Live Blog

• After some brief introductory remarks from Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Robert Thomson, who jokes about implementing an 18-second delay for expletive-fond Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, and a welcome song from Jill Sobule, Walt welcomes Randall Stephenson to the stage and the second day of D7 begins.
• For a first question, Walt, referring to poll data, asks Stephenson why some folks might not be interested in buying an Apple iPhone because of AT&T. Stephenson notes that AT&T is improving network quality and reducing churn.
• Walt says he gets frequent reader mail complaining about AT&T service coverage. Stephenson says the company is way down the road in terms of the level of data traffic on the networks. Behavior changes radically. He says AT&T is a year ahead of other carriers in terms of network management, managing the volume and behavioral changes from adoption of new devices.
• Walt: Let’s talk for a moment about the iPhone. It’s a data-intensive device. You weren’t ready when you first launched the iPhone 3G. What happened? Stephenson says the company wasn’t quite ready. “But we’re improving.”
• Walt asks the audience how many people use AT&T. Many hands raised. How many had it before the iPhone? A fair bit. How many are satisfied with the service? Also a fair bit. Clearly, AT&T’s service must be getting better.
• The level of data volumes we are seeing on our networks is changing customer behavior dramatically, says Stephenson. This is challenging, but the company is addressing it.

• Walt: If we project out farther past the iPhone, are the mobile networks we have going to be able to handle these new data-intensive devices? Stephenson: The answer is clearly no. That’s why we’re buying more spectrum and moving toward LTE. What’s so good about LTE? Speed levels of 20 megs plus, for one, says Stephenson, who admits that real-world performance will be somewhat less than that.
• Stephenson says AT&T is more than doubling the theoretical speed of the network. Does this mean the speed of our handsets will also double, asks Walt. Not on current handsets. But on future ones, which will all be backward-compatible.
• When you upgrade the network to 7.2 will it have any negative impact on the network as data demands grow, asks Walt. Stephenson says no. “It’s all network management….We’ll have a whole new capacity.”
• Walt: In a world where both you and Verizon (VZ) go to LTE, will I be able to take my handset and switch to Verizon’s network? Stephenson says the LTE standard is consistent and should permit that.
• The conversation shifts to Wi-Fi. Walt asks about AT&T’s Wayport efforts. “When we look at the world today and the world of the future, the fixed-line bandwidth requirements are not slowing. Then you move to the wireless broadband world, where bandwidth requirements are not slowing either. You need a bridge between the two.” That bridge is WiFi, adds Stephenson, noting that the company sees extraordinary WiFi usage among it smartphone users.
• Stephenson talks for a moment about automatic authentication and says AT&T is working to implement it. “The current system is kludgey. People want it seamless.”
• Walt asks about the company’s broadband business. Stephenson says it’s doing well. Notes that it is doing nearly as well as Verizon’s FIOS business.

• Walt asks how the economy is affecting AT&T’s various businesses and the advance of the company’s capital spending plans. Stephenson says the board business has obviously been affected. Business is slowing especially in enterprise and the consumer phone business. Interestingly enough, people are more apt to disconnect the home phones than they are broadband. So AT&T continues to aggressively invest in mobile apps and in wireless infrastructure. He notes that the company is really pushing hard to build out its U-verse network. “I’ve been through a few of these recessions in my 20 years in this business, and it will turn. So you must continue to invest and prepare for the day when it does.”
• What about competitors? What are they doing? In wireless, says Stephenson, competitors also investing. A lot of capital is coming into the wireless business. In broadband, cable guys have not slowed down. Telecom structurally in a good place. Regulatory structure continues to bring in capital.
• Back to the issue of the iPhone. Was it worth it to sign the deal with Apple (AAPL)? How has it worked out? “It’s worked out terrific. We have no complaints.” He notes that the company incurred dilution, but has benefited by getting the premier customer in the space–one with high data usage and low churn. “I’m very pleased with the deal.”
• Walt asks if the company has suffered from the iPhone’s fixed data charges. It’s not a variable charge. How does that offset the dilution that AT&T has to pay? We made a bet, says Stephenson, that the industry was heading toward smartphones, and that was a good bet. Now we’re seeing dramatic uptakes in usage, so the pricing model must change. And it will change. The market will dictate that change more than anything else. But right now the economics of the iPhone are very good for us.
• Walt: Have you ever called Steve Jobs and just asked him to put a keyboard on the iPhone? Stephenson chuckles. No. “If Steve wants to put a keyboard on the iPhone, I’m sure he will.”
• Walt: Are all these new operating systems arriving at market problematic for AT&T? The iPhone, Palm’s (PALM) WebOS, Android? Would it be easier if there were fewer platforms? Stephenson: Do I want to see fewer platforms? Yes, it’s better for my business. Will I see fewer platforms? I don’t think so. So we need to take advantage of it and use it as an opportunity.

