Quick as a wink, I got in my tux and hailed a cab for midtown Manhattan. That message from a friend who shall not be named was how I ended up crashing the 2012 Inner Circle Show, an annual New York ritual where members of the city’s press corps put on an impressive musical roast of the local, regional and national political elite since 1922. It’s a big black-tie affair, and an invite is not easy to get.

The highlight of the night is always the Mayor’s Rebuttal. Last year, Mayor Mike Bloomberg flew around the stage as Spider-Man, taking advantage of the infamous buzz that plagued that Broadway show back then.

As you’ve probably figured out, Mayor Mike doesn’t do anything small. Being the 20th-richest person the world — worth some $22 billion via his majority ownership of the financial data and media company that bears his name — has its perks. One of them is the ability to hire the cast of a hit Broadway show to help make you look good on stage. (Full disclosure: I worked for that company for about a year before taking this job.)

This year, Bloomberg hired what must have been the majority of the cast of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” including its current headliner, Nick Jonas, a.k.a. “the cute Jonas Brother,” and also longtime Hollywood actor Beau Bridges.

Naturally, there were a lot of references to local political chatter. In the skit, Bloomberg bans coffee at City Hall — a reference to his administration’s war on nasty food ingredients like trans fats and salt — touching off a drama among city employees. He also quizzes the presidents of Cornell and Stanford University on their knowledge of New York — a quiz Stanford fails, prompting her to walk out. It’s a reference to a real-world competition between the two to develop a technology hub on Roosevelt Island, and yes, Stanford really did walk away. And of course there were plenty of references to Lady Gaga, whom Bloomberg famously kissed on New Year’s Eve.

Below is a six-minute highlight reel of Bloomberg’s production, which ran a good 30 minutes or more. The fun lasted well into the wee hours this morning. Hilton security guards shut down a crowded after-party in a penthouse suite at about 2:30 am. (I crashed that, too, again with the help of the friend who shall not be named.) One wonders if Bloomberg can be coaxed into a reprise when he hits the stage at our D10 conference in May. We can at least hope!

And in 2012 — which also happens to be the 10th anniversary of the confab of tech and media titans — it’s already shaping up to be another fantastic event in terms of programming, with a lineup of onstage appearances that is sure to make some news.

There are many more very big names to come, but Walt Mossberg and I are pleased to introduce the first group of interviewees, which will give you a glimpse into the firepower we expect at D10 in late May. It is again being held in Rancho Palos Verdes, just south of Los Angeles.

The initial speakers we have confirmed so far include: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; serial entrepreneur Sean Parker, who will appear with Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek; Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus; Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz; LinkedIn Chairman and VC Reid Hoffman, who will appear with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner; and Skype CEO Tony Bates.

It’s hard to imagine someone we have wanted to have onstage more than Michael Bloomberg, a man of many talents and interests. He’s known worldwide as the 108th Mayor of the City of New York. First elected in November 2001 (and again in 2005 and 2009), he is also one of the most compelling politicians in the U.S. today.

But Bloomberg is also a pioneer in terms of the business of digital news and information technology, having built a huge and groundbreaking media company and information service. Bloomberg (the company) has 310,000 subscribers to its financial news and information service, and more than 15,000 employees worldwide.

There will be a lot to talk about with him, from the upcoming presidential election to the state of our government to the future of innovation, news and technology.

Also sure to be voluble is Sean Parker, the legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has been on the cutting edge of innumerable important digital trends of the recent decade. In 1999, Parker co-founded Napster, the controversial and industry-changing music service, at the age of 19.

He followed up with early contact information service Plaxo, and then shifted over to his critical involvement as founding president of Facebook in its early days as a start-up, an experience which was dramatized in the movie “The Social Network.” Parker continued to found and also invest in companies, from Causes to Spotify to his most recent, Airtime, a social video company that he is doing with his Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning.

Parker will be appearing onstage with Daniel Ek, another serial entrepreneur and technologist, who started his first company in 1997 at the age of 14. The Swedish native later co-founded online music phenom Spotify in 2006, with Martin Lorentzon.

The former CTO of Stardoll and founder of Advertigo leads a company that is changing the way music is delivered and consumed by fans, against a backdrop of intense change in the industry, succeeding even as a plethora of other services have stumbled.

Also a groundbreaker is Zynga CEO and founder Mark Pincus, yet another serial entrepreneur, whose latest effort in the online gaming arena has finally resulted in his biggest success. It recently went public, and now has a nearly $10 billion market cap.

Before founding Zynga in 2007, Pincus had already started three other companies: Push start-up Freeloader in 1995; automated tech-support company Support.com after that; and early social networking site Tribe.net in 2003.

(I met Pincus when he was at Freeloader in Washington, D.C., while writing a profile of him for the Washington Post, so I have enjoyed tracking his progress since then.)

Pincus is also an avid angel investor, with early stakes in Napster, Brightmail, Twitter and Facebook.

Reid Hoffman was another early investor in Facebook, along with many of Web 2.0’s most successful ventures. Well-known in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur and VC, and recently dubbed the “start-up whisperer” by the New York Times (although I am not sure exactly what that means), he’s also chairman of LinkedIn, the business-networking service that also recently went public (at a $10 billion valuation, too).

He’ll appear with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, who started out life in Hollywood, but soon made his way to Silicon Valley as a top exec at Yahoo. After running its media division, Weiner spent a short time at venture firms before going operational again at LinkedIn.

What it takes to build and maintain momentum as tech companies move into more mature stages, as well as how the social networking space evolves, are among the many topics on tap for the pair.

The evolution of a start-up phenom — in this case, Internet telephony service Skype — will be among the topics covered by Tony Bates, who is now a president at Microsoft, which bought it last year.

As such, he is responsible, says the software giant in its description of his job, “for overseeing the company’s direction, strategy and overall mission to become a global communications service that will eventually reach billions of users.”

That’s a tall order for Bates, who came to Skype from a top job at Cisco. Bates has deep roots (or maybe, routing?) in the guts of the Internet, having done backbone-engineering strategy for Internet MCI. The U.K. native also holds nine patents.

