March 2010

Vivek Kundra, the Obama official with $79 billion to spend on technology, said the government can be more efficient by putting programs on the Web, paving the way for companies like Microsoft and Google to win business.

The government wants to put data such as health-care pricing information on Internet-based systems as they grow more secure, the U.S. chief information officer said in an interview this week. The U.S. can cut costs by outsourcing that work, said Kundra, who has overseen the federal technology budget since President Barack Obama appointed him last year. Microsoft, Google and Amazon are all offering more databases and programs online, allowing customers to curb storage costs. Sharing software and data that way would shrink U.S. storage needs, helping to cut expenses after previous governments spent more than $500 billion on data centers and other technology initiatives in the past decade, Kundra said. "It's mind-boggling," said Kundra, a New Delhi native who previously managed information technology for the District of Columbia. "It costs a fortune, it's duplicative and it's an energy hog."

The model Kundra is looking at is known as cloud computing, where users go through the Web to access computers, applications and data instead of through their own servers. He declined to say which companies are best fit to operate government clouds. He noted that Google and Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft have introduced government-focused clouds in the past few months.

No tweeting or status updates in court or deliberation rooms.

Judges have been increasingly instructing juries to stay off Facebook and Twitter -- and don't use the Internet to investigate the cases, according to Joseph Rosenbaum, a Reed Smith partner, who chairs the firm's global Advertising Technology & Media Law practice. Social media and access to search the Internet from anywhere have begun to change the rules in the U.S. court systems. County and city courts have begun to post rules outside each courtroom instructing people not only to turn off their mobile phone to eliminate the noise from obnoxious ringtones, but to keep people from writing blogs and posts. Judges have started giving juries instructions to stay off social network sites. As jurors come on to the jury and during the trial, "judges have begun to tell them they cannot surf the Web, do their own independent research and communicate with others via social media," Rosenbaum says. "They take the 'don't communicate and don't read the newspapers' language we use to hear and moving it into the digital age." Some courts have contemplated banning bringing mobile phones and personal computers into courtrooms, Rosenbaum says.

While today a ruling might get thrown out of court if someone tweets or blogs during a trial, at least one state has considered taking criminal action against the jurors.

Telepresence, an advanced form of videoconferencing, aims to simulate the experience of a face-to-face meeting by using high-definition, jitter-free video coupled with spatial audio. Only a small fraction of the 230,000 videoconferencing systems sold worldwide in 2009 were telepresence systems, according to Wainhouse Research. But the technology is earning a following, and Wainhouse expects to see the technology's share of the videoconferencing market increase substantially over the next five years, helping to drive strong videoconferencing system growth. Depending on the number of sites connected and the equipment involved a telepresence meeting could include as many as 300 people. Whoever is talking at any moment appears on screen virtually life size.

Countless laws across different levels of government (federal, state, and local) and agencies mandate that service providers disclose material conflicts of interest to their customers. Countless private entities, including trade associations and media outlets, have ethics codes with similar disclosure requirements.

Emerging web technologies, often categorized under the rubric of the "semantic web," offer a way to automate conflict of interest disclosure in new and powerful ways. But this requires that an open, standards-based "bias ontology" be first developed. The efficiencies created through the use of a bias ontology offer an opportunity to rethink the scope and methods of conflict-of-interest disclosure regulation. A good place to start would be the Federal Trade Commission's new conflict-of-interest disclosure laws for bloggers who review products. As a complement to mandatory disclosure of conflicts of interests for legally recognized fiduciaries, a system of voluntary certification with significant penalties for false disclosure could be offered. In this way, service providers who want to make a credible claim that they are independent but are not covered by one of the government's mandatory conflict of interest laws could be offered an opportunity to do so.