Shutterstock/Péter Gudella

One of the agency’s mandates is to make sure that the carriers are securely protecting the information they collect from their customers. For example, phone companies have to protect the databases that store the information on call records and other data.

The question on what steps they must take when it comes to information on devices is a tricker one The FCC looked into this question back in 2007. At the time, the carriers contented that information stored on phones wasn’t information they were collecting, but rather data being voluntarily entered by consumers.

However, the FCC thinks it might be time to revisit this given revelations last year that there is software, such as that from Carrier IQ, that is preinstalled and collecting information that users are largely unaware of and unable to control.

“Since the Commission last solicited public input on this question five years ago, technologies and business practices have evolved dramatically,” the FCC said in the document seeking comments. “The devices consumers use to access mobile wireless networks have become more sophisticated and powerful, and their expanded capabilities have at times been used by wireless providers to collect information about particular customers’ use of the network — sometimes, it appears, without informing the customer.”

The FCC isn’t taking issue with the collection of such information, but rather is examining what duties the carriers might have to encrypt or protect such information. Carrier IQ doesn’t encrypt the data it collects, but does store it in a binary format not generally accessible to other applications, the company said.

“We haven’t gone to that extent because we haven’t needed to,” Carrier IQ Vice President Andrew Coward told AllThingsD on Friday. “If the industry decided we needed to, then we would take that step.”

Carrier IQ is also taking steps to allow customers to see the information that is being collected about them by their software.

Following the comment period, the FCC could decide to, among other things, take no action, clarify its existing rules or propose new rules.

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And when it comes to the company’s major markets in Western Europe, Maitre said things are in pretty good shape. Windows Phone, Android and iOS have paved the way for a solid set of options for both high-end devices and even midrange ones, often sold prepaid and, in some cases, under the Orange brand name.

But when it comes to serving the next 6 billion potential smartphone customers, Maitre said that none of the major operating systems is really lightweight enough from either a cost perspective or from the amount of bandwidth consumed.

In an interview Thursday, Maitre likened it to when he was growing up in France and his family had a two-cylinder Citroen. He idolized the huge eight-cylinder cars coming out of Detroit in the 1970s. And while those cars did enjoy a moment in the sun, the world realized that with more cars out there, gas wasn’t unlimited.

In the end, the car makers like Toyota that created fuel-efficient vehicles fared better.

While conventional wisdom is that low-cost Android devices will bring smartphones to the developing world, Maitre says even Google’s OS is too resource intensive. It may have started out as a four-cylinder or six-cylinder car, he says, but with the latest Ice Cream Sandwich release it is every bit the gas guzzler that iOS and Windows Phone are.

Maitre said that Orange is committed to building 3G networks in all of its markets, but that it needs more energy efficient vehicles, if you will.

“I cannot run an eight-cylinder car because it is too expensive,” said Maitre, a senior vice president at France Telecom’s Orange unit. The average selling price of phones in Orange’s developing markets is $54. And while customers might be willing to spend an extra $30 to get a smartphone, they can’t spend another $100.

“If we are not in a position to give them a smartphone at $80, we will miss the six billion,” Maitre said, adding that Orange is committed to having smartphones that hit that price. “If I cannot have Microsoft on it, if I cannot have Android, if I cannot have iOS, then I will look somewhere else, mostly likely in China,” Maitre said.

Already the company is looking at a variety of options including Mozilla’s Boot-to-Gecko project and mobile Linux options like Tizen, in addition to low-cost Android variants coming out of China.

Phones also must become more bandwidth-efficient, Maitre said, because, like gas for cars, bandwidth is a limited commodity.

Today, he said, there are about a billion people crowding the airwaves, most of whom use less than one gigabyte of data per month.

“Tomorrow, seven billion people will use bandwidth and all use [in the range of] five or six gigabits,” he said. “The bandwidth will start to become a very valuable resource.”

Learnist builds on Grockit’s social teaching concept while adding another element that company founder Farb Nivi claims is crucial: The visual element.

Think of Learnist as something of a mashup between Pinterest and Wikipedia. Users find content from across the Web — videos, news stories, music, Soundcloud links and what have you — and post it to a personal board that other users can follow. It’s ideal, Nivi says, for teachers who want to curate multimedia lessons for students to follow, though without the feel of a stodgy, traditional lesson plan.

Grockit has already garnered a following, attracting more than a million users through its test prep service product alone. But the user pool for online test prep is only so large. With Grockit’s wiki-like Learnist product, the company hopes to spread its reach far beyond the cramming crowd. Facebook integration, which the product indeed has, will only help to further the cause.

Naturally, iPad and iPhone apps are in the works, to be expected in the coming weeks.

