Google from abusing the gatekeeper control it wields over the Internet?

The letter continues after that, detailing all of the times when Google may have exercised its power to somehow restrict free speech or show favoritsm toward certain political views that were in line with its own. AT&T even pulls out Google’s famous “don’t be evil motto”, asserting that Google should have “no objection to abiding by the Internet Policy Statement and other net neutrality principles it advocates with respect to Google Voice and all of the Internet-based services, applications and content that it offers.”

Finally, AT&T summarizes its arguments with a document called “The Truth About Google Voice and the Open Internet Principles“, where it presents four supposed lies being told by Google, each tagged with the heading “What Google Wants You to Believe” (duh duh duh), followed by AT&T’s response, “The Truth“. That document begins on page 9 of the embed below.

It’s all worth a read, but once again it’s hard to listen to AT&T’s argument’s for net neutrality when it concludes the letter by saying it’s against changes in policy in the first place. Still, AT&T does raise some interesting points, and it’s likely we’ll be hearing similar debates as the line between telecommunication services and Internet services continues to blur. For now though, the FCC doesn’t seem to buying the net neutrality angle. From the Washington Post:

Sources at the FCC who spoke on the condititon of anonymity said the FCC inquiry focuses on the question of potential violations of telecommunications law. The agency does not plan to look into potential violations of net neutrality — or open-Internet guidelines — because officials didn’t appear to agree with such claims.

attletterfccgoogvoice –

Document via The Washington Post.

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In a blog post, Google has given their take on the whole brouhaha over the restriction of outbound Google Voice calls to phone numbers in “rural” areas. Google writes that the reason they restrict these calls to local phone carriers’ in rural areas is not only because they charge pricey termination rates for calls but because these carriers are partnering with adult sex phone operations and free conferencing call centers to drive traffic. Google says that because Voice is a free application, they can’t afford to pay for these rates — and that because it is not a traditional phone service, it shouldn’t have to.

AT&T has also previously tried to block calls to these areas but the FCC mandated that the carrier continue service to these areas to provide universal service. AT&T called Google out a few weeks ago to the FCC, saying that there’s no reason that Google should be able to block these calls because of the rates if AT&T can’t do this. Shortly afterward, Google responded, explaining that it was not a traditional phone carrier and should not be held to the same rules as AT&T. But AT&T continued to complain and has even convinced a number of members of Congress to decry Google’s actions.

Today, the FCC responded to AT&T’s complaint by asking Google for more information about Google Voice, which Google claims is a free web-based free application designed to “supplement and enhance existing phone lines, not replace them.” Google says that AT&T is in a completely different situation, in part because the carrier charges users for their services and receives hundreds of millions of dollars in universal service subsidies. Google says that web applications like Google Voice and Skype shouldn’t be treated like traditional phone services and calls attention to AT&T’s hypocrisy in the whole matter.

Here’s the the conclusion from Google’s post:

And despite AT&T’s lobbying efforts, this issue has nothing to do with network neutrality or rural America. This is about outdated carrier compensation rules that are fundamentally broken and in need of repair by the FCC.

Photo credit: Flickr/technicolorcavalry

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Two weeks ago AT&T wrote a letter to the FCC about Google Voice, complaining that the service was preventing users from calling certain numbers, which is against FCC policy (AT&T has previously attempted to do the same thing but was prevented from doing so). Google promptly responded, explaining that it was not a traditional phone carrier and thus should not be held to the same rules as AT&T. Earlier this week AT&T’s complaints (along with some greasing from lobbyists, no doubt) prompted a number of members of Congress to decry Google’s actions. Today, the FCC has decided to follow up on the matter, issuing a letter to Google with the subject line “Google Voice Calling Restrictions”.

The letter begins with an explanation that “in light of pending Commission proceedings regarding concerns about so called “access stimulation”, the Commission’s prohibition on call blocking by carriers, as well as the Commission’s interest in ensuring that “broadband networks are widely deployed, open, affordable, and accessible to all consumers,” we are interested in gather facts that can provide a more complete understanding of this situation.”

The letter’s first question asks how Google Voice’s functions work from a technical standpoint, and how Google informs users about any numbers they may be restricted from calling. Question two asks what Google means when it says that Google Voice is currently “invite only”, which was one of the defenses Google offered in its Public Policy Blog to AT&T’s initial accusations, and how many people are on Google Voice. The third question will likely be a key one — it asks how Google Voice fits in with the classifications in the Communications Act of 1934, and if Google competes with any services classified as “telecommunications services”. Question four asks how Google actually identifies the numbers it restricts. The final question explores if Google contracts with any other services to function.