Lastly, given all the activity we expect will happen between government regulatory agencies and tech companies over the next few years, we felt it was key to bring in FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz. He has been at the FTC as a commissioner since 2004, but was given the top job by President Barack Obama in 2009.

Among his priorities, according to his bio, is “promoting competition and innovation in the technology sector through law enforcement and policy initiatives; and protecting consumers’ privacy — especially while they are using the Internet.”

Uh-oh!

Leibowitz knows from regulation, having served as the Democratic chief counsel and staff director for the U.S. Senate Antitrust Subcommittee from 1997 to 2000, where he focused on competition policy and telecommunications matters, as well as a similar stint at the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism and Technology before that.

There will be a lot more speakers to come, of course. But, so far, we think D10 is off and running fast.

The experiment, should it become a reality, would involve a special Square-built payment terminal on tablets in the back of 50 taxicabs to start, as well as a Square application that would process riders’ credit card payments. And the swap-out — and the stakes — would go beyond just hardware.

If tablets running Square were to supplant some of the existing technology in the back of New York City cabs — currently supplied by Creative Mobile Technologies LLC and VeriFone Systems Inc., one of the world’s largest electronic payment companies — fee structure and revenue from “Taxi TV” content would also come into question. (It’s important to note that the New York TLC hasn’t formally submitted the Square proposal to its board of commissioners yet; it plans to do so on March 1.)

Of the 13,237 official taxicabs currently on the road in New York City, VeriFone processes the credit card payments in approximately half of them; CMT handles the other half. The two companies were awarded the contracts in the summer of 2007, after the Commission had put out a challenge seeking innovative tech and electronic data tracking for taxicabs; by November 2008, the technology had been fully implemented in all cabs.

The systems currently use cellular data to power the transactions, which is also technically possible through an iPad or another type of tablet device. In addition to the payments technology, current systems provide automated dispatch capabilities, GPS, computerized trip logging and text messaging — also functions that a tablet could likely provide.

So hardware aside, consider the content on the Taxi TV’s. Those loops of news updates, late-night talk show clips and dining guides that cab riders see on the backseat TVs are the result of a partnerships that VeriFone and CMT have forged with TV networks (though the TLC commands 20 percent of the screen time on the primary channel for public service announcements). VeriFone has rolled out NBC content in 12,000 cabs across the U.S.

While we know that content can stream quite nicely on tablet devices, too — and likely provide an even slicker viewing experience — the companies are making money off of back-of-cab media and would lose that if they lost control of the screen. At the same time, more gaming and social networking options are being proposed for the back of cabs, which would provide potential ad revenue streams.

But ultimately the real sticking point could be fees. It’s unclear what a new payment structure would look like, but David S. Yassky, the chairman of the Taxi and Limousine Commission, has been quoted as saying he hopes credit card transaction fees could be lowered.

The TLC Web site currently says that cab owners can expect credit card and debit fees to average 3.5 to 4 percent, whereas Square charges its small-business users 2.75 percent per transaction without additional interchange fees. If Square offers taxi cab medallion owners — who also pay for the installation of the technology up front — a lower fee option on credit card transactions, the way it does for small businesses that shy away from investing in bulkier credit card systems, Square could have a leg up on its rivals.

And those rivals are unlikely to remain quiet.

Verifone has previously taken direct aim at San Francisco-based Square for what it alleged was a security flaw, saying that Square lacked the ability to properly encrypt data. (Square’s Dorsey quickly responded by saying that credit cards are inherently not secure, but that Square continually reviews, verifies, and stands behind the protections that it has put into place in its credit card reading device.)

For now, the San Jose-based payments giant isn’t offering a formal response to the new taxi cab proposal. A spokesman for VeriFone would say only that the company is not going to comment on a proposal nobody has seen yet.

According to the New York Times, Creative Mobile Technologies has also raised concerns about the security of Square’s technology and has previously requested that the vote on the proposal be delayed.

But if the proposal were approved next month, the pilot program using Square on tablets could kick off “within a month or two,” according to Allan Fromberg, a spokesperson for the TLC.

And that’s when things will get interesting in the back of taxicabs.

(Photo courtesy of Flickr/JosiSilva)

Here’s the new official movie trailer for next summer’s latest take on the moody web-slinger of New York City, Peter Parker.

“The Amazing Spider-Man” looks at the comic book hero’s origins more deeply, but mostly it will be about the special effects and 3-D.

Here’s the video:

When I first moved to New York 15 years ago, for a few years during the holiday season I’d be asked by people from elsewhere if I’d be among the throngs in the Times Square crowd, watching and cheering as the ball drops. I’ve never done it, and I probably never will. I dislike crowds and I dislike standing in one place for hours on end with nothing to do but cheer. And the Times Square area is, for me, my work environment, and during the holidays I’d rather be at home, which for me means uptown and out of the way.

I’ve worked in Rockefeller Center, mere blocks from Times Square, for about six years now, and watched as the size and density of the crowds of visiting tourists have seemed to increase incrementally during the holiday season each year.

It wasn’t my imagination. New York City’s own official statisticians say that 48.8 million people visited the city in 2010, up from fewer than 43 million in 2005 when I became a Midtown regular. The forecast for 2011 is 50.2 million. Assuming the forecast is correct, the city will have beat by four years Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s goal, set in 2008, of attracting 50 million visitors by 2015. These same statisticians say that one out of every three international visitors to the United States comes to New York City.

And that ball has a lot to do with it. It’s said that 1 billion people will watch the ball drop in Times Square tonight on television. This I usually watch, and not because I’m a Ryan Seacrest fan. But for some reason that makes little logical sense, I enjoy seeing the part of the city where I spend so much of my daily life being enjoyed by so many people. I like seeing my adopted home town being the center of the world’s attention.

So what about that ball? It was replaced last year, and has some pretty impressive specifications. As Scientific American tells it, it is 12 feet in diameter and weighs nearly six tons, or 11,875 pounds.

