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Every few weeks, some tech writer holds up a media analyst report allegedly showing, once and for all, that the cable guys have finally lost, and the cord-cutters have finally won. One week, that report might come. It will really be something. This is not that week. Let's start with news that might appear to be the death throes of cable. Cable companies' TV subscribers collapsed by more than 1.5 million in the last year, according to Leichtman Research Group. (The Big Two, Comcast and Time Warner Cable, have declined by more than 900,000, alone.) In fact, the trend has been underway for a while. Cable TV customers peaked in the late 1990s and have since fallen to early Clinton-era levels. But the cable companies aren't exclusively in the business of selling TV. They're really in the business of communications infrastructure, which is TV, phone, and Internet. The Internet business in particular has done very well for them. Since cable video subs peaked in the late 1990s, the industry has added 45 million high-speed Internet customers. Click headline to read more and view charts--
DirecTV is contemplating embedding an antenna into their set top boxes in order to offer live over the air broadcasts, thereby circumventing retransmission fees. Speaking at the JP Morgan Technology, Media and Telecom conference in Boston, DirecTV chief financial officer Patrick Doyle stated they didn't have a timeline on the project, but that it makes financial sense due to the soaring price of retrans fees and the landscape shift that's occurring courtesy of Aereo. He also stated that whenever it does get deployed, it would only be initially made available to new customers. "We’ll probably test in some markets an over-the-air integrated tuner set-up and make sure the customer experience is there," insists Doyle.
DirecTV and Time Warner Cable Inc., two of the largest U.S. pay-TV services with 32 million total subscribers, complain they have no control over the changes and are wary the networks will demand more money for unproven shows. The companies agreed to carry specific content, their executives said. Now they’re saddled with programming they didn’t order, and unsure they can pass on future fee increases to customers. “You bargain for a specific service that you were pitched to meet the needs of consumers,” Dan York, head of programming for El Segundo, California-based DirecTV, said in an interview. “If that doesn’t work, it doesn’t mean the content provider has a unilateral right to turn it into something else or even call it something else.” News Corp.’s decision to change its Nascar-focused Speed into the all-sports Fox Sports 1 starting Aug. 17 marks an effort to turn a channel with low ratings into one that rivals Walt Disney Co.’s ESPN. ESPN, the most-watched sports network, reaches about 100 million homes, collects $5.54 a month per subscriber and had 2012 revenue of $7.83 billion, according to research firm SNL Kagan. Fox’s Speed network is in 86 million households and charges 31 cents a month, SNL Kagan said. Click headline to read more--
TechHive, together with testing partner OpenSignal, visited 20 U.S. cities throughout March and April to measure the real-life speeds of wireless networks across the country.
We found that LTE speeds are getting faster, that AT&T has the fastest LTE speeds right now, that Sprint's and Verizon's respective 3G services are stuck in low gear, and that the differences between the speeds of the carrier's various services are considerable.
This infographic should help you get a handle on our most prominent findings.
