Year: 2010

Social Studies

Pinker vs. Carr, Theory vs. Reality

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Steven Pinker
PowerPoints make you productive (Wikipedia)

Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker took up the mantle for twitter-reading, YouTube-watching, blog-scanning, email-reading multi-taskers in an Op-Ed in last Friday’s New York Times. In what amounts to a direct critique of Nicholas Carr’s recent remarks on hyperlinks and his new book, What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Pinker says that claims that our cerebellums are being re-wired to think less and react more are overblown.

Pinker scores valid points with familiar arguments from this camp. The move to the written word from an oral tradition, for example, was thought by the ancients to be a memory crutch and would inhibit good conversations and interactions. Sound familiar?

I can’t talk about whether there is a permanent rewiring of the brain, but I don’t see how Pinker and his cohorts can deny the productivity draining aspect of too much digital interactivity.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

The AT&T-Verse

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Waves of bad news coming out of AT&T recently stand as a reminder of what life would be like if the crown was restored to this former monarch.

First there was the iPad security escapade wherein a group of hackers fooled a very insecure AT&T web form to display email addresses of iPad owners. Then the pre-order web meltdown in which customers for Apple’s iPhone 4  were faced with an AT&T back-end order entry system that stopped working. Then there’s the customer who received a terse cease-and-desist voicemail response after he emailed AT&T’s CEO Randall Stephenson to complain about the new caps on data—Zappos’s Tony Hsieh is probably smiling and FedExing a copy of his latest book, Delivering Happiness, to Randall.

Add to this brew the usual problems with AT&T’s 3G coverage (see TechCrunch’s  wireless frustrations) and barely acceptable customer service, and you’ll get a pretty good sense of how telecom was delivered in the Middle Ages (circa 1970s) when AT&T and the Bells were the only games in town.

And to rub salt into our wounds, AT&T is threatening to cut off investment in its U-verse/IPTV cable rollout if the FCC doesn’t reconsider its reclassification of cable broadband as Title II telecommunications.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Free WiFi at Starbucks Starting July 1

MIAMI - JANUARY 28: A Starbucks Coffee is see...
Image by Getty Images

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced free WiFi  yesterday at Wired’s Business Conference.

Obviously, this is good news for Web-browsing-coffee-slurpers everywhere, and is another validation for Starbucks as a third place between work and home.  It is also a win for AT&T against cable operators Comcast, Comvision, and Time Warner, who were planning on offering free WiFi hotspots in the NYC metropolitan area.  AT&T provides WiFi for Starbucks.Continue reading

@NYC

Finale: Startup Weekend NYC

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I was able to catch most of the Startup Weekend NYC closing presentations, which were held this year at New York University’s Courant Institute. It was my first time as an attendee, and though I’m sorry I missed Mantrophy’s pitch, after about ten or so presentations, I definitely got a feel for the energy, industry, and the sheer fun of hatching a business.

If the rest of the events of Internet Week NY could be considered watching the early careers of startups, Startup Weekend NYC was a front row seat to witnessing the first big break for a future Foursquare or Etsy— American Idol for the tech set.

The whirlwind began on Friday evening when developers, marketers, designers, and business managers paired up to launch their plans. By Sunday, there were software mock-ups, sales projection spreadsheets, marketing roadmaps, and elevator pitches. Considering the limited time, the final PowerPoints and closing remarks were compelling enough, I believe, for most of these startups to continue with their efforts.

There were a few I liked.Continue reading

The Rack

Good News from Google: Renaming Folders

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Google may have accidentally-on-purpose scooped up data while (war)driving in Germany, and its new option to change the background on its home page is just plain silly, but they did do something right in the last few weeks.

I am a heavy user of Google products and an appreciator of the simplicity of its design philosophy, but with Google Reader they may have  moved the scalpel a little too close: until recently there was no way to rename a folder containing RSS feed subscriptions.  Once you created a folder, you were stuck with it—unless you wanted to start over with a new name and  forklift existing feed entries.

On the Official Google Reader Blog, the company announced on June 1 that users now have the ability to rename folders.

Often times, it’s the small things that make the difference.
Continue reading

@NYC

Tech City

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I took a quick peek at the Internet Week NY headquarters on 18th street in Manhattan while on the way to New York Tech Meetup’s “action packed” June event. I had just enough time to see some of the booths, grok the social media aspects of the planned discussion topics, and take a picture of Brooklyn-based MakerBot Industries’ CupCake CNC machine (also known as a 3-D printer) before I left for the Skirball Center.

My take away from IWNY: engaged communities swarming around focused content and, thanks to startups like MakerBot, custom hardware will rule the future. And it’s happening here in NYC!

Then I went to the NYTM and watched a man smash an iPad with a sledge hammer.Continue reading

Quote of the Day

AT&T gets credit for pushing the idea of a two-way video conversation back in the 1960s. They understood that this intrusive technology meant a loss …

Archaic Telecom

From AT&T Picturephone to Apple FaceTime

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AT&T Picturephone

It’s been a long standing journalistic practice that when writing about the failure of yet another video phone product, you march out AT&T’s Picturephone launch at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. I believe it’s a pretty safe bet that Apple’s new FaceTime will break the long losing streak of this concept and make video chats as natural and popular as, well, a cell phone call. Even though we finally have a video phone winner, it’s still instructive to look at that early Bell product, if only to understand why it will take a company like Apple to make it a mass success.

