Victor Luckerson

Social network wants to expand its reach beyond tweets

Twitter is trying to make itself an essential part of the app ecosystem with a new suite of tools aimed at mobile developers. Those tools, announced Wednesday and bundled together in a free service called Fabric, put Twitter in more direct competition with Google and Facebook for control of the mobile future.

Fabric is comprised of a suite of individual tools that together help developers deal with many of the issues they face getting their apps up and running. Crashlytics, a company Twitter bought in 2013, will help developers analyze crash rates for their apps and improve stability. MoPub, another recent Twitter acquisition, is an ad exchange that allows developers to easily serve ads in their apps that are bid on in real-time auctions. The third leg of Fabric, called Twitter Sign In, will let people sign into different apps using their Twitter login credentials rather than a username and password specifically for that app. Similarly, a new service called Digits will let people sign into apps using their cellphone number instead of a username and password.

Outside of Digits, Twitter had offered some form of these services before, but they hadn’t been wrapped up in one simple-to-use interface. Announced at the company’s first-ever mobile developer conference, Fabric is something of an olive branch Twitter is extending to the development community after the social network tightened access to its API a few years ago. Whether app makers will play nice with Twitter now remains to be seen.

You may be better off seeking last year's cheaper models

Apple’s latest iPads, the iPad Air 2 and the iPad Mini 3, are being released to relatively muted fanfare compared to the excitement that surrounded the launch of the company’s latest iPhones. It makes sense—while the latest iPhones sported larger screens, much-improved cameras and the ability to be used as mobile wallets in stores, the improvements to the iPad line are subtle by comparison.

The new iPads are great, reviewers say, but they may not warrant running out for an immediate upgrade. Here’s a rundown:

Over at The Verge, Nilay Patel praises the iPad Air 2’s unprecedented thinness (6.1 millimeters), improved A8X processor, TouchID fingerprint scanner and battery life. However, at $499 for the cheapest model with 16 GB of storage, he says the product doesn’t differentiate itself enough from the slightly smaller iPhone 6 Plus or a full-fledged Macbook:

iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite are designed to make the transition from iPhone to Mac easier than ever with features like Handoff and Continuity; there’s hardly any reason to take a pitstop at the iPad along the way . . . For better or worse, Apple’s allowed the iPad to become the giant iPhone its critics have always insisted that it is, and in a world with giant iPhones that’s a tough spot to be in.

The iPad Air 2 is undoubtedly better than any other current iPad, but its advantages might matter less than last year’s dramatically-redesigned iPad Air: screen quality, size, and battery life are close enough, effectively, to feel the same. Processor power and camera quality — and Touch ID — are welcome additions, but not needle-movers for the typical iPad user. Year-old iPads have never seemed like better bets.

The original iPad Air is now retailing for $399 for its cheapest model. Critics say that may be a better choice for iPad newcomers or those with even older tablets looking for an upgrade.

Apple’s new pint-sized tablet, the iPad Mini 3, probably isn’t worth its price, according to the New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo. It doesn’t sport the super-fast processor in the iPad Air 2 and it has the same weight and dimensions as its predecessor, the iPad Mini 2. The newly-added Touch ID is the main differentiating factor, along with a new gold model, but Manjoo says that’s not enough. “Unless you’re going to be doing a lot of Apple Pay shopping or you’re gaga for gold, it’s best to save the $100 and go with the Mini 2,” he writes.

The final verdict: Apple’s latest products are well-designed and probably the most advanced in their respective markets, but they still don’t quite warrant their high price tags, especially if you’re looking for more storage than the basic models provide.

For Apple Pay to work, Apple needs to get customers, retailers and banks all in lockstep

It's not a matter of if more channels will be sold a la carte, but when

It’s been a long time coming. For years, television viewers have griped about having to pay for a massive bundle of channels that they barely watch. In 2013, the average American TV household received 189 channels, but tuned into just 17 of them. A careful, decades-long dance between pay-TV providers and networks has ensured that, for the most part, you need a cable or satellite subscription to watch live TV.

Two back-to-back announcements this week could threaten this extremely lucrative business model. HBO, which has TV shows so valuable that people have actually been begging to pay for them, announced Wednesday it’s launching an online streaming service in 2015 that doesn’t require a cable subscription. If it’s like HBO Go, that means users will be able to stream all the network’s hit shows as they air on TV. CBS made a similar move Thursday by announcing CBS All Access, a new platform that will allow customers to access much of the channel’s past and present content online for $5.99 per month, including live broadcasts in 14 markets.

