March 2010

RCN To Be Acquired For $1.2 Billion

RCN will be acquired by investment fund ABRY Partners for about $1.2 billion in cash, the companies announced Friday.

ABRY has agreed to pay $15 per share for RCN, representing a 43% premium over RCN's average closing share price during the past 30 trading days and a 22% premium over the closing share price on Thursday, March 4. Financing for the transaction -- which includes the assumption of RCN's debt -- comprises a combination of equity to be invested by ABRY and debt financing to be provided by SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, GE Capital, Societe Generale and certain of their affiliates, the companies said. As of Sept. 30, RCN had $729.7 million in long-term debt and capital lease obligations. The transaction is expected to be completed in the second half of 2010, subject to stockholder and regulatory approvals. As a result of the deal, RCN said it will not hold a fourth quarter 2009 results conference call, which had been previously scheduled for Tuesday, March 9. RCN, created in 1997 as a video, data and phone competitor to cable and telco operators, went through a Chapter 11 reorganization in 2004.

RCN's primary service areas include New York City; Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia; Lehigh Valley, Pa.; Boston; and Chicago. The company had 367,000 video customers as of Sept. 30, 2009.

Federal officials address ed-tech concerns

Before an audience of chief technology officers from across the country at the Consortium for School Networking's March 1 CTO Forum, Karen Cator, director of education technology for the U.S. Department of Education, and Federal Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra discussed the nation's education technology efforts and held a frank question-and-answer session that ranged from the proposed education technology budget for fiscal 2011 to removing barriers to classroom technology use.

Technology as a force multiplier is one focus of the 2009 book Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics, and the Future of American Education, by Terry M. Moe and John E. Chubb, which predicts that online learning will completely transform schools into learning centers where students take many of their classes online. And ed-tech advocates and school IT staff will have to focus on supporting networks, infrastructure, and other systems that enable this kind of an environment. It is important to "create technology systems in our schools and districts that allow teachers, students, and administrators every single day to do the work they need to do" without being hampered by the way the technology operates -- or doesn't operate, Cator said.

Government: Cybersecurity IT Skills Scarce

More than half of government cybersecurity managers say it's "very challenging" to find candidates with the right skills and the right amount of experience for new jobs, according to a new survey by the International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium ((ISC)2). Finding someone with the right skill sets and experience is the most difficult part of the process.

FBI director warns of 'rapidly expanding' cyberterrorism threat

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III warned Thursday that the cyberterrorism threat is "real and . . . rapidly expanding."

Terrorists have shown "a clear interest" in pursuing hacking skills, he told thousands of security professionals at the RSA Conference in San Francisco. "They will either train their own recruits or hire outsiders, with an eye toward combining physical attacks with cyberattacks," he said. "Al-Qaeda's online presence has become as potent as its physical presence" over the last decade, he said. Osama bin Laden long ago identified cyberspace as "a means to damage both our economy and our psyche -- and countless extremists have taken this to heart," he said. Terror groups are using the Internet to recruit, radicalize and incite terrorism, he said. They are posting videos on how to build backpack bombs and bioweapons. "They are using social networking to link terrorist plotters and plans," he said.

Beijing says working with Google to resolve dispute

China is in consultations with technology giant Google to resolve its dispute with the company, which has threatened to abandon the Chinese market over hacking and censorship concerns, said a Chinese official on Friday. The comment came from Li Yizhong, minister of China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), speaking on the sidelines of China's annual parliament.

Apple's multitouch lawsuit is both dumb and dangerous

When Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone at 2007's Macworld conference, he began by describing the device's groundbreaking user interface. "We have invented a new technology called 'multi-touch' which is phenomenal," Jobs said. "It works like magic." In his superlative-laden way, Jobs explained that Apple's new touch screen was so sensitive that you could use it without a stylus, so smart that it could detect and ignore unintended touches, so elegant that it could understand elaborate multifinger gestures. And then he added five words to emphasize how special and unique this multitouch technology was: "Boy, have we patented it!" Now Jobs is making good on that implied threat.

