A class action lawsuit was filed today against Research in Motion (RIM), the makers of Blackberry, after a massive, three-day service outage affected millions of its subscribers worldwide in October.

The lawsuit was filed Tuesday in Quebec Superior Court by a Montreal law firm, “on behalf of individuals who have BlackBerry smartphones and who pay for a monthly data plan but were unable to access their email, BlackBerry Messenger service (BBM), and/or Internet for the period of October 11 to 14, 2011,” the court filing says.

“When RIM’s system went down — and the backup system failed to kick in — it caused a chain reaction that caused messages that saw a backlog of messages build up in other network centres around the world, which started a chain reaction, causing message delays around the world,” according today’s report in the The Financial Post.

The company has apologized repeatedly, and CEO Mike Lazaridis issued a mea culpa in a video (see below.) RIM also tried to make amends for the outage by offering $100 worth of  free premium apps to affected users. Apparently, user are having none of it.

While iOS and Android devices are eating the Blackberry’s lunch in business communications, RIM is still one of the top handset makers for enterprise communications, due to its emphasis on security. However, handsets from Apple and those running Android are starting to erode any market position that RIM may have.

via: BGR

Patrick Bisch, founder of Pinglio.com, was on his Twitter earlier today when he noticed something different. For reasons unbeknownst to him, his timeline, or stream of tweets, suddenly had new features including a button to expand tweets.

Thus far, Twitter’s timeline has been fairly cut and dry. There are the tweets themselves, a time stamp and from where the tweet was sent. A slider opens on the right side of the Twitter page to show media and a section of replies or photos and videos. Nothing much more fancy is needed for a 140 character conversation. But it seems Twitter may be streamlining the look of its stream.

Bisch, who wrote about the changes on Pinglio, found that his retweet, reply and favorite buttons had been moved to the top of his tweet, as opposed to living on the bottom as per usual. When he hovered over the buttons, the time stamp, which usually appears at the top right of the tweet, read “open.”

When clicked, the open button does just that, it isolates the tweet in the timeline and also shows any replies to the conversation associated with that tweet. Similarly, you can open multimedia tweets to view photos — photo uploader agnostic — and potentially videos. If a tweet in this new timeline has been retweeted, the open function will show a horizontal list of all those who retweeted.

To view a specific Twitter handle, the profile appears floating over the rest of the Twitter stream, as opposed to on the right hand side of the webpage. It still only shows the last three tweets made by that handle.

Why these showed up in Bisch’s stream is unknown. We’ve reached out to Twitter for comment and will update upon hearing back.

Check out the video from Bisch below:

[Photo courtesy of Pinglio]

Netflix ended the third quarter of 2011 with just 23.8 million total subscribers — 810,000 fewer subscribers that the previous quarter, the company revealed today in its latest earnings report (PDF).

So, where did those lost subscribers go? Most of the losses are attributedto the company raising subscription rates by 60 percent on its DVD-by-mail service. The low numbers are also reflective of Netflix’s unpopular decision to split its DVD-by-mail business into a separate company called Qwikster — a move that Netflix later canceled after receiving backlash from its customer base.

In a guidance update issued in September, Netflix did predict it would lose subscribers in the third quarter. However, those predictions were lower than the company’s original estimate of decreasing from 25 million subscribers to 24 million.

It’s also worth noting that subscribers for both its streaming and DVD business were down (– a prediction that was supposed to hold true for only the DVD side of the business). Netflix ended the quarter with 21.5 million streaming customers, compared to the estimated 21.8 million. As for DVD subscribers, the company had 13.9 million, compared to its estimated 14.2 million prediction.

In a letter to shareholders, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and CFO David Wells said they expect both revenue and profits in the fourth quarter to decline lower than expected. However, the company should still remain profitable overall due to Netflix’s entrance into new international markets, like the UK and Ireland .

Despite additional revenue from international launches in Latin America and Europe, Netflix’s stock price has been taking a beating. The company’s stock was hitting $300 a share earlier this summer but is now hovering just below $100.

It’s hard to believe that 10 years ago today Steve Jobs first introduced the iPod at a low-key event, which is far different than the auditorium-sized keynotes that have become standard for Apple announcements.

Ten years ago, Apple was entering into a portable digital music player market that had no clear market leader — although companies like Creative, Sonic Blue and Sony had certainly been trying. Jobs talked about how music had been around a long time, and wasn’t going away anytime soon.

