February 2009

Apparently, Mignon Clyburn, a member of the Public Service Commission of South Carolina, will be tapped to serve on the Federal Communications Commission. She could replace Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, whose FCC term expired last year, but who may continue serving at the FCC until the end of this year or until a replacement is appointed. Clyburn has been on the SC PSC for eleven years and is the daughter of one of the most powerful men on Capitol Hill, Majority Whip Jim Clyburn of South Carolina. In South Carolina, the PSC has jurisdiction over telecommunications, investor-owned electric and natural gas companies, privately-owned water and sewer companies as well as some transportation systems (passenger carriers, household goods movers and hazardous waste for disposal carriers). The state's General Assembly elects PSC commissioners to four-year terms. Clyburn was first elected in 1998; her current term ends June 30, 2010. Clyburn chaired the PSC from 2002 until 2004. She also ran The Coastal Times -- a small, weekly African-American newspaper in Charleston -- from 1984 when she graduated from the University of South Carolina with a BS in banking, finance and economics to when she was first elected to the PSC in 1998.

With cell phones having reached a saturation point in the US market, declining consumer spending and a lack of must-have new features could add up to the industry's worst year ever. "People have been replacing their old phones steadily for the past few years, but as the economy goes down, they're not spending as much," said Allen Nogee, a principal analyst at In-Stat. Moreover, he says, the cell phone industry may have reached its apex when it comes to adding new features, which had been a prime selling strategy for cell phone makers and service providers.

Up until very recently, perhaps as recently as six months ago, the prevailing wisdom among analysts who covered the media industry was that "content is king." It is an inexact way of looking at what editors, photographers, actors, producers, and reporters create. But content is rapidly being devalued. The first people to press that case are accountants. They have insisted that companies write-down tens of billions of dollars in assets. Part of the problem with content value is tied directly to the recession. Accountants should take it easy when they lean on that too hard. The best assets bounce back when the economy recovers. But, by forcing companies to write-down their content assets so extremely they are saying that the firms can never go home again. Their TV shows, movies, magazines, and newspapers will never recover all of their value. No one knows to what extent content will be "re-valued" as the economy improves.

The number of connections on mobile phone networks has crossed the 4 billion mark worldwide, industry association GSMA said on Wednesday, forecasting further growth to 6 billion by 2013. The number of connections does not translate directly into the number of users, however, because in many mature markets, one user may have two mobile phones, or a phone and a mobile data device, which would both count as two connections. In Western Europe, about a fifth of connections are estimated to be due to one user having more than one device, a figure that probably applies to many developed markets, a GSMA spokesman said. In developing countries, by contrast, phones are often shared.