According to Verizon’s tweet, only the 4G network appears to be affected:

VZW is investigating customer issues in connecting to the 4GLTE data network. 3G data, voice and text services are operating reliably.

Update: At 10:21 PT, Verizon notified customers through its Twitter feed that LTE service had been fully restored. Verizon called the outage a “brief issue,” which may be true, but it certainly wasn’t a localized one. As you can see in the comments to this post, GigaOM readers reported losing 4G connectivity, and sometimes 3G, from all over the country.

Depending on the scope and duration of the problem, this outage could pass by with little notice, or it could be another black eye for Big Red, which suffered a chain of big LTE failures in December. Those problems were all caused by bugs in Verizon’s core service delivery architecture – in telco speak called the IP Multimedia Subsystem, or IMS – but Verizon VP of network engineering Mike Haberman said the carrier had since taken multiple steps to ensure that such problems wouldn’t occur again. From our December post:

While Verizon won’t promise that no more outages will occur, Haberman said it has taken measures to ensure that they’re minimized when they do happen in the future. He said he’s begun geographically segmenting the LTE network, so if a software bug does break out it can be isolated to a particular region or market instead of spreading nationwide. Verizon is also upgrading all of its software and cutting down on the signaling clutter running over its IMS grid.

“Our goal is to ensure that our 4G network meets the same high standard that our 3G network does,” Haberman said. “We’re not there yet, but we’ll get there.”

In the current outage, 3G service appears to be working for LTE smartphone customers as it did in previous outages. Thus, Verizon may  be experiencing problems with its IMS core once again.

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The China Telecom deal has been in the works for a while. Last month it was reported that only the final steps for the phone to be certified to run on the network remained, and that the deal would be finished by the end of February. By offering the iPhone 4S — of which Apple has sold 37 million units in just three months — to China Telecom’s 15 million customers, Apple stands to add to its already impressive tally for number of iPhone 4Ses sold.

But more importantly, by adding yet another carrier, Apple is moving closer to more fully addressing its second-most important market in the world. It already has China Unicom, where one out of every five of the carrier’s subscribers have chosen the iPhone, according to Morgan Stanley’s Katy Huberty.

The big “get,” however, is China Mobile, which has a 70 percent share of mobile customers in China. The two sides have been talking, but there are still some technical hurdles. Considering how important China is to Apple, it seems like Cupertino would find a way to iron those out eventually.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has been very clear about his commitment to the country and has said he’s “never seen a country with as many people rising into the middle class aspiring to buy products that Apple makes. It’s an area of enormous opportunity.”

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“While coworking spaces might come pretty close to the ideal working space, at times they can also be spaces where some of the worst characteristics of a capitalist economy are being reproduced — just like in an ordinary workspace,” she writes. Independent work may solve many problems, but it doesn’t get rid of asymmetric relationships between those handing out work and those completing it, she states. What does she mean by this?

If there is a big difference between the partners in a work relationship, sometimes the stronger party gets all the advantages and benefits, while the weaker party has to bear the full risk and disadvantages.

Usually the strong partner is someone who is established and well connected. Often these people or companies are very good at communicating and selling, they act mainly as project managers, while contracting out the actual development or design work to other people. The subcontractors in turn are often newcomers who don’t have a big network, who are rather inexperienced and not as good at selling themselves and their work. Usually these people are happy that someone subcontracts them work and they don’t have to spend time on acquisition, communicating and networking. The relationship between the main contractor and the subcontractor can be win-win situation, but rather often it is not.

The result of this unequal balance of power, Pohler claims, can be impossible deadlines, insane hours, failure to pay for revisions to a project and extremely long lag times before payment for subcontractors. And coworking spaces, she feels, may be inadvertently making the problem worse. “It is easy to find young, skilled and motivated people as subcontractors, and it is easy to build relationships on the assumption that everyone is more or less the same and equal,” she writes.

Pohler may diagnose the problem in her article, but when it comes to solutions, she simply advocates for greater discussion of the issue and more openness in the community.

Is that an adequate solution, or do you think independent workers need to do more to protect themselves?

Image courtesy of Flickr user JD Hancock.

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There’s a new mobile app store available for millions of devices, but it’s not for iOS, Android, or Windows Phone handsets. As of Tuesday, the newest app store is for robots, and the first four apps are compatible with the estimated 6 million iRobot Roomba vacuums. Yes, we now have an app store for robots!