For those that haven’t been following the story so far: Google’s decision to block certain numbers stems from the way some rural local carriers have been exploiting current FCC rules. Some local carriers charge very high prices for AT&T, Google Voice, and other services to connect their calls. Few people would normally call these rural numbers, so these local carriers team up with conference calling centers and sex lines to further drive traffic. AT&T has previously tried to block these numbers but was barred from doing so, and is upset that Google Voice is getting away with it. AT&T has framed this as part of the Net Neutrality debate, though given their past stance on the issue it’s hard not to take their arguments with a grain of salt.

Update: Google has responded to the letter by writing a blog post outlining AT&T’s hypocrisy.
You can find the full letter below.

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OnLive, the gaming company trying to reinvent the Games On Demand service, has announced a Series C round of venture financing from AT&T Media Holdings, Inc., Lauder Partners, Warner Bros., Autodesk, and Maverick Capital. Warner Bros., Autodesk and Maverick Capital have participated in previous rounds of financing as well. OnLive did not disclose the size of financing.

OnLive has been working on the launch of its cloud-based OnLive Game Service, which delivers the latest games instantly through the MicroConsole TV adapter. Unveiled in March at the 2009 Game Developers Conference, the OnLive Game Service recently went into beta testing and is speculated to officially launch this winter.

Palo Alto-based OnLive raised $16.5 million in previous funding.

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Eventually, it’s probably safe to assume that all electronics will be in some way connected to the Internet. As long as you’re not worried about a Skynet-style Terminator apocalyptic future, that’s probably a good thing. With that in mind, the online gaming network SGN began working on a secret project to connect children’s toys to the Internet. Today, ToyBots is being unveiled at TechCrunch50.

Basically, the ToyBots’ vision is to be the platform that any toy maker can use to make sure their devices have a portal to the Internet, and all the data potential that comes with it. SGN and ToyBots founder Shervin Pishevar describes the key idea as a “Kindle of toys” or an “iPhone inside of a toy.” The thought there being that the Kindle works so well because of the network behind it that allows the device to seamlessly connect to Amazon’s extensive collection of books. Likewise, ToyBots is announcing a partnership with a major telecom provider (they’ll announce in the next week or so) that will allow toy makers to set up pre-paid service for their toys (that is, have wireless costs baked into the product, like the Kindle, rather than making customers pay a monthly fee).

ToyBots’ demo product is called the Woozee. Basically, it’s a cute stuffed toy that can transmit messages sent over the Internet. So if a parent is away on a business trip, but wants to be able to read to their child at night, they can record themselves reading on something like their iPhone (via an app) and send it to the toy. The child would get an alert via the toy that a message is there. Then, when they’re ready, they can play it back, via the toy (think: Teddy Ruxpin, but with a parent’s voice rather than a stranger’s, and it has an accelerometer!). A sender could also set message to play for a specific time; the child’s bedtime, for example.

There is also a website component to this Woozee that allows for further functionality. You can have a network of friends with their own toys, for example. This is kind of like the Chumby, as it’s a web-connected device with a website component where you can manipulate it as well.

Alongside Pishevan, Carrie Feigel, Senior Director Marketing, presented today.

Expert Panel Q&A (paraphrased)

The experts: Don Dodge, Yossi Vardi, Ron Conway, George Zachary, and Jason Hirschhorn.

Q: Who are you selling to? And will you let Obama speak to children through this device?

SP: Yes, Obama will be able to speak to the kids. The number one audience is the developer community to make all kinds of toys. We’d like the major toy companies to get on board.

Q: How important is the platform versus the toys? I want a Chucky toy.

SP: I want a Chucky toy as well. A lot of different audiences can be reached with this. We hope it’s similar to the App Store with the iPhone.

CF: There’s a big market for people who want to get their favorite toy with this tech.

Q: How does Spongebob get on this?

CF: He would get his own toy and cotent.

Q: Do you make royalties from toy developers?

CF: That’s a part of it, but also a partnership.

SP: We don’t want to build the toys ourselves. We want to be the gaming cloud.

Q: Will you open this to anyone, or will you control this? What about porn?

SP: We’ll leave that to someone else to work on.

Q: What’s the security?

CF: There would have to be careful controls, we would approve apps, and manufacturers would have a say.

Q: Big challenge crossing the virtual world to physical world with a toy.

CF: Club Penguin started virtual then went physical.

Q: Invest/take another meeting/pass?

GZ: Second meeting
JH: Same
RC: Get retailers
YV: We need better toilet seats first!
DD: Nothing more to say than what Yossi did.

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