Month: June 2011

Bloomberg Complaint Against Comcast: Not Neighborly?

By Editor June 30, 2011 May 3, 2012

When Comcast acquired NBC from General Electric, one of the conditions in the FCC order approving the acquisition was that this media conglomerate must carry in their existing news neighborhoods “all independent news and business news channels”—like, for example, Bloomberg’s upstart TV channel.

You knew Comcast wasn’t going to make this easy.

Earlier this month, Bloomberg filed a complaint with the FCC against Comcast in which it documented in excruciating detail how in the 35 most populous DMAs (designated market areas), Comcast effectively exiles Bloomberg’s content away from a key block of consecutive news channels.

The correspondence summarized in the complaint between Dan Doctoroff, President of Bloomberg, and Comcast’s Neil Smit is comical in a bureaucratic, miscommunication kind of way.

The Rack

FYI: Office 365 Is Out of Beta (yawn)

By Editor June 29, 2011 June 29, 2011

I tried Microsoft’s Office in the cloud last month as a beta user, and I’ve managed to somehow since get my work done without Office …

Quote of the Day

By Editor June 29, 2011 June 29, 2011

It had no interest in ensuring that all Americans would have several opportunities to watch The Good Wife on their computer or Internet-capable device in …

Archaic Telecom

Cable Over the Air

By Editor June 28, 2011 September 7, 2011

At last week’s CEA Line Show, I was reminded again about that other industry that uses wireless and cable transmission to distribute content onto a flat LCD screen.

Admittedly, some of my television watching has been replaced by web browsing and the focus of this blog has been on apps and Internet, rather than TV channels and set-top boxes, but I was still stunned by ESPN’s 3D sports channel.

In other words, there’s still much to get excited about in the non-interactive, non-social TV medium.

This became clearer when I met briefly last week with industry pioneer and disruptive force Jack Perry, whose company Syncbak has worked out a clever solution that would let local TV stations monetize their live transmissions on the Web.

As with most things involving communications, this story about retransmitted broadcast signals includes well-intentioned but conflicting public policy, litigious players, and the Internet making everything more complicated and the stakes higher.

Archaic Telecom

Good VoIP Choices from Ars Technica

By Editor June 28, 2011 June 28, 2011 1

Ars Technica, a favorite read of mine, answered a question yesterday from a reader seeking a VoIP solution for a remote office situation. In the “Ask Ars” column, Jon Stokes provides a few cloud-based telephony providers that should be familiar to readers of this blog.

Stokes approves of Junction Networks’ OnSip, which by the way is the service used by Ars as well as by Technoverse’s editorial offices, and 8×8’s Virtual Office.

He even talks about using SIP softphones with these services, and there’s a mention of Asterisk, the PBX software project (but nothing on SipXecs)

It’s a good run down and worth a read.Continue reading

@NYC

Brief Interlude at CE Week, NYC

By Editor June 23, 2011 September 10, 2011

The Consumer Electronics Association, better known for its giant show in Las Vegas, launched its first CE Week in New York City.

There are events around the city for the next few days, including CEA Research Day at the Time Warner Building (today, actually), Digital Downtown (hey, isn’t that NYTM’s Nate Westheimer on the speaker list?), and the CEA Line Show, where the public gets to peek at the newest multi-media gear and gadgetry.

I was in attendance yesterday and saw booth after booth of electronica and other A/V hardware–speakers, headsets, televisions, tripods, solar powered radios.

One couldn’t help but notice that 3D is a major theme for the television industry.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Download Speed Competition: US Is Definitely Not Number 1

By Editor June 21, 2011 October 24, 2011 1

It’s not news that US broadband speeds ain’t world-class.

For confirmation, check the OECD’s (Organisation for Economic Cooporation and Development) extensive data sets culled from the advertised speeds of ISPs across many countries.

The spreadsheet I looked at, based on data from 2010, shows that US cable broadband performance is somewhere in the middle: ahead of France, Chile, Luxemborg, and Germany, but behind Estonia, Slovak Republic, Portugal and Finland.

Those last two, by the way, have the best speeds in Europe.

And let’s not even get into fiber bit rates.
Continue reading

@NYC

Fun with ThingLink

By Editor June 20, 2011 June 20, 2011

Image hotspots have been around for a long time—since at least HTML3—and have allowed developers to add interactivity to graphics.

You know, hover over a state in a map of the US, see the name pop up, and then click to get routed to an informational page.

And of course, Flash and Silverlight have come along to provide ultimate interactivity and media capabilities. But the emphasis has always been on developers, especially with the aforementioned tools.

ThingLink is a San Francisco startup that is bringing hotspots, which they call Rich Media Tags, within reach of HTML- and ActionScript- challenged publishers.

