September 2011

Report: Amazon Wants To Buy WebOS; That Could Mean Kindle Phones, PCs Too

HP’s WebOS is up in the air and we now have a new player that apparently wants to catch it: Amazon. A report in VentureBeat quotes sources who say that Amazon is in “advanced negotiations” to buy WebOS. Furthermore, those sources note that Hewlett Packard wants to relieve itself of the WebOS burden ASAP -- despite HP saying that it would stick by WebOS, even after announcing to dump its hardware business.

For Amazon, the idea would be to use WebOS as a basis for its new line of tablets -- rather than the forked version of Android that Amazon is currently using to power its Kindle Fire tablet unveiled earlier this week after what seemed like decades of speculation. Perhaps more significantly, Amazon could also use the platform to power other products in the future, too -- such as smartphones and PCs, both areas where Amazon could naturally move, given its strong position in mobile retail already, plus its huge push to cloud computing with Amazon Web Services. For those who might think that an Amazon/HP tie-up sounds out of the blue, it’s not: Jon Rubinstein, the former Palm head, joined the board of Amazon in December last year as a director.

Justice, FCC OK Level 3 Acquisition of Global Crossing

Level 3 Communications and Global Crossing Limited announced that the U.S. Department of Justice has cleared Level 3’s previously announced acquisition of Global Crossing.

The clearance completes the process under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976 (HSR), and is effective immediately. Level 3 also announced that the Federal Communications Commission has issued an order approving the transaction, effective immediately. Level 3 expects to close the transaction as early as next week.

Twitter Study Tracks When We Are Happy

However grumpy people are when they wake up, and whether they stumble to their feet in Madrid, Mexico City or Minnetonka (MN), they tend to brighten by breakfast time and feel their moods taper gradually to a low in the late afternoon, before rallying again near bedtime, a large-scale study of posts on the social media site Twitter found.

Drawing on messages posted by more than two million people in 84 countries, researchers discovered that the emotional tone of people’s messages followed a similar pattern not only through the day but also through the week and the changing seasons. The new analysis suggests that our moods are driven in part by a shared underlying biological rhythm that transcends culture and environment. The report, by sociologists at Cornell University and appearing in the journal Science, is the first cross-cultural study of daily mood rhythms in the average person using such text analysis. Previous studies have also mined the mountains of data pouring into social media sites, chat rooms, blogs and elsewhere on the Internet, but looked at collective moods over broader periods of time, in different time zones or during holidays.

A cure for 24/7 'communication'

[Commentary] As I watch people madly pecking on tiny keyboards or announcing their locations as if they're human GPS devices, there's really nothing people won't interrupt in order to connect with … well, just about anybody. I understand that we work long hours, process too much information, take in too much media; still, I'm amazed at the apparent loneliness that drives these incessant efforts to "communicate." Clearly, these are desperate times. It is, I think, possible to cure this addiction to 24/7 "communication" -- "selective availability." It is, I believe, possible to check your email only every few hours, catch up with Facebook and Twitter once a day and enjoy dinner with friends without adding your iPhone and BlackBerry to the guest list. The trick: Use devices — just never the latest version.

[Kornbluth is a journalist]

Amazon poised to take one of Google’s most critical assets

The practice of successfully building and selling an “Android-compatible device” is much different than the theory.

First off, there’s the fact that Honeycomb has never been open-sourced. Android’s public repositories cap off with Gingerbread, which puts independent tablet makers in a bind.

Secondly, royalties on Android devices are essentially taking the place of licensing fees at this point — you can't actually use Android for “free” on a commercial device without attracting attention from Microsoft’s lawyers.

But third — and this is key — Android is significantly devalued as a consumer platform if you don't have Google’s blessing to ship your product. You lose the suite of Google services that users are automatically expecting when they take your device out of the box, including Gmail, Maps and the official Android Market. It’s been said a thousand times before that a vibrant, easily-accessible ecosystem of third-party apps is central to a successful mobile product — and if you lose the Market, you lose that ecosystem. Independently-launched devices (particularly tablets) have tried to make up the difference with their own aftermarket app stores, but when “success” is measured in hundreds of thousands of available titles, there’s simply no substitute for the real thing. Or is there? When the Amazon Appstore launched in March of this year following a lengthy, low-key test with developers, it was immediately evident that the company had an opportunity to challenge the official Android Market’s dominance in a way that no one else had been able to do.

