The FCC is further beefing up its Enforcement Bureau, adding Phillip Rosario, former head of the Consumer Protection Department at the Connecticut Attorney General’s Office, as deputy chief. Rosario established the department and collaborated with the FCC on recent cramming settlements with AT&T and T-Mobile, said a news release.

The FTC settled a lawsuit against two individuals for alleged involvement in a multi-million dollar international telemarketing fraud scheme that targeted U.S. senior citizens. Defendants Marc Ferry and Robert Barczai allegedly withdrew money from the accounts of seniors without authorization, while claiming to sell fraud protection, legal protection and pharmaceutical benefit services for $187 to $397, the complaint said. As part of the settlement, Ferry and Barczai are barred from using remotely created checks, are required to obtain consumers’ consent before debiting accounts and are prohibited from misrepresenting any goods or services. They also must turn over proceeds from the scheme, which the FTC estimates are around $11 million. “Scammers thought they could cover their tracks by operating across borders, but law enforcement caught up with them,” said Jessica Rich, Consumer Protection Bureau director. “We’ve shut down their scheme of lying to older people and stealing their money.” The settlement announced Tuesday is part of a complaint issued against Ari Tietolman and his associates who “established a network of U.S. and Canadian entities to carry out their scam,” the FTC said.

Hype about the launch of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus last fall took a toll on sales of iPads in Q4 for Apple, which shipped 4.6 million fewer tablets versus the previous-year quarter, an industry research firm said. Apple had a 17.8 percent shipment decline over Q4 2013, to 21.4 million units in 2014 Q4, a Monday report​ from IDC said. Apple CEO Tim Cook said last week when releasing quarterly results that the iPhone was the star of that quarter (see 1501280031). The company expanded its iPad lineup by keeping around older models and offering a lower entry price point of $249, but the strategy “wasn't enough to spur iPad sales given the excitement around the launch of the new iPhones,” Jitesh Ubrani, IDC senior research analyst, said. Apple’s efforts to maintain iPad momentum “have fallen flat” because the latest generation of iPads offer “very minimalistic upgrades over their previous versions,” IDC said. "Cannibalization at the bottom from the iPhone and at the top from the Mac appears to be a serious issue for the iPad.” Worldwide tablet shipments, meanwhile, had a year-over-year decline for the first time since the market's inception in 2010, IDC said. It said overall shipments for tablets and 2-in-1 devices slipped 3.2 percent, to 76.1 million in Q4, compared with 78.6 million for the 2013 period. "The tablet market is still very top heavy" because Apple and Samsung are largely carrying the market each year, Ubrani said. Fifth-place Amazon had the steepest annual volume decline of the top five tablet vendors, IDC said. Despite a product refresh at the end of September with the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 and 7-inch Fire HD, holiday sales tumbled nearly 70 percent compared with 2013, IDC said. Of the top five, it said that only Lenovo, in a distant third place, had growth in Q4, boosting tablet shipments by 9 percent to 3.7 million units for 4.8 percent global market share. IDC forecasts growth for the tablet category in 2015, Jean Philippe Bouchard, research director-tablets, said. Potential growth contributors include Microsoft's new operating system, a shift toward larger screen sizes and “productivity focused solutions,” along with technology innovations such as gesture control, he said.

The table is set for Thread Group-branded connected home products to reach store shelves during the second half of 2015, Sujata Neidig, its vice president-marketing and Freescale Semiconductor business development manager, told us Friday. The alliance, which said last week it had surpassed 80 members, is on a fast track to bring the connected home mainstream, Neidig said. Thread’s initial goal is to get the spec released, due for summer, and then to increase awareness of the protocol among developers, manufacturers and software developers, Neidig said. The group then will raise awareness among consumers, she said. Success will be launching products that are Thread-enabled and expanding the market from there, she said. The connected home has been talked about for many years, Neidig said, “and we want to enable it as soon as possible.” The alliance positions Thread as a simple, low-cost way to connect devices in the home. “We built Thread based on existing technologies,” Neidig said, adding that Thread runs on any existing 802.15.4 radio, of which “millions” are in homes today. “All you’re doing is adding the Thread software stack,” she said. “Theoretically, any device on the market today that has an 802.15.4 radio in it can be updated on the air via software to run Thread.” Thread’s position in the Internet of Things is that it’s targeted only to the connected home, it’s focused on connecting devices and enabling them to communicate, and it’s an IP-based standard in a mesh network configuration that’s low power and scalable, Neidig said. Founding companies include Nest, Samsung and Silicon Labs. Thread Group also announced last week its enabler program that’s designed to spur development among startups that don’t have the $2,500 funding necessary to join the group (see 1501280033).