The unmanned Dragon capsule’s halting, painstakingly slow final movements toward the station, where it was grabbed by a robotic arm at 9:56 a.m. Eastern daylight saving time, represents a first-of-its-kind achievement in the annals of space science. Until the Southern California company, known as SpaceX, succeeded in attaching the capsule to the space station, only governmental agencies had attempted such a rendezvous.

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The analysis, from online advertising network Chitika, finds that those stodgy old PCs still produce just under 80 percent of Web traffic, with smartphones accounting for 14.6 percent and tablets making up 5.6 percent.

Other findings of note, Windows Phone now accounts for a third as much traffic as BlackBerry devices. Undoubtedly its market share is far less than that, but its more powerful browser and larger screen likely make it more conducive to Web surfing.

Also, as it has seen in the past, Chitika said that tablet and mobile phone Internet usage peak in the evening hours. That’s when people leave their computers for a bit and pretend to have a real life, while nonetheless staring at their phones or sitting on the couch watching TV and simultaneously pawing an iPad.

Speaking of iPads, Chitika says that 95 percent of tablet Web traffic comes from an Apple device, compared to phones, where Apple’s share is 72 percent, compared to 26 percent for Android devices.

On the desktop, Chitika says that just over 85 percent of Web traffic comes from Windows machines, compared with slightly more than 13 percent stemming from Macs.

Quest is a 25-year-old company that last year reported $857 million in sales and a $44 million net profit. Its speciality is creating management systems for enterprise software.

One product is called SharePlex, and it’s described as an Oracle replication product that promises to make a live copy of an Oracle database without slowing down its operation and availability. Another product for the Oracle environment is Toad, a tool that automates a lot of the maintenance tasks associated with running an Oracle database. Toad appears to be a flagship product as there are a few other versions of it for Sybase and SQL Server. Quest also builds tools to manage and maintain some Microsoft products like SharePoint and Exchange.

Quest’s market cap was just north of $2 billion as of yesterday. On today’s word of deal talks, its shares surged by 95 cents, or nearly 4 percent, to $26.13. It has been the subject of regular speculation all year that it might be taken out in an acquisition and as a result its shares have inflated by about a third during that time.

The purported offer from Dell is one of several coming in response to Quest’s agreement to be acquired by Insight Venture Partners in a deal to go private at $23 a share. The deal’s terms provide for a “go shop period” that allows the company to basically shop around for a better offer. It may get one. J.P. Morgan values Quest at $28 a share based on its sales and cash flow alone.

Also, Quest is right in the wheelhouse of the sort of things that Dell is trying to emphasize as it seeks to transform itself into an enterprise hardware, software and services concern, and de-emphasize its reliance on its traditional PC business. By at least one metric, that strategy is working — a little. Dell’s consumer PC business, for which it is best known, amounts to about one-fifth of revenue, while its enterprise-oriented businesses amount to about 50 percent. The wrinkle is that the enterprise bit includes PCs.

You can make that case, and if you want to hear an entertaining rendition of it, check out Peter Lauria’s live-on-tape report from Times Square here.

But here’s a less-dramatic reading of Ergen’s ambitions: Like everyone else in America, Ergen likes TV, a lot. He just wants to pay less to watch it.

TV programmers have been able to push up the price for their shows, year after year, even as the audience for those shows gets smaller and smaller. Their latest move: Convincing pay-TV operators to pay them “retrans” fees for the four broadcast networks, which are theoretically supposed to be available to anyone in the country, free of charge.

The pay-TV operators have been taking those fees and passing them along to consumers, because it’s easier to do that than anything else.

And in that context, Ergen’s ad-skipping feature makes a lot of sense, because it freaks the networks out, for obvious reasons. So if the courts let it stand, then Ergen finally has real leverage when it comes to fees: If the networks won’t lower them, he’ll torch their ads.

There is another way to negotiate with the programmers: Just don’t carry their stuff at all. And that’s what Ergen is threatening to do with AMC TV, the people who bring us “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad.” While a bunch of us really love those shows, the majority of pay-TV viewers don’t watch them, so Ergen’s bet is that he can live longer without AMC than it can do without his fees. But he can’t afford to do that with the broadcasters, who still have mass reach.

Still, note that even in that case, Ergen isn’t saying that he doesn’t want to carry “Mad Men,” et al, on his service — he just wants to pay less for it.

“Obviously there’s a price where an [AMC Networks] product makes sense. We just don’t think that’s where we are today,” he told investors earlier this month.

My hunch: That’s what he’s saying to NBC, Fox, CBS and ABC, too. He’s just using technology and the courts to deliver the message.

Sources close to both companies confirmed to AllThingsD that Spence has signed on with Sonos, tapped by CEO and founder John MacFarlane to be its chief commercial officer.

