RIM’s BBM Service Suffers Partial Outage In Canada, Latin America

RIM, to put it mildly, has been having it rough these past few days. Among other things, they’ve failed to hit their quarterly revenue goal, sold far fewer PlayBooks than they had hoped, and potentially let their market share slip into the single digits.

After all that, RIM didn’t need any more problems, but another one has popped up anyway: it seems that their BBM and email service is partially down in a handful of countries.

A quick Twitter search shows that subscribers in Canada and Latin America seem to be the most stricken by the partial outages, with the Financial Post reporting that pockets of users on three of Canada’s carriers (Rogers, Bell, and WIND) have been affected. Meanwhile on the southern front, NTN24 states that the partial outage has affected people in Venezuela, Colombia, Panamá, Chile, México and Argentina. The outage may even be more widespread, as the Huffington Post reports that sporadic tweets from the UK and Egypt indicate similar service issues.

RIM has acknowledged the outage on their official BlackBerryHelp account, but the feed has yet to offer any salient details. In fairness, this may not be an end-of-the-world scenario for BlackBerry users, but the timing for RIM is atrocious. While I’m sure they have teams fighting to find a fix, consumer confidence in the Waterloo-based company may dip even more as a result of today’s issues.

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Sprint Cancels Store Leave, Confirms iPhone 5 Launch Window

Remember when a company memo telling employees they can’t take any time off in a two-week period was an occasion for gloom? That’s certainly not the case with the leak of an internal memo from Sprint management, which seems to suggest the iPhone 5 will be launching — on Sprint, as well as Verizon and AT&T — in the first half of October.


The memo, obtained by SprintFeed, reads: “due to the possibility of a major phone launch in October we are blacking out September 30th through October 15th.” In other words, batten down the hatches. No Sprint employee is leaving the store in the first two weeks of October. Something big is coming down the pike.

Bear in mind that we’ve seen reports since late August that Sprint will be a launch partner for Apple’s iPhone 5. Best Buy inadvertently confirmed that last weekend, via a leaked document that claimed the Sprint iPhone 5 would be available in the first week of October. And early Friday came word that Sprint’s unlimited data plan would be available on the iPhone 5 as well as other Sprint phones — making the number 3 carrier a serious competitor in the iPhone 5 stakes.

Our best guess for the iPhone 5 launch date is still Friday October 7. That lines up with the Best Buy report, another leak from an AT&T executive, another report from 9to5Mac — and it’s smack dab in the middle of Sprint’s blackout period.

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Google Explains Its Google Docs Outage

Google Docs suffered an extended outage this week, which raised concerns, yet again, about the reliability involved with storing mission-critical documents in the cloud. Personally, I’d rather trust Google’s redundant server infrastructure than my own hard drive. However, for enterprise users, the problem with cloud outages is that local I.T. staff can’t do anything about the problem, unless they use a third-party backup service, for example.

Today, Google is sharing details on what happened to its Docs service, and what it’s doing to correct the problem in the future.

According to a post on the Google Enterprise Blog, the outage was caused by a change designed to improve real time collaboration within the document list, says Google. This change exposed a memory management bug which was only evident under heavy usage.
Writes Alan Warren, Engineering Director:

Every time a Google Doc is modified, a machine looks up the servers that need to be updated. Due to the memory management bug, the lookup machines didn’t recycle their memory properly after each lookup, causing them to eventually run out of memory and restart. While they restarted, their load was picked up by the remaining lookup machines – making them run out of memory even faster. This meant that eventually the servers couldn’t properly process a large fraction of the requests to access document lists, documents, drawings, and scripts which led to the outage you saw on Wednesday. 

The entire outage lasted around 30 minutes, with 24 minutes dedicated to rolling back the changes, and 5 more minutes for the normal functioning of the service to fully resume.

According to Warren, analysis of the issue has enabled Google to reduce the chances of future events, decrease resolution times if such an event was to occur again, and limit the scope which any single problem can affect.

Again, for most casual users of Google Docs, the outage probably went by unnoticed. It’s the affected Google Apps business users who are most concerned by cloud outages such as this. Transitioning to the cloud is not without its faults, but let’s remember: no system is perfect, not even the one your I.T. guy used to run for you.

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Ever-Popular iPhone Named Top Smartphone. Again

The iPhone undoubtedly is among the most popular phones ever, and yet another survey shows it continues resonating with consumers.

In J.D. Powers’ semi-annual customer satisfaction survey, Apple’s iPhone takes the top spot yet again, making it the top smartphone brand five years running. Apple scored an 838 on the survey’s measure of performance, ease of operation, features, and physical design. HTC scored second place with 801.
“Our results are based on consumer experience. The intuitiveness of the device itself and ease of operation are important factors, and are cornerstones to most of Apple’s products,” says Kirk Parsons, senior director of wireless services at J.D. Power and Associates.

The online survey uses daily interviews to poll current owners of branded smartphones and people who don’t own a smartphone. The data is then collapsed into six month periods, so if you get a phone that’s well received, that manufacturer’s score rises accordingly.

“HTC and Motorola’s scores were closer overall to Apple last year than this year,” said Parsons.
“The iPhone is a beautiful jewel of a device, and it works just the way it should. It’s intuitive, and it’s dead simple,” says Leander Kahney, editor and publisher of Cult of Mac (and a former Wired.com managing editor and news editor). “It’s taken the pain out of personal computing in so many different ways.”

The iPhone has helped propel Apple to record revenues since its debut, breaking several sales records along the way. It was among the first smartphones to successfully implement a touchscreen and ditch the keyboard, making it utterly unlike peers like the first generation Sidekick phones, which featured QWERTY keyboards and no onscreen touch controls. With the introduction, and continued popularity, of the Apple App Store, the iOS solidified itself as a robust, capable platform on the iPhone.

