June 2011

A proposed new rule for the federal e-Rate program could discourage schools from buying service contracts when they purchase network equipment, at least one program expert warns.

The rule is part of a draft version of the latest Eligible Services List for the e-Rate, which provides discounts on the cost of telecommunications services and Internet access. If approved, the revised list would take effect in the 2012 program year. Released June 24 by the Federal Communications Commission, the draft doesn't propose any major changes to the list of services that would be eligible for e-Rate support, but it does clarify several points. One of these points is whether the e-Rate should apply to maintenance and support for internal connections, or the wiring, routers, switches, and file servers needed to bring Internet access into classrooms. The FCC’s proposal states that basic maintenance of internal connections is to be reimbursed only for “actual work performed.” That means schools can’t apply for e-Rate discounts on the service contracts they might buy along with any internal connections; instead, they must wait until work is performed and then apply to be reimbursed for the cost of this work.

Cathy Cruzan, president of the e-Rate consulting firm Funds For Learning, said she worries that the rule might discourage schools from buying service contracts on their network gear, because they would have to go through two sets of program reviews.

On June 29, the General Services Administration's Office of Citizen Services will begin publishing a list of 10 challenges facing federal agencies developing a mobile presence.

The office will publish one challenge online each day, along with an open forum for agencies to discuss the challenge and offer tips. The challenges list is the second phase of Mobile Gov, a GSA program aimed at promoting the development of mobile apps in government. In later stages, Mobile Gov aims to establish a set of standards and best practices for government mobile apps so the government can be more deliberate and rational about its rollout of mobile apps than it was about the proliferation of government websites in the 1990s.

Seventy percent of the world relies on pre-pay cell phones and their tariffs and unsubsidized handset prices.

This may come as a surprise to US consumers, used to two-year contracts and handset prices that sometimes cost nothing. But it also highlights something surprising: All the battles we've heard about so far in the rapidly growing smartphone market are really only addressing 30% of the globe. The real war is about to begin. Yet another statistic for you to think about: 40% of European phone buyers, according to a recent survey, are planning on buying an iPhone next--twice as many as plan on buying an Android device, and this is a region where nearly half of the phones sold are on a pre-pay basis. Do you see where we're going with this? Nearly everything we think about the smartphone wars rests on relatively few markets, and in the case of the U.S., mostly on contracted, post-pay vendor models.

As smartphone sales explode around the world, Android is certainly the most popular OS for now--it's taking up the gap that the demise of Nokia's Symbian-powered feature phones once occupied. But if Apple really does bring its "luxury" iPhone to a lower price, then it will target that 70% global space that we tend to forget about. Though probably not for long

If you hang around in the news media business long enough, you'll hear a certain lament about the last 15 years. It usually comes in a couple of layers:
If only news organizations had banded together to pool their precious content on the web.
If only they had started charging for their stuff right from dawn of the Internet.

Then, the thinking goes, darkness wouldn't have fallen on the industry. That argument surfaced just last week via James O’Shea, author of the new book The Deal from Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers. A former managing editor of the Chicago Tribune and former editor in chief of the Los Angeles Times, O’Shea told the New York Times, “None of this had to happen.” His book contains this riff: “The Internet and declining circulations didn't kill newspapers, any more than long stories, skimpy attention spans, or arrogant journalists did. What is killing a system that brings reliably edited news and information to readers’ doorsteps every morning for less than the cost of a cup of coffee is the way that the people who run the industry have reacted to those forces.”

Contrary to popular mythology, it’s not as if they didn't try. As O’Shea outlines in his book, nine newspaper companies in the mid-’90s joined forces to create the New Century Network (NCN). If the title sounded evangelistic, perhaps that’s because it was: The papers were trying to bring about a new day, one where all their goodies would be packaged nicely and sold for reasonable prices to online readers.