Samsung is the subject of a probe by the Taiwanese Fair Trade Commission after it was alleged the South Korean firm hired students to post negative online comments about Smartphones made by rival HTC, the AFP reports.

According to the United Evening News, Samsung has been accused of “false advertising” after a variety of students posted articles online that criticize HTC devices but endorse Samsung handsets. It is alleged Samsung hired the young people through its local agent.

Taiwanese Fair Trade Commission spokesman Sun Lih-chyun said the agency would investigate the false advertising claims and, if proven to be true, Samsung and its local advertising agent could face a fine of up to $835,000 U.S.

“The case was set up last week after we received complaints,” Lih-chyun told AFP.

According to the AFP report, a Samsung Taiwan spokesperson said the firm had yet to be informed of the Fair Trade Commission’s inquiry.

In a post on its Facebook page, however, Samsung Taiwan said it regretted “any inconvenience and confusion from the Internet event.”

“Samsung Taiwan has halted all Internet marketing such as posting articles on websites,” it said.

Samsung also sent the following statement to CNet:

Samsung Electronics remains committed to engaging in transparent and honest communications with consumers as outlined in the company’s Online Communications Credo. We have encouraged all Samsung Electronics employees worldwide to remain faithful to our Credo. The recent incident was unfortunate, and occurred due to insufficient understanding of these fundamental principles.

Samsung Electronics Taiwan (SET) has ceased all marketing activities that involve the posting of anonymous comments, and will ensure that all SET online marketing activities will be fully compliant with the company’s Online Communications Credo.

We regret any inconvenience this incident may have caused. We will continue to reinforce education and training for our employees to prevent any future recurrence.

This is not the first time Samsung has been the subject of a Taiwan Fair Trade Commission probe. According to AFP, the South Korean Smartphone-maker was fined roughly $10,000 earlier this year for allegedly using misleading advertising to market its Galaxy Y Duos camera.

Samsung was also slapped with a $16.2-million fine at the beginning of the year by China’s National Development and Reform Commission. The company was accused of collaborating with LG and four Taiwanese firms to fix  LCD panel prices.

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Samsung Accused of ‘False Advertising’ By Taiwanese Authorities

The software giant today released a new cloud-computing service that will enable customers to “easily migrate existing applications and infrastructure” to servers and storage machines in Microsoft data centers.

Dubbed Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, the service will match Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) prices.

“Customers have also told me that they don’t want to have to choose either a low price or good performance; they want a low price and good performance,” said Bill Hilf, general manager of product management for Windows Azure, in a press release.

“That’s why today we are also announcing a commitment to match Amazon Web Services prices for commodity services such as compute, storage and bandwidth.  This starts with reducing our GA prices on Virtual Machines and Cloud Services by 21-33 percent.”

Currently, about 71 percent of companies use AWS, according to a Forrester poll. Only about 10 percent use Microsoft.

Microsoft, after more than nine months of testing, is looking to unseat Amazon as the cloud provider of choice for storing and handling data for companies’ online applications.

Companies are increasingly turning to the cloud so they do not have to build their own technology storage facilities. This way, they only pay for the space they use.

“Customers don’t want to rip and replace their current infrastructure to benefit from the cloud; they want the strengths of their on-premises investments and the flexibility of the cloud,” Hilf said. “It’s not only about Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS), it’s about Infrastructure Services and Platform Services and hybrid scenarios.  The cloud should be an enabler for innovation, and an extension of your organization’s IT fabric, not just a fancier way to describe cheap infrastructure and application hosting.”

Microsoft has added new high memory VM instances (28GB/4 core and 56 GB/8 core) to Windows Azure to run ably handle cumbersome workloads.  The company has also added in a number of new virtualmachine templates to its list such as SQL Server, SharePoint, BizTalk Server, and Dynamics NAV.

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Microsoft Challenges Amazon With New Cloud Service

Despite e-retailer sites containing complex Java scripts and a myriad of images and web pages increasing more than 56 percent, access from desktops is “a bit” faster while mobile access is 30 percent faster than last year, according to a Google Analytics site speed report.

“Over the last year, we have seen significant improvements in the core infrastructure that powers the Internet: the web browsers have gotten faster; there have been quite a few LTE/4G deployments making mobile networks a lot faster; and processing power on mobile devices continues to increase at a rapid pace,” reads a post by Arvind Jain and Mustafa M. Tikir on the Google Analytics blog.

To discover if these improvements in technology are indeed increasing speeds online, Google compared its recent site speed data with last year’s results.

Google image

“It’s great to see access from mobile is around 30 percent faster compared to last year,” the post reads. “For desktop, there is not a significant change in the bucket distributions, but for mobile we see a shift from slower buckets (i.e. higher page load time) to faster buckets.”

