Revere Digital

Managing children’s screen time has been a perennial concern for parents -- even back when there was only one screen in the home to monitor.

PBS Kids has applied a contemporary solution to this familiar parenting challenge: An app that allows parents to monitor which videos their children watch on PBSKids.org, what games they’re playing on the site and what they’ve learned along the way.

The new PBS Kids Super Vision app even lets parents set a timer that effectively puts the PBSKids.org site to sleep when it’s bedtime, dinner time or simply time for the child to move away from the computer screen.

“The kids know that there are rules, and when the show is over that’s enough -- but I like having that reinforcement,” said Abby Jenkins, a mother of two boys, ages 2 and 5, who has had access to a pre-release version of the app as a PBS employee.

PBS Kids Digital Vice president Sara DeWitt said the app was developed in response to a series of focus group meetings with parents, who said they think of PBS as educational but don’t know enough about the programs or the educational skills these shows seek to develop.

Dish Networks is trying to put together an “over the top” pay-TV offering, which would deliver cable channels over the Web, priced at around $30 a month.

But rival satellite service DirecTV doesn’t seem all that intrigued by the notion.

CEO Mike White talked about the pros and cons of selling Web TV. Short version: It’s easy, technically speaking, to stream pay TV over the Internet. But it’s hard to make much money assembling a package of channels that the TV programmers would be willing to sell, at a price consumers would be willing to pay -- because no one in the TV Industrial Complex wants to fundamentally disrupt their own business, which is still working very nicely.

Each of the top mobile operating systems -- Android and Apple’s iOS -- has some obvious features that the other is missing. And it would benefit consumers if each adopted its own version of these. These are some things Apple and Google could learn from each other:

• Email: Android typically comes with two email apps, one of which is strictly reserved for Google’s Gmail. On the other hand, Android’s main email app, the one for Gmail, allows you to attach any file to an email as you are composing it.
• Screens: In both systems, the screens are mainly filled with icons that launch apps. But Android offers more creative options.
• Quick Settings: Because wading through smartphone settings can be tedious, both platforms include a quick-settings feature -- with a subset of common settings, like turning on airplane mode or adjusting brightness -- that you access by simply swiping from the top or bottom of the screen. By contrast, on the latest Samsung, the “quick” settings are so long you either have to swipe through a row of icons wider than the screen, or select an even more extensive list with 20 settings that includes marginal items.
• Privacy control: On iOS, there’s a special settings section for controlling privacy. It allows you to decide which apps can use your location, contacts, calendar, photos, microphone and more -- all in one place. Some of these options are available on Android, but I couldn’t find any similar, detailed, unified privacy-control panel on the latest Samsung, Nexus or HTC models.
• Customization: Apple doesn’t allow iPhone users to customize common features like the lock screen (beyond choosing a photo or design) and keyboard. By contrast, many Android phones do allow customization.
• Tablet apps: Apple boasts around half a million apps optimized for the iPad in its App Store. These apps make use of the larger tablet screen to add additional panels or other user interface features that aren’t available in iPhone versions.

[Commentary] Once again, T-Mobile is boasting about how its wireless growth outpaced the rest of the industry combined.

And rarely does a week go by without CEO John Legere touting all of the many ways that his un-carrier is shaking things up. But the question now is whether those market share gains -- and all that bluster -- will actually make it harder for T-Mobile and Sprint to complete a merger that many say the companies need to become a long-term competitor to Verizon and AT&T.

“The answer is 100 percent yes,” said wireless industry analyst Chetan Sharma. “It would have been easier to push through a deal if T-Mobile was weaker than it is today. In an ironic twist of fate, the recent success of T-Mobile has worked against them.”

[Commentary] Mobile technology is now a ubiquitous part of our daily lives, whether we’re texting friends, checking the headlines, or mobilizing a protest. While smartphone technology remains most prevalent in the “developed” world, this is rapidly changing as the cost of devices drops, making smartphones more accessible to the growing middle classes in emerging markets (check out the $25 smartphone Mozilla showed off at Mobile World Congress in February).

Feature phones -- cellphones not connected to the Internet -- are already revolutionizing the lives of farmers, educators and health-care providers in the developing world. With the power of the Internet at their fingertips, individuals, families and entire communities will be further empowered.