Click headline to view the full infographic--
Students, staff and researchers at college campuses throughout the nation, and participating institutions through regional, national and global research and education partner networks will benefit from a faster and more secure connection, thanks to a new peering arrangement between Microsoft Corp. and Internet2, the nation’s premier research and education network. This new agreement enables improved access to infrastructure and application services that support virtual learning environments and large-scale data intensive research projects, through the use of Microsoft’s high performance computing clusters, collaboration tools, and disaster recovery services. Campuses around the world will have enhanced access to two Internet2 NET+ offerings from Microsoft – Windows Azure and Microsoft Office 365 Education. These services will enable unmetered access to both the high-performance computing and the communications infrastructure to aid collaboration. This peering service is part of ongoing collaborative efforts between Microsoft and the Internet2 community to bring other enhanced services to researchers, educators, and students that leverage the Internet2 Network. “Microsoft and Internet2 have agreed to establish direct peering to leverage the nation’s fastest research and education network in bringing the power and diversity of Microsoft cloud services to the entire education and research community,” said Shelton Waggener, senior vice president, Internet2. “We are very excited to work collaboratively with Internet2 and the Regional Education Networks to help schools quickly build, deploy, and manage cloud applications so they can benefit from big data insights. Windows Azure’s global and scalable cloud infrastructure enables education institutions to meet their research goals and serve their students’ needs on an open and flexible cloud platform,” said Margo Day, vice president, Microsoft US Education. Click headline to read more--
I propose a new category of thinker in addition to the traditional visual and verbal: pattern thinkers. In society, three kinds of minds — visual, verbal, pattern — naturally complement one another. Reading an interview with Steve Jobs, I came across this quote: “The thing I love about Pixar is that it’s exactly like the LaserWriter.” What? The most successful animation studio in recent memory is “exactly like” a piece of technology from 1985? He explained that when he saw the first page come out of Apple’s LaserWriter — the first laser printer ever — he thought, There’s awesome amounts of technology in this box. He knew what all the technology was, and he knew all the work that went into creating it, and he knew how innovative it was. But he also knew that the public wasn’t going to care about what was inside the box. Only the product was going to matter — the beautiful fonts that he made sure were part of the Apple aesthetic. This was the lesson he applied to Pixar: You can use all sorts of new computer software to create a new kind of animation, but the public isn’t going to care about anything except what’s on the screen. He was right, obviously. While he didn’t use the terms picture thinker and pattern thinker, that’s what he was talking about. In that moment in 1985, he realized that you needed pattern thinkers to engineer the miracles inside the box and picture thinkers to make what comes out of the box beautiful. I haven’t been able to look at an iPod or iPad or iPhone without thinking about that interview. I now understand that when Apple gets something wrong, it’s because they didn’t get the balance between the kinds of thinking right. Click headline to read more--
The BMW Guggenheim Lab, a traveling think tank/community discussion space, released today their latest list of urban trends, gleaned from almost six months’ worth of workshops held in Mumbai, Berlin, and New York City. From Container Architecture to Data Visualization, Crowdsourcing to Urban Data, many of these trends — discussion points, really — pop up frequently in Wired coverage as well. The list, an expansion of last year’s Berlin-specific release, is a glossary of sorts, and each term is associated with a program or event, says Maria Nicanor, the project’s curator. It’s a record of the issues most important to each city. Over the course of the workshops, which averaged about six weeks, the lab put on daily events and discussions in pavilions built specially for the event. Nicanor, who is also curator for architecture at the Guggenheim, distilled the most important messages into these trends. “They’re not intended to forecast anything new,” says Nicanor. “They’re a list of the most talked-about terms in each of the cities.” Laid out in an interactive visual grid, the trends and their related terms light up when you hover your cursor over them. Some overlap between labs — all three cities, for example, discussed Bottom-Up Urban Engagement — but more of them are unique to the cities they came from, and the particular challenges each faces. “In each of those cities, we basically design a space for events, and programs, and conferences, and screenings,” says Nicanor. “It was a thought of taking architecture, design, and events around it outside of the museum walls.” Click headline to read more--