Google image

Google image

Mobile access speeds have improved globally, even in countries that are already known to have quick Internet access. For instance, Japan improved from 3.5-second to three-second page load times while Sweden improved from 3.3 to 3.2 seconds.

The U.S. led the way in mobile speed improvements with a 40 percent jump between April 2012 and April 2013 aided by the launch of a number of LTE networks. The U.S. went from 4.5-second load times to 2.7 seconds.

In second place was Finland with a 37.97 percent improvement. Rounding out the top 10 are: Germany, 36.17 percent; Hungary, 33.96 percent; China, 33.93 percent; Mexico, 33.82 percent; New Zealand, 32.69 percent; Canada, 31.48 percent; Philippines, 28.74 percent and Argentina, 21.51 percent.

Even countries such as Nigeria with poor Internet infrastructure enjoy faster mobile access speeds this year.

Google image

The site speed report measures three aspects of latency: Page-load time for a sample of pageviews, execution speed or load time of any discrete hit, event, or user interaction and how quickly the browser parses the document and makes it available for user interaction.

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Mobile Access Speeds Rise Despite More Cumbersome Websites

Firefox Mobile OS will launch this summer in five countries: Venezuela, Poland, Brazil, Portugal and Spain.

Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs made the announcement at the All Things D conference in New York April 15.

Mozilla is currently working with Smartphone manufacturers LG, ZTE and Alcatel to build the first Firefox OS devices powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon mobile processors. Huawei and Sony will join later this year. So far, 17 carriers from around the globe are on board.

Mozilla previewed the first commercial build of its Firefox OS open mobile ecosystem Feb. 24. Firefox OS, which is designed for low-end devices thus far, targets the “emerging world,” Kovacs said.

Given that the “emerging world” is just coming on board with Smartphones, he added, Mozilla felt this was the right place to start and will gradually take Firefox OS global. Kovacs said Mozilla has partners lined up in the U.S. and will likely launch Firefox OS there in 2014.

Firefox OS Smartphones are the first to be built “entirely to open Web standards, enabling every feature to be developed as an HTML5 application,” reads a company press release. 

$15M iPhone has Unique Home Button

A Chinese businessman is shelling out $15 million for a one-of-a-kind iPhone.

The man, whose name was not revealed, took his love of Apple products to a whole new level after commissioning British craftsman Stuart Hughes to decorate the handset with a family heirloom: a 26-carat black diamond.

The device took nine weeks to create, according to Hughes’ website. Hughes re-created the original chasis of the iPhone 5 in solid gold, all of which was started and finished by hand. The black diamond replaces the home button.

“The chasis was inlaid with a circa of 600 white flawless diamonds with full gold dressing for the rear section with the logo in solid gold with 53 flawless diamonds,” the website reads.

“This masterpiece boasts a massive circa of 135 grams of 24-karat gold and of course sapphire glass set in the screen. The result was outstanding even down to the precise polishing to reveal its most beautiful harmonious appearance.”

Dish Network Makes $25.5B Offer to Sprint Nextel

Dish Network Corp. is ready to cough up $25.5 billion in cash and stock to acquire wireless service provider Sprint Nextel Corp.

The No. 2 satellite television provider in the U.S. is competing against Softbank Corp. of Japan for the No. 3 U.S. wireless carrier.

Dish Network is offering $17.3 billion in cash and $8.2 billion in stock to shareholders. That translates into 4.76 per share in cash and 0.05953 Dish shares per Sprint share.

“The Dish proposal clearly presents Sprint shareholders with a superior alternative to the pending SoftBank proposal,” said Dish Network chairman Charlie Ergen in a press release. “Sprint shareholders will benefit from a higher price with more cash while also creating the opportunity to participate more meaningfully in a combined Dish/Sprint with a significantly-enhanced strategic position and substantial synergies that are not attainable through the pending SoftBank proposal.”

In a letter to the Sprint Nextel board of directors, Ergen said if the deal goes through, Dish Network will be “the only company able to offer a fully-integrated, nationwide bundle of in- and out-of-home video, broadband and voice services to meet rapidly evolving customer preferences.”

He also said the “new company’s assets will immediately establish national cross-platform leadership and will position the company to deliver innovative services while expanding our collective subscriber base.”

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Technology News Briefs — April 16, 2013

The technology titan has notified the approximately 2,000 Glass Explorers via an e-mail that, rather than waiting for all of the wearable computing devices to be finished, it is shipping them to developers in batches.

“We’ve been working hard on the Glass Explorer Edition and we have great news: the hardware and software are now ready for you,” the Glass Team wrote in an e-mail that was posted on Twitter by Brian Klug.  “We’re seeing the first few devices come off the production line right now.”

