Top 10 Most Trusted US Brands

Tech brands have earned consumer trust for privacy, rubbing shoulders with some of the most established brands in America says a new study released by The Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe.

Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe conducted a two-stage survey to gauge the privacy policies and practices of leading consumer brands. First, the companies were rated as “most trusted” in an unaided survey of 6,486 adult-aged U.S. consumers. Second, an expert review panel at the Ponemon Institute judged the companies based on rigorous criteria, including the clarity and readability of privacy statements, notice, access to account information, cookie management, in- and out-of-network data sharing practices, as well as the availability of customer service staff.

According to the 2009 survey results, eBay is the Most Trusted Company for Privacy, proving that the e-commerce site can protect consumer privacy, while handling massive volumes of sensitive data. For the first time a telecommunications company made the top 10. Verizon earned the ranking as the second most trusted company. Despite negative press coverage on Facebook’s privacy problem, the 300 million user social networking company broke into the top 10, indicating Facebook’s new privacy practices re approved by both their user community and privacy experts.

Dr. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder, Ponemon Institute said, “Year in and year out our Most Trusted Companies for Privacy study is a fascinating snapshot of public sentiment toward business.With the banking industry at the center of a national financial crisis, it’s no surprise to see a loss of trust reflected in the rankings of even those top performers on this list. Meanwhile, the continued strong showing of e-businesses such as eBay, WebMD, Yahoo!, and Facebookseems to demonstrate consumers’ growing comfort with doing business online.”

2009 Award Winners

1. eBay
2. Verizon
3. US Postal Service
4. WebMD
5. IBM
6. Procter & Gamble
7. Nationwide
8. Intuit
9. Yahoo!
10. Facebook

The Ponemon Institute is a privacy-focused research center. TRUSTe is a privacy services and seal provider. The #1 ranked auction site eBay, the #2 ranked cell phone provider Verizon and #10 ranked Facebook are Gold Award Winners in their respective categories on TopTenREVIEWS.

Best Games All Weekend

Weekend Shopping: New Low Prices on Wii, Palm Pre and Xbox 360

This is the weekend to pick up newly reduced must-have electronics, assuming you can fit in a quick shopping trip between football games. Count on us at TopTenREVIEWS to make it as easy as possible. We’ve got a rundown on the big games scheduled for the weekend and all the information you need on these new lower priced products.

First up: The Products

Nintendo Wii: This week saw a $50 price drop for the ever popular Nintendo Wii. This is a full package including the motion-sensing Wii Remote™ controller, Nunchuk™ controller and Wii Sports™ software. The Wii remains the best selling game console http://video-game-consoles-review.toptenreviews.com/ of the big three: Wii, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. Watch all the college ball you want on Saturday because this deal doesn’t start until doors open on Sunday.

Price: $199
Where to buy: Try Wal-mart, Target, Best Buy and Toys ‘R Us (in that order)
If you go to Wal-mart, you can pick up some used Wii games as well.

Xbox 360: At the end of last month, Microsoft cut $100 off the Xbox Elite, that’s the 120GB version with built-in DVD player and Netflix support.

Aaron Greenberg, director of product management for the Xbox 360, summed up the Xbox price cuts,
"With the Pro console we are dropping the price down $50 to $249 while supplies last. Moving forward we will have two, the $199 Arcade and the Elite console for $299."

The only difference with the $299 Elite versus the pre-price cut models, is the $299 does not include an HDMI cable.

Price: $299
Where to buy: Gamestop, Best Buy, Target, Wal-mart (in that order)

Palm Pre
Amazon announced today it would sell the Palm Pre for $99 with two year contract. It’s a great phone, often compared to the iPhone sans all the apps. This deal is only available through Amazon right now, so don’t go down to your neighborhood Sprint store and expect to pay less than $150 for it. Hey, that just means more time for watching football.

On to Saturday’s games:

Illinois vs #13 Ohio State
This game will be worth watching with lots of fun elements in it. We’ve got mobile quarterback versus mobile quarterback , Illinois’ Juice Williams up against Ohio State’s Terrelle Pryor, both teams coming off of wins and Illinois hoping to upset Ohio State to vault them back into the top 25. Illinois came into this season with high hopes , but were quickly disappointed a 37 – 9 humbling at home to Missouri. Hopefully Illinois will live up to its potential and pull off an upset. Ohio State is still vulnerable after almost losing to perennial whipping boy Navy in week one. Tune in at 3:30 ET.

#6 Cal (3-0) vs. Oregon (2-1)
As the Cal Bears and the up and coming Heisman candidate, Jahvid Best look to extend their good fortune against the Ducks, they just may do so. However, Oregon is coming off of a big win at home against 16 games-in-a-row winner, Utah. They’ll be looking to ruin the season of Cal as well in this big Pac-10 matchup. Catch it at 12:30 p.m. PST.