That means bloggers, Tumblrs, etc. can quickly add linkable, position-aware icons to their pics.Continue reading

@NYC

Visiting Wanderfly Land

By Editor June 17, 2011 September 30, 2011

Wanderfly, the travel planning site we like, has just signed up a few more media companies as curators.

It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement wherein the likes of Mashable, Jaunted (“celeb-favorite destinations”), Havaianas (“beaches that soothe your sole”), and my favorite, the History Channel, control a piece of Wanderfly’s web real estate.

From there the subject matter experts can make travel suggestions and perhaps History Channel curators can inspire readers to learn what really happened at the Circus Maximus or the Baths of Caracalla.

With this announcement, it seemed like the right time to take a deeper tour of Wanderfly.Continue reading

The Rack

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

By Editor June 16, 2011 June 16, 2011

I couldn’t resist.

This morning I was in New York City, near Union Square Park, which is known for its excellent farmer’s market.

And temporarily, the Best Buy on the south end of the park is one of the few places you can see and touch Samsung’s stunning Android tablet.

So I took the subway uptown and then made a beeline for the store Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Back at the FCC: Community Information Needs and Hurricanes

By Editor June 15, 2011 September 7, 2011

The FCC released another paperweight-class report.

Entitled The Information Needs of Communities, this 478 pager (with footnotes) is “an in-depth analysis of the current state of the media landscape along with a broad range of recommendations.”

Produced by journalists, academics, entrepreneurs, and led by Steve Waldman, a former editor and the founder of Beliefnet, the report has the obviousities you would expect, including newspaper revenue has dropped, local TV is a not source of investigative reporting, and the Internet has reduced the cost of gathering and distributing news.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Avaya Files IPO: S-1 Paints a Bleak Picture

By Editor June 10, 2011 September 25, 2011 4

I just took a peek at Avaya’s S-1 filing with the SEC.

To these admittedly non-financial eyes, this ain’t pretty.

We learn that this legacy PBX vendor, which had pinned its hopes on something called unified communications, ended its 2010 fiscal year last September with a net loss of over $800 million.

And it appears from their income performance for the first six months of 2011 that they are ahead of schedule: dripping red ink at the rate of $600 million.

On the balance sheet, they’ve accumulated around $6 billion in debt, a result of the pricey private equity buyout by Silver Lake and TPG in 2007 and then the purchase of Nortel’s Enterprise Solutions business in 2009.

Archaic Telecom

Good Move AT&T: Free WiFi in NYC Parks

By Editor June 9, 2011 September 8, 2011

New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg announced today an agreement with AT&T to provide free public WiFi service for the next five years in 20 city parks.

They’ll soon be coverage in parts of Manhattan’s Central Park, in Battery Park, along the trendy High Line, and Tompkins Square Park.

Thank you AT&T and New York City. Now I can realize my dream of checking emails on a non-3G Android tablet while strolling in “The Ramble”.

Brooklyn residents will be able to connect with AT&T’s WiFi in Prospect Park, Brooklyn Bridge Park, and Fort Greene Park.

On a related matter, their WiFi initiative takes some of the sting out of one of Sprint’s criticisms in its lengthy petition to deny the T-Mobile acquisition.Continue reading

Lunch Hour

Hot Afternoon Diversion: Entoforms

By Editor June 8, 2011 September 8, 2011 2

An email from Dutch visual artist Dolf Veenvliet arrived at my inbox just at the right time.

With August weather making an early appearance in June, Veenvliet’s exotic and slightly creepy Entoforms roused me out of my weather-induced torpor.

Entoforms are imaginary life-forms that have been designed using Blender, the open-source 3D software, and have even been a given a kind of DNA by Veenvliet, in his role as creator.

I’m assuming that unlike the story of Genesis, Veenvliet’s work took more than a day. And as far as I know the Old Testament god was not using 3D printers, which is how the Entoforms become physical realizations.Continue reading

@NYC

Wanderfly Makes Time’s Top 10

By Editor June 2, 2011 September 30, 2011

Last week at TechCrunch Disrupt, I had a chance to see the revamped Wanderfly.

Christy Liu, Wanderfly’s co-founder and Director of Marketing, put me behind the new dashboard of this visually intensive travel recommendation site as we looked for warmer spots while shivering during an unusual late May cold spell.

The photos I looked at for Italy (Rome, Venice, Sienna) are stunning. And for my next job, I’d like to be the house photographer for Wanderfly.

I learned from Liu yesterday that Wanderfly made Time Inc.’s list of “10 NYC Startups to Watch” and Entrepreneur magazine’s “100 Brilliant Companies”. Continue reading