Tag Archive for: fees

Subscription Fees Get Mixed Results from Car Buyers

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A year after BMW began selling subscriptions to use its vehicles’ heated seats in South Korea, and with General Motors predicting annual software and services revenue of $25 billion by the end of the decade, S&P Global Mobility has surveyed nearly 8,000 consumers on the topic of vehicle feature subscription services.

S&P Mobility reported the results of its survey yesterday, saying that car-shoppers are largely satisfied with subscription-based infotainment services, but data security and privacy are concerns.

According to S&P Mobility, fewer than 30% of survey respondents are willing to pay for heated seats or a heated steering wheel by monthly subscription, and navigation and safety/security features were the ones most desired in respondents’ next vehicles.

As for infotainment subscriptions, the survey found that consumers favor their smartphone over their vehicle where features are redundant. Gen Z and Millennial respondents are most likely to drop connected-services subscriptions because of similar services on their smartphones, says S&P Mobility.

This could explain GM’s decision last year to remove Apple CarPlay and Android Auto user interfaces from its forthcoming electric vehicle lineup, opting for the company’s own infotainment system instead. According to S&P Mobility, GM sees an opportunity in consumer usage data.

“GM cannot get consumers’ usage data from the infotainment system if users only connect via third party apps like Apple CarPlay and Android Auto,” says Fanni Li, connected car services research lead at S&P Global Mobility. “Having this data on their own will become one of the competitive advantages for OEMs.”

When it comes to data collection, 37% of respondents worry about security issues, while 32% fail to understand the value that a connected service would provide from the shared data, says S&P Mobility. At the same time, the survey reported 31% of consumers “feeling comfortable” with OEM’s collecting their data.

These concerns did not seem to alter respondent subscribers’ attitudes towards subscription services, however. S&P Mobility reports in a subset of about 4,500 respondents who had experienced a free trial or an existing…

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Match takes on Google, saying it’s ‘a hostage’ to monopolistic Play Store fees

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Dallas-based Match Group Inc. accused Alphabet Inc.’s Google in a lawsuit of acting as a monopolist with its app store billing rules, the latest escalation in a brawl over the mobile-app industry.

Match Group, which operates dating apps such as Tinder and OkCupid, alleged that Google breaks federal and state laws and abuses its power with a requirement that app developers use its billing system on Android devices.

“Ten years ago, Match Group was Google’s partner. We are now its hostage,” Match Group said in a complaint filed Monday in northern California federal court. “Blinded by the possibility of getting an ever-greater cut of the billions of dollars users spend each year on Android apps, Google set out to monopolize the market for how users pay for their Android apps.”

Google, like Apple Inc., has faced enormous recent legal and political scrutiny over the commission fees and billing restrictions both companies apply to paid services in their app stores. Congress is currently weighing a bill to force Google and Apple to change their business models.

In response to public pressure, Google has halved its 30% fee for some apps. But the company said it would tighten its rules that require the use of its billing system for in-app purchases, citing security concerns. Google gave a June 1 deadline to comply or be removed from its Play Store.

In March, Google announced it was letting select apps offer their own billing service in addition to Google’s on Android devices. Spotify Technology SA, another app store critic, said it was using this option and Google suggested more companies would follow.

Not Match Group, apparently.

“This lawsuit is a measure of last resort,” Chief Executive Officer Shar Dubey wrote in a statement.

Dubey said her company tried “in good faith” to resolve its concerns with Google but was left with “no choice but to take legal action.” In its filing, Match Group said that it asked Google to adopt this new “user billing” feature but Google refused.

Google representatives didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Bloomberg.

Match is forecasting $42 million in additional costs for Google’s Play Store during 2022, chief…

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Lorex Smart Home Security Center review: Self-monitor, no fees

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The budget-priced Lorex Smart Home Security Center (model HC64A) consists of a touchscreen console, two indoor/outdoor cameras, and a Wi-Fi range extender. The system can be expanded with up to six additional cameras, as well as motion and door/window sensors and a video doorbell—provided they’re all manufactured by Lorex. But you’ll need to monitor this security system yourself, as there is no option to pay for professionals to do it for you.

Lorex offers this console in nine other kits with different combinations of cameras and sensors, ranging in price from $350 (two outdoor cameras, but no range extender) to almost $800 (four cameras, a floodlight cam, and a video doorbell). For this review, I augmented the HC64A kit with a USB-powered camera, a doorbell camera, and a motion detector.