The 14-year RIM veteran was growing disillusioned with the company after being passed over for COO, sources say. He’d recently begun exploring other opportunities. So evidently MacFarlane’s call came at the perfect time.

News of the appointment was first reported by Reuters.

Sonos declined comment on the hire.

This week, OpenDNS founder and CEO David Ulevitch invited me to the company’s new San Francisco office — a former party-supply warehouse where the walls are now blue and the conference rooms are named after top-level domains — to share new stats and explain more about where his company came from and where it’s going.

In the past three years, OpenDNS has become more of a security company than a domain-name system provider, Ulevitch said. It still routes users to Web sites using a global network of 14 data centers — in fact, it handles about 40 billion DNS requests per day.

But Ulevitch’s goal is to become a distributed security provider — “the Akamai for security,” he called, it, giving people anywhere in the world a secure connection to the Internet on any device — in the same way Akamai delivers content from its huge global network of servers.

Ulevitch, who founded OpenDNS in 2005 straight out of college, is also changing his company’s business model.

OpenDNS has been cash-flow positive since 2007, with “well into eight figures” of revenue today, Ulevitch said.

But where the company used to make its money from advertising a few years ago, today it brings in 75 percent of revenue from paid products, mostly massive enterprise and school deployments. And OpenDNS will soon try to compete with virtual private network and virtual machine providers.

Making money from advertising is a bad fit for a security company, Ulevitch argued. “I think it’s fundamentally incompatible to be paid by somebody who’s not your customer,” he said.

And I can see his point — when I used OpenDNS a few years ago, I was annoyed that it would hijack my attempts to use the browser toolbar to navigate myself to Web sites, by taking me to an ad-supported search results page instead.

OpenDNS has toned all that down now, Ulevitch said.

These changes started to kick in when Ulevitch was reinstated as CEO of his own company in 2009, a year after he’d been demoted by major shareholder Halsey Minor. Minor has since sold his shares and given his board seats to Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital.

For Ulevitch, spending time under a hired CEO seems to have lit a fire in his belly. Since 2009, OpenDNS users have more than tripled, and the company’s employee count has grown to 80 from 20. Recent management hires include the former CTO of Websense, Dan Hubbard, and the former head of global alliances at ScanSafe (acquired by Cisco), Mark Kreitzman, who now have the same titles at OpenDNS.

Ulevitch’s next challenge? Figuring out if he should change his company’s name to something that better describes what it does now.

Trading desks at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., two of the firms that helped Morgan Stanley underwrite the IPO, were among those lending out Facebook shares that hedge funds needed for short sales, according to people familiar with the matter.

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The e-commerce giant, which already had an enormous selection by any measurement, is calling this its “Add-on” program, where consumers will be able to add low-cost items to their baskets in order to qualify for free shipping — as long as they spend $25.

Many of the new products fall into the household goods, beauty or grocery categories, such as Guayusa Tea ($3.52); four ounces of chopped pecans ($3.42); or a 1.6-pound bag of Iams cat food ($4.72). The items are identified by a blue checkout box.

Previously, Amazon had said these products were not available on the site at all, or had to be purchased in bulk, making them a little impractical. After all, how many four-ounce bags of pecans does one family really need?

An Amazon spokesperson confirmed that the program launched about two weeks ago.

The addition of low-cost everyday items to Amazon’s site signals that the company has been able to figure out how to make the economics work for items that were previously deemed uneconomical, or that it is betting that the program will lead to incremental sales.

For instance, now customers will be able to use these low-cost items to fill out their baskets in order to qualify for the company’s free Super Saver Shipping program, which requires orders of $25 or more. Consumers were often faced with the dilemma of adding more items to their cart in order to hit the $25 minimum — often overspending to do so — or paying for shipping.

Now, they could order a $22 book and add a box of tea to qualify without going over, or they could just buy five “add-on” items for $5 each in order to get free shipping.

Amazon Prime members, who pay $79 a year for free two-day shipping on qualifying items, will also have to spend $25 in order to get these items, but they will get items shipped to them faster — or within two days.

Cook is forgoing $75 million in dividends to which he’s entitled.

In a Thursday SEC filing, Apple announced plans to award a $2.65-a-share quarterly dividend on restricted stock units held by its employees. It’s a nice — and unusual — perk to offer (and one certain to cement employee loyalty in a very competitive talent arena), but Cook is passing it up.

From Apple’s 8-K:

At Mr. Cook’s request, none of his restricted stock units will participate in dividend equivalents. Assuming a quarterly dividend of $2.65 per share over the vesting periods of his 1.125 million outstanding restricted stock units, Mr. Cook will forego approximately $75 million in dividend equivalent value.

That’s a lot of money to turn down. True, Cook is very well compensated — deservedly so, considering Apple’s performance — so he can obviously afford to forgo it. But, as best I can tell, he didn’t have to. 

