GigaOm

Since it launched two years ago, FreedomPop has been moving beyond its original freemium mobile broadband concept. It moved away from iPhone sleeves and mobile hotspots to start selling smartphones and voice services.

Now FreedomPop is adopting what has become an old standby among budget mobile carriers: The unlimited data plan that really isn’t unlimited. FreedomPop launched a new $20-a-month smartphone plan called Unlimited Everything for its new line of LTE phones. It comes with all-you-can eat voice and text and 1 GB of LTE data. Once that gigabyte of 4G data is used up, speeds are throttled back to 3G levels for the remainder of the billing period. It’s a format many other smartphone driven mobile virtual network operators like Straight Talk and H20 Wireless and even major carriers like T-Mobile have adopted.

[Commentary] Comcast is expanding its network of Wi-Fi hotspots in an effort to “kneecap wireless providers” such as AT&T and Verizon.

While Comcast has yet to announce any specific plans, it recently wrote in a Federal Communications Commission filing that it could build “a ubiquitous Wi-Fi network” that could connect users via Wi-Fi whenever possible, falling back to a cellular network only when necessary. The strategy could enable Comcast to deliver wireless services at a fraction of the price of traditional cellular network operators.

A huge looming question, then, is how Comcast would launch a mobile service: Would it partner with an existing carrier to launch a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), or would it buy its way into the market via acquisition?

Since the dawning of its Open Graph back in 2011, Facebook has been encouraging users to not only provide status updates but to check in to locations, activities, entertainment and even feelings.

Now an update to Facebook’s apps, rolling out soon, enables users to take advantage of their microphones and automatically check in to TV shows, movies and music. The optional feature, when enabled, will listen to noise around the user -- meaning that it can actually identify media while statuses are written -- and detect media from a catalog of movies, TV and music.

When shared, friends can access a 30-second preview for music, a link to the Facebook page for movies and a listing of the episode name and number for television shows. A representative from Facebook said that the company has partnered with media companies to provide the information for 150 live TV channels as well as up-to-date listings on new movies and music.

As the government discusses the pending Comcast acquisition of Time Warner Cable, the latest broadband adoption stats from Leichtman Research Group show that if the deal goes through, 79 percent of US broadband subscribers will find themselves under a data cap.

Because Time Warner Cable, the third largest broadband provider in the US, didn’t have a cap, the acquisition by Comcast would notably change the number of people who will go from unlimited broadband to those who have a cap or pay more the more they download.

EBay users are being advised to change their passwords after hackers compromised some employees’ log-in credentials to break into the eBay corporate network.

The company said in a statement that the hackers broke into a database including “encrypted passwords and other non-financial data” and had not got their hands on any financial or credit card information, but best practice dictates users should change their passwords anyway.

The stolen information may include customer names, phone numbers, dates of births, email addresses, physical addresses, and encrypted passwords. The breach took place between late February and early March but was not detected until recently. PayPal data is not affected, being stored in a different (and fully encrypted) system.

Someone claiming to be an ex-Google employee suggested in April that the company conspires to steal revenues from its partners who host Google-provided ads on their websites.

Now, a prominent Seattle-based lawyer who used to work for Microsoft is using those accusations as the basis for a nationwide class action lawsuit against Google. A company called Re-Post filed a class action complaint in San Francisco on behalf of other websites that are allegedly getting shortchanged by Google.

The complaint suggests this is part of a pattern: Google conspires to cheat those who use its AdSense program, which lets websites host ads provided by Google and share in the profits. Under the alleged scheme, Google waits until a few days before an AdSense partner is due to receive a quarterly pay-out, and then cites a policy violation in order to terminate their account. Terminating an account in this way lets Google keep all the money.

Critics of Google can find plenty to gnash their teeth about: from its repeated privacy flubs to its illegal pharma ads to its growing influence in Washington.

But a lawsuit claiming that Google is blatantly cheating and shutting down its AdSense partners, which contribute a good part of Google’s revenue, just doesn’t make much sense. Rather, this new lawsuit over ads, along with another improbable class action filed against Google in April, suggests that someone is running what amounts to a legal smear campaign.

