Communications Act Version 2.0

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

The Helpfulness of Crowds

For the past few weeks I’ve been trying out a few of the collaborative recommendation sites that are  currently on the scene. My interest was initially piqued by an NYC startup or two, then I learned about Aardvark, now part of Google and one of the most successful of the purely crowdsourced Q&A sites.

You ask a question  and one of Aardvark subscribers is likely to have an answer. I was quite impressed that I got a quick and meaningful response about a good Spanish white wine to match with seafood.

Not all of the cloud-based oracles work this way.  Many instead rely on machine-learning techniques (decision trees, Bayesian classifiers, clustering, …) in which the mileage of your answers will vary based on the terrain of the data.

Then I learned about a mega success story from MetaFilter, a community weblog, in which two young Russian women were saved from entering the sex trade by MetaFilter members. Continue reading

Apple: World's Most Profitable Mobile Manufacturer

According to tech research firm Gartner, Apple sold over eight million mobile handsets in 1Q 2010 for a 2.7% share of the market and ranks 7th on the leaderboard (hat tip to MacRumors.com).

Nokia is in the first spot with over 110 million units sold in the first quarter.

However, Apple’s iPhone sales add up to over $5 billion, while all of Nokia’s unit sales across its many models accounted for $9 billion.Continue reading

The Chrome Web Store

I’m keeping one eye on my Wave box as I try to follow the Google IO conference while juggling a few other tasks. One significant product announcement that came out of yesterday’s keynotes was the Chrome Web Store.

Yes, it is very nice that Google is now creating a place for web developers to put up a shingle and sell under the Google banner. Google does make it very clear that these are ordinary web apps:Continue reading

The Real FCC Plot: Open Internet Access

After the FCC lost its net neutrality case against Comcast, I put on hold a project to review a series of YouTube videos involving Chairman Genachowski. The rough plan was to gain some insight as to how the FCC would approach net neutrality, open internet, and universal access based on Genachowski’s public statements. I wasn’t going to do this alone, instead I would enlist the resources of Crowdflower’s cloud workers to help with the analysis.

That was ages ago (last month). Since then the FCC has announced its plan to place has placed broadband transmission under Title II regulation and has regained the net neutrality high ground. And in response, one well known, respected FCC watcher, Glen Beck, has said that the President plans to regulate the Internet and control the “misinformation” through net neutrality—there was also some talk about Marxism and public utilities.

This was enough to spur me into action and get those videos scanned for certain keywords.Continue reading

Cisco Loses $3.7M Patent Suit

Cisco Systems, lnc.

A federal jury in Texas decided in favor of closely held Commil USA in its patent infringement suit against Cisco. Commill USA owns a fixed mobile convergence patent that was developed by an Israeli tech company, also called Commil.

The Israeli company, started by three engineers in 2000, gained early success with a networking architecture to switch calls between Bluetooth and cellular.

With the networking industry’s move to WiFi , Commil couldn’t develop a similar type of technology and the company was closed down by CEO Yuval Duvev.
Continue reading

Social Networks as Living Organisms

Leading public health and social network scientist Nicholas Christakis spoke at TED in February.  As a doctor and public health researcher, he brings the study of social networks back to its roots as a tool to understand disease spread. One of his better known research projects shows that obesity can be contagious.

While watching the presentation, you quickly realize that visualization of data related to obesity, emotions, and friendships is more effective than tables of numbers in explaining how the power of our connections can influence our behavior.

Interesting factoid: if your friend’s friend’s friend is obese, your risk of obesity is 10% higher.

In other words, something is spreading.Continue reading

Get Ready for the Cruz Reader Cisco Cius Quirky Product Idea Factory Dueling Headlines on iPhone 4 Visualizing Broadband Competition Verizon’s Good Deal: 1 Mbps …

Multimedia Fun with SIP

In my evolving unified communications projects, I’ve been searching for a way to switch media between voice and text. My current two Tropo apps (the headline reader and the Gov 2.0 bill browser) are voice-centric, but at times I would like to eliminate the text-to-speech part and just send the text.

This should be possible with SIP, which underlies the unified communications platforms I’ve been accessing with my X-Lite softphone.

So called “multi-modal” communications, in which device capabilities (plain cell phone, smartphone with keyboard, smartphone with video,etc.) and presence ( in meeting, on the road, in the quiet car) are acknowledged in routing and rendering decisions, is one of the important advances of this session technology.Continue reading

Wideband Audio Anyone?

Glad I’m not the only curmudgeon who’s troubled by the state of 21st century audio! The lower quality of digitally compressed MP3 (compared to CD ) made the front page of yesterday’s New York Times. Economics and convenience are to blame for the lossy, lower-sampled recording formats that are used to cram more tunes into our portable devices.

So why are our cell phone conversations still stuck with a slice of audio spectrum that dates to the 1930s? I’ve written about a newer wide band codec (G.722 standard) that could deliver a far broader 7kHz of sound. Unfortunately, you’re more likely to experience that on station-to-station calls in a large corporate environment (courtesy of Avaya, Cisco, and other enterprise players).

Outside of the confines of an office park, we’re all struggling to make ourselves heard over a skinny, tinny sounding 3.3kHz swath. I found some of the answers as to why this is the case from a presentation given at this year’s eComm event.Continue reading

FCC’s Third Way Approach

As expected, the FCC has decided to reclassify Internet broadband as a telecommunications service. It’s approach is to apply Title II common carrier requirements to Internet broadband, but forbear most of the provisions except six, those associated with denial of service and unreasonable practices (in other words, net neutrality).

You can read the legal theory behind the reclassification and forbearance here.

Updated: After reading through the legal reasoning behind the FCC decision, I was nodding in agreement with some of the ideas being explored. One is that different parts of Internet communications require separate regulatory approaches.Continue reading