“We know you’ve been standing by patiently to get Glass. So, instead of waiting for all of the devices to be ready, we want to start delivering them to you now. We’re producing enough for everyone, but only a portion of them are ready today. Therefore, we’ll be notifying you in waves and, as soon as we’re ready to invite you, we’ll let you know. When the time comes you’ll receive an e-mail with all the details.”

Google gave tech enthusiasts a chance to help “shape the future” of its wearable computing device by launching its Explorer program Feb. 20.

The Glass Explorer Program is a bid to get feedback about the futuristic, titanium-framed spectacles while they are still in development.

“Glass is still in the early stages, so we expect there will be some twists and turns along the way,” Google said in a Feb. 20 blog post. “While we can’t promise everything will be perfect, we can promise it will be exciting.”

Those who were chosen to be Explorers were required to pre-order a Glass Explorer Edition for $1,500 plus tax. They must also pick up Glass in person, in either New York, San Francisco or Los Angeles.

Google officially unveiled the glasses during its I/O conference last summer. At that time, the headset, which was controlled by head movements, had video and audio capability and a built-in compass and accelerometer. A lot of improvements have been made since then and, when Glass goes on the market in 2014, consumers can expect to see a lot of improvements and additions to the device — which is where Google’s Glass Explorer Program comes in.

To learn more about the functions of Glass thus far, click here.

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First Batch of Glass Ready to Ship, Google Says

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She Geeks: A Look at Women in STEM Careers

Fast forward to today when the browsing is for more than just magazines. Best Buy and a slew of other ‘hard goods’ retailers will tell you that a growing percentage of ”customers” in the store have no real intention to purchase anything. They are instead engaging in ”showrooming.” This is the practice of viewing goods in the real world in order to make an online purchase (most likely at a significant discount off the showroom price).

This phenomena has existed since e-tailing first emerged, but has accelerated with the advent of ‘always on’ Internet connections accessed via mobile devices, and a variety of applications which make comparing prices drop dead easy. Price check by Amazon is one such app that allows a user to scan the barcode of a product and see a price comparison almost instantaneously. If the price difference between the online retailer (Amazon) and the brick and mortar retailer is significant enough, the buyer will presumably just purchase the product online. So what are bricks and mortar retailers to do in order to thwart such ‘showrooming’ activities?

One recent solution is to charge store visitors a fee just to look around the store. In essence, to charge the visitor to browse.

A retailer of gluten free products located in Brisbane, Australia has posted a sign at the store’s entrance stating, ”Dear Customers — As of the first of February, this store will be charging people a $5 fee per person for ‘Just Looking.’ The $5 fee will be deducted when goods are purchased.” The owner claims that only four shop visitors to date have had to pay the fee.

Consider as well the case of Vera Wang’s bridal gown boutique in Shanghai. The retailer first announced a nearly $500 fee for a 90 minute try-on session. After Chinese social media excoriated the store, the fee was later dropped. A statement issued by the company said in part, ”We wish for all Vera Wang customers to enjoy the same standard of excellence worldwide.”

While a fee simply to browse or try on outfits seems strange to some consumers, it is not an unheard of practice. Retailers argue that try-on charges limit the store visitors to more ‘serious’ shoppers and dissuade counterfeiters of high-end brand products from looking too closely at clothing and designs.

Daniel Foster is co-founder of U.K. Web hosting firm 34SP.com and has been enabling online retailing for more than a decade.

Mr. Foster offered the following insight on ‘showrooming’ and the emerging practice of paying to shop: ”I would expect that charging customers to browse would put them off visiting a store — it would certainly put me off! It gives an easy opportunity for a competitor to gain an advantage simply by doing what it’s always been doing — allow potential customers to visit the shop and view the items for sale. That being said, online stores do hold some advantages over traditional bricks and mortar retailers, the main one being that warehouse space is cheaper to rent and maintain than high specification retail space, even with postage added on to all the items they sell. The conclusion is that traditional retailers can compete against online retailers (and hence customers showrooming on their premises) by providing superior service. They must at least be competitive on price, but people will always be willing to pay some level of premium to be able to carry their goods home rather than endure the frustrating wait to get their new toys from an online provider.”

There are some examples of bricks and mortar retailing which defy the recent trends — notably Apple retail stores. The shops go beyond the product and let visitors experience the brand. Therein, the experience replaces the object and visitors find the act of entering and browsing creates real value unto itself.

Mr. Foster explained it this way: ”Apple exercises enough control over (its) sales channels that there really isn’t any discount to be had by shopping around. As a result, I have often bought products direct from Apple stores safe in the knowledge that it’s the best price I’m going to get and with the satisfaction of taking the new toy home right away.”