MyRobots.com just launched the new store which has some similarities to other mobile app stores. For example, the company will take 25 percent of any paid transactions for robot apps. One huge difference, however, is that these apps will run directly on a robot, or in the cloud for connected robots. Don’t expect, then, to see smartphone apps that interface with robots in this store.

The first initial applications add some interactivity to the Roomba, including a free app that allows you to have a text chat with your mobile vacuum. The three others are all priced at $25 and range in functionality: remote control over the web; mobile surveillance if you have a web-cam on your Roomba; and a telepresence app for when you’re away from home.

A developer program for the Robot App Store is now in beta, so developers can sign up to help shape the storefront with apps. Will this store ever rival the size and scope of the iTunes App Store? That’s not likely, but I do see many reasons to believe home robotics is the next big thing. I shared those ideas back in 2010 in a GigaOm Pro report (subscription required), saying the brains and sensors in a smartphone are enough to get the home robot movement rolling.

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Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents was in attendance at the court’s announcement of the ruling on Friday and said that Judge Andreas Voss didn’t specify any particular reason for the decision. The first ruling against Samsung last week also didn’t include a reason. Mueller said at that time that the reasons could either be that Apple had been found not to infringe the patent or that Samsung’s rights in exerting the patent had been deemed exhausted, which would result in Apple’s being granted a license by default. The same reasons could also be applied to Friday’s ruling.

For Samsung, this is definitely a setback, but it isn’t the end of the road; the company still has three other 3G/UMTS patents at issue in separate complaints filed with the Mannheim court. As long as the reasons behind the dismissals of these two lawsuits aren’t somehow related to all the patents in question, it could still claim a victory on one or more of those remaining.

Samsung could also still appeal the decision, and given that it, like Apple, posted record earnings for its most recently completed quarter, there is no financial barrier preventing it from doing so. With two companies at the top of their game slugging it out in the legal arena, there is little incentive for either to stop.

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As more and more workers take up the promise of technology and get out of the office to work where and when it suits them, employees’ needs for their company’s office change radically. Cubicles fall in importance as many opt to stay away from the office when they want to grind out work in isolation, and the remaining spaces increasingly need to be designed to foster collaboration. Enter coworking, whose very existence is predicated on the idea of providing spaces to break down isolation and get workers’ creative juices flowing. What lessons does the movement have for corporate types looking to create spaces that foster collaboration?

GCUC is featuring a panel entitled “How to Design, Build and Grow your Space for Collaboration” and to get a sense of what answers it might offer for those providing corporate spaces to increasingly nomadic teams, we spoke to two panelists — architect Jerome Chang, who is also founder of BLANKSPACES coworking in Los Angeles, and Harvard-trained designer Sidi Gomes, who is the founder of ParallelCities.com – for a sneak preview. Both said those interested in the future of office design should pay plenty of attention to coworking.

“The future, I believe, is that corporate offices are going to become coworking offices,” said Gomes. “One space that was able to host 100 permanent workers can now hold 300 mobile workers working different hours, half the time from home, or the coffee shop. Therefore, corporate offices should be learning everything they can from coworking spaces, especially how to still keep ‘community’ when the population suddenly triples in size.”

Chang agrees, calling Zappos’s new campus  for example, “a great extension of coworking ideals.” How so? Change explains that “Zappos is looking to build a whole mini-city community by having encouraged a lot more people to live, work and play all in the same area as their office. The surrounding community becomes the campus itself.” That’s an idea more companies may want to explore.

Not only are the ratio of workers to square footage and the relationship between campuses and their surrounding communities set to change, but so too is the balance of private to public spaces within offices, according to both Chang and Gomes. And coworking has something to teach companies here too, they feel.

Collaboration is all well and good, “but true creativity really comes from privacy and reflection,” according to Gomes. “Imagine Frankenstein being developed in a public lab. You need the privacy of a basement to do that.” But this creativity-protecting cocoon of privacy needs to be balanced with idea-sparking sociability. “If you were always locked up in a basement, you would never get the idea to create Frankenstein to begin with,” he continues. Coworking can provide a template for corporate offices looking to get this fine balance right.