The original iPod featured a 5 GB hard drive that could hold about a thousand songs. It had a two-inch white backlit LCD display and an estimated 10-hour battery life. The device officially debuted during the holiday season of 2001, but I didn’t actually get my hands on one until almost a year later. (I still remember my neighbor coming outside with his bulky graphite-colored MP3 player that held only 15-songs. He was shocked and sort of in disbelief when I told him how many mine held.)

For the sake of nostalgia, we’ve embedded a video of Jobs first iPod announcement below.

When did you acquire your first iPod? Let us know in the comments.

Apple has scheduled a private, invitation-only memorial service for Steve Jobs on Oct. 16, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The event is set for Stanford University on Sunday evening, according to the invitation. Last week, the Jobs family held a small private funeral for the Apple co-founder, who died on Oct. 5 from pancreatic cancer.

The memorial is expected to be attended by a number of Silicon Valley luminaries, but Apple told the Wall Street Journal that the service is a private one. Guests were invited to respond to the Emerson Collective, a charity group set up by wife Laurene Powell Jobs. Apple is also gong to have an employees-only celebration of Jobs’ life at its headquarters on Oct. 19.

The Stanford setting seems appropriate, as that was where memorial services were held for David Packard, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, when he passed away in 1996.

Just in time for Halloween, streaming video service Netflix has signed a deal with TV network AMC to bring its highest rated program, zombie show The Walking Dead, to its Watch Instantly subscribers in the U.S. and Canada (sorry Latin America).

The content agreement is one of many Netflix has signed to boost its subscriber rate through a strategy of providing a large collection of content from various providers, which it hopes will keep people from fleeing for a growing number of streaming video service competitors like Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime Instant Video (as well as cable and satellite TV providers).

Starting yesterday, Netflix subscribers will have access to the first season of The Walking Dead. Future seasons will become available just prior to the beginning of the following season’s TV premiere. The deal isn’t exclusive — meaning both Amazon and Hulu are bound to sign similar agreements at some point.

In addition to past seasons of both Breaking Bad and Mad Men, the agreement with AMC Networks will also bring other programming to Netflix, such as shows from IFC, Sundance Channel and WE TV.

Oracle has paid out in excess of $199.5 million to settle a case with the U.S. government.

The case, which was brought to light by former Oracle senior director of contract services Paul Frascella in 2007 and was pursued by the Justice Department, claimed that Oracle had for nine years overcharged the U.S. government while giving steep discounts to corporate entities.

Claims included the allegation that Oracle had discounted goods and services by up to 92 percent for businesses while giving various United States government agencies around 25 percent to 40 percent discounts, all the while not telling the government what its pricing policies actually were, as it was contractually obliged to do.

Specific allegations included breach of contract, constructive fraud, fraud by omission, payment by mistake and unjust enrichment. The suit said these practices had been going on since at least May 2001.

Oracle maintains that it adhered to pricing as laid out in its contracts, and a spokesperson said the company only settled because “many of the witnesses are no longer available or do not clearly recall these events” and pursuing litigation would be more costly than the $200 million settlement.

In a statement, General Services Administration Inspector General Brian Miller said, “It’s more important now than ever before to make sure that taxpayer dollars are not wasted on higher prices. We will not let contractors victimize the taxpayers by hiding their best prices.”

Steve Jobs, the cofounder and former chief executive of Apple, has died. He was 56.

Jobs was a visionary leader who, more than any other single person, reshaped the face of consumer technology.

He was often quoted as saying “we’re here to put a dent in the universe.” He did exactly that.

From his earliest computers, co-developed with Steve Wozniak, to the smartphones and tablets that his company developed, Jobs showed a singleminded dedication to building products that were easier to use, better-looking and more intuitively useful than what had gone before.

He liked to say that Apple’s products were “magical,” and if that’s the case, he was the marketing and technology magician behind the curtain.

And if they weren’t exactly magic, Apple’s products were certainly a sufficiently advanced technology.

Many of the innovations that Apple would become famous for — the mouse, the desktop metaphor, icons, touchscreens — didn’t originate with Apple. But Jobs clearly had a knack for identifying ideas that weren’t reaching their full potential elsewhere, then integrating them into compelling products that struck a chord with consumers.

The Macintosh was the first commercially-successful computer to use a graphical user interface and a mouse, a decade after the technologies had debuted at Xerox PARC and SRI. The iPhone threw out the book on how to make a smartphone and reoriented an entire industry around touchscreens and apps, well after touchscreens first appeared in PDAs like the PalmPilot. The iPad succeeded in making a popular tablet computer after Windows-based computer manufacturers had tried to do so for nearly a decade.