[Commentary] Apple is reportedly building its own content delivery network and is in the process of signing peering agreements with the big Internet service providers (ISPs), according to Dan Rayburn, an industry consultant and analyst.

Rayburn uses Apple’s apparent willingness to sign peering agreements with ISPs as a way to argue that Netflix’s complaints about having to pay Comcast an interconnection fee are dubious.

But what’s dubious is not Netflix’s complaints over paid peering agreement or Apple’s willingness to enter into these agreements. Instead, the bigger issue is the secretive nature of how content is exchanged on the Internet at a time when a number of the significant content and broadband players are consolidating. Not only are these deals secretive, but they happen in markets that aren’t competitive.

Both edge providers and ISPs consolidating their power -- Google’s YouTube potentially buying Twitch, which is a growing source of traffic (about 1.35 percent of total bandwidth according to Sandvine) is an example of this consolidation on the edge provider side.

Meanwhile, while AT&T’s Dish deal or Comcast’s proposal to buy Time Warner Cable shrinks the overall ISP market -- fewer players are at the negotiating table.

[Commentary] At its core, there is no great mystery (or great strategic vision) behind AT&T’s acquisition of DirecTV. As more services are delivered via IP over broadband networks, previously distinct business such as voice, media delivery, home automation and data, are becoming much less distinct. No matter their industry of origin, service providers of all stripes increasingly are all in the same business (or collection of businesses).

So the real battle has become one simply of subscriber bases and customer lock-in rather than the value or margins of any one service. Eventually, every service provider will be delivering everything to everyone.

The tools for managing and monetizing live-event streaming are getting better and more scalable, at a time when advertisers are increasingly focused on live, DVR-proof programming. Live events are also likely to be critical to the growth of the mobile video business, particularly as more spectrum becomes available after 2015 and technologies like multicasting develop.

Consumers may be wary of paying data charges to watch on-demand content they could watch at other times on non-metered platforms. But for most consumers, live events still need to be watched live, and they’ll pay for the ability to watch them.

[Sweeting is Principal, Concurrent Media Strategies]

Apple and Google declared a dramatic peace in their global battle over smartphone patents, but there’s little indication the pact will end legal hostilities between Apple and its Korean rival, Samsung. Instead, the two companies traded insults in a new court filing that was supposed to describe their efforts to settle a long-running patent case in California.

In the filing, Apple complains that Samsung’s head lawyer, John Quinn, described the iPhone maker as a “jihadist” to the media, and that Quinn had also described the patent case as “Apple’s Vietnam.” Apple also points to a new Vanity Fair article that claims Samsung systemically filches others’ intellectual property part of its business model. Samsung, meanwhile, claims in the filing that Apple is demanding improper concessions before settlement talks even begin -- specifically, that Apple insists that Samsung not bring up the talks in unrelated legal proceedings.

“Only Apple,” says Samsung, “seeks to impose an obstacle to this resolution through a unilateral condition precedent to further [Alternative Dispute Resolution].”

Digital self-publishing site Smashwords is making its e-books available to more libraries through a partnership with Overdrive, the country’s largest digital library distributor.

Through the partnership, Overdrive library clients -- the company works with about 28,000 libraries and schools worldwide -- will be able to purchase about 200,000 e-books by 88,000 Smashwords authors and lend them out to their patrons.

Smashwords is not a stranger to libraries: It already has deals with distributors Baker & Taylor Axis 360 and 3M Cloud Library, as well as with regional library systems like Colorado’s Douglas County.

Because so many libraries work with Overdrive, however, and because Overdrive supports Kindle e-readers while its competitors do not, this partnership has the potential to bring Smashwords authors’ titles in front of more readers globally. Two hundred thousand titles is a lot and most libraries won’t be purchasing nearly all of them. For libraries that want to purchase titles and aren’t sure where to start, Smashwords and Overdrive are creating curated collections of Smashwords’ bestselling titles.