“The cool thing about coworking spaces is that ‘privacy’ is achieved in an open floor plan setting, because you are surrounded by people you don’t know, and therefore are not expected to talk to, so you can put your head phones on and go heads down,” explains Gomes.

Could a bustling corporate campus housing three times as many folks as a standard office and with people coming and going at less regular hours offer the same advantages of meeting stimulating (relatively) new people combined with the privacy of proximity to near strangers that coworking does?

Image courtesy of Flickr user .dh.

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What did the new data reveal? As Steve King of Emergent Research recently told WebWorkerDaily, coworking, it appears, is exiting its infancy and moving into a more business-savvy second phase with fresh faces outside the original, typical community-minded founders taking an interest in collaborative work spaces. And coworking space owners have apparently gotten the memo about their movement’s exploding popularity, telling the pollsters in large numbers that they hope to capitalize on growing interest in the movement and expand their businesses in 2012.

More than one in three owners (36 percent) surveyed said they hope to open an additional location this year. But not all owners are aiming to be moguls of coworking with a chain of spaces to their credit. A further 10 percent are simply hoping to expand their existing space in 2012. Just over a quarter (27 percent) have no plans to expand at all.

Earlier findings from this same survey indicate only a modest 40 percent of coworking spaces were profitable last year. ‘Wouldn’t owners of spaces in the red shy away from further investment?’ you might ask. The survey results suggest that’s not the case. “Of the spaces that want to open a new location, only 44 percent are presently profitable, while the majority of the expansion-planners are either making a loss or breaking even,” reports Deskmag.

For more information on how expansion plans relate to the number of months a space has been in operation and other details such as owners’ predictions for membership numbers in the coming year, check out the full write-up from Deskmag.

Are owners of often unprofitable spaces looking to expand prematurely?

Image courtesy of Flickr user britain.

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Step one: Find out if your Mac can handle it

Not all Macs are eligible for memory upgrades, or at least not ones you can perform easily at home. Some might already be equipped with their maximum supported memory, and some might have more difficult to replace memory kits, like the MacBook Air does, for instance. But in general, you can find out if your Mac could take on more memory by checking your system stats.

In Lion, this is easy. Go to the Apple menu, click “About this Mac,” and then click “More Info…” Then, click the “Memory” tab along the top and it’ll show you how much memory you currently have installed, and the capacity of each individual module. In my example, I have 4 x 4 GB modules installed on my iMac, which is the most this model officially supports. Many base configuration models of iMacs currently available ship with two slots free, as mine did before I upgraded.

To find out the maximum memory your model supports, you can do two things. First, click the link in that Memory information page that says “Memory Upgrade Instructions” to be taken to the relevant Apple support site for your computer. So long as you know when your computer was released, you can find all the information you need, including Apple’s maximum memory capacity for your specific model here. If you need to find when your Mac was released, check our guide for finding that out.

You can also take a second option, which is to visit OWC, find your Mac of choice under the “Memory” section and see what options the site provides. OWC actually offers kits that provide memory in capacities that often exceed Apple’s official supported specs, but will still work fine with your hardware.

Step two: Figure how much memory you need to upgrade

OWC is a great resource for figuring out how much RAM you need to purchase to upgrade. Navigate to the Memory section on the OWC homepage, then find your model of computer. Now, the site will provide you with a number of options for memory upgrades and replacements. OWC had basically done the thinking for you, so you can just click on a combo package greater than your current memory configuration and not worry about whether or not the modules will work with each other or your machine.

The other benefit of going through OWC is that they have very fair prices, and they even offer rebate pricing on the memory that shipped with your Apple computer. You won’t get much, but it’s more than you’d make by throwing your old RAM in the garbage.

Step three: Install the RAM

Following Apple’s installation guides is the best way to go about replacing your RAM. Here are links to the instructions for upgrading iMac memory, Mac mini memory, MacBook Pro memory, and MacBook memory. It’s not difficult and requires a minimum of tools, but you will need a small screwdriver, like one you’d use for eyeglasses repair, in order to replace memory on iMacs and MacBooks.

Step four: Enjoy considerable performance boosts

When I upgraded my 2011 iMac from its basic 4 GB of memory to 16 GB, it was definitely like getting a new machine. Things never grind to a halt anymore; I can run Photoshop alongside other demanding applications without major slow-downs; and my computer seldom requires an actual restart or power-down to get things moving smoothly again. The entire upgrade cost me less than $100, too.