Right now, emerging-market consumers conserve their Internet activity for opportunities when they have access to a wireless network, which may be once a week or less. Even if they have access to a wireless network, the high cost of data plans bars many people from accessing the Internet via their phone. In parallel to innovating down the cost of smartphone devices, we also have to tackle the critical issue of insufficient network infrastructure in the developing world.

The real challenge has to do with sustainability: Mobile network operators (MNOs) need to develop business models that allow them to profit from bringing data networks to poor and remote parts of the world. I believe the best form of smart, sustainable development comes from incentivizing existing, scalable business models.

One way to catch these consumers as their spending power grows could be for MNOs to partner directly with advertisers or application developers; this is already happening in the developed world, where phone carriers and makers have deals with certain search engines or map applications. Even if young users in Kenya or Ghana don’t have the money to spend on products just yet, as the consumer class in emerging markets grows, they will be extremely valuable to any business looking to hook a new generation of buyers.

[Eberhard is CEO and Founder, Mobile Accord]

Silicon Valley companies may not like official Washington sometimes, but they’re increasingly happy to throw it a party. Google, Facebook, Microsoft and a handful of other tech companies are hosting bashes as Washington politicians and journalists party during White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner weekend, an annual schmooze- and selfie-fest that started with a dinner and has grown into a four-day party marathon.

Nine parties are planned, including an event at the Institute for Peace co-sponsored by Google and Netflix which will include actors from Netflix’s “House of Cards.” Across town, Microsoft and AOL are helping sponsor a “New Media Party” that will feature craft cocktails, “spheres over the dance floor enabling guests to download music” and miniature talking robots.

For firms like Google and Facebook, the parties represent a chance to gin up some goodwill among lawmakers, administration officials and journalists. Other tech companies, such as BuzzFeed and Yahoo, are using the weekend to draw attention to their burgeoning new media operations.

[Commentary] Comcast and Time Warner Cable? Doable, but rough. Sprint and T-Mobile? Really rough. But if AT&T wants to buy DirecTV, it has decent odds of getting it done.

At least from the regulators’ perspective. So let’s say regulators say the deal is OK with them. What does it do for AT&T? That one is harder to parse. It’s hard to argue, as Comcast and Time Warner Cable can, that the two companies can find operational efficiencies -- since maintaining telecommunications/broadband pipes and operating satellite TV networks are two distinct things.

The most obvious answer is that combining the two companies will give them more power when it comes to negotiating licensing deals with TV programmers. But that’s only relevant if AT&T decides or is allowed to keep its pay TV subscribers. And even then, the combined company may not be able to do much more than it was doing as two separate companies. Analyst Craig Moffett estimates that AT&T might eventually end up saving $400 million a year in programming costs.

T-Mobile is trying to walk a fine line as it touts the gains it is making as an independent company while still arguing that further consolidation would benefit consumers.

T-Mobile Chief Financial Officer Braxton Carter and marketing chief Mike Sievert said that a potential combination with Sprint or another entity would allow the company to take its “un-carrier” approach to more consumers.

“We believe this is a scale industry,” Sievert said. “It would allow a disruptive player to become even more disruptive.”

Carter said it would be kind of like putting the un-carrier “on steroids.” Regulators in Washington, though, seem opposed to a Sprint-T-Mobile deal, although Sprint and SoftBank have been making the rounds in DC trying to put forward their case for why it could be a good thing.

The jury weighing the Apple-Samsung patent case heard more than 50 hours of testimony, but still has some questions they wish had been answered.

In a series of notes to the court, the deliberating jurors asked for more details on how Apple and Samsung chose the patents they sued over in this case, as well as what Steve Jobs said when Apple first decided to pursue its patent case against Samsung and whether Google was mentioned. They also asked what Samsung’s reaction was when it learned Apple believed it was infringing.

The jury is still out on the latest Apple-Samsung patent trial, but Samsung has already won the larger battle.

When the iPhone was introduced in 2007, Samsung’s US smartphone market share was about 10 percent. By mid-2010 it had dropped to about half that level. By 2013, Samsung had more than rebounded, nabbing nearly a third of the US market in some quarters.

For all Apple’s legal victories, including a roughly $1 billion verdict in the last patent trial, Samsung has continued to grow its share of the smartphone market, both in the US and globally.