President-elect Barack Obama has named two telecom industry and policy veterans and a leader of Google’s philanthropy arm to craft the new administration’s high-tech policy priorities.
The policy working group on Technology, Innovation and Government Reform will “develop proposals and plans from the Obama Campaign for action during the Obama-Biden Administration,” according to the president-elect’s transition web site www.change.gov.
The authors of what could be sweeping changes in broadband rules, privacy and government transparency include:
–Blair Levin, a telecom investment analyst at Stifel Nicolaus and former chief of staff to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt. Levin is also seen among a short list of candidates to head the FCC in the new administration.
–Julius Genachowski, former chief counsel to Hundt at the FCC and a member of Obama’s…
Tags: Barack Obama, Blair Levin, Broadband, Department of Treasury, Federal Communications Commission, former law school classmate, Goldman, Google, Google Inc., high-tech policy priorities, IAC/InterActiveCorp, India, Indicorps, Julius Genachowski, Obama-Biden Administration, Obama-Biden Transition Project Advisory Board, policy working group, Reed Hundt, Rock Creek Vetnrues, Sachs and Co., Sonal Shah, Stifel Financial Corp., Stifel Nicolaus, telecommunications leaders, The Washington Post Company, transition web site www.change.gov, Washington Post.
One of the key actions required to make Mobile 2.0 real is to allow people to use voice commands instead of typed commands. Looks like Google has made a big leap:
Both Yahoo and Microsoft already offer voice services for cellphones. The Microsoft Tellme service returns information in specific categories like directions, maps and movies. Yahoo’s oneSearch with Voice is more flexible but does not appear to be as accurate as Google’s offering. The Google system is far from perfect, and it can return queries that appear as gibberish. Google executives declined to estimate how often the service gets it right, but they said they believed it was easily accurate enough to be useful to people who wanted to avoid tapping out their queries on the…
Global Telecoms Business, a journal for communications service providers around the world, has named Tata Communications (formerly VSNL) CEO N Srinath has been as one of the 10 most influential telecom personnel.
Among the top 100 telecom personnel named by the magazine, N Srinath has been positioned at number 8. He has been credited for transforming Tata Communications in an international company and for the acquisition of networks like Teleglobe and Tyco Global Networks.
The list tops with Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt, and Apple CEO Steve Jobs at number two.
Other Indians in the list are Bharti Enterprises Chairman and Group CEO Sunil Bharti Mittal (at number 35), Bharti Airtel CEO and Joint MD Manoj Kohli (number 39) and CEO of Motorola’s mobile services division Sanjay…
Tags: Bharti Enterprises, Business Standard, communications service providers, Eric Schmidt, Google, Google Inc., Inc., Manoj Kohli, mobility solutions, Motorola, Sanjay Jha, Steve Jobs, Sunil Bharti Mittal, Tata Communications, Tata Communications Limited, Teleglobe, Teleglobe Inc., Tyco Global Networks, Vodafone Arun Sarin.
Interesting point Kelly Glynn makes in apache.sys-con.com:
It isn’t easy to look on the bright side of an economic crisis. The unstable stock market is provoking widespread talk of “belt-tightening,” and already thousands of people have lost their jobs. However, there is a silver lining for cloud-based services: companies looking to cut IT spending are starting to take notice of Google Apps and other online productivity suites.
The relatively new concept of the cloud model makes some organizations wary. Up until recently, risk-averse companies and large established enterprises have seen little reason to ditch their trusted offline office suites and move their entire technical infrastructure onto the internet. But now, the economic recession and subsequent panic are sparking an interest in the lower costs of SaaS suites.
The cloud is…
An intriguing move from a consortium that includes Google that seeks to provide cheap and plentiful broadband to areas around the Equator:
O3b, by contrast, intends to offer bandwidth on a wholesale basis to internet-service providers, and transmission services to telecom operators, to link remote base stations to their core networks. Furthermore, O3b’s service will be available only in a ribbon around the equator, covering most developing countries. It can start offering this service with just five satellites (it will eventually have 16) circling 8,000km above the equator. These should be in orbit by late 2010.
More on this here.
Vint Cerf, who can fairly be described as one of the godfathers of Internet has endorsed Barack Obama in the US presidential race, saying that his decision is swayed by Obama’s stance on net neutrality - the question of whether content providers should be charged more for different content by the “pipe” providers.
Extracts:
We believe that the Internet should remain an open environment. It’s vital to innovation. Companies like Google, and Yahoo, and eBay, and Amazon, and Skype and so on, got their start without having to get permission from any ISP or any broadband provider to offer services. They simply acquired access to the internet, put their services up and then made them available to the general public.
We think that’s the best way for the…
Tags: Amazon, Barack Obama, Broadband, eBay, Google, ISP, net neutrality, Skype, United States, Vint Cerf, Yahoo!.
LIRNEasia is, among other things, a research organization. Good research is what goes through peer review. But peer review requires a lot of genuflection to the prior literature (not that easy to do, sitting in Sri Lanka/India/etc, and lacking access to all the relevant journals (despite the wonders made possible by Google). It takes a horrendously long time.