So Cook truly did just walk away from $75 million. Which is remarkable for an executive of his standing in an era when entitlement, greed and arrogance are so often part of the job description. Which is not to say that he’s not reaping some benefits here. There’s a lot of mileage for Apple in a symbolic gesture like this, and Cook profits when Apple’s overall value increases.

Say what you will, but this was a classy gesture up and down. When was the last time you saw headlines about a successful CEO of a wildly successful company walking away from millions of dollars that he could have just as easily pocketed?

Clearly, Cook is focused on more important and interesting things than having the biggest yacht in the harbor.

We’re at the end of the lifespan of the current generation of consoles, so the focus has been on the depth of story. When the new generation of hardware comes out, people will revel in the graphics and story will be swept aside again.

– Shadowrun creator Jordan Weisman

Approximately a half-dozen people — the core of what remained of the Enyo engineering team — have been hired by Google, and will start at the company next month. Enyo is the HTML5 app-creation framework that HP is in the process of turning into an open source project.

Google didn’t strike a deal with HP to acquire the technology, according to a source, but has been talking with individual workers over the past month. Rather, each of the workers making the move was hired individually by Google, with the team set to regroup at their new employer next month.

While it’s not 100 percent clear what the team will be working on, Google has been a big proponent of HTML5 apps, particularly as it looks to boost its Chrome OS effort, which depends on there being lots and lots of Web apps out there.

Also unclear is what HP will do with what remains of the webOS effort it had said it would help fund as an open source project. The webOS unit had significant layoffs earlier this year, and many of those who remained have since moved on, from former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein on down throughout the business and engineering ranks.

Google’s hiring of the Enyo team was first reported by technology news site The Verge.

Update: In a statement, HP reiterated its commitment to Enyo and webOS:

“We’re pleased with the traction Enyo has gained to date and plan to continue its development along with the open source community,” HP said. “The Open webOS project is on schedule and we remain committed to the roadmap announced in January.”

That deal had something of a transformative effect on the cloud software landscape. Soon, other players in its niche were snapped up. Oracle acquired Taleo for $1.9 billion, and Salesforce.com acquired Rypple. Meanwhile, Workday is growing fast and prepping for what looks to be the biggest IPO of the second half of the year.

So back to SuccessFactors. A quick look at the infographic below gives you some idea of the outsized impact it has had on the wider world. SuccessFactors alums are in senior positions at companies as varied as Okta, Pandora, Workday and Marketo. It sounds cool, but looks a lot cooler when presented in a snappy infographic like the one below. Click on it to make it bigger.

On Thursday Dish sued the four major broadcast networks in federal court asking for a “declaratory judgment” that a controversial ad-skipping feature on its new digital video recorder doesn’t infringe copyright.

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Le Figaro reports that Cagni, who joined Apple in 2000, tendered his resignation Wednesday. Sources close to the company confirmed to AllThingsD that this is indeed the case, though they had no explanation for Cagni’s sudden departure.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

AOL filed an investor presentation with the Securities and Exchange Commission today tooting its own horn, in prep for its upcoming annual meeting in which it is still facing a proxy challenge.

In a nutshell, readying to battle an alternate slate put up by Starboard Value: Our stock more than doubled from all-time lows of last summer; our turnaround is turning; we sold a buttload of patents that netted us a truckload of cash; and, of course, we’re not going to settle like Yahoo did with Daniel Loeb of Third Point, because CEO Tim Armstrong’s resume is fine and dandy, thank you very much!

(Okay, I made up the last one, but I am peckish today.)

In any case, AOL shares have indeed been on a fast upward move since the $1 billion patent sale, up 103 percent in the last six months, to close at $27.61 today.

Enjoy the pretty AOL slides:

AOL_Investor_Deck_May24

AOL-20120524-DFAN14A-0

AOL_Investor_Presentation_Release_May24

I am a bit sleepy and getting ready for our 10th D: All Things Digital conference next week, so you are going to have to read for yourself this short regulatory filing Yahoo just made about its recent deal to sell half of its large stake in China’s Alibaba Group for about $7 billion.

The deets were all reported here earlier, but knock yourself out if you want more:

YHOO-20120524-8K-20120520

SimpleAir said that the agreement was confidential and did not announce terms of the deal.

The Marshall, Texas-based company sued Apple back in September 2009. A trial had been set for April, but the two companies reached a tentative deal at the courthouse just before the case began, SimpleAir said.

The firm has also sued a number of other companies in the mobile space, including Microsoft, Nokia, Sony Ericsson (now a part of Sony), Samsung, LG, Huawei and HTC.

SimpleAir bills itself as “an inventor-owned technology licensing company with interests and intellectual property in the wireless content delivery, mobile application, and push notification market spaces.”