January 2012

CoSN outlines goals to help schools implement technology

Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), one of the nation’s major educational technology advocacy groups, has identified five key goals in a new three-year advocacy plan that will help advance new K-12 ed-tech learning opportunities.

Close the Access Gap: Increase awareness of requirements to close the technology access gap for learning inside and outside of school.
Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Skills: Enhance the skills and competencies of CTOs and raise expectations as defined in CoSN’s Framework of Essential Skills of the K-12 CTO and measured by certification.
Team Capacity: Build district-wide support for educational technology through strategic partnerships and professional learning opportunities.
Voice: Advocate for investments in education technology to enhance learning opportunities and drive economic growth.
State Capacity: Expand the capacity of CoSN chapters by enabling professional learning opportunities and developing the ability to influence state policy.

Want to swap your Verizon copper for FiOS? Just call to complain.

If Verizon has to visit a copper line customer more than twice to repair the line, the communications company thinks it’s a better idea to just switch the customer over to fiber.

Verizon has sold off much of its landline and DSL business in the last few years, but it still has about 9.9 million copper voice and 3.9 million DSL customers on the books. And while its FiOS expansion isn’t expected to move forward rapidly anymore, Verizon CFO Fran Shammo said the company would embark on a strategic initiative to replace problem copper lines with FiOS for lines that experience “chronic problems.” Shammo said: “So what you’re going to see this year is a very strategic initiative, that we go out and we look at areas where there are chronic copper problems and we start to transform them onto our FiOS network. And the math would say if there is a chronic problem that we have to visit more than two times a year, the actual financial benefit of us transforming that to FiOS pays for itself within that year.”

Press Freedom Index: Occupy Wall Street Journalist Arrests Cost U.S. Dearly In Latest Survey

The targeting of journalists covering the Occupy Wall Street movement has caused the United States to drop precipitously in a leading survey of press freedom.

Reporters Without Borders' latest Press Freedom Index reflects some of the tumult that took place in the world in 2011, as well as the impact that those events had on journalists across the globe. Reporters became targets over and over again throughout the year, both in the Middle East and on the streets of New York. Some examples of the change wrought by the Arab Spring could be found in Tunisia, which the compilers moved up 30 places on the list in the wake of that country's democratic revolution. Not so lucky were Bahrain and Egypt, both of which cracked down on journalists and on the popular movements pressing for further change in their countries. They fell 29 and 39 places, respectively, on the scale. But the U.S. tumbled almost as far as Bahrain did in the wake of the repeated crackdowns on journalists covering Occupy movements. Reporters Without Borders was explicit in its summary of its report, saying that "the United States (47th) also owed its fall of 27 places to the many arrests of journalist covering Occupy Wall Street protests."

Mobile Marketing Association Issues App Privacy Guidelines

Addressing a touchy topic for consumers and their advocates, the Mobile Marketing Association has released new guidelines on application privacy.

According to the MMA, the completed guidelines address the industry’s core privacy issues with regard to current data processing standards. Mobile app developers knew that industry guidelines were inevitable, and even beneficial to their businesses. According to Greg Stuart, CEO of MMA Global, they only asked that the policy language be clear, transparent and easy for consumers to understand. The new guidelines “gives the app development community the meaningful support they need,” said Stuart. Key issues include annotated guidance on core privacy principles and consumer-friendly language for developers to consider; ways to inform users on how data is obtained and used; and guidance on security and confidentiality of information.

Mobile Usage Soars For Internet, Ad Forecast To Hit $2.6B

Tablets have become the consumer's fourth screen, especially among those with smartphones. Techies with smartphones continue to use tablets at a higher rate. T

hose in the United States -- at 17% -- are among the highest, followed by Japan at 11%, and the United Kingdom at 10%, according to Google. The data appears to fall into line with AdWords tools allowing marketers to add Wi-Fi ad targeting. Google also added the ability to target by mobile operating system in AdWords. The research -- which Google conducted in two phases during 2011, in January and February followed by September and October -- finds consumers shifting from feature phones or smartphones for Internet access. In fact, they use smartphones more than desktop or laptop computers in the U.S., UK, Germany, France, and Japan. Germany had the biggest increase in smartphone owners using their device for daily Internet access, jumping from 39% to 49%. Japan had the highest percentage accessing the Internet daily on their smartphone, at 88%. A little more than two-thirds of smartphone users in the U.S. -- and more than half of smartphone users in the UK -- access the mobile Internet daily. Research firm eMarketer estimates mobile advertising spending in the U.S. reached $1.45 billion in 2011, up 89% from $769.6 billion in 2010. This year, U.S. mobile ad spending will grow 80% to $2.61 billion.

