Posted by Bill

Anyone who lived through the Internet bust at the turn of the century – you remember kids, back before we had the iPhone – rightfully is wary of drinking any “new paradigm” Kool-Aid too far ahead of the curve. That doesn’t look as if it’s going to be a problem with cloud computing.

Although numerous industry surveys and analyses indicate many enterprises and smaller businesses are moving IT assets and processes to the cloud slowly if at all – Gartner Group’s Tiffani Bova recently estimated only about 20 percent of businesses will have moved to the cloud by 2012 – the fundamental shift to cloud clearly is accelerating in tangible ways.

Case in point: The Wall Street Journal’s July 20 article detailing the huge demand for Internet servers and the cloud’s role as a primary driver of that demand. Couple that with another significant corporate cloud development — Rackspace’s plan to release an open source cloud platform it developed with NASA, a direct response to more proprietary cloud architectures from giants such as Microsoft and Amazon — and it’s clear that despite a fair amount of hype, the cloud is more than vapor. Open systems architectures and solutions are the foundation of the cloud, which itself has its greatest utility if end-users easily can move their data from one provider to another as the need or want arises – a task that closed or proprietary systems or a lack of widely adopted standards make more difficult for both provider and customer.

The next step is showing actual results from the cloud business case that prompt the corporate migration to cloud platforms and services to accelerate. Don’t expect that to take as long as it took to sop up all the excess bandwidth capacity deployed before the tech bust.

Posted by Bill

The age of the Kindle seems to be waning as quickly as it waxed. At least, that’s a possible outcome of the latest wrinkle in digital book sales, now that Google plans to enter the business in competition with Amazon.com and its Kindle e-book reader perhaps as soon as June. Various reports indicate that via the new Google Editions service, buyers will be able to buy and access new and older titles – including, potentially, out-of-print books for which Google has a rights agreement with the author – using a variety of platforms such as a laptop, netbook, smartphone, etc.

If this seems like another big blow to Amazon, it is. While the online retailer has sold an estimated 1.5 million of the devices in the first two years after it launched the original Kindle in November 2007, Apple took less than a month to reach 1 million sales of its new iPad – which many observers see as a natural e-book reader and can access Kindle content. Good-bye to Amazon’s nascent grip on the e-book reader side of the market.

Now on the e-book content side, enter Google and its ability to leverage the Web vs. having to rely on a proprietary device and content delivery network. According to The Wall Street Journal, Google Editions not only will enable users to buy books that turn up in Google searches on a variety of sites, but also will enable brick-and-mortar booksellers – including small, independent retailers – to sell Google Editions content from their own websites, capturing most of the revenue from those sales. So, in addition to facing a competitive juggernaut on the e-reader device side of the business, Amazon now faces on the content side a competitor that potentially will be able to a much greater number of titles but also to a handful of reader device options.

It may be just as well that Amazon’s place in the e-book world shrinks. Besides staging the ultimate Big Brother moment for Kindle users a couple of years ago, Amazon’s handling of its e-book platform has gotten a little creepier lately than some people would like.

The NAB Show takes place next week.  As broadcasters from around the country gather in Las Vegas for the annual convention, they will ask themselves the same questions about the future of their traditional broadcast business model.

For two decades, over-the-air broadcasting has struggled to maintain its share of the video market, consistently losing ground to cable, IPTV and satellite.  The business faces a rapidly growing threat from online video.  Time-shifted television has impacted advertising revenues and viewership. And the nation’s transition to digital TV didn’t create new opportunities for broadcasters that some had expected.

Over-the-air television isn’t dead. But the business needs a new plan if it wants to survive in the 21^st Century.

This week, Bortz Media and Sports Group and International Media Advisors released preliminary findings from a report outlining digital television opportunities for broadcasters and how they can best maximize their use of digital broadcast spectrum.

The study concludes that multicasting, in which digital broadcast spectrum is broken into smaller digital channels for delivery to viewers, presents the best and most immediate opportunity for broadcasters to generate incremental revenues. The research also suggests multicast can generate further increases in retransmission consent license fees.

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Posted by Bill

A federal appeals court panel’s April 6 ruling that the FCC had overstepped its authority in trying to enforce net neutrality restrictions on Comcast brings to mind Winston Churchill’s famous quote that the 1942 victory of British forces over Germany’s Afrika Korps was “…not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Yes, the ruling leaves Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and other service providers free – for now – to decide which data traffic gets priority on its networks, possibly slowing some traffic from operators of video servers like Hulu or YouTube whose bandwidth-chomping applications might hinder network performance for other users. But the war over net neutrality isn’t over.

Before the dust settled over the ruling there already was talk that the court’s decision could give Congress the impetus to pass legislation explicitly allowing FCC regulation of net neutrality. And Light Reading Cable’s Jeff Baumgartner, in a post perhaps presciently titled “Did Comcast Really Win?” pointed out Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett’s take that the court ruling could resurrect “a whole raft of regulatory obligations from the days of monopoly telecommunications regulation – including price regulation.”