Although the endless stream of rumors can get tiresome, the iPhone remains a buzz magnet because Apple’s upcoming products and technological developments are so closely guarded.

“Apple is so secretive. It’s such an aggressive company. There’s this great anticipation that they’re going to push the state of the art even further,” Kahney says. According to J.D. Powers and Associates, that certainly helps Apple stay at the top of the rankings.

“It’s not unexpected that satisfaction is higher for devices that have new technological advances or features,” said Parsons in the press release.

Or that consumer anticipation rises when those new technological advances get close to their release date.
For instance, reports of the iPhone coming to Sprint in October have persisted for the last few months, with analysts corroborating the move. But it now looks like Sprint not only will have the iPhone, they’ll be offering up unlimited data plans for the handset, too. Competitors Verizon and AT&T already have killed their unlimited data plans. Sprint currently offers a $100 unlimited data plan for BlackBerry smartphones and the HTC Evo.

Reports that ship times for the iPhone 4 were delayed, followed by the removal of shipping times on the Apple website’s product pages, the feeling that the next chapter in the iPhone saga is near has become practically palpable.

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Android App Lets You See Invisible Space

Well — invisible stuff IN space. Effusions of gamma rays, clouds of X-rays, “filaments, clouds, shells”, all known technically, if I recall, as space gush. Columbia Hubble Fellow Joshua Peek (almost certainly not the same guy as the rodeo Josh Peek) gets to look at these wonders through big telescopes. He collaborated with app developer Xperia to make an Android app, The Invisible Universe, so the rest of us could look at them with phones.

I don’t own an Android device, but now wish I did. No matter: this video about the project, a masterpiece of product understatement, leaves the app almost unmentioned as it chooses instead to simply Make Cool of Peek’s work. It nicely humanizes Peek, who seems hip and fun and smart, and the earthy attention paid to his office and lab — notebooks, drawings, lenses, stacked astrophysics journals — anchors us and the film. It’s gorgeous.

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LinkedIn Now Lets You Include Volunteer Experience in Your Profile

LinkedIn is adding a new “Volunteer Experience & Causes” field to profiles, the company announced Wednesday. The section will let users highlight and showcase their unpaid or charitable work experience.
Users can click off causes that mean the most to them, fill out an experience profile or add specific organizations — such as the American Red Cross or Habitat for Humanity — that they support.

Promoting your charitable experience will help get you a job, according to a recent survey by LinkedIn. The company polled nearly 2,000 U.S. professionals and found that 41% said that when they are evaluating candidates, they consider volunteer work just as much as paid work. Of the hiring managers surveyed, 20% said they gave a job based on a candidate’s volunteer work experience.

This is good and bad news. Of the 2,000 professionals surveyed, 89% had volunteer experience but only 45% included that information on their resume.

“A lot of people said, ‘I didn’t want to appear to be bragging, I see volunteering as something that I do on a very personal level and I don’t expect to be rewarded for it on a professional level,’” says Nicole Williams, LinkedIn’s connecting director.

Volunteering is a way of getting your nose out in front of other candidates, Williams says. It helps you meet potential employers or recommendations without having to search out paid work experience in a down economy.

“There are a lotof people that keep it private because they do it for themselves and i respect that,” Williams says. “But at the same time, I think there’s something to be proud of with your commitment to causes.”
What do you think of LinkedIn including volunteerism and causes? Will you add the section to your own profile? Let us know in the comments below.

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RadiumOne Gets Into The Group Messaging Game, Debuts App For iOS And Android PingMe

RadiumOne, an online ad network that aims to combine social and intent data to serve ads, is getting into the group messaging space today. The company is releasing a free, group messaging app for iOS and Android called PingMe Messenger that allows users to message each other in real-time, across platforms.

The app has actually come out of RadiumOne Labs, a division of RadiumOne, which incubates what the company calls ‘first-party products’ for the publisher community they serve. The first product to be released by RadiumOne Labs is PingMe.

Similar to other group messaging apps, PingMe gives users the ability to send realtime messages to friends and family without incurring text messaging costrs, similar to the act of sending a BBM on a BlackBerry phone. Once downloaded, the app allows users to connect with their friends through their telephone’s address book, Facebook, or the PingMe network. The registration process is fairly simple—your phone number is your user ID, and you don’t need a password or hard-to-remember PIN to connect with your friends.

With the app, which only cost $160K and took 4 months to develop, you can chat with friends in groups or individually with the same speed of messaging as BBM. And PingMe is free in the U.S. and worldwide and offers unlimited messaging.

Some of the more unique features of PingMe include an opt-in geo-location functionality that lets friends find each other based on their location, the ability to post status updates a news feed and PingMe tells you when someone sends you a message – even when PingMe is closed.

So why is a social advertising company getting into the group messaging game? Eventually, the goal is to offer a white label, skinned version of the app to publishers and advertisers that they can offer to customers, says founder Gurbaksh Chahal.

For background, RadiumOne mines social data and use this information to identify relevant consumers for brands. Through what Chahal calls “social retargeting,” RadiumOne analyzes how users interact with one another on social networks to find the consumers that identify with a brand’s current customer base, and then serves advertisements to this audience across the company’s network of publishers. The company just raised $21 million in new funding at a $200 million valuation.

RadiumOne Labs will be launching a number of similar white-label offerings for advertisers and publishers in the future for various products, Chahal explains. While PingMe will go head to head with GroupMe (recently acquired by Skype), Facebook, and others; Chahal doesn’t seem to be too worried about the competition and believes there’s still room for innovation in the group messaging space. RadiumOne will launch PingMe apps for BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7 devices in the next few weeks.

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