Free Internet access may be a bygone perk of the dot-com bubble, but it appears to be alive and well at the world's largest Internet service provider, America Online.
AOL offers a battery of free promotion and retention programs, but refuses to disclose how many of its subscribers pay nothing for the service. Now, Wall Street is zeroing in on some financial details that it believes offer a guide to this elusive number--and it doesn't like what it sees.
The worries over the freebie issue were sparked by a widening gap between the price of an AOL subscription and the average amount the company collects per subscriber. Although the service charges $23.90 a month--up from $21.95 after a price hike last year--average monthly subscription revenue per member has hovered between just $17 and $18, according to calculations provided by three Wall Street analysts, figures that are as much as 29 percent below the list price.
That doesn't mean that nearly 30 percent of all AOL members are using the service for free: The company has a number of pricing plans and distribution deals, which cut into its margins. But the size of the shortfall offers strong evidence that AOL's much-vaunted growth has increasingly become dependent on free sign-ups, analysts said.
News source: CNet News
AOL offers a battery of free promotion and retention programs, but refuses to disclose how many of its subscribers pay nothing for the service. Now, Wall Street is zeroing in on some financial details that it believes offer a guide to this elusive number--and it doesn't like what it sees.
The worries over the freebie issue were sparked by a widening gap between the price of an AOL subscription and the average amount the company collects per subscriber. Although the service charges $23.90 a month--up from $21.95 after a price hike last year--average monthly subscription revenue per member has hovered between just $17 and $18, according to calculations provided by three Wall Street analysts, figures that are as much as 29 percent below the list price.
That doesn't mean that nearly 30 percent of all AOL members are using the service for free: The company has a number of pricing plans and distribution deals, which cut into its margins. But the size of the shortfall offers strong evidence that AOL's much-vaunted growth has increasingly become dependent on free sign-ups, analysts said.
News source: CNet News
Lead researcher Dr. Mijail Serruya and his colleagues at Brown tested the device by having a monkey play a simple video game, in which the animal used the cursor to chase a moving target on a computer screen.
The monkey was able to move the cursor ``instantly'' with as much control as if it were using a computer mouse or a joystick, Serruya said. The monkey wills the cursor to move. The cursor moves.
The animals' hands-free cursor control was almost as fast and accurate as when they used their hands, the researchers reported. So far, three monkeys have received the implant.
Linked to a personal computer, the cursor-control device ``would work for anything you can do or you can imagine doing by pointing and clicking. This includes reading e-mail,'' Donoghue said. ``Or imagine an on-screen keyboard that someone can use to type sentences or issue commands by pointing and clicking.''
The Brown implant system uses an array of 100 tiny electrodes to detect electrical activity from a pinprick of neurons -- between seven and 30 motor cortex cells -- and feed it through a cable to a personal computer.
There, a formula the Brown group designed turns the brain activity into instructions a computer can use to plot the cursor movements. That software interpreter uses a fairly straightforward application of textbook algebra, the scientists said.
The system is so small and draws so little power that any future device developed for human use could easily be made wireless, said biomedical engineer Sandro Mussa-Ivaldi at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.
It may be a decade or more before any clinical product is ready for testing, however. So little is known about tapping the neural activity of the human brain that researchers are likely to proceed slowly. No one knows, for example, what the effect would be of having such an electrode in the brain for years or whether over time the implant might lose its ability to function. ``This implant is potentially one that is very suitable for humans,'' Serruya said. ``It shows enough promise that we think it could ultimately be hooked up via a computer to a paralyzed patient. ``We want to be careful that the implant is suitable and safe,'' said Serruya. ``There are a few technical details that we are still working on.'' The Brown researchers have filed for a patent on the technique and formed a company called Cyberkinetics to develop medical applications.
Other research groups in recent years have announced encouraging successes in experiments with devices designed to turn brain commands into computer instructions. Until now, these were limited in their potential usefulness by technical constraints.
What makes the newest effort to link brain and machine remarkable is the ease with which it can be learned and the small number of neurons it requires to operate, Mussa-Ivaldi said.
"There are a mountain of things we still need to know," he said. "But this is progress."
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