Measuring 7.1 x 7.5 x 3.3-inches (HxWxD), the console will easily fit on any desk, kitchen counter, or even a bookshelf. Its fold-up antennas help bring in weak Wi-Fi signals, but they add 2.3 inches to its height. The center of attention is its angled 7-inch, 720p display that can show up to four video streams simultaneously.

three camera feeds on the lorex smart home console Brian Nadel / IDG

The Lorex Smart Home Security Center’s console supports up to eight cameras, but it can show only four video streams at once.

The system has a dual-band (2.4- and 5GHz) Wi-Fi adapter onboard, as well as a Bluetooth LE radio. It supports a variety of indoor and outdoor Lorex home security cameras, including a camera/floodlight combo. The company doesn’t sell door locks, thermostats, smoke detectors, or air-quality sensors, and the hub can’t connect to generic smart home devices that use the Zigbee or Z-Wave protocols. As such, it’s a better security camera system than it is an entire smart home system.

This Lorex hardware does work with Amazon Alexa and Google Home Assistant, but it can’t stream video directly to an Amazon Echo or Google Nest smart display. You can stream the camera feeds to a TV that has an Amazon Fire TV or Chromecast plugged into it. It isn’t compatible with Apple’s HomeKit ecosystem, and Lorex is not part of the Connectivity Standards Alliance’s Matter initiative to standardize smart…

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New Bill Calls For An End To PACER Fees, Complete Overhaul Of The Outdated System

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The perennial make-PACER-free legislation has arrived. If you’re not familiar with PACER, count yourself among the lucky ones. PACER performs an essential task: it provides electronic access to federal court dockets and documents. That’s all it does and it barely does it.

PACER charges taxpayers (who’ve already paid taxes to fund the federal court system) $ 0.10/page for EVERYTHING. Dockets? $ 0.10/page. (And that “page” is very loosely defined.) Every document is $ 0.10/page, as though the court system was running a copier and chewing up expensive toner. So is every search result page, even those that fail to find any responsive results. The user interface would barely have been considered “friendly” 30 years ago, never mind in the year of our lord two thousand twenty. Paying $ 0.10/page for everything while attempting to navigate an counterintuitive interface draped over something that looks like it’s being hosted by Angelfire is no one’s idea of a nostalgic good time.

Legislation attempting to make PACER access free was initiated in 2018. And again in 2019. We’re still paying for access, thanks to the inability of legislators to get these passed. Maybe this is the year it happens, what with a bunch of courtroom precedent being built up suggesting some illegal use of PACER fees by the US Courts system. We’ll see. Here’s what’s on tap for this year’s legislative session:

Representatives Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) and Doug Collins (R-Ga.) are hoping to drastically change all of the above with their bipartisan reform effort, the Open Courts Act (OCA).

The bill would make online access to federal court records free to the public. It also contains language that would effectively improve upon PACER’s current and wildly out-of-date search functionality, increase third-party accessibility to the entire system, and upgrade and maintain the database using modern data standards.

This is a good bill. It aims for something more than just free access. (To be honest, that would at least offset the frustration of subjecting yourself to PACER’s hideous charms in an attempt to talk it out of some filings.) Free access is a necessity. At this point, the presumed openness of the court still hides behind a paywall, separating citizens from courtroom documents under the naive theory that it’s impossible to give something away if it costs money to produce. (And that assumption ignores the tax dollars already earmarked for running the court system.)

This bill would also drag the PACER system (presumably kicking and screaming) into the future… or at least a much more recent past. The 1995-esque front end would be updated, along with all the other stuff that doesn’t work well… which is pretty much everything.

It would be a bit more future-proofed. The bill [PDF] demands transparent coding that will incorporate “non-proprietary, full text searchable, platform-independent” elements. This means documents will finally be searchable by the text they contain, rather than limited to locating documents by finding the right docket and going from there. And this will hopefully fix another problem with PACER: search issues baked into the system by jurisdiction divisions. Each federal court has its own login page and, while it’s possible to search all jurisdictions, it’s far more likely you’ll be dimed to death by useless searches before you find what you need.

But who’s going to pay for this, I hear the US Courts system asking? Well, like any other FTP service, it will be mostly supported by whales.

On its own terms, the OCA would take two to three years to modernize the overall CM/ECF so that all court documents are searchable, readily accessible and machine-readable regardless of an end user’s browser setup. During this period, so-called institutional “power users” would still be subject to PACER fees–if they charge over $ 25,000 annually.

But not forever.

After that, fees would vanish entirely.

Will this be the bill that sticks? Maybe. Courts are finding the PACER system questionable — not just the barrier it places between the public and court documents, but the uses of the fees as well, very little of which has actually been spent on improving PACER itself. If there’s something almost everyone agrees with, it’s that PACER sucks. Being asked to pay for the dubious privilege of using a barely working system is the insult piled on top of the $ 0.10/page injury.

Techdirt.