Consumer education is needed to make people aware of their privacy rights as more health data is put online and/or stored electronically, a civil liberties advocate said at an event Thursday. The event was declared otherwise off the record in the middle of the program. Privacy concerns related to an individual’s health records were discussed at the panel hosted by the Center for Democracy & Technology. Panelists included FTC Commissioner Julie Brill; Corinne Carey, assistant legislative director, New York Civil Liberties Union, who was the one panelist who agreed to speak on the record; Ben Heywood, co-founder of PatientsLikeMe; Indiana University law professor Nicolas Terry; and Chris Boone, executive director of the Health Data Consortium. Panelists discussed whether sharing health data would help medical professionals accurately diagnose patients and help researchers find cures for medical conditions more quickly, whether the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act should be abolished, expanded or amended, who owns the rights to health data, and the need for consumer education when it comes to digital health care rights -- especially as wearables and health apps become increasingly popular. Privacy doesn't matter to consumers until their information is revealed, Carey said, and most consumers believe they're protected by HIPAA -- the most misunderstood law, she said, that doesn't include the word privacy in its acronym. "Privacy laws are decades old" and patients don't own the rights to their health records -- the creators of those records, the health providers, do, she said.

Development for Apple Watch “is right on schedule” and shipments are expected to begin in April, Apple CEO Tim Cook said Tuesday on an earnings call. Developers are hard at work on apps “all designed specifically” for the Apple Watch's user interface, he said. Cook has “very high” expectations for the Apple Watch, he said. “I'm using it every day and love it and I can’t live without it. So I see that we’re making great progress on the development of it. The number of developers that are writing apps for it" is "impressive and we’re seeing some incredible innovation coming out there.” The iPhone was the star of Apple’s Q1 ended Dec. 31, Cook said. That Apple sold on average 34,000 iPhones every hour that quarter is a volume that’s “hard to comprehend,” Cook said. Apple sold 74.5 million iPhones in the quarter, an increase of 23.4 million over last year, representing 46 percent unit growth, said Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri. Sales of iPhones grew strongly in both developed and emerging markets, Maestri said, including a 44 percent increase in the U.S. and a 97 percent increase in Brazil, Russia, India and China, he said. The company's stock closed up 5.6 percent at $115.31 Wednesday. The introduction of the large-screen iPhone 6 Plus helped push iPhone average selling prices $50 higher than a year earlier, to $687, Maestri said. The downside of iPhone’s popularity was that iPhone “channel inventory” fell by 200,000 units in the quarter, “and we were not able to reach supply-demand balance until this month,” Maestri said. “This left us below our target range of five to seven weeks of channel inventory on a look-forward basis.” Apple works with "about 375 carriers, representing 72 percent of the world’s mobile phone subscriber base, and we have over 210,000 points of sale for iPhone across the globe,” said the CFO. Apple thinks its iPhone strength will be sustainable throughout calendar 2015, Cook said. “We are incredibly bullish about iPhone going forward,” he said. “We believe that it’s the best smartphone in the world. Our customers are telling us that. The market is telling us that. We’re doing well in virtually every corner of the world." Only a “small fraction” of the iPhone installed base has upgraded to iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus, he said, suggesting sales momentum will continue. “We had the highest number of customers new to iPhone last quarter than in any prior launch,” including the “highest Android switcher rate in any of the last three launches in the three previous years,” he said. Asked to quantify that “small fraction” of iPhone users who have upgraded to an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus, it’s “a number that's in the mid-teens or barely in the teens,” Cook said. “There is an enormous amount left. And given there are fair amount of Android units out there, there is also an enormous amount of Android customers that could switch. And I’d also remind you that there is a lot of people that have not yet bought a smartphone. And I know it doesn’t feel like that when you’re sitting in the United States.”