The Canadian Science, Technology and Innovation Council released its bi-annual report this week, continuing the tradition of ‘groupthink’ evident in its previous two reports. To be fair, measuring innovation is an impossible task, since it includes everything from product innovations to new processes and technology to marketing and organizational structures. Inevitably the report’s primary focus is on some of the inputs into the process of innovation (like R&D), and not the outcome, which hopefully is more innovation. But unless we can say what successful innovation is and measure it, monitoring a partial list of inputs is hardly satisfying. By focusing on those things that can be quantified, the report makes a commonplace but fundamental error of social science that anything that can’t be counted doesn’t count. Friedrich Hayek devoted his Nobel Prize acceptance speech to the errors of analysis along exactly these lines. The report discusses things largely because data about them exist, even though what is being measured is only partly or tangentially related to innovation. The most obvious example is research and development, to which whole chapters are devoted. There is not enough discussion of the pitfalls and limitations of relying on R&D to understand innovation. The report acknowledges that “the significant investments that Canada’s natural resource industries make in exploration and evaluation activities and in field testing facilities” are not counted as R&D, but clearly are innovative. However, that is the last we hear of the problem of this type of ‘hidden’ innovation. The report does not recognize the full implications of Canada’s resource-based industrial structure. Comparing R&D as a share of GDP across countries shows that resource-based nations are usually in the bottom half. Conversely, nations that rank high in R&D do so partly because they often have no resource base, including Israel, Korea, Japan and Denmark. To advocate that Canada should have an R&D structure like Israel or Japan either misunderstands the differences between the industrial structures of these economies or says we should renounce our resource heritage. Besides R&D, another indirect input used to measure innovation is cross-border trade in business services, but these exclude intra-company technology transfers. Since we live next door to the world capital of innovation (think Apple or Google), is there a need for Canada to duplicate U.S. efforts in innovation? Click headline to read more--
The RIAA is gearing up for the big copyright reform battle doing the only thing it knows: whining that everyone else won't fix its own broken business model. Despite heavy budget cuts and layoffs, the RIAA hasn't yet realized that singing the same old debunked song isn't a winner. It's claiming that the DMCA's safe harbors are broken and need to be fixed. It's really quite incredible. They talk how they've sent 20 million DMCA takedowns to Google, and then complain that the process isn't working. Seems odd, then, that they would send so many. Perhaps they should have knocked it off earlier, and focused on things like teaching people how to have better business models.
But, that's not how the RIAA functions.
Big phone companies have begun to sell the vast troves of data they gather about their subscribers' locations, travels and Web-browsing habits. The information provides a powerful tool for marketers but raises new privacy concerns. Even as Americans browsing the Internet grow more accustomed to having every move tracked, combining that information with a detailed accounting of their movements in the real world has long been considered particularly sensitive. The new offerings are also evidence of a shift in the relationship between carriers and their subscribers. Instead of merely offering customers a trusted conduit for communication, carriers are coming to see subscribers as sources of data that can be mined for profit, a practice more common among providers of free online services like Google Inc.and Facebook Inc.
When a Verizon Wireless customer navigates to a website on her smartphone today, information about that website, her location and her demographic background may end up as a data point in a product called Precision Market Insights. The product, which Verizon launched in October 2012 after trial runs, offers businesses like malls, stadiums and billboard owners statistics about the activities and backgrounds of cellphone users in particular locations. Several European mobile-network operators have launched similar efforts. This week, German software giant SAP AG is introducing a service that will gather smartphone-use and location data from wireless carriers and offer it to marketing firms. Carriers acknowledge the sensitivity of the data. But as advertisers and marketers seek more detailed information about potential customers and the telecom industry seeks new streams of revenue amid a maturing cellphone market, big phone companies have started to tiptoe in. Click headline to read more, view graphic and watch video clip--