If you love your Mac but find yourself less than impressed with its performance lately, a memory boost could be just the thing to put the spark back in your relationship.

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While on average nearly one-in-five (17 percent) wired workers claims to telecommute on a frequent basis, the percentage of workers taking advantage of their broadband connection to get out of the office was far higher in emerging markets.

“Those working in the Middle East and Africa (27 percent), Latin America (25 percent) and Asia-Pacific (24 percent) are considerably more likely than those in North America (9 percent) and Europe (9 percent) to telecommute ‘on a frequent basis,’” the survey found. The rates for individual countries hold more surprises with these nations reporting the most and fewest telecommuters:

• India: 56 percent
• Indonesia: 34 percent
• Mexico: 30 percent
• Argentina: 29 percent
• South Africa: 28 percent
• Turkey: 27 percent
• Canada: 8 percent
• France: 7 percent
• Italy: 7 percent
• Sweden: 6 percent
• Germany: 5 percent
• Hungary: 3 percent

So who exactly qualifies as a frequent telecommuter for the purposes of the Ipsos survey? A telecommuter, the release explains is “an employee uses a stationary or portable computer to do their office work from a location outside of their office,” so a fairly standard definition that encompasses how the word is commonly used here in the States.

The survey also found differences between populations in how much appetite for telecommuting exists among those who have not yet been offered the option. In Japan, a measly 12 percent would telecommute if given the opportunity. Sixteen percent in Sweden and 19 percent in Great Britain felt the same, while a whopping 54 percent of Argentines would happily jump on the telecommuting bandwagon if allowed.

One thing healthy majorities in nearly every country agreed on though was that telecommuting is a productivity booster. Sixty-five percent globally told pollsters “telecommuters are more productive because the flexibility allows them to work when they have the most focus and/or because having maximum control over the work environment and schedule leads to job satisfaction and happiness.” Surprisingly, in telecommuting-bereft Hungary, 74 percent agreed with this proposition, as did a similar proportion of those polled in Argentina, Poland, India, Indonesia, Mexico and Saudi Arabia.

What do you think accounts for the national differences revealed by the survey?

Image courtesy of Flickr user diongillard.

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But recently ,Canadian current affairs magazine Maclean’s offered another possible contributing factor, one that gets a lot of consideration here on WebWorkerDaily. “Could the rise of independent work be partly to blame for the rise of inequality?” the article asks in an article entitled “The End of the Job.”

The rise of the contract worker may also be having a more wide-scale impact than previously realized. A growing gap between rich and poor in countries like Canada has been blamed, in part, on a growing number of poor quality jobs. There’s also mounting evidence to suggest that the rise of the throwaway worker has made recent recessions more painful and longer-lasting. Temp jobs? More like a temporary economy.

“It all amounts to a sea change in corporate attitudes about what constitutes a job in the first place,” concludes the article, noting the death of the job-security-for-loyalty model of previous decades. This move toward more independent and contract work is not only another contributing cause of inequality, but also of the general economic doldrums:

The concern is that all of this impermanence risks creating an economy built not on bedrock, but shifting sand….  Companies see contract employment as the answer to uncertain times, but [professor at the School of Labor Studies at McMaster University Wayne] Lewchuk says it may be a case of the medicine being worse than the disease. People who don’t earn as much money spend less, which isn’t good for the economy. “If people stop buying, then companies stop producing and lay off more workers,” he says. “You get yourself into a quicker and deeper hole. Meanwhile, on the other side of a recession, when you start bringing people back, you’re doing it at lower wages and they don’t have the kind of purchasing oomph necessary to get the economic engine started again.”

Of course, the need for companies to grow leaner, including by utilizing more independent workers, is driven by larger economic forces like globalization and better, cheaper technology, so it’s difficult to argue that independent work itself is the root cause of the problem. Pretty clearly it’s an effect rather than a driver of change. But Maclean’s contention that independent work may be a piece of a destructive cycle that’s both increasing inequality and holding back growth seems worth considering.

How much is the rise of independent work contributing to increased inequality? To economic stagnation?

Image courtesy of Flickr user _PaulS_.

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