All Articles Tagged "verizon"
Verizon Goes To Church: Gospel Choir Competition “How Sweet The Sound” Returns With A Big Prize
(AP Photo/Reed Saxon)
Verizon is ready to make big noise with this year’s How Sweet the Sound gospel choir competition. According to the company, the competition will be bigger than ever.
Donald Lawrence and Yolanda Adams are back as hosts. The popular competition is now in its seventh year.
The winner will receive a How Sweet the Sound/eOne recording contract, up to $50,000 in cash and prizes, and the title, “Best Gospel Choir in America.”
The winners last year were the 90-member Dexter Walker & Zion Movement Choir. The Chicago-based choir received a recording contract, $25,000, smartphones and gift cards. They also got a chance to tour across the country in select cities, performing to sell-out crowds.
Know a great gospel choir? Maybe they should get in on this.
BlackBerry Sales Off To A Slow Start, But In-Store Sales Have Little To Do With It
AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Nathan Denette
Sales of the new BlackBerry Z10 weren’t exactly stellar this past weekend, the first three days that the new device was available to AT&T subscribers. But the lack of people lined up at stores didn’t tell the whole story, according to FierceWireless.
The website says that 10 days of pre-sales, BlackBerry’s emphasis on enterprise users, and the coming sales of the device at other carriers, including T-Mobile, could be contributing to the slow start.
Moreover, experts that spoke with the site say that BlackBerry, which popular abroad, is facing overwhelming competition here from Apple and Samsung.
The lackluster start drove down BlackBerry’s stock by about eight percent on Friday and Forbes says it doesn’t look like it’s going to get much better. Goldman Sachs has also downgraded the stock.
Part of the problem is very likely the marketing. We’ve seen promoted Tweets, but other areas seem to be lacking. We asked on Friday about Alicia Keys’ disappearance. One of our Twitter followers, @AlexsisRenee, noted that she’s only see one commercial. And then our writer Ann Brown noted this story from NJ.com talking about a kick-off event with Ludacris and Janelle Monae in Times Square over the weekend. How come we didn’t hear about this? Did anyone?
Sales at Verizon start today.
Man Outsources Job, Watches Internet Videos All Day, Still Makes Six Figures
Shutterstock
Verizon revealed through a security team case study that, during the course of 2012, one of the company’s software developers had actually outsourced his own job to a company in China. While those workers were busy, he sat in his office watching cat videos, surfing Facebook, and otherwise hanging out online.
This developer, only referred to as “Bob,” was making a six-figure salary, “several hundred thousand dollars a year” according to the case study. He only needed to send a small portion of this huge take-home ($50,000 according to Gawker) to get the job done (by other people half a world away). I’m laughing as I type.
TheNextWeb goes into the technicalities of how Bob accomplished this; there was a rerouting of the VPN connections that gave the folks in China the ability to log in, but they had to do so with a key. It was discovered that the key was being used to log in from Shenyang, China rather than Bob’s desk, which sent up security alarm bells. Not only did he do this at Verizon, but at a few other companies. Laughing even harder.
If it’s any consolation, the Chinese company was doing a great job, earning Bob numerous glowing reviews. Andrew Valentine, a principal at Verizon Enterprise Solutions, the group that Bob worked for, outlined Bob’s daily routine as such on his blog:
9:00 a.m. – Arrive and surf Reddit for a couple of hours. Watch cat videos
11:30 a.m. – Take lunch
1:00 p.m. – EBay time.
2:00 – ish p.m. – Facebook updates – LinkedIn
4:30 p.m. – End of day update e-mail to management.
5:00 p.m. – Go home
Speaking with ABC News, Valentine suggests that Bob would’ve been better off setting up a server in his house and directing the folks in China to use that one. Verizon would’ve concluded that he was working from home. Take notes readers.
Get Ready For It: Verizon Will Now Charge You to Pay Your Bill
Verizon apparently missed the memo that consumers don’t like to pay to access options that are rightfully theirs–like paying a bill. Remember how quickly Bank of America backtracked with the $5 monthly fee they were going to charge people to access their own money? But if the phone company is looking at things from an airline perspective, they might assume that sure, consumers will put up a fuss initially, but at the end of the day what other choice do they have?
Starting Jan. 15, Verizon will charge customers at $2 fee if they pay their bill with a credit card online or over the phone. Most companies I’ve had personal experience with charge to pay a bill over the phone–and typically more than $2–but those fees were standard policies from the beginning, not a sudden attempt to cover the ability to “continue to support these bill payment options” as Verizon explained it. And being charged to simply pay a bill online with a credit card is extremely rare.
A Verizon memo says it will offer customers free options before charging the fee. That includes snail mail, enrolling in Verizon’s AutoPay, allowing the company to keep a credit, debit or ATM card or bank account on file (their preferred method), electronic check, using your bank’s online bill pay, or paying at a Verizon kiosk.