This lawsuit could apply to just about every one of Apple's tech rivals, including Microsoft, Motorola, Palm, and Research in Motion, the BlackBerry's manufacturer. In the three years since the advent of the iPhone, smartphone makers have moved aggressively to mimic the device. Every mobile company now makes multitouch phones, and with all the tablets and e-readers hitting the market, touch screens are becoming ubiquitous. You wouldn't be going out on a limb to predict that touch-screen devices will play a major role in the future of computing. With this lawsuit, Apple is standing in the way of that future.

That Whole Internet Thing's Not Going To Work Out

Terrible predictions can be instructive -- in their wrongness, we can see the flaws of our own visions for the future.

Part of the fun of watching and reading old sci-fi is in seeing how old visions of today match up with the dreary reality. We don't have flying cars or jetpacks and only a few prescient visionaries predicted anything like the Internet. Given how wrong they tend to be, it's generally a good idea to ignore all predictions. The future is unknowable—especially in the digital age, when we're constantly barraged with new technologies. Still, we'll never stop being obsessed with the future. With that in mind, it would be nice to have some idea of which predictions to trust and which to dismiss.

Here are a few rules for separating the good from the bad: Good predictions are based on current trends. Don't underestimate people's capacity for change. New stuff sometimes comes out of the blue. These days it's best to err on the side of optimism.

Glendale, California signs contract for federal smart grid grant

Glendale Water and Power signed a contract for a $20 million federal Smart Grid Investment Grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, becoming the first city in the nation to receive smart grid funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

The grant will help GWP fund implementation of $51 million for the city of Glendale AMI-Smart Grid Initiative. The first significant milestone will be a demonstration project to prove the smart meters portion of the project this spring. The demonstration project will include the installation of a meter data management system, 1,000 electric meters, 500 water meters and 300 in-home displays, with plans to have all meters replaced by September 2011. The new smart meters will allow for two-way communication between customers and the utility, and for the first time will provide customers with real-time electricity usage data to help them save on their bills.

In addition to replacing all electric and water meters with new smart meters, receipt of the $20 million in DOE grant funds will allow GWP to expand the project scope and accelerate implementation to include the following additional smart grid activities: Distribution automation, New enterprise data storage system, Residential and small business smart grid devices, Thermal energy storage, Demand response, Expanded Wi-Fi backhaul.

Smart Grid and the "Buy American" Rule

Four Democratic senators are calling on the Obama administration to halt spending on a renewable energy program in the economic stimulus package until rules are in place to assure that the projects use predominantly American labor and materials.

The senators said that more than three-fourths of $2 billion spent on wind-energy projects supported by the stimulus package had gone to foreign companies. They said that effectively undercut the purpose of the stimulus program -- formally known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act -- which is to jump-start the American economy and create jobs here. "A critical Recovery Act priority is investment in the domestic renewable and clean energy industry, not investment in foreign manufacturers," the senators wrote to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on Tuesday. They asked Sec Geithner to apply a buy-American provision to future energy projects funded under the act. The letter was signed by Senators Charles Schumer of New York, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Jon Tester of Montana. Sen Schumer raised objections last fall to a $1.5 billion West Texas wind project that would use turbines built in China. Sen Schumer said that project would create 3,000 jobs in China, but only 300 in the United States.

Experts question Google phone business model

When Google introduced its Nexus One phone in January, it unveiled a whole new business model in the mobile phone market. But it has become clear that the business model is based on a vision that isn't currently possible in the U.S., experts say.

"Google was initially saying it wanted the Nexus One not to be tied to an operator, to be open and free for anyone to buy it and use it," said Allen Nogee, an analyst with In-Stat. "It seems like a great philosophy. The problem is in the U.S. the operators have built a web in such a way that's impossible to do." Google's recent response to the U.S. Federal Communications Commissions' questions about early termination fees points to the disconnect between Google's vision for its phone business and the current reality of the mobile business, Nogee and other experts say. In a letter to the FCC, Google describes its new business model. "Simply put, empowering consumers to pair a mobile device such as the Nexus One - and additional devices in the future - with the users' choice of operator and service options is a new model for selling mobile devices in the United States, one that we believe will maximize consumer benefits," Google wrote in the filing. But unless Google plans to offer essentially a universal phone, it will be doing nothing different than the many third party phone retailers in the U.S. that already sell a variety of phones that are tied to a specific operator.

Benton

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