• What about the Palm Pre? “Would I like to see the Pre on our network some day? Of course I would,” says Stephenson. “We obviously talk to all the handset manufacturers. We want a broad selection of devices in the lineup. That’s important. Devices right now are what’s driving the customer adoption as much as anything.”
• Stephenson says he’s seeing dramatic uptakes in data usage. Pricing models will change over time, he says. How it changes will depend who you are. He notes that costs are variable in wireless–every new bit has a direct cost tied to it, unlike wireline business. AT&T margins are 40 percent-plus in Q1 on wireless business.
• Walt: Can you foresee a day when you’re not running retail stores? Why do you want to run stores when you’re really a network company? Stephenson says distribution is changing. But a retail presence is always going to very important, and I always want to have a part of that.
• Moving on to the Q&A: How do you transform wireline customers into wireless and broadband customers? Integration is very important, says Stephenson. If you already have AT&T Wireless, it’s a natural step to add broadband and even wireline if it’s offered as a bundle.
• Why can’t we have data roaming on LTE from the beginning and avoid the mistakes of the 3G networks? Stephenson says the LTE network will have similar roaming agreements as those on the current networks. “It’s in all our best interests.” The industry always evolves to a point where broader coverage is needed and these agreements become necessary. You’ll see that with LTE as well.
• Question about SlingBox on 3G network being rejected: Who decided that? Stephenson says that terms of service agreement for the customer do not allow customers to move live stream video over the wireless platform. Not like the fixed line side. If you start congesting network with data, voice quality goes down. We have to maintain some quality, so it’s not allowed under terms of service.
• Responding to a question on warrantlessly providing data about customers to the government, Stephenson says AT&T will act within the law in all regards to customer information and privacy. “We will comply with the law, absolutely,” he says.

A note about our coverage: This liveblog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations written and posted to the Web as quickly as we were able. It was not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

http://allthingsd.com/20080819/mapping-your-digital-photo-world/ http://allthingsd.com/20080819/mapping-your-digital-photo-world/#comments Wed, 20 Aug 2008 01:02:02 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/20080819/mapping-your-digital-photo-world/ After spending summer vacation shooting the sights, many people face the same chore: labeling and organizing digital photos before forgetting what they are and where they were taken.

Now there’s a way to upload photos that are already labeled with their exact latitude and longitude using geotagging, the fancy name for labeling data with information on its geographic origin. Photos with “geotags” have coordinates embedded invisibly in them. Some programs or online photo services use these tags to generate maps showing just where each photo was taken, or to label or organize the images. Not long ago, this capability was mostly done through manual labeling or with costly equipment.

The $129 Eye-Fi Explore Card from Eye-Fi Inc. gives people the ability to wirelessly send geotagged photos from a digital camera.

This week, I tested the $129 Eye-Fi Explore Card (EyeFi.com), a special two-gigabyte memory card from Eye-Fi Inc. that adds a photo geotagging feature to Eye-Fi’s original functionality: the automatic wireless uploading of photos, straight from a digital camera to a home computer or photo-sharing service. If all goes well, users can capture and upload what are essentially geographically prelabeled batches of digital photos — with minimal effort and time.

But after days of testing, I found myself more frustrated as I used this wireless memory card in various places and situations, and found the tagging to be unreliable in one scenario. (Eye-Fi Inc. said my experiences weren’t typical.) At home in Washington, D.C., and while on a business trip to California, I tried it using a two-year-old Kodak digital camera and two different Vista laptops, though it also works on Macs.