By making these channels available for purchase individually, CBS and HBO are embracing the “a la carte” TV model, in which viewers would be able to select the individual channels they want to pay for and ignore the rest. It’s a concept that makes intuitive sense in a world where songs, movies, books and news can be consumed individually, on the go and at little cost.

But the model poses a huge threat to cable operators, network owners and even subscribers. If every network did what CBS and HBO are doing, cable and satellite operators would have the core part of their businesses wiped out. Network owners, meanwhile, would have to convince millions of individual customers to buy their channels instead of negotiating with just a few large pay-TV companies. Greater price transparency would hurt most channels—just ask Netflix, which said a $1 price increase caused it to miss its subscriber growth projections in the most recent quarter. While a prestige channel like HBO could command a high price on its own, more niche channels would probably find it tough to turn a profit individually. Many of them would likely fold, according to one study, and the quality and quantity of content of available on TV might actually diminish.

For these reasons, we’re still not close to a world where consumers can buy any channels they want in any combination. The owners of basic cable channels in particular, which are widely distributed and generate revenue even from subscribers who never watch them, aren’t keen to disrupt the current model. And anything involving high-profile sports is likely to remain under tight lock and key—CBS’s streaming service, for instance, won’t play NFL games.

“It would be absolutely detrimental to their current business model,” Erik Brannon, an analyst at IHS Screen Digest, says of the full unbundling of cable channels. “I just don’t see them being willing to jeopardize future affiliate fee growth for a few bucks here and there on the Internet.”

Still, operators and networks are finally being forced to reckon with shifting consumer habits. The number of U.S. pay-TV subscribers declined for the first time ever in 2013. Meanwhile, the number of households that watch TV content solely through a broadband connection has doubled in recent years, according to Nielsen. These are mostly young adult viewers who will define the way TV content is consumed in the future.

“There’s a shift that’s going on in consumer behavior in viewing video,” says Brian Blau, an analyst at Gartner. “Consumers are slowly but surely moving away from watching linear television on cable. They’re starting to watch these TV shows and movies more on their mobile devices.”

In the near term, analysts say the networks most likely to mimic the HBO or CBS model are their most direct competitors. It’s easy to imagine Showtime offering an HBO Go-like service, Brannon says, or ABC live-streaming its programming for a monthly fee. And while the cable bundle isn’t going anywhere, it may go on a much-needed diet. A growing number of consumers are picking smaller cable packages, indicating they’re tired of paying for hundreds of channels they don’t watch. And new entrants in the pay-TV space like Dish Network are building their business models around offering smaller, cheaper bundles of channels.

What HBO and CBS are doing suggests the future of TV will be messier and more confusing and perhaps less entertaining than the so-called “golden era” we live in now. But consumers will have more choice of what they watch and how much they pay for it. “It’s not a matter of if” more channels will be sold individually, says Brannon, “but when, and for how much.”

Online streaming service revealed Wednesday it had missed growth targets, as HBO announces a rival streaming-only service

Correction appended Wednesday, Oct. 15

Netflix stock took a nosedive in after-hours trading thanks to a confluence of bad news for the company on Wednesday.

The streaming service missed its subscriber growth forecasts for the quarter and is one of the companies most threatened by HBO’s surprise announcement Wednesday that it will begin offering its content in a stand-alone streaming service in 2015. Netflix shares fell more than 25% in after-hours trading, erasing more than $7 billion in company value.

Netflix added 3.02 million subscribers globally during the third quarter, well off the 3.69 million the company had projected. In the U.S., the company blamed the stalled growth on a $1 price hike that went into effect in May. “Slightly higher prices result in slightly less growth, other things being equal, and this is manifested more clearly in higher adoption markets such as the U.S.,” the company said in a letter to shareholders. Netflix also missed the mark in international markets, though it rolled out in six new European countries in September.

The streaming service’s financial results were more positive. Netflix pulled in $1.4 billion in revenue, meeting analysts’ expectations. Earnings per share were 96 cents, beating projections of 93 cents. Overall Netflix generated $59 million in profit.

But the looming specter of a stand-alone HBO that consumers will be able to buy without subscribing to cable may be a greater threat to Netflix than slowing growth. The company did not seem overly concerned, however, about having to convince customers that House of Cards is more worthy of their money than Game of Thrones.