It’s made up of 2,688 Waterford crystal triangles, and is lit by 32,256 Philips Luxeon LED lights, which is apparently triple the number of lights on the ball last year. All those lights — and being LEDs they’re programmable — are capable of producing 16 million colors, with the number of theoretical combinations numbering in the billions. It’s also more energy efficient — by somewhere between 10 to 20 percent — than it was last year, and consumes about the same amount of power as is required to power two typical electric home ovens. For the geekier minded among you, there’s even more to know in this article in PDF format from something called Lighting Science. It hadn’t occurred to me, for instance, that since the ball is on display year-round that it would require significant cooling during the hotter days of summer.

It has come a long way from the original ball in 1907, which had 120 25-watt light bulbs on it. There’s a picture of one from 1978 included with this long history of the whole ball-dropping tradition.

If you’re in or around Times Square in the days leading up to New Year’s Eve, and have the presence of mind to look up, you can probably see one of many test drops of the ball. I found this Associated Press video covering one such test, via the Village Voice.

And if you’re not near a TV, you can of course catch a live stream of the festivities.

Happy New Year, everyone.

(Image of the 2007-vintage ball via Wikipedia.)

Aside from that, customers who visit the shop will likely feel as though they’ve just walked into … an Apple Store.

The store features multiple areas, with sleek-looking tables set up for product viewing, testing and express purchasing. And, of course, there’s a Genius Bar, set up in the southwest corner of the space.

The Grand Central Terminal store is Apple’s fifth in New York City, adding to the company’s footprint of more than 300 stores worldwide. Bob Bridger, Apple’s vice president of retail and real estate development, said Apple has seen more than 12 million visitors in its New York stores this year, and more than 300 million visitors worldwide.

The Cupertino-based maker of the iPhone and iPad is in the midst of a notable retail expansion, though the company recently scaled back its schedule of large store openings in China, where demand for the popular iPhone 4 was said to outpace supply.

Grand Central is currently home to other retailers, including Banana Republic, Kenneth Cole, MAC Cosmetics, Papyrus and Rite Aid; plus a slew of coffee shops and newsstands, restaurants like Michael Jordan’s Steak House and the famed Campbell Apartment bar.

Apple’s lease arrangement with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which owns the space, has come into some question following a New York Post story about the terms of the lease, as the company has ramped up for the opening of this store.

The NYP and Associated Press report that Apple signed a 10-year lease with the MTA for the space once occupied by Metrazur restaurant, which got $5 million from Apple to clear out early; and that unlike other tenants in the building, Apple will not be sharing revenue with the transit authority. At $180 per square foot, Apple is also paying slightly less than other tenants in the space, but the MTA has said that cost reflects the $5 million payment to the restaurant, plus Apple’s $2.5 million capital investment in the space and a $1.1 million annual rate.

While the daily foot traffic through New York City’s Grand Central Terminal is somewhere around 750,000 people, according to the MTA, the Apple Store may do more for the other retailers in the commuter and subway train station than the station does for Apple.

One element of this Apple Store that’s different from others: The Grand Central Terminal Apple Store will offer 15-minute express classes on Apple products for commuters looking to kill some time.

It offers a personal pickup service that allows commuters using the Apple Store app to make a purchase using their iPhone and pick it up immediately upon arrival. The store also lets customers make purchases entirely on their own using a barcode scanner.

The store opens Friday, Dec. 9, at 10 am ET.

P.S.: A little history lesson for the kids: It is actually called Grand Central “Terminal” and not Grand Central “Station,” as it is commonly referred to. I’m talking to you, Beyonce!

While New York City was largely spared — though Staten Island and Queens were whacked fairly hard — surrounding states, especially Connecticut and New Jersey, got a good thumping. As many as 700,000 people in Connecticut and 600,000 in New Jersey are without power in the wake of Irene, and many will go without for as long as a week.

Power outages in others states, in no particular order: Vermont is reporting another 50,000 residents without power, and at one point or another, every single road in that state, except for Interstates 89 and 91, were closed due to flooding.

Another 700,000 are without power in Massachusetts; 160,000 are without power in New Hampshire; power is out for 171,000 in Maine; and power is out for 284,000 in Rhode Island.

Power outages were still being addressed this morning in Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina; another 20,000 or so are without power in the District of Columbia. Delaware has 39,000 without power, and a tornado touched down there; Pennsylvania, including the Philadelphia area, has about 400,000 without power. The total number of homes and businesses without power up and down the East Coast was in the neighborhood of six million.

An estimate of the cost of damage to insurers, conducted by Kinetic Analysis, a firm that predicts storm damage, is about $3 billion, down from an earlier estimate of $14 billion. The death toll so far is 25.

Flooding is by far the biggest threat. The city of Troy, New York, is threatened by a swelling Hudson River and a fragile dam holding it back.

Overall, communications infrastructure held up pretty well — except in those places where it didn’t. In a conference call on Sunday, the Federal Communications Commission said that 130,000 wireline subscribers lost phone service, while nearly 1,400 cellular telephone sites were out of service. Another 1,093 cell sites were running on backup power, and 500,000 cable TV subscribers lost service. The agency warned the tally could get worse, as power outages remain and battery backup systems fail.

All the stock exchanges in New York will open normally, though lots of traders who typically come into the city on Metro North may have trouble getting to work.

Did I say New York was largely spared? By the storm, mainly, but not by slightly panicked officials. The Metro Transit Authority is scrambling to get the subway system back up and running normally. Having for the first time shut the entire system down, it was limping back to life as of 6 am Eastern time. While the Long Island Railroad is running a nearly normal schedule, Metro North is not expected to operate at all.

New York area airports are re-opening as of 7 am Eastern time. Traffic at Logan International Airport in Boston is still snarled, as is Amtrak’s Acela service. Flights into and out of Baltimore and Washington, D.C., were slowly getting under way.

Another casualty: Local public radio station WNYC suffered damage to its AM transmitter because of flooding in New Jersey, and directed listeners to its Web stream, though its FM transmitter was fine.

For all the trouble Irene caused humankind, a more fragile creature emerged unscathed from the storm’s path. USA Today has an interesting story about a rare whimbrel, a type of shorebird, nicknamed Chinquapin by wildlife scientists in Georgia, who tagged it with a radio tracking device and spotted its signal on the Caribbean island of Eleuthera. The bird had flown through the most dangerous northeast section of Irene when it was still a Category 3 hurricane. Whimbrels typically spend their summers in Canada and then fly south to Brazil to breed. That’s one tough bird.