Eye-Fi introduced the Explore Card as a follow-up to the company’s original wireless memory card, which it introduced last fall. Once set up, the first Eye-Fi card initiated the transferring of photos to a computer or Web site whenever the digital camera was turned on and as long as it was near a pre-associated wireless network.

Through a partnership with Skyhook Wireless, the Explore card can automatically label photos with their latitude and longitude using data from the Skyhook’s Wi-Fi positioning system. As long as a photo is captured within the Skyhook coverage area, which the company says covers 70% of North America, and the geotagging is enabled, each photo will be coded with data identifying where it was captured.

The Explore Card turned otherwise normal photo-sharing sites into mini maps showing where I had traveled while on a business trip in Silicon Valley. I set my account up to work with Flickr, Kodak Gallery, Snapfish, Shutterfly and Picasa Web Albums, though only one will work at a time. Flickr, Picasa Web Albums and Smugmug make use of geotagged photos by tagging shots with their location data, such as “Downtown Palo Alto, California.” I used Flickr and Picasa Web Albums to instantaneously generate a map showing where I was when I took photos.

On Flickr, each image was represented by a pink dot associated with one of several photos displayed in a horizontal bar below the map. This map can be searched for specific tags (photo labels) or locations and can be narrowed to show images from everyone who uses Flickr, just your own photostream, or only photos from friends or contacts. My searches returned results in seconds, finding shots that were geotagged with “Palo Alto” and tagged by me as containing flowers. I enjoyed looking at other Flickr users’ photos when I searched everyone’s images, specifically in cities where I recognized landmarks.

Picasa Web Albums showed each geotagged image on a map by placing tiny versions of each photo on the map. In certain cases, when I had multiple photos taken at the same spot, photos appeared with lines drawn from them to a spot, much like spokes of a wheel. I also looked at my Picasa photos on maps in Google Earth; a quick link to the program is conveniently found at the top of the Picasa Web Albums screen.

Another key feature of the Explore Card is its hotspot connectivity. The card is capable of working in any Wayport location, which includes McDonald’s (MCD) restaurants and certain airports and hotels. Though using Wayport locations normally requires sign-ins and/or payment via a computer screen, the Explore Card works as soon as the camera is turned on in these locations. This service is free for the first year, but after that, it costs $19 annually to continue.

Finally, the Explore Card notifies users via SMS or email messages when photos have either started or finished uploading; or if these uploads are interrupted, which happened to me a few times. This is useful in Wayport wireless zones, where the camera has no real way of signaling when an upload is finished or when a computer isn’t handy.

In a hotel with a flaky Wi-Fi network, the Explore Card was crippled, though I blame the hotel for this inconvenience. But even when I traveled to a local McDonald’s, where Eye-Fi’s maker has a deal for free Wi-Fi for its cards, the Eye-Fi stuttered and couldn’t consistently upload photos. When I plugged the card directly into my laptops, the results weren’t much better.

If you aren’t within Wi-Fi range while taking a photo, it won’t be geotagged. I ran into this issue in one instance: On California’s highway 101, I took a handful of photos, but when I checked my Eye-Fi account later, none of these photos was automatically geotagged.

Some people worry about privacy settings when it comes to uploading geotagged photos directly to a sharing Web site. Settings within the Eye-Fi Manager make it easy to adjust permissions to determine who can see your photos within each of about 25 sharing sites.

Users can opt to share photos only to a home computer through their own Wi-Fi network, and a special card is designed for just that: the $79 Eye-Fi Home. This is meant to serve as a shortcut for transfers.

The original Eye-Fi, which costs $99, was a useful tool as a wireless memory card, but I didn’t have as much luck with the more expensive Eye-Fi Explore. Still, when it did work, I found geotagging to be a great way of automatically labeling and organizing my photos. Instead of just being neatly stored in a folder on your computer, geotagged images are given a spark of life and relevancy when plotted out on a map.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email: mossbergsolution@wsj.com

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