AT&T’s New Shared Data Plans Won’t Deliver ROI for Most

AT&T will begin offering shared data plans in late August. That means the Motorola Atrix HD, an AT&T exclusive phone, could share its chunk of data with other smartphones and tablets on the same bill. Photo: Peter McCollough/Wired

AT&T is following in Verizon’s footsteps as the second major U.S. carrier to offer a single shared data plan across multiple devices. The “Mobile Share” plans, which AT&T announced on Wednesday, essentially work the same way as Verizon’s “Share Everything” plans, which were announced last month.

And like Verizon’s offerings, AT&T’s plans won’t be cheap.

The Mobile Share plans, which AT&T has talked about for months now and will begin offering in late August, offer unlimited minutes for phone calls and unlimited text messages. They work with up to 10 devices, one of which must be a smartphone.

AT&T subscribers who opt for the Mobile Share plans will have to pay a monthly fee for each smartphone they have tied to their bucket of shared data. The larger the data plan, the less expensive the monthly smartphone fee will be. For the base configuration, this means a charge of $45 per smartphone tied to 1GB of data at $40 a month. But if you opt for a 20GB shared data bucket, you’ll pay for $30 per smartphone tied to a $200 monthly data plan.

On top of that, users will have to pay monthly fees for non-smartphone devices tied to the shared plans. This clocks in at $30 for each “basic” non-smartphone handset, $20 per laptop or air card, and $10 per tablet or “gaming device,” such as Sony’s PS Vita.

The larger the data bucket is, the smaller the per-gigabyte price is — 1GB at $40 a month, 4GB at $70 a month, 6GB at $90 a month, 10GB at $120 a month, 15GB at $160 a month and 20GB at $200. AT&T will charge $15 (same price as Verizon) for every gigabyte of data consumed past a monthly allotment on the Mobile Share plans.

So, is this approach any cheaper than what AT&T is already offering? In some cases, a bit. In most cases, not at all.
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Hands-On With Twist, the App That Tells People You’ll Be Horribly Late

Don’t be late! When you create a twist on the Twist app, you can see your location along a route. Photo: Peter McCollough/Wired

Whether you have a habit of arriving awkwardly early or annoyingly late for meetings, a new app called Twist is here to help. The location-based app, which launched on Wednesday, is akin to Find My Friends, but adds the useful element of notifying family, friends or colleagues when you’re going to arrive at a specific location.

The app offers a clean and simple way to accomplish multiple tasks: Track a person’s location, receive directions, share photos along your route, send messages, and get venue and weather details. It’s not the snazziest-looking app, but the uncluttered experience is actually refreshing in a world where apps are trying to stuff as much as they can into the iPhone’s 3.5-inch screen. (Twist is currently only available on iOS.)

The app is especially helpful for someone like myself, who tends to show up early (or at least on time) for social gatherings. I end up sending friends an embarrassing amount of texts along the lines of, “Where are you? When are you getting here? How far away are you now, specifically? What bus are you on?”, etc. (Yes, it’s that bad.) So, instead of bombarding my contacts with all these queries, they could simply use Twist to proactively keep me abreast of their whereabouts with push notifications, texts or emails — and thus be saved from my interrogations. Plus, I can track a friend’s exact location within the app.

Twist is just as useful for people who are always running late to meet-ups. Instead of having to call or text apologies while you’re already speed-walking to your appointment (or, worst yet, driving), Twist does the work for you. And even though Twist is iOS only, the app can still send location notifications to people via text or email.

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Microsoft Promises Oct. 26 Launch Date for Windows 8

Microsoft Windows 8 to ship Oct. 26, 2012. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired

According to Microsoft’s official Windows blog, the company’s Steven Sinofsky just announced a firm ship date for Microsoft’s upcoming operating system, Windows 8, at its annual sales meeting. Sinofsky announced that the OS will ship as both an upgrade and on new PCs starting Oct. 26.

This follows a recent announcement that Windows 8 would ship sometime in October. Currently, it’s available as a Release Preview version. The firm ship date is a signal that the company has the product very near a final version. There is still, however, no firm ship date announced for its upcoming foray into hardware, the Surface.

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Flickr’s Engagement Problem May Be Too Big for Even Marissa Mayer

An utterly banal image of a Post-It we uploaded to various social sites yesterday for testing purposes. Photo: Mat Honan/Wired

Nobody loves Yahoo. But people do love some of its parts, most notably Flickr, the photo sharing site that once seemed poised to take on the world, at least until it was acquired by Yahoo, which largely squandered its potential. There was a point in time when Flickr could have been Instagram, or even Facebook. Instead it joined the ranks of Friendster and MySpace and other sites that also could have been, but never quite were.

Despite that, Flickr is still incredibly beloved — so much so that it represents a huge opportunity for Yahoo’s newest CEO. In short, who cares about the greater Yahoo whole? The real question is, Can Marissa Mayer save Flickr, the one Yahoo property with legitimate user affinity?

‬No matter what kind of upgrades its team rolls out, Flickr can’t be “awesome again” as long as it’s a ghost town.‪

‬Case in point: Sean Bonner published a single-serving site called Dear Marissa Mayer just after Mayer’s Yahoo appointment was announced. It’s a straightforward appeal to the new Yahoo CEO to “Please Make Flickr Awesome Again.” The site’s #dearmarissamayer hashtag was all over the place. Bonner didn’t identify what would make Flickr awesome, or even better than it is today. But I will: Flickr needs engagement.

Flickr used to be the world’s best photo-sharing service because it was the most likely place for people to interact with your pictures. Yet for myriad reasons — from missing the boat on mobile and real-time, to poor sign-up and sign-in experiences, to social problems — Flickr just isn’t as engaging as it once was. I suspect that’s what so many people tweeting #dearmarissamayer would like to see: engagement. When it comes to social, engagement is the killer feature.
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A Digg Power User’s Inside Take on the Rise and Fall of a Social Empire

Mklopez was an icon of Digg’s social power. Photo: Peter McCollough/Wired

In December 2004, Digg founder Kevin Rose demoed his just-launched news aggregation site on the tech television show Screen Savers. Miguel Lopez happened to be watching, and decided to create a Digg account on a lark. And thus one of Digg’s most visible power users, mklopez, was born.

“I can tell you, it was fun. The term ‘gaming Digg’ was frequently used to describe cheating the system and trying to get your stories to the front page, but ‘game’ in my case was appropriate because it was a lot of fun,” Lopez told Wired.

The fun started almost immediately. After signing up, Lopez started digging content he liked, and his submissions were hitting the Digg front page. Those initial homepage wins garnered Lopez thousands of followers, and all that social clout — along with Lopez’s interactions with other Digg users via instant messaging and email — made support from the screen name “mklopez” extremely valuable to sites trying to secure Digg referral traffic.

Lopez’s Digg persona was so influential, in fact, sites began offering payments for his Digg support. But Lopez told Wired he was never interested in the money: “I always cut down on anyone who contacted me with business propositions way before any dollar amount was mentioned.”
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