Yes, New York and much of the Eastern seaboard is preparing for a direct hit from Hurricane Irene, which is being described locally as as a “once-in-a-lifetime” type of hurricane that hits all the populated coastal areas rather than skirting them.

Mayor Mike Bloomberg just announced mandatory evacuations for areas of the city that are most likely to be flooded, which affects more than a quarter-million people. Subway trains, buses, as well as the Long Island Railroad and Metro North rail service are all scheduled to shut down tomorrow at noon.

Many New Yorkers, myself among them, are either getting out of the city or hunkering down. Last night I stocked up on new flashlights and a few of those huge packages of batteries that tend to last for years. As much faith as we have in Con Edison and other regional power companies who keeps the lights on, they’re warning of possible outages.

Phones, wireless, and Internet infrastructure are likely to take a hit too up and down the East Coast. I checked in with several companies to see what they’re saying about their ability to keep services turned on so that people in affected areas can stay informed and communicate with loved ones.

If the power goes out, and if you haven’t done away completely with your old-school telephone line, now would be the time to make sure you have an old-school corded phone around the house. If your home loses power, the phone lines will keep running. The phone networks’ central offices and switching stations have backup power to keep the dial tone on. However, if you have a cordless phone you’re out of luck. Best to spring for an old-style corded phone if you don’t have one lying around.

If you’re wireless-only, you have a pretty good chance of being able to make calls. I checked in with Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile today. As with the central offices on the wireline network, wireless towers have backup power too. All carriers said their teams were fanning out across the region topping off the fuel tanks of backup generators and readying mobile cell sites that can be deployed quickly where needed.

I remember my BlackBerry kept running during the Northeast Blackout of 2003. I was able to contact friends outside the blackout zone to get news stories about what was going on. That is, until my BlackBerry’s battery ran out. Have extra batteries and even an extra phone charged up and ready, and make sure your phone stays dry. All the carriers are advising that you save your power for emergency calls and use text messaging to minimize network congestion. Remember that it was network congestion that ground the wireless networks to a halt after the earthquake on Tuesday. (It felt so strange to type that. Suddenly I feel like I’m a character in a Left Behind novel.)

So what about the Internet? Customers of Verizon FIOS know that even if the power goes out, their modems have an eight-hour backup to keep the bits flowing and the dial-tone on for phone service, but not the Internet. Time Warner Cable, which serves about 6 million people from the Carolinas to New England, has deployed Business Recovery Unit trailers up and down the coast to quickly restore service to affected areas.

All that is great news for connections at home. What about critical services for businesses? As we saw in April when it crashed for a few days, Amazon Web Services is pretty critical for several companies. The company has data centers in Northern Virginia that are close enough to Irene’s path to make customers nervous. Geekwire noticed a message on a support forum advising customers to make sure they’re running applications in more than one data center. “We are monitoring Hurricane Irene and making all possible preparations, e.g. generator fuel, food/water, flashlights, radios, extra staff,” the message said.

And what about Monday morning? In New York, the big question is whether the markets will open on time. After 9/11, the New York Stock Exchange closed from the time of the attacks (Sept. 11, 2001, was a Tuesday) through the end of the week. Trading reopened the following Monday, Sept. 17. If the market did fail to open Monday, it would be the first time such a closure was forced on the exchange by external forces since then. The last time a hurricane shut down financial markets was in September of 1985, during Hurricane Gloria.

Reuters is reporting that staffers at the big board were laying in a supply of fuel for backup power generators located above the trading floor, as well as a supply of food. A final decision about whether or not to open as usual will be made Saturday or Sunday as circumstances warrant.

The hurricane’s name, of course, can’t help but conjure up thoughts of “Goodnight, Irene,” the early 20th century folk standard that seems to close every third or fourth installment of Garrison Keillor’s “Prairie Home Companion” radio show, the lyrics of which have been running through my head all day. The folks at The Awl have collected 23 different versions of the song performed by artists as varied as Willie Nelson, Eric Clapton and The Meat Puppets. If you’d care to have the same lyrics in your own head while you rush your own hurricane preparations to completion, you can enjoy the Lead Belly version I’ve embedded below. Everyone stay safe.

It launched its first AmazonLocal site in June, and has been able to expand quickly through its investment in LivingSocial, which sells many of the deals to spas, restaurants and other services in those cities on behalf of Amazon.

Today, Amazon announced that in addition to local deals, it will also be sweetening the pot by offering special discounts from Amazon-affiliated sites, including Amazon.com; MyHabit.com, which offers flash sales on apparel and home decor; endless.com, a designer apparel site; and 6pm.com, a discounted apparel site operated by Amazon-owned Zappos.

AmazonLocal said over the next few months, offers will include $25 for $50 to spend on jewelry and watches at Amazon.com, $40 for $80 to spend at MyHabit.com and $25 for $50 to spend at 6pm.com.

The offers will drive traffic to its lesser-known brands, which at times have had difficulty gaining traction, and also provide some incentive for people overwhelmed by offers from a dozen Groupon wannabees to subscribe to yet another daily deals site.

While it may appear the daily deals business is a small side project for the large e-commerce provider, if done well it may become exceedingly important as it uses ads and offers to discount the price of hardware.

Amazon has cut the price of its 3G Kindle to $164 and the Wi-Fi version to $114 thanks to the introduction of advertising on the platform.

As evidenced by the extreme interest in the discontinued HP TouchPad tablets that were being sold off in a fire sale at $99 apiece, you can see how important it is to drive the price of similar hardware below $100. Amazon plans to release a tablet computer by October, people familiar with the matter said, intensifying its rivalry with Apple’s iPad.

For other daily deal providers in the space, ranging from Groupon to Google, the entrance of Amazon may be intimidating. Despite announcing the launch in New York City only today, it has already sold 80 vouchers for food and drinks in downtown New York; 121 vouchers to hot yoga in the Upper West Side; 581 tickets to Cirque du Soleil’s “Zarkana” performance; and 259 vouchers to a restaurant in Brooklyn.

But! It certainly seems as if Twitter is finally getting ready to open up an Official New York Office. For real.