The European Parliament passed a resolution on Thursday demanding that the free-trade pact now under discussion with the United States exempt “audiovisual” industries so that countries like France could shelter their movie businesses from foreign competition. The resolution, which also called for similar protections to be granted for online media, underlined the sensitivity in parts of Europe to the encroachment of American culture. It also represented a reality check for trade talks that in their early stages had generated enormous optimism but could still bog down in trans-Atlantic acrimony. “This vote shows the honeymoon phase is over,” said Marietje Schaake, a Dutch member of the European Parliament for the free-market D66 party. She was referring to the excitement that many trade advocates had felt since February, when President Barack Obama endorsed U.S. efforts to reach a trade deal with the European Union that would create a partnership between the biggest markets in the world. While the resolution is not binding on the Union’s governments, which still must agree on a mandate for the European Commission to begin negotiating with Washington, the vote was a signal that the Parliament was prepared to use newly acquired powers to block any eventual agreement with the United States that it disliked. And ultimately, the Parliament’s consent would be necessary as part of any final passage. Click headline to read more--
In the Broadband Data Improvement Act of 2008, Congress directed the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to produce an interactive and search- able map detailing broadband avail- ability nationwide. This mandate was part of a comprehensive effort toward utilizing broadband to drive economic growth and improve social welfare. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and the National Broadband Plan, proposed in 2010, were also part of this effort. The former authorized funding to provide focused broadband invest- ments to reinvigorate an economy that had faced numerous challenges. The latter identified broadband as a vital ingredient in lasting infrastruc- ture improvement. Through these actions, Congress clearly recog- nized that Internet connectivity has become a vital part of our society for all members. To ensure that no one is left behind, it is necessary to pinpoint the gaps in Internet avail- ability across the United States and to identify priorities for action. The National Broadband Map, the first step toward achieving these goals, was developed in an innovative way. Agencies face numerous regulatory burdens, and those that spearheaded the project, the NTIA and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), are no exception. However, the National Broadband Map was up and running in a relatively short period of time, and it has already had a tangible impact on policy. This is due to a series of deliberate deci- sions by the team that built the National Broadband Map. Click headline to read more and watch the video of the discussion--
Thou shalt not curse the deaf, nor put a stumbling-block before the blind, but thou shalt fear thy God: I am the LORD. – Lev. 19:14 In a few weeks, the 186 governments that are members of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) will gather in Morocco with the goal of ratifying the Treaty For The Blind – an agreement that would facilitate global production and lending of audio books and otherwise enable the visually impaired and those with certain learning disabilities to have access to printed material and visual works. But last minute lobbying by Hollywood and publishing interests in the U.S. and Europe have threatened to derail the Treaty for the Blind at the last minute. Despite previously expressing support for the Treaty in the past, the Obama Administration is — surprise! — wavering in its support. Why would the Obama Administration, or anyone else for that matter, throw the blind under the bus in favor of Hollywood and the rest of the IP Mafia, especially when the laws of the United States already comply — or go beyond — what the new Treaty for the Blind would require? Perhaps this Biblical verse can provide an answer: Do not take [campaign contributions from corporations and trade associations] for [campaign contributions from corporations and trade associations] blind the eyes of the wise and twist the words of the righteous. Deut. 16:19 As we all know now from long experience, the Obama Administration can do the right thing when they get pushed hard enough. So remind the Administration: Thou shalt not put a stumbling block before the [Treaty for the] Blind. Please sign this We The People Petition telling the Obama Administration to side with the blind, not Hollywood and the rest of IP Mafia. Click headline to read more and access hot link to sign the White House petition--
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ndependent broadband provider Canby Telcom, based in Canby, Oregon, is set to launch a channel on the Roku OTT set-top-box, which features a package of live local broadcast channels and video-on-demand from its own local content channel CTV5. The move illustrates the emerging trend of broadband TV, where broadband carriers look to leverage the convergence of OTT video and broadband into a video offer of their own. Canby will take eight existing broadcast channel feeds in MPEG-2 and adapt them to multi-bitrate Apple HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) using Elemental video processing systems. The local broadcast channel line-up, which will include NBC, CBS, FOX and others will then be delivered to an authenticated channel on the Roku platform for subscribers to watch their local channels.
This channel is not delivered over-the-top across the open Internet; rather, it’s delivered through Canby’s managed local broadband access network. Canby intends to start offering the service to their existing 5000 broadband customers in June, but also intends to offer the service to their 5000 wholesale Internet subscribers, who come through Canby affiliated ISPs in the Portland, Oregon DMA.
