August 2009

Health care industry a challenge, opportunity for telecom

The health care industry has long been a major consumer of bandwidth and a vertical market heavily targeted by telecom with specialized solutions. But trends in demographics, technology and the health care industry itself are making the telehealth and telemedicine markets of increasing interest to telecom service providers. Two specific trends are taking hold in a major way: The health care industry's need to use information technology and telecommunications to operate more efficiently, and an aging population's need and desire to use remote health care monitoring to promote better care for the chronically ill in their own homes. While often moving separately, those two trends converge to create a booming demand for health care networking that ties together all the piece parts of the sprawling U.S. health care system: hospitals and clinics, doctors and other health care professionals, insurance payers including the federal government, and patients as well as their caregivers. Against this backdrop, new business models are emerging. Some of these include the telecom service provider as a valued partner and others reduce telecom to a transport service, albeit a bigger, more mobile and more secure pipe.

Political Talk Shows Talk Themselves Out of Ads

Could Glenn Beck be killing off an entire cable genre? After the recent controversy over the cable talker, marketers seem to be considering pulling ads from the politically oriented cable news shows that have helped NBC Universal's MSNBC and News Corp.'s Fox News Channel thrive in the ratings -- no matter what their political leanings. Walmart Stores, Berkshire Hathaway's Geico and Men's Wearhouse have already said they've taken steps to ensure their ads will no longer appear during Fox News' "Glenn Beck" show. Procter & Gamble and S.C. Johnson recently said they had never intended to advertise on the show and ads were placed there by mistake. Now Clorox Co. has said it is taking its ad dollars out of all politically oriented talk programs.

Panelists to FCC: Raise e-Rate funding cap

The e-Rate can play a significant role in the national broadband plan being developed by the Federal Communications Commission, panelists said during an August 20 hearing -- but for this to happen, the Commission must raise the program's funding cap. "When the e-Rate began, our connectivity consisted of a few dial-up connections in our school libraries," said Sheryl Abshire, chief technology officer for the Calcasieu Parish Public Schools. "Today, this has all changed. We now have over 20,000 computers connected to our network, and--at any given moment--over 12,000 of them are accessing the network. Each day, our students, teachers, and administrators make more than 5 million web page or network object requests, send or receive over 35,000 eMail messages, and transmit 18.5 gigabytes of data." Yet, as successful as the program has been in connecting schools and libraries to the Internet, demand for the e-Rate still far exceeds what is available for disbursement, Abshire testified.

How Markey III Hurts the Internet

[Commentary] Reading the latest version of Congressman Ed Markey's (D-MA) Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009 is like going to your high school reunion: It forces you to think about issues that once appeared to be vitally important but which have faded into the background with time. When the first version of this bill appeared, in 2005, the Internet policy community was abuzz with fears that the telcos were poised to make major changes to the Internet. In the intervening years, Congress did exactly nothing to shore up the regulatory system, and the Internet appears to be working as well as it ever has: New services are still coming online, the spam is still flowing, and the denial-of-service attacks are still a regular occurrence. It's reasonable to ask how the Internet has managed to defy the odds and continue to function despite these forecasts of doom, and how it would be affected by passing the Markey bill at this late date. [Richard Bennett is a Research Fellow with the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation specializing in broadband networking and Internet policy.]

Bringing diversity to the newsroom is not the same as bringing diversity to the coverage

[Commentary] Let's stipulate that newsrooms should resemble the communities they serve and that after at least three decades of effort, according to surveys by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, they don't. So, maybe it's time to change the subject. Maybe it's time to acknowledge that "one from Column A and two from column B" efforts to make newsrooms diverse are really just tokenism in drag and won't inherently change how we cover minority or ethnic communities. Maybe it's time to put as much effort into the latter as we do the former.

What's keeping news organizations from trying the "low-profit" model?

[Commentary] With so many journalism luminaries focused this week on new business models at Aspen Institute's FOCAS09 conference, I was a little surprised not to hear more about the potential for the low-profit limited liability corporation, or L3C. The L3C is a hybrid corporation that straddles the line between for-profit and nonprofit enterprise. Vermont last year was the first state to pass a law allowing formation of L3Cs, and Illinois this month became the most recent. Several other states are considering similar legislation, as is Congress. Some have looked to the L3C model as a solution for newspapers because it allows a corporation to take on investors who are willing to accept varying rates of return - or possibly none at all. Foundations would be assured that their investment would qualify as a program-related investment - a crucial distinction under tax law - while socially responsible investors might be willing to settle for, say, a 3 percent return. So where is the grand experiment in L3C newspaper journalism? We're still waiting to find out. One of the big problems is that nobody really wants to go first, says Jay Hamilton, director of the DeWitt Center at Duke University. The concept remains fraught with uncertainties, not the least of which is whether newspapers can return to profitability after the recession.

Post-Newspaper Journalism?

What would happen if a major U.S. city was suddenly without a daily newspaper? It seems increasingly possible these days and so the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism set out to find an answer. They hired business analysts to create economic models for the news organizations that spring up. CUNY Professor Jeff Jarvis says journalism could thrive without a daily newspaper.

Daily newspaper's death leaves Ann Arbor at a loss

Across Ann Arbor, a city of 114,000, residents are coming to grips with the loss of their venerable daily newspaper, replaced by a Web version. Declining ad revenue and a prolonged recession are ravaging the newspaper industry, last year killing such iconic mastheads as Denver's 149-year-old Rocky Mountain News and the 146-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer. But Ann Arbor -- with its powerhouse university, world-class medical center, well-educated populace and an economy the envy of a down-and-out state - seems an unlikely destination for the ink-stained Grim Reaper.

Look How Ubiquitous Wi-Fi Has Become

[Commentary] Wi-Fi has become an indispensable part of our daily lives — at least for those of us who live in the United States, Decipher reported in a survey conducted on behalf of Devicescape, a networking software maker, chipmaker Intel, and Meraki, a networking hardware maker in San Francisco. Devicescape is a popular application among iPhone and iPod Touch users because it eliminates the need to constantly log onto AT&T or other Wi-Fi networks using a password. As a result, the numbers in this survey might be slightly skewed, so take them with a grain of salt. And anyway, what can you expect from a survey that's tied to three unabashed champions of Wi-Fi? But it is a good sign-post of the reality of Wi-Fi and its ubiquitous nature. Nearly 98 percent of Wi-Fi consumers log onto Wi-Fi networks once daily, while nearly 57 percent log in every day, according to the Decipher's survey of 8,000 users of the technology.

Why did Apple okay RingCentral?

Here's a question the Federal Communications Commission neglected to ask Apple in its inquiry into why the company rejected — or as Apple prefers, declined to approve — Google Voice: Why has a free app that does essentially the same thing — and would seem to raise the same red flags for Apple — been sitting on the App Store for nearly 10 months? The app is called RingCentral Mobile and not only does it perform most of the same functions as the Google app that's making all the headlines — universal telephone number, voicemail, dial-by-name directory, click-to-call, call forwarding, answering rules, call screening, music on hold, etc. — it was the template on which both Google Voice, and its predecessor, GrandCentral, were built.

Benton

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