August 2009

According to Forrester Research, more than four in five US online adults report using social media at least once a month. And while young people continue to march toward almost universal adoption of social applications, the most rapid growth occurred among consumers 35 and older. "This means the time to build social marketing applications is now," said Forrester analyst and report author Sean Corcoran. "Interactive marketers should influence social network chatter, master social communication, and develop social assets -- even if their customers are older."

As US regulators step up scrutiny of the dangers of texting while driving, software makers are scrambling to develop cellphone applications that block texts or minimize the distraction of texting. Texting while driving is unsafe: Not only are a driver's eyes off the road, one or both hands are off the wheel. Texting has been implicated in the crash of a Los Angeles train in September, as well as a trolley collision in Boston in May. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have banned texting while driving, with 10 passing laws this year, the Governors Highway Safety Association said. Safe Driving Systems Corp. is building a system that takes over a cellphone's display when its owner starts driving. Calls and text messages are received but can't be accessed, though users can place emergency calls. The system includes an electronic "key" that is installed in the car and emits a Bluetooth signal that disables the keypad while the car is running.

[Commentary] The Associated Press can't make enough out of legal uses of its content under the business models it has in place. One nice side effect of introducing the new service is to shift discussion away from the fact that its business model is failing and towards proposed technical and -- I would predict -- legal changes to safeguard that model. These may or may not be good ideas. But whichever way one comes out on that issue, one shouldn't be fooled by the meme that the newspaper industry in general and the AP in particular is in trouble mainly because of uses of its content that are illicit under current law. Universities may make news gathering a larger part of their mission. Subscription services may spring up to support a particular journalist or coverage of a particular issue. Newspapers may indeed start charging more aggressively for their news. Rupert Murdoch certainly plans to. Maybe the AP's tracking beacons will even have a role, though I doubt it. What we need is radically imaginative experimentation; public and private. And that is something we are unlikely to get if we succumb to either digital complacency or tales of piratical alarm. [James Boyle is a professor of law at Duke.]

Researchers from Microsoft and Harvard University have presented a detailed design and implementation of a wireless data network for use in unused portions of the UHF spectrum, commonly referred to as white spaces. Laying out their proposal in a paper presented at the SIGCOMM 2009 Aug. 17-21 in Barcelona, Spain, the authors acknowledge the requirement the Federal Communications Commission placed upon wireless white space devices not to interfere with incumbent spectrum users, including TV stations and wireless mics, when authorizing their use in November 2008. In "White Space Networking with Wi-Fi like Connectivity," the authors say they have identified the challenges of building a UHF white space wireless network, dubbed a "WhiteFi" network, and have presented ways to surmount those challenges, including new techniques, algorithms and protocols "backed up by extensive evaluation over a prototype network" and simulations.