Expect cable and other service providers to be lobbying furiously as Congress and the FCC move to provide some clarity on how the Internet regulatory scheme evolves from here.

Posted by Michael

Last week, news surfaced that Verizon will stop building its fiber-supported FiOS network in new markets.  The development is disappointing to some who wanted access to the robust fiber connections delivering video, voice and broadband.  But Verizon’s decision shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Rolling out fiber is an expensive endeavor. Estimates pegged construction of the FiOS network at $23 billion.  The effort made some on Wall Street cringe at the hefty CAPEX costs for the telco giant.

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Posted by Michael

The tumultuous year of 2009, considered by some the apex of the current “great recession,” may be a distant memory.  For broadband, however, decent subscriber gains during the 12-month period illustrate how the must-have high-speed Internet technology can survive even during the toughest times.

Last month, Leichtman Research Group released data that found the nation’s 19 largest cable and phone providers, representing about 93 percent of the broadband market, acquired nearly 4.1 million net additional high-speed Internet subscribers in 2009.  The top broadband providers accounted for nearly 71.8 million subscribers at the close of 2009, with cable companies serving 39.3 million customers and phone companies supplying broadband to 32.5 million subscribers.

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Posted by Bill

It seems not that long ago, the annual International CTIA Wireless show was the pinnacle for wireless news. For some reason, it doesn’t feel that way now. Seriously, you know when one of the big announcements is expected to be Sprint’s launch of its “Supersonic” 4G/WiMax phone, the breaking news from CTIA could be more incremental than monumental.

Now don’t get me wrong. CTIA still is a must-attend event for anyone working with just about any element of the mobile ecosystem, from base stations to backhaul. Wireless Week says attendance at this year’s show in Las Vegas could be up a whopping 26 percent from 2009, a potentially huge rebound. The big service providers will be announcing handset deals and the big vendors no doubt will be revealing customer wins of their own while swapping competitive bon mots about 3G coverage and LTE rollout plans.

Much of the crowd also will be buzzing about the wireless elements of the FCC’s National Broadband Plan and spending time at the concurrent Tower Technology Summit, where even a couple of cable TV industry players will be talking about solutions for mobile’s backhaul capacity crunch.

But these days, most of the big news about wireless tends to be spread out over the course of the year at a variety of events (CES, Mobile World Congress, 4G World, even CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment) or controlled by a different entity, such as Apple with its iPad – which likely will be talked about at CTIA but doesn’t hit the market until two weeks after the show.

Maybe that’s a good thing; a sign that times are good enough in the mobile business and all of its elements that members can afford to keep wireless buzz-worthy at a number of venues, instead of putting their critical publicity mass behind CTIA ever year.

Posted by Bill

News flash: Verizon Wireless says its new LTE networks will deliver average mobile download speeds of up to 12 megabits per second in “real-world environments,” according to Light Reading Mobile.

Reality check: Believe it when you see it. That’s no slap at Verizon Wireless, just an assessment based what any mobile network is capable of providing vs. what the real-life, everyday user experience is likely to be.

As even this guy would tell you, actual street-level data speeds for every carrier can vary widely from their theoretical capabilities due to conditions such as network congestion and proximity of the nearest cell tower. AT&T’s legal disclaimer for cell coverage also cites “terrain, weather, foliage, buildings and other construction, signal strength, customer equipment and other factors” as affecting one’s ability to get a full signal and peak data speed.

That’s one reason why, for example, in PC World’s latest 3G wireless speed tests of carriers in 13 cities AT&T’s HSPA 7.2 networks led with an average download speed of about 1.4 Mbps and bursts of up to 4 Mbps, far less than the network’s theoretical 7.2 Mbps capability.

That’s also why, outside of interviews with trade publications, wireless carriers shy away from citing even a range of data speeds in their advertising or marketing; dueling coverage maps notwithstanding, they all know that in some areas they’re dealing with innate limitations to how well they routinely can provide optimal speeds.

Posted by Joe

We see a lot of coverage about how technology improves the way we do business and how it entertains us — who can forget the countless stories on the iPad. But, technology also improves the lives of countless people giving them a second chance at rekindling something they thought they lost forever.

Famed film critic Roger Ebert has been battling thyroid cancer for several years, resulting in the removal of a portion of his jaw bone and the loss of his voice due to surgery on his larynx. In spite of all that has happened to him, he continues to review movies when he can.

Computer voice specialist CereProc has accumulated hours of Ebert’s voice from his television shows, so he can speak again.  The video is amazing!

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Posted by Rachel

Have you ever tweeted something like, “Off to Mexico for 2 weeks! Adios amigos!”?

It might seem harmless to share this with stalkers friends, but one web site, Please Rob Me, is bringing status updates like this to people’s attention.

Created to raise awareness of the dangers of divulging too much information online, Please Rob Me is essentially a list of status updates showing who just left home and in some cases, a person’s exact location.

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