Jobs was also a tough and uncompromising manager who inspired fear as well as admiration. He developed a reputation for not suffering fools, reportedly ending job interviews within minutes if he sensed the candidate wasn’t up to snuff. He was an awe-inspiring negotiator who won favorable deals for Apple from a string of companies, from record labels and Hollywood studios to AT&T, Verizon and telecommunications carriers around the world.

He was also adamant in resisting features that weren’t necessary. He’d say no to keyboards, because touch technology was enough — even though the vast majority of smartphones had keyboards and people would have thought it was crazy to drop them. He’d say no to multiple buttons on the front of the iPhone — it needed only one. Before that, he’d said no to floppy disks, optical drives, multiple-button mice and more.

Under Jobs’ leadership, Apple built a “vertical” empire, where everything in its line of products was dictated by the relentless focus on quality, and Apple controlled every slice of the value chain, from components and computer hardware to the operating system, software, online services and even digital media like songs and movies. That strategy went counter to and eventually won out over the “horizontal” empire that Microsoft and Intel had constructed.

Jobs was pushed out of Apple back in 1985, when his first spurt of creativity and leadership came to an end and Apple was losing market share. Jobs lost a board fight, and John Sculley was appointed to replace him as CEO.

However, Jobs’  banishment is credited by some for the source of the genius of his reign since 1996. By departing from the computer industry, Jobs was forced to get new perspective, and this undoubtedly played a role in letting him cut Apple from its ties to the past. He injected new life into Pixar, turning it from a tiny boutique animation shop into a dominant force in Hollywood movies and, eventually, the creative savior of Disney.

After his company NeXT was bought by Apple, and Jobs returned, he brought with him a new philosophy favoring recognizable products and simple design. His experience at Pixar, as chairman, also gave him understanding of the entertainment industry. Indeed, it all became the recipe for Jobs’ incredible second act. He helped Apple launch the iPod music player in 2001. Then after building out its iTunes business model, Apple built a phone product on top of that, with the release of the popular iPhone in 2007. The mobile app revolution was sparked, and Apple left everyone in the dust.

As a result, Apple’s stock has climbed steadily over the past several years. It first became the most valuable company in the world briefly in August, when it surpassed Exxon for the first time. Apple first surpassed Google three years ago, a testament to how the market perceives Apple’s business to be on firmer ground than Google’s. Google’s forays into software and into mobile phones look very much like Microsoft’s — horizontal plays that remain open to design weaknesses. Apple’s iPhones are pretty, and Google’s Android phones, while offering lots of cool features, remain universally criticized for their lack of attention to detail, and for compromising on key things like performance and battery life.

And then there’s Apple’s iPad, which first debuted in 2010. Apple was never supposed to be an “enterprise” company, or one that sold products to large companies. It was a consumer company. But surprisingly, by early this year, some 80 percent of Fortune 100 companies had already adopted the iPad in some form, according to Apple. It’s this last product that has helped pushed Apple to its global leadership position, and which helped lead HP — once the Silicon Valley icon of quality — to so stunningly kill off its own tablet operations.

The iPad was quite a final act. Jobs reportedly called it “the most important thing I’ve ever done.”

However, Jobs’ own words to graduating Stanford students at a 2005 commencement ceremony perhaps best sum up his philosophies and life’s work:

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

Matt Marshall also contributed to this story.

Even if women and men were graduating in equal numbers from technology and engineering degree programs, the technology industry would still favor men.

According to a new report from the Level Playing Field Institute, IT workplaces, including tech startups, can create hostile or unpleasant environments for women and people of color, leading to those employees seeking out other companies or even other industries for work.

The report states that biases inherent in the average tech workplace make it a less-than-inviting environment for women and minorities, who deal with negative workplace experiences, such as exclusionary cliques and bullying at much higher rates than do their male and white counterparts.

“The IT sector is one of the fastest growing in our country, yet women and people of color continue to be vastly underrepresented,” said LPFI Executive Director Robert Schwartz, Ed.D.

“Previously we’ve pointed to problems in the STEM education pipeline as the reason for low rates of women and people of color in IT positions. But the findings in this report clearly show that there are also significant concerns with company culture and workplace experiences of underrepresented professionals.”

The Level Playing Field Institute, or LPFI, is an organization dedicated to exploring and eliminating the gender and ethnicity imbalances and biases in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) communities.