Elizabeth Weil, who runs “culture” for the site, appears to have spent the last few days building out the thing by hand, with frequent visits to Home Depot. We’re still waiting for Official Confirmation From Twitter, but the new office appears to have a security system, Wi-Fi and coffee mugs. Plans also call for a “big ass map.”

So, at the risk of jumping the gun — Welcome To New York For Real, Twitter! (UPDATE: Twitter confirms that this is not, in fact, an elaborate HPOA-style prank: “We have a new perch in NYC, to house our growing flock there. #twitternyc opened this morning.”)

A couple of orientation notes: You’ll find your pals at Facebook down the street. If you ever have the urge to talk to the Google guys about anything, they’re about a mile downtown, on the West Side, right by the Apple store and all those dudes wearing too much Axe. Spotify rents some space in the same building, if you still need an invite. (And while you’re there, definitely check out the High Line. Seriously.)

Most important: It’s not “Mad Men” time anymore, so the ad guys you need to talk to aren’t all located on Madison Avenue. You may need to head downtown to Hudson Square, or even across the river to Brooklyn, to find some of them. Apparently it’s once again safe to swim over there.

(Careful when you walk, though.)

Do you think Zynga’s Mark Pincus would put a cat on his head for a national magazine shoot? Or LinkedIn’s Jeff Weiner? Or, perish the thought, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook?

But the wacky stylings of Groupon CEO and co-founder Andrew Mason seem to demand it.

Thus, straight-faced, he appears in a very long article, titled “Letter From Chicago: Groupon Therapy,” in this month’s Vanity Fair magazine with a very fat tabby cat clawing onto his noggin.

There’s also a shot of Mason in the equally kooky “Michael’s Room” at Groupon HQ and the expected plethora of ironic hipster anecdotes, such as the opening one about Mason almost giving a spotted pony to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg on a visit.

According to the piece:

“He had originally planned to give the mayor a puppy, but decided that a pony would be even more memorable. ‘I mean, it’s such a heavy thing to gift someone,’ he said, laughing. ‘I thought it would be funny to give it to somebody as busy as the mayor.’”

Buuuuurnnn!

Otherwise, it runs through all the whistlestops of the basic Groupon story — about its aggressively non-corporate nature, the pros and cons of using the social buying service, the insidious copycat competitors, the famously rejected $6 billion Google acquisition offer and, finally, the splashy upcoming IPO.

Also, as usual, the fretful worries about Groupon’s staying power, as evidenced by the Emma Stone-tastic cover tagline:

“Is Groupon This Year’s Facebook? (or Next Year’s Pets.com?)”

How about let’s be a little more creative and say neither.

Moving along, of course, plenty about the lovable Yogi Bear of a CEO, Mason, who apparently plays the accordion (who knew?), but who one close friend insisted was also highly disciplined and serious.

Of course he is, but not for lack of trying to seem not so much that way.

As he is quoted in Vanity Fair telling a group of new Groupon employees at an orientation session: “As we get bigger, instead of being like most companies, conforming and becoming more normal, we want to become weirder.”

With that cat on his head, this month at least: Mission accomplished, Andrew!

You can also check out more Mason funster times in this video of a very entertaining interview I did with him at the ninth D: All Things Digital conference recently:

(Photo credit: Martin Schoeller, exclusively for Vanity Fair.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110705/yes-that-is-a-cat-on-the-head-of-a-soon-to-be-public-company-ceo-and-of-course-its-groupons-andrew-mason/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110630/bloomberg-to-saic-new-york-city-would-its-600-million-back-please/ http://allthingsd.com/20110630/bloomberg-to-saic-new-york-city-would-its-600-million-back-please/#comments Thu, 30 Jun 2011 14:00:47 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=93141 Like so many cities and states around the country, New York City, America’s most populous, has been struggling with a budget gap. Without enough money coming in, the city council and Mayor Mike Bloomberg have been forced to make difficult and painful choices concerning what the city will do without in 2012.

The result is a $66 billion budget, approved this week. Before that, a $600 million deficit had been projected. The budget assumes that some 2,600 teachers will quit their jobs this summer and won’t be replaced, meaning the pool of teachers will ultimately shrink. Schools citywide will have to trim a combined $178 million from their budgets. Twenty firehouses that had been threatened with closure will remain open, though there will, however, be some painful cuts at the Administration for Children’s Services. Some workers there will lose their jobs, and the budget for child care vouchers will be cut.

Not that there’s any direct connection, but oddly enough $600 million is the same amount Bloomberg has just demanded from the IT company SAIC, an $11 billion (2010 sales) concern that specializes in government work. It reported a $618 million profit for the year ended Jan. 31, and as of that date had $3.8 billion in cash on its balance sheet.

SAIC was the lead contractor on a years-long project to supply the city with a timekeeping and payroll system used by 160,000 city employees. The system works just fine now, but it took 12 years to get it up and running, and ultimately cost $738 million, nearly 11 times the initial estimate of $68 million. It’s called CityTime, a word that has become synonymous with the kind of outrageous scandal that would make any taxpayer’s blood boil.

In May, a former project manager for SAIC, Gerard Denault, was arrested on charges of receiving more than $5 million in illegal kickbacks, federal authorities said Friday. Before Denault, six others — four of them consultants to the city’s Office of Payroll Administration, two of them relatives of those consultants — were charged in an elaborate scheme to defraud the city of $80 million.

Nine days ago, Reddy and Padma Allen — a married couple and the two top executives of TechnoDyne, a New Jersey-based subcontractor on the project — were indicted by a federal grand jury. They have not been located. Naturalized U.S. citizens from India, the Allens are thought to have returned to that country. Another former SAIC employee, Carl Bell, who was the chief systems engineer on the project, pleaded guilty to charges including wire-fraud conspiracy, wire fraud, and money-laundering conspiracy.

Federal prosecutors say the scheme was hatched by Mark Mazer, a consultant to the city’s Office of Payroll Administration. Mazer was close to that agency’s executive director, and thus had what amounted to carte blanche in approving additional city contracts on the project. The executive director, Joel Bondy, resigned last year and isn’t charged with any crime.