“The competition will drive us both to be better,” Netflix said in its letter. “It was inevitable and sensible that they would eventually offer their service as a standalone application. Many people will subscribe to both Netflix and HBO since we have different shows, so we think it is likely we both prosper as consumers move to Internet TV.”

Correction: The original version of this story misstated Netflix’s total revenue in the third quarter. It was $1.4 billion.

Read next: HBO Will Finally Start Selling Web-Only Subscriptions Next Year

Here's how to request yours

Hundreds of thousands of AT&T customers have requested refunds for bogus cell phone charges since the telco reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission last week to reimburse consumers, an FTC official told TIME Wednesday. In total, 359,000 individuals have sent in claims to the FTC seeking refunds for unauthorized charges that appeared on their cell phone bills in a practice known as “cramming.” Through cramming, third parties are able to issue unwanted, recurring charges for things like love tips and horoscopes to cell phone users.

Jessica Rich, the director of the FTC’s bureau of consumer protection, said the response from consumers was one of the largest the agency has ever seen. The only case with a larger number of claims that she could recall was a 2012 settlement with Skechers over deceptive marketing for one of its shoe lines, which garnered close to half a million consumer complaints. “We expect this to be a lot higher,” Rich said.

In total, AT&T has agreed to pay $80 million in refunds to customers for cramming charges. The telco giant will also pay $20 million in penalties and fees to the 50 states and Washington, D.C., and a $5 million penalty to the FTC. At the time of the settlement, an AT&T spokesman noted that the company was the first in the telco industry to stop charging customers for premium SMS messages in late 2013. The FTC is currently suing T-Mobile over the same issue.

It’s not guaranteed that all the people who have issued claims will actually receive refunds. An independent claims administrator will review the refund requests to determine if they are valid. “I’m expecting that most of the claims are going to be valid, but if they’re not valid, there will be a way to determine that,” Rich said.

Customers who think they were a victim of cramming can file to claim a refund until May 1, 2015.

Here's why it's probably best to be cautiously optimistic

After years of maybe’s and not yet’s, HBO has finally announced that it will offer its content as a streaming service independent of a cable subscription sometime in 2015. People who don’t subscribe to cable have been begging HBO to take their money for years. Now, it seems, a rising tide of cord-cutters getting rid of cable and young adults who never subscribed to cable in the first place have compelled the network to fulfill their wishes.

But the announcement was painfully light on details. We don’t even know whether this service will be the same as HBO Go, the robust streaming app the network currently offers to its subscribers. Here are the questions HBO still needs to answer:

How much will it cost?

They don’t call it “premium cable” for nothing. The cost of HBO currently differs based on pay-TV provider and region but generally falls in the range of $15 to $20. Many cable operators offer the service at a discounted price of $10 per month for the first year. High-definition streaming on Netflix, for comparison, costs $8.99 per month. It’s hard to say where exactly an independent HBO would fall on this spectrum. Time Warner, which owns HBO, currently splits subscription fees with cable operators, but the operators handle the billing, customer service, delivery of content and some marketing. With a standalone service, HBO would have to deal with those issues itself and charge a fee appropriate to recoup those costs. Two years ago, HBO tweeted that a TechCrunch story that pegged the amount people would pay for the service at $12 per month “has it right.”

Will I be able to watch the newest episode of Game of Thrones?

If this service is the same as the current streaming service, yes. HBO Go allows customers to live stream the network’s TV shows on their laptops, mobile devices, and televisions. But it’s worth noting that HBO didn’t specifically say that HBO Go will be the standalone offering. The company has been notoriously reticent to offer its newest content to people who don’t pay for cable. Even the monumental deal to bring HBO content to Amazon Prime Instant Video for the first time doesn’t include Game of Thrones or more recent seasons of current shows like Boardwalk Empire.

Will the service perform well, technically?

Going by HBO’s past track record, this could be a problem. HBO Go crashed during the season finale of True Detective and multiple times during the last season of Game of Thrones because too many people were accessing the service simultaneously. Obviously a standalone service would be even more popular. No doubt HBO would beef up its servers to handle additional load, but that added expense would place more pressure on the network to raise the price it charges customers.

Will Internet service providers play nice with an HBO streaming service?