Whatever the high street landscape looks like in the coming years, online retailing is here to stay and will only place increasing competitive pressures on bricks and mortar retailers. To thrive in retailing, merchants who sell in the ‘real world’ must focus on re-inventing the shopping experience to thwart ‘showrooming.’

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Would You Pay Just to Browse?

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United States Lead the Way in Digital Music Adoption

Companies like Time Warner and Comcast don’t have a competitive package that offers near one gigabyte a second for an affordable cost.

A La Carte Service

One of the biggest gripes with basic cable and satellite offerings is that subscribers can’t simply pick and choose the channels they want. For every ESPN, there are 20 additional Lifetime and Bravo stations added on. This happens because networks pay massive bucks to be included in those bundles, hoping subscribers will latch onto certain shows just by stumbling across them.

According to Wired.com, Verizon FIOS TV is taking some steps to level the playing field by tying fees to different stations based on how easy they are. The idea is to compete with the growing demand of subscription-based Internet services like Hulu, Netflix and Amazon which allow users to select and choose, not just what channels they want to consider, but pay individually for shows and episodes.

Google’s details on a la carte TV are vague, but they have an opportunity to capitalize where others fall short. By offering a pick-and-choose kind of TV, the mix with its broadband service would be an unstoppable force and likely impact networks and providers to change practices.

The Technology of TV

There’s a technology battle going down with TV. Dish Network has commercials touting the Hopper, features from the Genie, and cable providers advertise different Tivo-like features for DVR and episode search. This is Google’s greatest opportunity to crush the competition.

In 2010, Google released Google TV, a complement to cable and satellite TV that could work with live TV while also searching the Web all on one screen. It was met with limited reception and has yet to become one of Google’s more popular technologies, but it did set a standard for what we could be seeing with Fiber — imagine the features of Google TV implemented with its own TV service. According to CNET, Google’s all-IP TV service will record eight shows at once with a capacity of 500 hours total. That trumps any cable or satellite service on the market, but Google doesn’t plan to stop. The search and Web system that makes Google TV so useful will be a delightful addition to its TV service moving forward.

The Reputation of Service Providers

Popular service providers like Comcast aren’t ranking well on the customer service charts. In October 2012, technology blog Lifehacker rated Comcast as the worst company in the U.S. for customer service, placing them above (or below, depending on how you see it) PayPal, AT&T, Time Warner Cable and Verizon. The criteria for the wretched top spot consisted of constant outages, poor technical support and an overall sour relationship between company and consumer. Google, not currently known for any sort of outstanding phone support (or any support at all), wants to separate itself from the stereotype by delivering quality of service, which is what they’re really focusing on in Kansas.

It’s hard to imagine how fast Google Fiber will move east and west until it’s available for the whole country, but the public treatment for what Google is doing is overwhelmingly positive. The opportunity to change the game regarding TV is there. Let’s see if they do it.

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Google Fiber Will Dominate the Web, But What About TV?

Photos share well on social media and you can put your logo on them as a watermark to increase exposure for your website.

If you go to an event that fits in with your business take your camera and be on the lookout for photo opportunities to use in your campaign.

Here are my tips:

• Having a good camera and flash helps, but that is far from the end of it. Having a good camera helps you to capture the imagine, even in low-light settings. Having a big camera makes people take you seriously (I know….).
• Having a good lens can make a good camera take great pictures.  If you are just starting, you may consider a lens that offers some amount of zoom and as large of an aperture as you can afford.  Prime lenses (one’s with no zoom) are typically a bit sharper, but not quite as versatile as a zoom lenses.  Once you’ve warmed to your camera, you will probably start thinking about expanding your lens collection.
• A large part of taking good photos is about your attitude. You do not want to get in the way, but you need to have the confidence to ask to take people’s photos, and do so confidently so they are put at ease and are good subjects.
• Framing the right shot so you make your subjects look good in the photo also matters. Make sure you get just the right amount of room around them and check what is in the background.
• Use Photoshop. Changing the levels and colors in the photos after you have shot them can make OK photos look stunning.
• Photos of beautiful people get a lot of attention and a lot of likes on Facebook. So try and find some attractive people at the event.
• Posting your event photos on Facebook during or just after the event is far better then posting days or weeks later.
• Take a photo of the event organizer and tag him or her, so people will find your photos. If you make the organizer look good, he or she will invite you to future events.
• Group photos work well because if one person is tagged, their friends can find it.
• If you make someone look great, they will promote your photos for you.

Shooting professional-level photography is easier and less expensive than it was in the past. Cameras now have more features at a lower price.  Even high-end consumer models can take professional looking photos.  Now is a great time to become a photographer, whether it’s just a hobby, or something you want to do promote your business.

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Photography and Social Media — a Successful Partnership