All the defendants stand accused of committing fraud against the city, essentially by hiring numerous unneeded consultants at inflated rates averaging out to $160 an hour, and — oddly enough, given the project they were working on — fibbing on their time cards by billing the city for hours they didn’t actually work.

The federal indictment says Denault and Bell fed $400 million from SAIC to TechnoDyne in exchange for $15 million in kickbacks. Technodyne then paid $75 million to two smaller subcontractors who then provided $25 million to Mazer, the indictment says. One of those subcontractors pleaded guilty in the scheme and is cooperating with prosecutors.

It’s a tremendous mess, and has been described as one of the most brazen frauds ever committed in the city of New York. For the city that was home to Tammany Hall, that’s saying something. Before its name became associated with fraud, CityTime was at heart an IT project meant to streamline the costly and complicated process of tracking the comings and goings of city workers in hopes of squeezing some cost savings out of it. The system was declared fully operational last month.

What I always fail to understand in cases like this is the disconnect between technology and services used in government and those in the private sector. I spend my days writing about and talking to companies large and small whose very reason to exist is to make some business process easier. Payroll and timekeeping are business processes that most companies farm out to third parties that specialize in them. It comes down to doing math. A person gets paid at a flat salary or by the hour at a specified rate, and checks in when he or she is working, then checks out when the shift is over. Computers can do the math easily enough. The complexity comes from making the system universally accessible across multiple agencies with different working conditions and different kinds of jobs, and having them all feed in to a single system.

I’ll admit it’s a complex problem, but I’m still left scratching my head. By the end of the month, New York City will have some 165,000 employees using CityTime. With a little Googling I can find 25 large U.S.-based companies who have more employees than that. Companies with large work forces as varied as Yum Brands, FedEx, Verizon, UPS and Wal-Mart have all cracked the payroll and timekeeping nut, and they’re not exactly using abacuses. I’m forced to wonder: What was so hard about this that so many consultants were thought to be necessary without anyone wondering why?

Mayor Bloomberg has asked for the city’s money back. All $600 million of it. Given all that’s happened, it seems a reasonable request. His letter to SAIC is below. SAIC has said that it voluntarily paid the city back $2.5 million for the work done by Denault. It also said that in light of the circumstances it’s willing to “discuss appropriate resolution of this matter.”

2011 06 29 Michael Bloomberg Letter Saic Citytime 600M Refund

(Image from the NYC Mayor’s Office Flickr stream.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110630/bloomberg-to-saic-new-york-city-would-its-600-million-back-please/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110610/an-unlikely-pair-me-and-glamour-magazine-tackle-women-in-tech-conundrum-this-fall/ http://allthingsd.com/20110610/an-unlikely-pair-me-and-glamour-magazine-tackle-women-in-tech-conundrum-this-fall/#comments Fri, 10 Jun 2011 13:01:38 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=85309

As readers of mine know, I write a semi-ranty post now and again about the lack of women in high-level tech jobs and on the boards of its major companies.

While things are a lot better in the digital industry than, say, in meat-packing, it is still a slow slog to equality in both power and influence, even with ever more enlightened male tech leaders.

Many years ago, for example, I posted a piece, titled “The Men and (No) Women Facebook of Facebook Management” There were none in the high echelons of the social networking start-up at the time.

More recently, I wrote a piece — “The Men and No Women of Web 2.0 Boards (BoomTown’s Talking to You: Twitter, Facebook, Zynga, Groupon and Foursquare)” — about how all the often touchy-feely men entrepreneurs of the hottest Web 2.0 companies had a glaring problem.

While most of them have women as a majority of their customers, they could not seem to find even one qualified woman for any of their boards.

This makes it a struggle even in programming our D: All Things Digital conferences. We have featured almost every significant female tech exec we could — from eBay’s Meg Whitman to Hewlett-Packard’s Carly Fiorina to Yahoo’s Sue Decker and, later, Carol Bartz to Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg to this year’s amazing DARPA head Dr. Regina Dugan.

But it is still definitely not enough and a failing we think about improving all the time.

I could go on — and I am going to go on even more this fall in the pages of Glamour magazine, which has asked me to write an essay on where all the women in tech are and what is their status today and in the future.

I will also be part of what I hope will be a provocative panel, moderated by Glamour editor-in-chief Cindi Leive, in New York City on October 11.

The panel, said Glamour, “will ask where all the women are and why don’t we see more of them — and tell why the next Mark Zuckerberg should be a ‘Marcia.’”

I am not so sanguine that that will occur anytime soon, but it will be good to talk about this important issue. Diversity is at the heart of true innovation and more of it is needed for tech to thrive in the coming years.

I will also be helping select the panelists for the Glamour event and would welcome any suggestions, especially some ideas that are not typical.

Until then, here’s the impressive Dugan at D9 last week, as well as a video of the movie trailer for 1995′s “Hackers,” in which Angelina Jolie plays a hard-charging techie who is her mostly dude colleagues’ equal.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110610/an-unlikely-pair-me-and-glamour-magazine-tackle-women-in-tech-conundrum-this-fall/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110404/aol-confirms-tim-stevens-as-engadget-editor-in-chief/ http://allthingsd.com/20110404/aol-confirms-tim-stevens-as-engadget-editor-in-chief/#comments Mon, 04 Apr 2011 14:08:37 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=42340

As BoomTown reported earlier, AOL has confirmed that Tim Stevens (pictured here in a classic Speed Racer pose, but see his real face below) will replace Josh Topolsky as editor in chief of Engadget.

Stevens has been working at the large tech gadget news and reviews site since 2007, most recently as its automotive editor.

Unusually, he was a part-timer at Engadget until a few months ago and lives several hours north of New York City, where AOL has its HQ. The company said Stevens will commute as necessary.

In his bio on the Engadget site, Stevens noted, in part, that he’s “an avid gamer, amateur motorsports enthusiast, lover of most outdoor activities, and proud creator of the first (and possibly only) two-player game for the Sega VMU.”

Geek credentials–check!

The appointment comes amid a fair bit of hubbub, with the announcement last night of a new competing tech site with eight new staff members, all of whom have recently left Engadget.