AT&T gets credit for pushing the idea of a two-way video conversation back in the 1960s. They understood that this intrusive technology meant a loss of privacy, but thought it would be counterbalanced  by the public’s just-under-the-surface narcissism. Their original advertising slogan was “Some Day You’ll be A Star” (see P. Coburn’s, The Change Function). This was a  bold call to arms for a pre-Internet, pre-Facebook, and pre-Youtube America.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

AT&T’s New Pricing Plan

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Perspectives from David Pogue (New York Times) and Stacy Higginbotham (Gigaom) are a good starting point to understanding what data caps, pricing tiers, and tethering charges imply about the state of wireless competition (less than thriving) and profit expectations of a big carrier (“greedy”).  The money quote from Pogue after the jump:

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The Rack

$75 Tablet From OLPC

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The One Laptop Per Child Foundation has teamed up with chip maker Marvell to produce an inexpensive tablet computer for the education market.

OLPC XO-3 concept

OLPC , founded by Dr. Nicholas Negroponte, has committed to distributing a new family of XO tablets that will have some very desirable features, even for non-school children: based on low watt version of  Marvell’s Armada processor , multi-lingual, multi-touch soft keyboard,   multi-OSes (Android, Ubuntu, Windows Mobile), and 1080p  video. Continue reading

Quote of the Day

Other times, they’re tiny distractions, little textual gnats buzzing around your head. Even if you don’t click on a link, your eyes notice it, and …

Archaic Telecom

Visualizing Broadband Competition

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After tuning into parts of Google’s IO  conference last month,  news about version 3 of the Maps API slowly made its way into my waking consciousness. I had some time last week to explore this newer, cleaner Map interface as part of a project I’ve been thinking about.  I wanted to get a handle on competition in the broadband sector, a topic I’ve been covering since the start of this blog, and was hoping to use visualization tools to get answers and also generate new questions.

While trolling the FCC’s Gov 2.0 sitelet, I came across files containing service provider competitive data.   I then  learned about the extensive data the FCC captures from carriers on a per zip code basis as part of its “Form 477” database.  Some of the 477 statistics are publicly available, but much is still closed off, (Hey, FCC open those files!)

I just needed a way to render zip codes into geo data suitable for mapping. A few more Google searches led me to state-by-state files of zip code polygon paths at the US Census Bureau’s page of cartographic boundary data.

I had enough to get started.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

700 MHz Public Spectrum at Work on the Gulf Spill

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The FCC reported that  emergency agencies in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama were able to stitch together a 700 MHz radio network to connect first responders and government workers.   This was an ad hoc telecom effort to, in effect, route callers into the right conference group.

The agencies in these Gulf states created a workable, but still somewhat primitive (compared to what’s coming), radio trunking system to share available frequencies more efficiently and allocate them into separate radio talk groups.

A better solution is in the works.
Continue reading

Quote of the Day

I think it’s true that the Communications Act gives us the authority that we need. But I also think that by virtue of it’s structure, …

Archaic Telecom

Verizon's Good Deal: 1 Mbps for $20/month, forever

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Carriers have always loved to meter. They are utilities after all.  Of course, then came the Internet,  dirt cheap bits,  and a generation of consumers brought up on free.  Wanting to charge on a piecemeal basis but fearful of consumer outrage on being nickel-and-dimed, the telecom industry has been adopting pricing tiers (see AT&T) as a compromise solution.

With tiers, the meter isn’t running. Instead, customers pay a fixed amount for a given level of service (speed, capacity, quality, etc.)   This has traditionally been the arrangement in business telecom—of course, in that world you’re protected by service level agreements that pay out for disruptions, excessive latency, and packet errors.

I was excited to learn about an interesting variation on the pricing tier model that was revealed in a  letter from Verizon.  In its latest  marketing campaign, Verizon promises to lock in a  stingy 1 Mbps broadband for its subscribers at $19.99 per month, forever: “...low price you can count on, month after month, year after year.”
Continue reading

The Rack

Shogo: Rhymes with iPad

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Shown off at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, Freescale’s  7″ tablet prototype was supposed to inspire manufacturers and design houses to produce real products.  Realease took the bait and has followed up with an iPad clone it calls Shogo.

This Hong Kong product design company has come up with a Linux-based, iMX-37 powered, 10″ multi-touch capacitve screen… Oh, heck here’s the spec list, so I don’t have to string together more coordinating adjectives:Continue reading

@NYC

Soluto: The Windows Whisperer

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I had allocated a small slice of my attention span to keeping tabs on the TechCrunch Disrupt startup battlefield earlier this week.  I was wowed by UJAM, and thought  they would surely come away with first place.

The judges instead chose Soluto, a company that sells  “anti-frustration” software for Windows owners.

Curiousity got the better of me, and I downloaded Soluto onto my aging Dell Dimension Tower to see what got the judges excited.

Disclosure: I recently purchased an Apple MacBook Pro because my long standing aggravation with Windows had reached a breaking point.  I had made a vow to not spend another dollar on upgrading my Microsoft-Dell productivity killer.

Soluto is a slickly designed utility that analyzes your bootup sequence— I had initially 47 apps in mine—and visually explains what processes are needed and what can be removed.

Bottom line:  After letting Soluto tame my unruly Windows bootup, I’m willing to spend more quality time with Windows XP.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Communications Act Version 2.0

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Congress announced on Monday that they will start the process of revising the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The key committee players (Sen. Jay Rockefeller, Sen. John Kerry, Rep. Henry Waxman, and Rep. John Boucher) will bring together “stakeholders” in a “series of bi-partisan, issue focused meetings beginning in June.”

As you may vaguely remember, the ’96 legislation was intended to spur innovation and competition by forcing the incumbents to unbundle parts of their networks and make them available to competitive carriers at wholesales prices.

The incumbents resisted mightily both in the trenches and in the courts, and the competitive carriers that have survived to this day are just holding on.

There is a big difference this time around as Congress rolls out 2.0 of the Act. Continue reading