BARCELONA, Spain (AP) ? AT&T Inc. is scoring a win over rival Verizon Wireless as it takes over the contract to supply wireless connections to cars with General Motors' OnStar service.
Verizon Wireless and its predecessor companies have supplied the network for OnStar since the service launched in the 1990s, but AT&T will take over with the 2015 model year, AT&T and GM said Monday.
The news comes as cellphone companies are jostling to connect non-phone devices to their networks. Now that nearly everyone has a phone, the phone companies have to look elsewhere for growth. Dallas-based AT&T has been particularly aggressive in this area, garnering, for instance, the contract to connect Amazon Kindle e-readers.
AT&T will connect OnStar cars to its new "4G LTE" network, which can supply much higher data speeds than current OnStar connections. That means GM could deliver car software updates wirelessly, instead of making owners take their cars to the shop. It could also enable video streaming for passengers, in-vehicle Wi-Fi "hotspots" and give GM a better view of what's going on inside a car, and whether it needs maintenance. Owners might even be able to call up views from their car's cameras, remotely.
"They're basically smartphones on wheels," said Glenn Lurie, head of AT&T's "emerging devices" division.
Verizon has an LTE network that delivers speeds similar to AT&T's, with wider coverage. Lurie said that by the time AT&T takes over the contract, its LTE network will cover 300 million Americans, or 96 percent of the population. It also has older, slower networks as a backup.
Verizon Wireless said it was looking forward to continuing to provide service to current OnStar customers.
AT&T and GM made the announcement just before the opening of Mobile World Congress, the world's largest wireless trade show, in Barcelona. The companies didn't reveal financial terms. The 6 million current OnStar users pay $19 per month or $199 per year, plus per-minute calling fees. Turn-by-turn GPS navigation costs extra, too.
British automotive research firm SBD believes that 100 million cars worldwide will have built-in wireless capabilities by 2015.
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AP Auto Writer Tom Krisher contributed from Detroit.
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Zynga is cutting costs further by closing its Baltimore studio and consolidating its presence in New York City and Texas. The moves follow a series of cost-cutting efforts that saw the closure of the Boston and Tokyo offices along with layoffs for about 5 percent of the company’s workforce. Those moves allowed the company to save $25 million last quarter. In today’s changes, Zynga is consolidating the McKinney, Texas office, which came out of the very successful Newtoy acquisition back in 2010. The company is?moving the 30 or so employees there to Dallas, which is an hour away. The studio’s leaders and Newtoy’s founders Paul and David Bettner left in the last year as their “With Friends” line of games had a strong run under Zynga. Zynga is also closing the Baltimore studio, which was behind CityVille 2. Zynga recently shut that game down after it didn’t live up to expectations as a follow-up to the original CityVille. The company is also closing down one of its Austin offices and moving those employees to North Austin. Zynga’s New York City offices will also get moved to the company’s mobile studio in the city. The company says that fewer than 1 percent of the company’s employees will be affected. Zynga chief operations officer David Ko said in a statement: ?In an effort to leverage resources as we focus on creating franchises and driving profitability, Zynga has made changes to four of our US offices. We are closing the McKinney, Texas and downtown Austin offices and relocating those teams near-by to our existing Dallas and North Austin offices. And, we will be consolidating our NYC offices to move staff to our NYC mobile studio. Also, as a part of today?s changes, the Baltimore studio will be closed. While these decisions are always difficult, these steps will affect approximately 1% of our workforce and enable us to focus our resources on the most significant growth opportunities.?
Yes, you can fix that smashed iPhone on demand now. That means no visits to the Apple store, or intensive DIY efforts. A YC alum called iCracked launched a real-time, iPhone or iPad repair service a little over a month ago. Think of it like an “Exec” or an “Uber” for your broken iPhone that you can order straight to your door. With hardly any publicity at all, the service is blowing up: it boosted iCracked’s number of monthly customers by about 250 percent and the company tells me the business is eyeing “eight figures” in revenue for this year. The changes add iCracked to a growing class of startups like Exec, Uber, Zimride’s Lyft, Instacart and Postmates that are all trying to solve the logistical issues of delivering products and services in real-time in urban cities. “We want to be the ‘AAA’ for your device,” explains AJ Forsythe, the company’s CEO. “We’re doing on-demand repair and buyback for just about every major city in the U.S.” He shared some of the maps above and below with us, showing actual completed repairs in the last 30 days. Above is the San Francisco Bay Area, and just for good measure to show that this isn’t a Silicon Valley-only phenomenon, he showed us a map of South Florida (below). “We’re trying to get to a place where we can get someone to them in the shortest amount of time at the click of a button,” he said. He partnered with a 20-year-old from the U.K. named Martin Amps, who had built a dispatch system just months ago. Amps never implemented it because it was so specialized, but Forsythe found him on a Hacker News posting and thought the system could be of use to iCracked. Up until then, iCracked’s three-prong business model worked similarly. But it didn’t operate in real-time. Customers would have to mail-in their devices or schedule appointments with iTechs. iCracked earns revenue in three ways: it does 1) repairs, 2) buybacks and 3) sells do-it-yourself kits (pictured right) for people who want to fix phones themselves. The company has more than 350 “iTechnicians,” who work as contractors and are trained to quickly fix broken iPhones and iPads. They earn decent salaries of between $70,000 and $100,000 a year. Forsythe says he’s selective and he only ends up hiring about 2 to 3 percent of iTech applicants. While these “iTechs”