An Apple-obsessed, gadget-loving, nerdy-McNerd Gang of Eight!

That includes Topolsky, who is joining Jim Bankoff at his well-funded SB Nation sports and news start-up to launch the still-unnamed site.

Bankoff–in even more only-in-tech interconnectedness–was key to the purchase of Engadget many years ago when he was AOL’s top content exec.

An AOL spokesperson said in an email that “Engadget stays the same, with an obsessive focus on news.”

He correctly pointed out that “there’s a long tradition of handing down the editor in chief baton to someone from within: Pete Rojas to Ryan Block to Josh Topolsky to Tim Stevens.”

The site’s editorial director since 2009 has been Josh Fruhlinger. Recently promoted managing editor, Darren Murph, will also remain in the job at AOL.

In a statement to me, Fruhlinger said:

“As a member of Engadget since 2004, I know that we built our success on a commitment to what matters most to readers: staying focused on the latest technology news. Tim has a reputation for sharp news coverage and is a natural leader–our staffers are deeply loyal to him and stand behind him as we move on to the next generation of Engadget. Darren has an intuitive sense for discerning news and trends that matter. And we’re thrilled to be working with Arianna Huffington as part of The Huffington Post Media Group, as Arianna has a history of die-hard support for the work of journalists.”

Earlier Fruhlinger also tweeted: “In case anyone wondered, Engadget will be hitting tech news when we all wake up. Just like today. Just like 2004.”

Thus, everyone back to work as before!

Until more Engadget news is committed, here’s Stevens–who thinks he looks more like Racer X in the photo above–with an actual face on display (“I AM THE STIG” is yet another car-racing reference):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110404/aol-confirms-tim-stevens-as-engadget-editor-in-chief/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110318/facebook-twitter-finally-link-up-via-new-york-office-sublease/ http://allthingsd.com/20110318/facebook-twitter-finally-link-up-via-new-york-office-sublease/#comments Fri, 18 Mar 2011 14:49:50 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=30904 The last we heard about Twitter’s New York office was that Twitter did not have a New York office, just a place in New York where people go to work. But now that place that is not an office is going to move–to Facebook’s old office. Twitter will be subleasing Facebook’s old midtown space, which is just down the street from Facebook’s new midtown space, reports BetaBeat.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110318/facebook-twitter-finally-link-up-via-new-york-office-sublease/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110131/ibm-brings-the-cloud-to-new-york-city/ http://allthingsd.com/20110131/ibm-brings-the-cloud-to-new-york-city/#comments Mon, 31 Jan 2011 14:30:44 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=2579 Computing giant IBM has announced that it has landed a contract to consolidate the computing operations of 14 different New York City agencies to a modern cloud computing environment.

The contract, I’m told, is worth $7.7 million and covers the first part of a three-phase project called CITIServe, which will ultimately see the consolidation of 50 different municipal data center operations scattered around the city over five years. The city hopes to save $100 million on its IT budget over the five years. Helpful, yes, but it’s not likely to put much of a dent in the city’s budget deficit, which is expected to be $2.4 billion in the fiscal year beginning July 1.

It might not occur to the average New Yorker that the city has so many data centers. It certainly surprised me, though calling them data centers may be overstating it a bit. A few are groups of servers in back offices no bigger than 1,000 square feet. The plan is to get them centralized both physically and from a management perspective. Each agency has its own staff handling the management.

The first things that will be streamlined in this phase of the project are the help desk, hosting, storage, email, virtualization and network for several city departments, though neither IBM nor the city is saying yet exactly which departments are involved. A statement from the city last March said the departments of Education, Buildings, Housing Preservation and Development, Sanitation and Finance would be among the first involved. Finance itself will be a pretty big job. It collects $25 billion in taxes and other revenue, and assesses about a million individual properties collectively worth more than $1 trillion. Then there’s the matter of the 10 million parking tickets the city issues each year.

The agency in the spotlight is the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, which will be in charge of managing the migration and then will run the new data centers once they’re operational. The plan is the result of a top-down 30-day study of the city’s IT infrastructure that Mayor Mike Bloomberg ordered last year.

Getting these services centralized will make them easier to protect and reduce the power needed to run them, thus reducing the city government’s carbon footprint, says David Cohn, program manager of the Smarter Cloud program at IBM Research. It’s not uncommon for servers that are set up to run just one application to use only 10 percent of their computing capacity, and then sit idle the rest of the time, burning electricity throughout that idle time.

“Getting a smaller number of systems running more applications and using less power is just the beginning,” Cohn told me. “After that you start developing deeper insight into where all your information is going that you couldn’t get before.”

It’s a positive sign for IBM on the cloud computing front. You may remember that Ric Telford, IBM’s VP of cloud services, said government is a segment it considers a priority this year. If New York successfully adopts the cloud, more will probably follow.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110131/ibm-brings-the-cloud-to-new-york-city/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110126/nyc%e2%80%99s-new-digital-chief-goes-private-on-facebook/ http://allthingsd.com/20110126/nyc%e2%80%99s-new-digital-chief-goes-private-on-facebook/#comments Wed, 26 Jan 2011 08:00:10 +0000 Michael Howard Saul http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=35595 Rachel Sterne, New York City’s first chief digital officer, was hired to improve the city’s online communications. But one day after the Bloomberg administration announced her appointment, the 27-year-old digital guru increased the privacy restrictions on her Facebook page–allowing her fellow New Yorkers less access to her online persona.

As of Monday, The Wall Street Journal–like the public at large–had access to Sterne’s Facebook “wall,” a place where people can post messages for Sterne and others to see. The city’s new digital commander-in-chief posted news of her new job in the space, prompting a flurry of responses from other Facebook users.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110126/nyc%e2%80%99s-new-digital-chief-goes-private-on-facebook/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110110/verizon-iphone-what-att-worry/ http://allthingsd.com/20110110/verizon-iphone-what-att-worry/#comments Mon, 10 Jan 2011 18:11:43 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=55493 Another question to ponder on the eve of the iPhone’s debut on Verizon: Now that its archrival has the device on which it once had an exclusive, a device that has done so much for its bottom line, how will AT&T respond?