Canby is an existing IPTV operator and looks at the Roku offer as a complement to their existing triple play bundle, extending the reach of their video capabilities to include this new broadband TV approach. “Our new EZVideo channel on Roku allows us to provide an affordable, premium-quality video service targeted to customers who are looking to augment their current digital television service with an OTT solution,” said Keith Galitz, president of Canby Telcom in an Elemental press release. Click headline to read more--
Cable overbuilder WideOpenWest said it lost 14,100 video, 10,200 phone and 1,900 high-speed Internet subscribers in the first quarter. The Englewood, Colo.-based company said late Wednesday that the subscriber losses "were driven primarily by increased disconnects of past-due customer accounts" that occurred after it converted to a new billing platform in the fourth quarter. It now counts 690,500 pay TV, 706,800 high-speed data and 432,600 phone customers. WOW, which acquired Knology for $1.5 billion in April 2012, said it generated $296.4 million in revenue in the first quarter, a decrease from $298.1 million in pro forma revenue reported for first quarter of 2012. Its net loss widened to $35.1 million compared to a pro forma net loss of $33.9 million last year. The company's subscriber losses are noteworthy, considering it was ranked by Consumer Reports in March as the top triple-play provider in the United States. It also tied Verizon's (NYSE: VZ) FiOS Internet as the No. 1 high-speed Internet service and was ranked as the second-best phone provider. Click headline to read more--
Last week in GN Docket 13-5 the FCC issued an update that asked additional questions about its planned transition of the historic TDM telephone network to all-IP network. This docket asked for comments on several topics like having a trial for transitioning the TDM telephone network to all-IP, for having a trial to go to enhanced 911 and for making sure that a switch to IP would not adversely affect the nationwide telephone databases. But the docket also asks for comments on whether the FCC should grant telephone companies the right to substitute wireless phones for wireline phones and abandon their copper network. The docket mentioned two companies that wanted to do this. For example, Verizon said they intend to put wireless on Fire Island off New York City as they rebuild it from the devastation of hurricane Sandy. But AT&T has told the FCC that they are going to request permission to replace “millions of current wireline customers, mostly in rural areas, with a wireless-only product”. Let me explain what this means. There are now traditional-looking telephone sets that include a cellular receiver. To replace a wireline phone, the telephone company would cut the copper wires, and in place of your existing phones they would put one of these cellular handsets. They would not be making every family member get a cell phone and there would still be a telephone in the house that works on the cellular network. This make good sense to me for Fire Island. It is mostly a summer resort and there are not many residents there in the winter. It’s a relatively small place and with one or two cell phone towers the whole island could have very good coverage. And if the cell phone tower is upgraded to 4G there would be pretty decent Internet speeds available, certainly much faster than DSL. One would have to also believe that the vast majority of visitors to the island bring along a cell phone when they visit and that there is not a giant demand for fixed phones any longer. It is AT&T’s intentions, though, that bother me a lot. AT&T wants to go into the rural areas it serves and cut the copper and instead put in these same cellular-based phones. This is an entirely different situation than Fire Island. Click headline to read more--
Market research from Ubiquiti Networks sees a strong, perceived link between mobile WiFi Internet access and productivity: while 48% of respondents in a recent survey graded WiFi availability and performance in their hometown a ‘B’, 70% said their productivity suffers when WiFi isn’t readily accessible in the workplace. Fifty-two percent of respondents to Ubiquiti’s latest “State of WiFi Report” said that work-essential apps often can’t be used due to poor WiFi availability or reliability in the workplace. Seventy-one percent agreed that they would use more demanding applications, such as video and chat, if higher performance WiFi was more widely available. Forty-four percent of the 84% who reported WiFi was available at work gave their employers a ‘B’ grade for its general availability and performance. “WiFi has become a must-have capability for mobile workers—it’s impacting revenue and worker productivity for businesses of all types and sizes,” Ubiquiti’s chief marketing officer David Hsieh commented in a press release. “Increasingly powerful mobile device capabilities mean user needs are outpacing existing networks in terms of accessibility, dependability and performance.” Key takeaways of the report include: Click headline to read more--
While we realize that the intricacies of IP law (and its often-attendant ridiculousness) can be rather difficult for the average, uninterested person to parse, it's really not asking too much to expect large international news agencies to make an effort to get the terminology right.
As you recall, Kim Dotcom recently announced he holds a patent for two-factor authentication, which he then waved in the direction of other internet titans like Twitter and Google, promising not to sue in exchange for contributions to his legal defense fund.