Microsoft’s “most strategic objective” is to build “developer momentum” behind Windows 10, and that’s what the company is focusing on “with a lot of different actions,” CEO Satya Nadella said on an earnings call. Microsoft plans to release Windows 10 later this year as a free upgrade for Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 users who act to redeem the offer in the first year, Microsoft has said. Its goal with Windows 10 is to create a “great opportunity for every developer” to write these “universal” applications that will run on the desktop as well as on Microsoft phones and tablets, Nadella said Monday. With Windows 10, “we're building a device platform for the mobile-first, cloud-first world,” Nadella said. “It's a world where the mobility of a person's experience is paramount, requiring a platform that spans devices from small screens to large screens, to no screens at all. It's a world where interacting with technologies is as natural as interacting with other people and it's a world that demands trust and security." For developers, Windows 10 “will be the most attractive windows development platform ever,” Nadella said. “We ... have made this our most collaborative project yet with more than 2 million insiders giving us feedback every day.” Microsoft also is “making progress with our own devices,” Nadella said. For Q2 through Dec. 31, Microsoft surpassed the $1 billion revenue mark with its Surface tablets for the first time, he said. For Microsoft Surface, “the value proposition of being the most productive tablet is resonating,” he said. But the company's stock closed down 9.3 percent to $42.66 Tuesday. Microsoft sales of Lumia phones topped 10 million units in Q2 and are up 30 percent compared with the same quarter a year earlier, Nadella said. Sales were particularly strong of Lumia 500 and 600 series “affordable smartphones,” he said. “In this segment of the market, the combination of our brand and value stand out and we plan to continue to build a beachhead here.”

U.S. telecom companies are “ready to install broadband connections to give communities reliable access to the Internet and to help build the smart cities that [India’s] Prime Minister [Narendra] Modi has called for,” President Barack Obama said Monday at the U.S.-India Business Council Summit in New Delhi. “We can work together to develop new technologies that help India leap forward,” Obama said. He cited India’s plans of “fast-tracking American investments” in the country: “We need to be fostering a business environment that’s more transparent and more consistent, and more predictable. In knowledge-based economies, entrepreneurs and innovators need to feel confident that their hard work and, in particular, their intellectual property will be protected.” Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker is accompanying Obama on the trip. Disney CEO Bob Iger was also present for a CEO roundtable on the visit, a pool news report said Monday. Obama said a lack of effective IP protection has caused U.S. industry to limit investment in India, hurting India's software development, according to a different pool report.

The Obama administration plans an “all-of-the-above” approach on spectrum, wrote White House Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Jason Furman and U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith, in a joint Wall Street Journalop-ed. The AWS-3 auction “is an important step toward President [Barack] Obama ’s goal of freeing up 500 megahertz of spectrum by 2020, nearly doubling the amount available for mobile broadband use,” they said. It’s crucial to make more spectrum available and that government agencies continue to find ways to free up more spectrum, they said. “Ultimately, reaching the president’s 500 MHz goal will require changing the traditional spectrum model of exclusive, licensed use. Many organizations have begun to explore new technologies for sharing spectrum more efficiently and new economic models for allocating this scarce resource.”

Comments are due March 9, replies April 7, on a Nov. 21 NPRM on governance and oversight of 911 service in light of the IP transition, said a Thursday FCC Public Safety Bureau public notice. "The American public has developed certain expectations with respect to the availability of 911 and E911 emergency services, and Commission action is both appropriate and necessary where reliance on voluntary efforts alone proves inadequate to ensure reliable and resilient 911 service,” the FCC said in the NPRM.