#3 Alabama (3-0) vs. Arkansas (1-1)
The top five teams this year have definitely been in danger more than once. We’ve already seen some big ones fall, most recently Ole Miss, and Oklahoma to BYU at the start of the season, so if Alabama thinks this’ll be a dance through the daisies, they’ve got another thing coming. The Razorbacks aren’t coming to mess around. Look for this one to be close, but we’ll see if Alabama learned their lesson from last year’s Sugar Bowl and puts ‘em away early. Tune into CBS at 3:30 p.m. EST.

Now if you’re aiming for the Wii on Sunday, work your shopping around these NFL games. TopTenREVIEWS resident football expert, Scott Wimmer, says these are the ones to watch. And this guy knows his football: he’s currently ranked in the top 100 of the hhgregg Pro Football Expert Club. Top prize: 55” LED TV from Samsung and additional weekly prizes.

Sunday’s Must-See Games:

New England Patriots (1-1) vs. Atlanta Falcons (2-0) 1:00 p.m. EST
New England coming the biggest upset thus far this year look to rebound, this will be a tough rebound as the once run heavy Falcons have come out of nowhere and started throwing on everyone. This one is intriguing for the quarterback matchup, Tom Brady v Matt Ryan, old dog vs the young up-and-comer. Even though I’m pretty sure the pats will most likely come out on top it’s still fun to watch.

Buffalo Bills (1-1) vs. New Orleans Saints (2-0) 4:05 p.m. EST
Who doesn’t like to watch T.O. (Terrell Owens)? And, who doesn’t like to see lots of throwing and a dynamic offense with the league’s most accurate passer, Drew Brees? This game should be a shootout, at least New Orleans should do plenty of scoring, let’s hope Buffalo can keep up.

Minnesota sVikings (2-0) vs. San Francisco 49ers (2-0) 12:00 p.m. CST
Power Running vs. Power Running, this is a game for people who like to see football the way it was played back in the day: running the football and running some more. All eyes will be on the matchup between league MVP, Adrian Peterson, and last week’s big surprise Frank Gore. Sorry Frank, don’t think you’ll be running for 200+ this week, although I hope so.

How to Prevent BlackBerry Outage

North American Blackberry users suffered their second outage in a week early Tuesday evening. For about eight hours, messaging, email and some Internet service were out, but users could still send and receive phone calls and texts.

During the outage, Twitter lit up with BlackBerry users asking if anyone else was having problems with their phone email. Within five hours of the outage, BlackBerry was the top search query on Google and a trending topic on the Twitter homepage.

In a statement issued to the Canadian press, Research in Motion (RIM), manufacturer of BlackBerry phones, wrote:

"Based on preliminary analysis, it currently appears that the issue stemmed from a flaw in two recently released versions of BlackBerry Messenger (versions 5.0.0.55 and 5.0.0.56) that caused an unanticipated database issue within the BlackBerry infrastructure," the spokesperson wrote. "RIM has taken corrective action to restore service."

BlackBerry Messenger is RIM's proprietary instant messaging system that offers messaging from one BlackBerry user to another. It can be used worldwide without additional international charges. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the BB Messaging Service was one of the only open communication channels available to emergency responders. It's a valuable system, but one potential weakness is that it must be updated by users on a routine basis.

The fix

Surprisingly, the fix that RIM issued has no obvious connection to the most common problems resulting from the "flaw" — email failure.

RIM recommends "anyone who downloaded or upgraded BlackBerry Messenger since Dec. 14 should upgrade to version 5.0.0.57, which resolves the issue. The update is available now through BlackBerry browsers at blackberry.com/messenger or BlackBerry App World.

Even users who do not use BlackBerry Messenger should install the update as it apparently affects them as well. Enterprise clients using BlackBerry Enterprise Server software were not affected.

Damage control is a real problem for RIM. Yes, the technical issue seems to have been repaired, but communicating the news and its solution to BlackBerry users fell short this time. And RIM has repeatedly broken its promise that such outages will not happen again. After an outage in 2007, RIM CEO Jim Balsillie said, "It was a process error that we had that's been fixed. It shouldn't have happened, and it won't happen again."

But subsequent widespread outages occurred on Feb. 11, 2008, Dec. 17, 2009 and — the most recent one — Dec. 22, 2009. According to a comScore report issued in Oct., 14 million Americans use a BlackBerry compared to 8.9 million iPhone users.

Users deserve better communication

If millions of users turn to Twitter, RIM could do the same. On July 3, 2009, Authorize.net, the Internet's largest online transaction provider, went down due to a fire in a Seattle data center. Within an hour, Authorize.net launched a Twitter page that reported the problem, updated the status of the service, and responded in real time to customer questions.

In addition to a Twitter page, RIM could also put news front and center on its webpage. A visit to the site revealed the last Troubleshooting Tip for Top Issues was dated Sept. 9, 2009.

Old-school communication is not sufficient for alerting millions of users to a problem with their phone service. Advanced devices deserve advanced news distribution..