This year has seen an ongoing debate between Netflix and several ISPs over who should pay to deliver Netflix’s content to customers. Netflix suffered slowed speeds on the networks of Comcast and Verizon until the company agreed to pay them to establish a better connection. As a streaming service that will also stream its content over ISP’s pipes, HBO could face similar costs. It doesn’t help that many of the ISPs are also pay-TV operators that aren’t likely to be pleased that HBO is giving customers an incentive to cut the cord.

Can I finally dump my cable company?

If you were only keeping it around for HBO, and the new service functions similarly to HBO Go, sure. Otherwise, you’ll still need cable to watch a lot of TV content live, especially sports. But the fact that a cable network as prestigious as HBO is willing to break out of pay-TV’s walled garden in such a big way could have implications later. Other channels that already have robust streaming apps, such as FX and ESPN, could follow in HBO’s footsteps.

Does this matter to me if I still have cable?

It might. Cable operators initially offer HBO at a discount to entice customers to subscribe to the service. Now that HBO is becoming a competitor as well as a partner, they may be less motivated to subsidize the channel. And with HBO having to take on new infrastructure costs, the network may pass those expenses along to both cable and non-cable subscribers.

First: There is such a thing. Also, it will play music, make calls and log onto Facebook

Apple is launching its much-anticipated smartwatch in early 2015, but rapper/tech evangelist will.i.a.m is hoping to beat the company to the punch. The artist (who was a guest at Apple’s unveiling earlier this year) is planning to debut his own long-discussed smartwatch Wednesday night at a Salesforce.com tech conference in San Francisco, according to blog Engadget. Will.i.am. will be the featured speaker during a session called “Wrist Power: The Vision of Wearable Computing and Fashion Tech.”

The rapper, who also serves as the Director of Creative Innovation for Intel, has been teasing the watch for a while. Back in April, he said that the device won’t have to be tethered to a phone to function, unlike most similar devices on the market. His watch will be able to make calls, play music, use Bluetooth to interact with other devices, and feature social apps like Twitter and Facebook.

There’s no word yet on price or battery life, but it’s likely will.i.am will try to market his watch as a high-end, fashionable device. He debuted a $475 iPhone camera add-on aimed at “influencers” in 2012 and more recently partnered with Lexus on a car equipped with specially designed cameras to take panoramic photos.

Living the dream with free booze, ball pits and helicopter rides

Everyone knows by now that tech workers in Silicon Valley get lavish perks such as round-the-clock free food and unlimited vacation days. But as competition to recruit and retain the world’s best software engineers has increased, so has the quality of the benefits. Case in point: Apple and Facebook will soon pay for female employees to have their eggs frozen. The procedure usually costs at least $10,000, according to NBC News, but apparently that’s a cost tech giants are willing to pay in order to attract top female talent.

There are plenty of more unusual perks to go around in the Valley, though. Here’s a look at 9 other real job benefits you can consider bringing up at your next performance review.

Nap Pods – Anyone who’s ever gotten caught dozing at their desk would appreciate these comfortable reclining seats that typically feature a spherical cover to help the user block out external stimuli. The pods are a mainstay at Google, among other companies.

Bike Repair Shop – Access to free bikes is common on the sprawling campuses of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies. Facebook even offers a bike repair shop where employees can bring their own vehicles for a fix-up.

Exercise Classes – Beyond having gyms on-site, many tech companies regularly offer free yoga classes. Fitbit has free kickboxing and zumba classes, and the IT firm ThousandEyes offers free massages every other week.

Booze – A San Francisco startup called Hipster was offering new employees a year’s supply of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer at one point. Though Hipster now seems to be defunct, cloud storage service Dropbox is well known for its Whiskey Fridays.

Helicopter Rides – Security camera company Dropcam offers every employee a voucher for a free helicopter ride with friends. Even wackier—the chopper is flown by Greg Duffy, Dropcam’s CEO.

Barbershop – For those in need of a fresh cut, Facebook has a barbershop on-site to meet all hair care needs.

Car Rentals – Google employees can rent electric cars on the company’s main campus for the day to run errands.

Arcades – Forget foosball—some companies have entire arcades to help employees goof off from time to time. At Eventbrite, a new arcade game is placed in the office once a month, while Facebook’s gaming room features both traditional arcade cabinets and more eleaborate gaming rigs. Other perks that help employees embrace their inner child include Facebook’s candy shop and Google’s ball pit.

Concierge Service – Because Google would rather have their employees writing code than running errands, the company offers a concierge service that will do things like help organize a dinner party or plan a home improvement project.