Or, rather, how has it been responding? Because it’s clear the company has been preparing for this moment for some time. Last year, it accelerated upgrade eligibility for iPhone customers, making it easier for them to get the iPhone 4 when Apple released it. And it locked them all into two-year contracts in the process. And then, last week, it drastically reduced the price of the iPhone 3GS, halving it to $49 from $99.

Presumably, AT&T could follow this with additional pricing promotions that could further limit iPhone subscriber defections to Verizon, though at this point one could argue that it’s as well prepared for its loss of iPhone exclusivity as it will ever be.

Why? Two big reasons:

1. According to Piper Jaffray analyst Christopher Larsen, nearly 80 percent of AT&T iPhone users are currently on family or corporate plans, which makes switching to a new carrier a difficult proposition.
2. Approximately 75 percent of them still have at least a year left on their contracts.

And there’s a third wild-card reason as well: How Verizon’s network fares after a big influx of data-heavy iPhone subscribers. That’s tough to predict, but two analysts I’ve spoken with said they expect Verizon to suffer some network growing pains, though not as bad as the ones suffered by AT&T. Ultimately, Verizon is starting off with a better network, and CDMA is said to be a more spectrally efficient standard than UMTS.

So will there be some AT&T subscribers who switch to Verizon when it begins selling the iPhone? Certainly. But they may not be nearly as large in number as you might think.

“AT&T has done everything it can,” Needham and Co. analyst Charlie Wolf told me this morning. “The company locked in a lot of iPhone owners by waiving early termination fees last summer. It’s moved aggressively to add a bunch of BlackBerrys and Android phones. And it should be remembered that AT&T will continue to sell the iPhone. So I doubt that the loss of subscribers to Verizon will be that large. But it could be material as it pertains to the bragging rights between AT&T and Verizon. “

PREVIOUSLY:

• Why Verizon’s iPhone Won’t Be So Bad for RIM
• How Might the Verizon iPhone Differ From the iPhone 4 (Besides Being Able to Make Calls)?
• Tired: Speculating About Verizon iPhone. Wired: Speculating About Verizon iPhone Sales.
• Verizon iPhone to Debut With Unlimited Data Plan
• Apple CEO Likely to Appear at Verizon iPhone Event
• Verizon Event Set for Tuesday–iPhone Time

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110110/verizon-iphone-what-att-worry/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110110/tired-speculating-about-verizon-iphone-wired-speculating-about-verizon-iphone-sales/ http://allthingsd.com/20110110/tired-speculating-about-verizon-iphone-wired-speculating-about-verizon-iphone-sales/#comments Mon, 10 Jan 2011 11:16:10 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=55465 Verizon Wireless will hold an event in New York tomorrow where, as we first reported here, it will announce the availability of Apple’s iPhone on its network. And when it does, it will halt once and for all the near-pathological Verizon iPhone speculation that preceded it.

But only because those who speculated about the existence of a Verizon iPhone have been struck by a new monomania: Speculating about first-year Verizon iPhone sales numbers.

Indeed, the sales estimates are already rolling out, with the consensus so far hovering between nine million and 12 milion.

“Some think 10 million is possible in the calendar year,” Wedge Partners analyst Brian Blair told me. “And I think it’s a reasonable assumption–not just because of what we’ve seen on AT&T but because you have three years of pent-up demand from users who are loyal to the Verizon network because of its coverage and reliability.”

Gleacher & Co. analyst Brian Marshall agrees, though he’s betting on sales hitting the top end of the range I mentioned.

“The iPhone on Verizon will sell 12 million units in calendar 2011 assuming there’s a ramp-up similar to the one AT&T experienced in 2007-2008 (i.e., 5 percent penetration of the postpaid subscriber base within five quarters of launch),” he told me, adding that AT&T will see a material decline in its iPhone sales as a result.

Taking a more conservative view of the iPhone’s prospects on Verizon is Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, who expects Verizon to activate roughly 25 million smartphones in calendar 2011, of which nine million will be iPhones.

Barclays Capital analyst James Ratcliffe too is betting on that nine-million figure, and of those he expects approximately 500,000 to one million to be purchased by AT&T switchers. Said Ratcliffe, “We don’t believe that the addition of a Verizon iPhone will be a seismic event in the wireless competitive environment, although we do expect it to result in a modest spike in AT&T churn, as customers who love their iPhones but have become unhappy with AT&T’s network take advantage of the alternative.”

PREVIOUSLY:

• Verizon iPhone to Debut With Unlimited Data Plan
• Apple CEO Likely to Appear at Verizon iPhone Event
• Verizon Event Set for Tuesday–iPhone Time

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110110/tired-speculating-about-verizon-iphone-wired-speculating-about-verizon-iphone-sales/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110109/verizon-iphone-to-debut-with-unlimited-data-plan/ http://allthingsd.com/20110109/verizon-iphone-to-debut-with-unlimited-data-plan/#comments Sun, 09 Jan 2011 19:05:15 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=55434 When the iPhone finally arrives on Verizon’s network, how will the carrier set it apart from the one that’s been offered by AT&T since it first debuted in 2007?

Here’s one way: By offering it with a wireless service plan free of the data caps used by AT&T.

Sources close to Verizon tell me the carrier will offer the iPhone with an unlimited data plan (presumably the same $30 unlimited plan it offers for other smartphones)–though they wouldn’t say for how long. That should distinguish it a bit more from the iPhone on AT&T, which requires a capped plan for data service.

Not that such differences worry AT&T any. “We think customers will prefer AT&T’s faster speeds and better functionality over a CDMA network device,” a spokesperson told me. And he has a point. AT&T’s UMTS network allows the use of data and voice simultaneously. Verizon’s CMDA network doesn’t–at least not yet. So, initially, Verizon iPhone users won’t be able to use the Web or check email while on a call–something AT&T iPhone users have long been able to do.

All Things D reported Friday that the special event Verizon is holding in New York Tuesday will be the carrier’s long-rumored iPhone announcement.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Apple CEO Likely to Appear at Verizon iPhone Event
• Verizon Event Set for Tuesday–iPhone Time

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110109/verizon-iphone-to-debut-with-unlimited-data-plan/feed/ 12