Proposed cuts to Congress’s investigative arm spark protest

Plans to cut deeply into Congress’s investigative arm have sparked a protest from a bipartisan group of senators who say it would hurt the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) ability to track government waste and abuse.

They have sent a letter of complaint to Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on The Legislative Branch. Chairman Nelson and the subpanel’s senior Republican, Sen. John Hoeven (R-ND), have crafted legislation to cut Congress’s budget by 5.2 percent, or $200 million. Nearly $42 million in savings would come from the GAO budget. Sens. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and John McCain (R-AZ), longtime watchdogs of wasteful government spending, said the cut falls disproportionately on an agency critical to congressional oversight of federal spending.

The Future of Health IT

On a scale of 1 to 10, America's health care system is a generous 3, a fellow at the National Academy of Public Administration said, citing wasted resources and inappropriate treatments. Gary Christopherson, along with Captain Michael Weiner, the chief medical information office at the interagency program office of Defense and the Veterans Affairs Department, hashed out the state of information technology and the health industry. While Christopherson described many problems with the current system, he sees major scale change in the future and called for a personal health system, which could be accessed from multiple locations and would allow patients to manage their own health.

"Health IT is not an end, it's a means," he said. While the Obama Administration's electronic health records program offers incentives for doctors and hospitals using e-records, change is slow. Only 17 percent of the nation uses electronic records, Weiner said, comparing this statistic with the Defense's 100 percent use of electronic records. The health IT space, however, is at an exciting tipping point, he said.

VP Biden Makes Another Pitch For Public Safety Network

Vice President Joe Biden made another push for giving emergency first responders the spectrum and funding they need to build a national broadband public safety network.

"You guys have been telling us now for ... 20 years that you have no band [that] is specifically dedicated for cops to be able to talk to firefighters, to be able to talk to National Guard, to be able to talk to the military, to be able to talk to anybody who responds to a genuine national emergency," VP Biden said during a stop at the Alexandria (VA) police department. "After 10 years, we are finally fulfilling the promise that we have been fighting to fulfill for you for a long time." In addition to funding to help localities rehire laid-off police officers and firefighters, the White House jobs bill sent to Congress earlier this month also includes spectrum legislation. The proposal would re-allocate a swath of spectrum known as the D-block to public safety for their broadband network and authorize funding to help build it. Under current law, the D-block is slated to be auctioned to commercial bidders.

House GOP Unveils Plan To Cut NPR, Job Training And Education Programs

Setting a collision course with Democrats that could drag out for months, House Republicans unveiled plans to cut federal money for job training, heating subsidies and grants to better-performing schools.

The draft measure for labor, health and education programs also seeks to block implementation of President Barack Obama's signature health care law, cut off federal funds for National Public Radio and Planned Parenthood, and reduce eligibility for grants for low-income college students. Democrats and Tea Party Republicans opposed the bill, blocking it from advancing through even the easy initial steps of the appropriations process on Capitol Hill. Instead of moving through the Appropriations Committee and the House as a whole, the $153 billion measure is instead expected to be wrapped into a larger omnibus spending bill this fall or winter that would fund the day-to-day operating budgets of Cabinet agencies.

News Corp. unit in SF under scrutiny

A U.S. subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. with an office in San Francisco has caught the eye of the Justice Department.

US investigators are looking into potential antitrust activities of Murdoch's News America Marketing Group, which specializes in producing in-store ads, coupons, advertising inserts and other promotional materials for supermarkets and retail outlets worldwide. Investigators reportedly are seeking documents relating to a 2009 trial of a suit against News America by a New Jersey advertising company, Floorgraphics, which had accused News America of, among other things, hacking into its computer systems and lying to its customers. The case was settled for an undisclosed sum, and News America subsequently acquired Floorgraphics.