The report is called Playing Field: An Examination of Hidden Bias in Information Technology Workplaces. It shows that subtle and implicit favoritism in both large IT enterprises and startups ”can produce unequal opportunities and outcomes for employees depending on their race and gender.” The study uses data collected from a sample of IT engineers and managers in large companies and small startups around the United States.
 
In addition to encountering more bullying and being negatively effected by cliques, women and underrepresented people of color saw a higher likelihood of experiencing negative workplace incidents. And the more negative work experiences each person reported, the less likely she was to be satisfied with her job and remain working for the company.

In other words, subtle sexism in tech workplaces is making women and minorities want to move on.

Nevertheless, the study also showed that for most hiring managers, maintaining a diverse workplace was not a high priority. In spite of the fact that most of the companies polled showed diversity stats representative of the rest of the tech industry (i.e., few women and underrepresented people of color), 68% of the managers and engineers polled said they were satisfied with their company’s diversity efforts.

Not surprisingly, women and minorities were much more likely to favor more diversity in the workplace. In fact, underrepresented people of color were almost twice as likely as white employees to want a company-wide policy to increase diversity (80 percent compared to 46 percent).

As a result of these subtle (and sometimes overt) biases and lack of diversity in the workplace, woman and minorities in the report were less likely to feel they had a career path at their current company or that they were adequately developing their skills and abilities. Likewise, the same groups were more likely to be looking for a new job or planning to leave their current job within the year.

It’s not surprising that negative workplace experiences were linked to job dissatisfaction. What is disturbing is that these factors were so closely tied to gender and ethnicity.

In the report’s conclusion, LPFI recommends more research on these biases. The authors of the paper also challenge everyone working in the tech industry to confront their own biases and to support productive conversations about these biases within their companies and communities.

AOL-owned tech blog TechCrunch is often accused of trading favors for exclusives.

Now we have an e-mail that appears to back up the claims.

A startup founder recently confused one of our reporters for a TechCrunch reporter. She’d been introduced to him as a VentureBeat writer; at some point he apparently mixed up his tech blogs.

In doing so, he made explicit reference to a recent conversation he’d had with a TechCrunch sales executive, Rahul Nihalani, and then made an offer: In return for publishing a story this evening, he’d offer TechCrunch “an exclusivity agreement for major announcements by our Company.”

In other words, if you cover our announcement today, we’ll give future stories to you exclusively.

The startup is Own, a startup point-of-sale company, and the founder is Verdi Ergün. (Note: VentureBeat writer Regina Sinsky’s husband Scott Crosby is on Own’s advisory board.) The full text of Ergün’s email to VentureBeat is below.

The mention of an ad sales executive also implies (though he doesn’t state this explicitly) that Own is considering buying advertising on the reporter’s blog, a fact that Ergün clearly thought would be relevant to a TechCrunch reporter. Most ethical reporters, for the record, pay no attention to whether a company they’re covering has bought advertising, and for all we know, the TechCrunch reporter for whom this message was intended could have ignored it too. But it’s such an obvious proffer, and one that would offend many reporters deeply, that we have to think it was made with some expectation in mind.

This is exactly the way many people have suspected TechCrunch of working: Trading favorable coverage for exclusives. In fact, many previous companies’ coverage on the site have followed this pattern: First, TechCrunch covers the company’s initial, minor announcement in a softball way. Then, TechCrunch publishes a series of exclusives handed to it by a grateful startup.

Indeed, now-ousted TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington has said publicly that he’s willing to manipulate his blog’s coverage in return for exclusives. The trouble is, he was able to laugh this off as a joke before.

But now, we see that this isn’t just a joke, or Arrington’s personal modus operandi. It’s the way TechCrunch works.

And that, by the way, is why anyone who cares about real journalism mistrusts TechCrunch.

Here’s the full text of Ergün’s email. We’re awaiting a response from Own and from TechCrunch, and we’ll update this post as soon as we hear from them.

Great to meet you! We just talked to the TechCrunch account manager Rahul. We want an introduction article introducing our Company to put up tonight.

You can even refer to our existing press releases for the article and media page. You can also mention we are relocating our entire Company to the Bay Area in two weeks (20 people). http://ownpointofsale.com/people

http://ownpointofsale.com/media/release/20110712_social.php

http://ownpointofsale.com/media/assets.php

This will help establish our relationship. From this point on we can move forward with an exclusivity agreement for major announcements by our Company including a major investment tomorrow morning from Detroit Venture Partners (DVP) that also includes Dan Gilbert (founder of Quicken Loans and owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers) and Magic Johnson…

Please send me the article when it’s up. All the best.