So it is with some pleasure that we see that peer review is being melded with blogging in the hope of accelerating the process:
“Although Web 2.0, with its emphasis on user-generated content, has been derided as a commercial cul-de-sac, it may prove to be a path to speedier scientific advancement. According to Adam Bly, Seed’s founder, internet-aided interdisciplinarity and globalisation, coupled with a generational shift, portend a great…
When I started teaching, a weekly visit to the library was a necessary ritual. Physically leafing through the indexes and abstracts, writing down the classification numbers (I still fondly recall the HE 7700s), and then walking into the stacks to pick up the books, scan for others that may be of interest that didn’t come up from the indexes, sitting in some corner trying to decide which ones to haul back to the office . . . these were familiar and pleasurable activities.
Then the library catalog (along with those of almost all the university libraries in the state) came online. Now the searching was mostly from the office. Then came the delivery service. I could order the book online and it would turn up in…
It appears that erstwhile rivals Google and Verizon are talking about putting Google on the mobile palmtop. Good news for those who see a mobile-centric future, like us.
Motorola recently announced an investment in VirtualLogix, a company that lets multiple operating systems run on the same piece of hardware. This means you could have a single phone in your pocket that runs Windows Mobile, the BlackBerry OS, and Google’s Android OS.
VirtualLogix is a provider of real-time virtualization. Its technology enables the mobility of applications from the desktop to devices, improves quality of service and security in an open mobile world, and will enable a new generation of dynamic individual user experiences. Motorola and others believe in the technology and decided it was worth investing in.
Currently, programmers have to rewrite every application - be it a game, social networking service, or other feature - for each of the various operating systems, including Symbian, Microsoft…
AT&T is finally warming up to Google’s phone OS, Android. T-Mobile and Sprint and members of the Open Handset Alliance, which champions Google’s new Linux-based platform, and Verizon has promised to make its network open to any device, a move that likely had Android devices specifically in mind.
At the CTIA wireless show in Vegas AT&T Mobility chief, Ralph de la Vega said,
“I like it a lot more than I did before… It’s something we would want in our portfolio.”
His conversion on Android came after Google executives showed him that AT&T would be able to load its own applications on any Android handset it sold. Previously, the company had been fearful the handset would be geared too much towards the Google brand. Too be fair, however,…
Tags: AT&T, CDMA cellular technology, cellular technology, Google, GSM, Linux, mobile phones, Open Handset Alliance, Ralph de la Vega, Verizon, wireless show.
Video Road Hogs Stir Fear of Internet Traffic Jam - New York Times
For months there has been a rising chorus of alarm about the surging growth in the amount of data flying across the Internet. The threat, according to some industry groups, analysts and researchers, stems mainly from the increasing visual richness of online communications and entertainment — video clips and movies, social networks and multiplayer games.
Moving images, far more than words or sounds, are hefty rivers of digital bits as they traverse the Internet’s pipes and gateways, requiring, in industry parlance, more bandwidth. Last year, by one estimate, the video site YouTube, owned by Google, consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000.
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TelecomTV - TelecomTV One - News
Google will combine with SingTel, Bharti, Globe Transit and Pacnet to build the mooted Unity cable, connecting Japan to the United States.The $US300 million system was revealed by SingTel and Pacnet this morning. The 7.68 terabit cable is expected to be ready for service in 1Q 2010.
NEC and Tyco will build the cable while Pacnet will be the largest investor with two of the five fiber pairs. Pacnet appears to have effectively rolled its EAC Pacific plan into the project.
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Microsoft to Buy a Maker of Consumer Smartphones - New York Times
Microsoft said on Monday it would acquire Danger, a maker of consumer smartphones, an indication that the software giant is quickly moving to expand its mobile strategy.
The acquisition came after an on-again, off-again series of talks with Danger, based in Palo Alto, Calif., beginning in the middle of last year. According to a person familiar with the negotiations, Microsoft ultimately doubled what it was willing to pay to keep Danger out of the hands of other suitors, including Google.
Terms of the purchase were not disclosed.
The transaction is evidence of the accelerating shift away from the personal computer and toward a proliferating array of hand-held devices that can access information and entertainment on the Internet.
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Despite protests from broadcasters, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) next week will begin testing devices that will allow Internet service providers to utilize unused spectrum for wireless broadband service.
The commission on January 24 will kick off a four-to-six week lab test of equipment that will allow ISPs to access this spectrum, known as “white spaces.” That will be followed by an additional six-week field test period, the FCC said.
At issue is the transition from analog to digital TV signals. In an effort to free up spectrum for public safety use, Congress has ordered TV broadcasters to shift their signals from analog to digital by February 2009. When this happens, there will be open, unregulated spectrum between the digital channels, or white spaces, that companies…
Tags: analog, Broadband, Congress, Digital TV, Google, Internet, Internet Service Providers, Microsoft, United States, US Federal Communications Commission, wireless broadband, wireless broadband service.
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