It should be noted that Verizon Communications Inc., the landline phone company that owns most of Verizon Wireless, tried to impose a $3.50 fee for people who paid their bill for FiOS TV or Internet service month-to-month by credit card last year and backed out after complaints. I’m pretty sure this attempt will follow suit. With enough people struggling to just pay a bill, the last thing customers need are erroneous fees.
Does your phone company charge you fees if you pay your bill a certain way?
Brande Victorian is a blogger and culture writer in New York City. Follower her on Twitter at @be_vic.
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Verizon Employees Taste A Morsel of Success
By J. Smith
In a major – and rare – victory for organized labor, the 45,000 union workers at Verizon Communications called an end to their 15-day strike and will return to work on Monday evening. The standoff ended with employees claiming the win, saying they had succeeded in getting Verizon to take their concerns seriously and negotiate more equitably at the bargaining table, the Wall Street Journal reports.
“The strike, the largest since a two-day walkout by 74,000 General Motors Corp. workers in 2007, followed a string of setbacks for organized labor, which has seen pay and benefits frozen or rolled back in such industries as aviation and autos. Labor’s bargaining power, exercised most pointedly through strikes, has been eroded by the rise of foreign competition and by the recession and the sluggish recovery. Verizon’s effort to roll back union benefits represented a new front in the battled as the company remains highly profitable,” the Journal reports.
But not everyone was happy with the result, and some labor experts say the move came without substantive concessions from the communications giant. In a year that has been steeped in sad labor union stories, this one offers both a glimmer of hope and the new definition of what it means to “win” in cases like these.
“The decision to return to work without a new contract at Verizon upset some union workers. ‘They had time before the contract expired to bargain with us,’ said Jim McCarty, 51 years old, a field technician with Communications Workers of America Local 1120. ‘We have leverage when we were out on the picket lines, and this just hands it right back to Verizon management.’”
Verizon has claimed that it needed to cut costs to help balance out its declining sales figures in the wire-line unit, which includes services like internet, FiOS television and tradition phone plans. The company has already laid-off half of its employees since 2000. According to the Journal, Verizon’s ideal solution would be to freeze pensions, tie pay increases more closely to job performance, make it easier to fire people and require employees contribute $100 or more a month toward health insurance premiums. But, the union still achieved its primary goals: “compelling Verizon to consider the unions’ demands for job security and to look at limiting a proposed rise in workers’ health care expenses,” the Journal reports.
This seems less like a victory and more like the first step on the road to victory. But it has to start somewhere; congrats re-employeed Verizon workers!
3 Stocks That Are Pricier Than They Seem
(Smart Money) — Determining the price of a publicly traded company seems simple enough. Multiply the stock price by the number of outstanding shares. Google (GOOG: 486.25, -2.31, -0.47%) costs about $156 billion. Verizon (VZ: 29.06, -0.02, -0.06%) goes for around $83 billion. However, companies aren’t like cans of peas. They have something called a capital structure, which can make the true cost of owning them, free and clear, differ sharply from the sticker price. Verizon owes billions. Add the cost of repaying that debt to the stock price and the result is an “enterprise value,” or true purchase price, of $140 billion.
Don't Count On A Verizon iPhone
(CNN) — It’s that time of year again: The weather is getting warmer, Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference is just around the corner, and rumors about the iPhone coming to Verizon are sprouting up. Don’t believe it, Verizon fans. It’s unlikely that Steve Jobs will announce a Verizon tie-up when he gets on stage at the WWDC event on June 7. The rumors have been swirling around for years because an Apple-Verizon partnership seems to make sense for both parties.
Don't Count On A Verizon iPhone
(CNN) — It’s that time of year again: The weather is getting warmer, Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference is just around the corner, and rumors about the iPhone coming to Verizon are sprouting up. Don’t believe it, Verizon fans. It’s unlikely that Steve Jobs will announce a Verizon tie-up when he gets on stage at the WWDC event on June 7. The rumors have been swirling around for years because an Apple-Verizon partnership seems to make sense for both parties.
Verizon and Microsoft Sitting In A Tree, K-I-N-N-I-N-G
(TG Daily) — Microsoft’s Kin was available online on May 6th. Now, it’s in Verizon’s stores. A week is a year on the Internets. I like the Kin. For that matter, I like every new phone that comes out because, phones are like lollipops: they’re bright, shiny, colorful, and for the most part, easily digestible. However, the Kin does have a few extra things going for it: Microsoft and Robbie Bach, iPhone fatigue, and Android support, or the lack thereof.
Verizon CEO Confirms A Google Tablet Is Coming to the Network
(Fastcompany.com) — The Wall Street Journal today reported that Lowell McAdam, CEO of Verizon, announced that a Google tablet would be coming to the Red Network (so named because of its favorite color and not any communist sympathies—that we know about. I’ve got my eye on you, McAdam.). “What do we think the next big wave of opportunities are?” Mr. McAdam said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “We’re working on tablets together, for example. We’re looking at all the things Google has in its archives that we could put on a tablet to make it a great experience.”