Here's how AFP (Agence France-Presse), the third-largest news agency in the world (and one of the oldest) titled its coverage of the Dotcom/patent story: Kim Dotcom might sue Twitter, Google and Facebook over copyright infringement.
Congratulations, AFP. The headline sounds like Facebook itself wrote it, using machine learning to gather IP-related flotsam from the feeds of millions of teenagers, each one bragging about trademarking their copyright on some catchy phrase they misheard on Twitter ("Be careful talking when you have a mouthful of glass") and regurgitating its findings in 40-pt font across the top of Raw Story's piped-in news selection.
The story reiterates the "copyright" claim in the opening paragraph. Click headline to read more--
Victor Wang of Hanhai Investments and San Jose Economic Development Director Kim Walesh spoke to me Thursday morning about a new nonprofit they formed to boost ties between China and Silicon Valley. The interview came after the Silicon Valley Business Journal's International Business Forum that focused on China's growing investment in the Valley. Click headline to watch the video of our conversations here--
All your Internet can be traced back to this moment of history with the launch of the Victorian Internet. This strip of paper records the first ever message sent by telegraph, a feat that occurred on this day, May 24th, in 1844. Standing in the chamber of the Supreme Court, Samuel B. Morse sent a 19-letter message to his assistant Albert Vail in Baltimore, who transmitted the message back. Members of Congress watched the demonstration with fascination much like their countrymen did in future demonstrations. The piece of paper you see above records three things: a note Morse appended to the top detailing its importance, the actual Morse code marks, and their translation into letters at the bottom. In most accounts, like the one maintained by the Senate (which used to house the Supreme Court chamber), the words Morse sent get short thrift: "A young woman provided the first message he sent: 'What hath God wrought.'" But the telegraph's long-distance application marks the beginning of a new era of communication, in which information can travel faster than any human by any means of conveyance. If you run the videos of the deployments of all the telephone and Internet and social networks around the world in reverse, they'd all wither and contract until there were only two points on the electric-information network: that Supreme Court chamber and the Mount Clair railway depot in Baltimore. In light of all that, the words of Morse's friend's daughter, Annie Ellsworth, take on more meaning than she probably anticipated: What hath God wrought, indeed.
A Blacksburg business incubator plans to boost its in-house Internet speed to 100 times conventional rates so companies housed there can create novel Web applications of the future. TechPad plans to establish a 1-gigabit connection to the Internet to empower software designers who rent work space at the hub of tech business development, founder Bob Summers said Wednesday. Several aspects make the project novel and noteworthy to technology fans: Under the banner “Help bring the Gig to Blacksburg,” TechPad is raising money to defray project costs over the Internet, and anybody can contribute. The technique, called crowd funding , typically involves small gifts — the minimum in this case is $15 — from a large number of people who believe in the project’s purpose or mission. The campaign, which began earlier this month and runs through June 5, is online at Crowdtilt.com. As of Wednesday, TechPad has raised $46,530 of $85,000 needed to begin in August and operate for the first year. Supporters include the digital advertising firm Modea in Blacksburg. Aneesh Chopra , former U.S. Chief Technology Officer, has given. A $2,000 pledge from the Montgomery County Economic Development Authority is not yet in the totals, Summers said. Click headline to read more--
Facebook is on the defensive again. Members of the social networking site sued the company for co-opting their identities in online ads, and Facebook agreed to revise its “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities” and offer a $20 million settlement. The case has drawn less attention than the dorm disputes portrayed in The Social Network, but the impact is far wider. An underpublicized aspect of the dispute concerns the power of online contracts, and ultimately, whether users or corporations have more control over life online.