State of the Union fails to leverage tech-savvy administration

Anyone expecting the leader of the most technology-focused White House to date to offer an innovation roadmap for the battered economy was probably disappointed in President Obama's state of the union address. Most of the address was focused on domestic issues, and references to technology and innovation didn't suggest any new programs in the offing, although President Obama did urge lawmakers to "tear down regulations that prevent aspiring entrepreneurs from getting the financing to grow" and invest in basic research.

Amazon Lawsuit Tests ‘No Harm, No Foul’ Rule For Leaked Personal Info

Amazon subsidiary Zappos, an online shoe retailer, faces a second lawsuit over a hacking incident involving 24 million customers.

The new suit seeks to test courts’ “no harm, no foul” rule when it comes to leaking personal data. In a complaint filed in Boston federal court, a group of customers claim Amazon is responsible for the hacking and that the company should pay an unspecified amount of damages for negligence, breach of contract and invasion of privacy. The lawsuit claims that Zappos has failed to pay for credit monitoring and other expenses that customers may have incurred in responding to the security breach.

What The Pundits Are Missing In The Megaupload Case

Media types are claiming that prosecutors will find it hard to pin copyright charges on Kim Dotcom, the 300-pound executive whose website Megaupload let users share millions of movie and music files. But this speculation overlooks the fact that the feds have an easier tool than copyright law to convict Dotcom -- the law of conspiracy.

The US charges against Dotcom, who was nabbed in a panic room clutching a sawed-off shotgun, are based on an indictment unsealed last week that accuses him and six others of criminal copyright and three other charges. Contrary to many reports, those other charges are not about money-laundering and racketeering but instead about conspiracy to commit those crimes. The distinction is important because conspiracy charges are a key law enforcement tool for the federal government that, critically, do not require proving the underlying crime.

Why Apple Just Pulled Off The Company’s First True Post-PC Quarter

We should no longer be confused about the notion of the “post-PC era:” Apple’s shocking iOS device sales numbers for its first fiscal quarter are just further proof that tablets and smartphones are the personal-computing products taking over our hearts and wallets.

The iPhone and the iPad were already the class of their respective market segments, but Apple managed to pull off something amazing during the last quarter of 2011, more than doubling shipments of both products en route to a spectacular quarter. Apple sold 37 million iPhones and 15 million iPads, accounting for 72 percent of its $46 billion in revenue. But Apple CEO Tim Cook made an interesting comparison during the conference call following Apple’s earnings release, pointing out that according to IDC more tablets were sold in the U.S. during the fourth quarter than desktop PCs. Now, desktop PC sales have been on a downward trend for a very long time, even prior to the release of the iPhone, so it’s not completely shocking that tablets would have closed the gap this quickly.

With $97.6 billion, Apple has more cash than ...

Apple has nearly $100 billion in cash. $97.6 billion to be precise. That is a lot of iDough. Even for Warren Buffett. Perhaps it's time for Apple to, I don't know, use some of it?

Unless Apple is planning to build an army of Siri-voiced iBots, it's hard to defend why the company needs that much cash. Even company executives admit that it may soon have to deploy some of it. Apple's iMountain of money has nearly doubled since the end of fiscal 2010. But Apple doesn't pay a dividend. It doesn't make splashy acquisitions or buy back stock. Now one reason Apple is still hanging onto cash is because it doesn't want to pay a sizeable chunk of taxes to Uncle Sam if it used that money on something productive or shareholder friendly. $64 billion of its cash is offshore. It is "trapped" if you will. Apple is a multinational company. So there is nothing legally wrong with keeping cash abroad. But it is apparently doing so to avoid having to pay the 35% tax rate on it if it were repatriated or brought back to the US. But even if Apple wants to keep fighting the tax holiday fight, you can't ignore the fact that it has $33.6 billion in cash in the United States. That still is a lot of money that Apple could use for a regular, steady dividend, a big one-time cash payout or stock buybacks.

Benton

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