Similar class action suits have been leveled against the popular photo-sharing application Instagram, and the mother of all platforms, Google. Fed up with the “contracts” these companies force on their customers, some people are finally striking back. While a few of the particulars here are new—filtered photos or copyrightable tweets—the legal dilemma is actually very old. As social media users, our rights are established through non-negotiable, one-sided and deliberately opaque “terms of service” contracts. These documents are not designed to protect us. They are drafted by corporations, for corporations. There are few protections for the users—the lifeblood powering social media. In return for driving the profits of social media companies, users get free software. But too often, the cost is unpredictable vulnerability: confusing, generic contracts that give companies control over your data, prose, pictures, personal information and even your freedom to simply quit a given website. This is a classic example of form contract abuse—when a single, powerful party pushes a contract onto a disparate group of other parties. Think of that cellphone contract you didn’t read, or the waiver you must sign to go river-rafting. Many companies use form contracts as a blanket waiver to protect against future liability, a trend discussed in The Fine Print, a book by Pulitzer Prize–winning author David Cay Johnston. The problem, however, extends beyond the ruthless profitability imperative. As Margaret Jane Radin documents in Boilerplate: The Fine Print, Vanishing Rights, and the Rule of Law>, a type of fine-print bullying has renegotiated the corporate-consumer relationship. Confusing contracts now degrade “traditional notions of consent, agreement, and contract,” she writes, by tricking people into forfeiting their “core rights,” such as the right to speak freely, control personal information or resort to courts for protection. The impact of boilerplate is especially acute for minors. Teenagers contract with online companies without understanding the vulnerabilities created upon clicking “I agree.” Today, the law protects these arrangements by assuming they were fairly negotiated, and thus reflect a “meeting of the minds” by equal parties. That is weird. Click headline to read more--
When I wrote about AT&T's blocking of Google Hangouts over cellular last week I admit I was confused. I didn't understand why AT&T would allow Hangouts on iOS but not Android. It really looked like some kind of oversight, because the Android app, just like the iOS app, was installed from an app store and not "pre-loaded," which is a distinction AT&T has made before. I also wondered if app developers had to somehow work some special magic to make their apps work on AT&T's network. But, yesterday AT&T put out a statement that clarifies some things while confusing others. First, it really does appear that AT&T defines Hangouts for Android as "pre-loaded." Even though it hasn't actually been pre-loaded on any phones yet, an app by the OS developer appears to count. Second, it also appears that handset manufacturers, not app developers per se, are the ones who have to call an AT&T hotline to figure out how to make "pre-loaded" apps work. AT&T points out that BlackBerry, Apple, and Samsung have done this. But since none of these companies developed Hangouts it's not surprising that none of them have done whatever it takes to make it work. Presumably Google's subsidiary Motorola could have called up AT&T and figured this out, but this wouldn't have been much help to users with other handsets (by HTC, LG, Pantech, etc). Click headline to read more--
It’s official Minnesota will require major online sites to collect Minnesota’s 6.875 percent sales tax starting July 1, 2013. Good news for brick and mortar shops who have felt the lack of online tax (or really lack of enforcing online tax) has been unfair. Bad news for shoppers and large online retailers. Small online businesses are still exempt from the tax. The Pioneer Press reports… "The new law will have some wrinkles that don’t completely close the online tax-free opening. Smaller e-commerce sites are still not covered. Nor are online retailers that don’t have affiliated partners or physical stores in Minnesota. An affiliated partner would be a third-party seller that a retail site such as Amazon connects with an online buyer." Click headline to access hot link to read more--
We were just talking about the third attempt by someone in Congress to deal with some aspect of patent trolling, and already we have a fourth bill. Senator John Cornyn has introduced the Patent Abuse Reduction Act, which has a variety of provisions that would make life slightly more difficult for trolls. Some of what's in the bill has been seen in those other bills, like fee shifting (such that trolls need to pay fees if they lose a case) and identifying who is really behind the lawsuit. As the EFF notes, there's plenty to like about the bill, but like all of the other bills so far, it still seems somewhat narrowly focused, rather than taking on larger problems, like the granting of bad patents by the USPTO. Still, it's good to see that Congress seems serious about dealing with patent trolls, and is actually bringing out bills to deal with the issue. Now let's see if something comprehensive might actually get enough momentum to become law. Click headline to read the bill--
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