January 2012

Consumers spend more on digital immersion than staying warm

PC support company iYogi released survey results showing consumers spend more on staying connected to the Internet than on staying warm.

Not surprisingly, mobile phones chew up a large and growing chunk of the average household's disposable income. Some 63% of American households spend 35% more on technology bills than utility bills, according to an in-depth survey of 1,100 adults. Consumer spending is rising for basic Internet connections, various online services, mobile communication, and multimedia entertainment. "Technology is now the real utility, as increasingly households spend more on a combination of technology bills to stay connected than their utility bills," says Vishal Dhar, president marketing and co-founder of iYogi.

Can electronic health records erase disparities?

Switching to electronic health records might help close health gaps between black and white Americans, researchers suggest in a new study.

They say government data on primary care visits from 2007 to 2008 show that when doctors didn't use digital records, there was a racial gap in how many patients had high blood pressure. But there was no such gap among patients treated at practices with electronic record-keeping. That could be important, because African Americans are more likely to have high blood pressure than whites, which might in turn explain why they also have more heart attacks, strokes and kidney disease, said Dr. Lipika Samal, who worked on the new study.

FCC Details New Emergency Altert Obligations

The Federal Communications Commission released a Fifth Report and Order in its review and overhaul of the of the Emergency Alert System (EAS). With this order, the FCC codifies in detail the general obligation the FCC adopted in the Second Report and Order in this docket to require EAS Participants to be able to receive Common Alerting Protocol (CAP)-formatted messages. This will enable EAS Participants not only to receive CAP-formatted alert messages, but also to redistribute those messages in the legacy EAS format over the current broadcast-based EAS.

Specifically, CAP-formatted EAS alerts:

will be converted into and processed in the same way as messages formatted in the EAS Protocol; and
will be used to generate enhanced visual displays for the viewers of the EAS station processing the CAP message.

In addition, the FCC is streamlining the Part 11 rules to improve the overall effectiveness of the EAS.

LightSquared owner pitches network directly to FCC staffers

Philip Falcone, the billionaire chief executive officer of Harbinger Capital Partners, which owns the beleaguered startup wireless broadband carrier LightSquared, personally made a pitch to top Federal Communications Commission staffers last week to approve commercial service over the company's network, which could blanket the country with 40,000 cell towers.

Falcone, along with Jeffrey Carlisle, executive vice president for regulatory affairs at LightSquared, and Ashley Durmer, a consultant to Harbinger, met with top FCC officials on Jan. 4 to address the interference issues. The company executives met with Edward Lazarus, chief of staff to FCC chairman Julius Genachowski; Amy Levine, special counsel and legal advisor to the chairman, and Paul de Sa, chief of the FCC Office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis. Falcone and Carlisle, according to the filing, "urged the Commission to continue to work toward a resolution that would enable the commencement of commercial service over the LightSquared network." They also emphasized the "significant investment" made in LightSquared -- $3 billion to date. The executives told the FCC that LightSquared has "invested millions of dollars during the past 12 months in conducting tests and developing filtering solutions to resolve issues with GPS receiver design that causes devices to look into spectrum licensed to LightSquared. As a result, the scope of the GPS technical issues has been narrowed considerably." Falcone and Carlisle also discussed with the FCC "various alternative technical solutions that will effectively and economically allow GPS receivers to work as intended, and still allow the deployment of the LightSquared network."

Comcast Starts Live In-Home Streaming; Requires New ‘AnyPlay’ Device

Comcast has started in-home streaming but it’s not quite live video Valhalla.

Streaming access to the Xfinity TV linear lineup via the internet is available only in limited areas for certain tablets -- and only with the use of a new device, the AnyPlay. The service, long in the works, is rolling out first for Xfinity HD Triple Play customers in Denver and Nashville. It will only work on the iPad to start, with the Motorola Xoom up next. The AnyPlay device works as a bridge between the wireless router and the devices, with an updated Xfinity TV app as the player.

SOPA becoming election liability for backers

To the ranks of same-sex marriage, tax cuts and illegal immigration, add this to the list of polarizing political issues of Election 2012: the Stop Online Piracy Act.

The hot-button anti-piracy legislation that sparked a revolt online is starting to become a political liability for some of SOPA’s major backers. Fueled by Web activists and online fundraising tools, challengers are using the bill to tag its congressional supporters as backers of Big Government — and raise campaign cash while they’re at it. Among the fattest targets: SOPA’s lead author, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX), and two of its most vocal co-sponsors, Reps. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN). House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) has also felt the wrath of SOPA opponents. Even GOP presidential contenders Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum were asked by voters recently to weigh in on the bill (neither gave definitive answers, though activists have interpreted Santorum’s response as more sympathetic to SOPA than Romney’s).

Can Two Smartphone Also-Rans Rescue Each Other?

Not too long ago Nokia was the largest tech company in Europe. Its market cap rivaled Microsoft's. It helped create the mobile phone industry as we know it. But the emergence of a new generation of smartphones — led by Apple's iPhone and Android-based offerings from Samsung, HTC and others — left Nokia behind. Now Nokia, with the help of Microsoft, is trying to force its way back into the North American smartphone market. At the Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas, Nokia said it will begin selling a new Microsoft Windows phone on T-Mobile on Jan 11 — and is unveiling the high-speed Lumia 900 this week. The Lumia 900 will be launched exclusively on AT&T and will take advantage of that carrier's new high-speed 4G LTE network. Executives at Nokia have to hope this represents a turning point for the company.

What if Insurers Didn’t Pay for Crashes Caused by Texting?

Last month, the National Transportation Safety Board called for a nationwide ban on the use of cellphones and other “portable electronic devices” while driving. It’s uncertain whether the board’s call will be heeded, given the public’s addiction to instant electronic communication, anytime and anywhere. But the proposal has generated discussion.

One provocative idea was floated by a man from Boulder (CO). He suggested, in a letter published in The Wall Street Journal, that insurance companies could curtail distracted driving if they simply refused to pay claims for accidents caused by texting. (Many states specifically ban texting while driving, but enforcement varies.) That sounded like an intriguing proposal to us here at Bucks — one that could be applied to all sorts of bad driving behavior, including drunken driving. The idea, though, seems to be a nonstarter. Insurance companies, and even a consumer advocate, make the point that coverage for injuries to yourself or others as a result of an accident — even one caused by careless or just plain stupid behavior — is one of the main reasons to buy insurance in the first place.

Google Adds Posts From Its Social Network to Search Results

Google excels at responding to search queries with links to Web pages, but those have become old-fashioned. These days, the company has concluded, Internet users increasingly want to find conversations and photos posted by their friends on the social Web. Google is taking its biggest step yet toward incorporating social networking posts from its Google+ service into its search results. Google says that the new feature, which it calls Search Plus Your World, is one of the biggest changes it has ever made to its search results. People will see posts and photos from their friends, profiles of their friends when they search people’s names, and conversations occurring on Google+ related to topics they search.

Seeing Social Media More as Portal Than as Pitfall

More than a hundred years ago, when the telephone was introduced, there was some hand-wringing over the social dangers that this new technology posed: increased sexual aggression and damaged human relationships. “It was going to bring down our society,” said Dr. Megan Moreno, a specialist in adolescent medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Men would be calling women and making lascivious comments, and women would be so vulnerable, and we’d never have civilized conversations again.” In other words, the telephone provoked many of the same worries that more recently have been expressed about online social media.

“When a new technology comes out that is something so important, there is this initial alarmist reaction,” Dr. Moreno said. Indeed, much of the early research — and many of the early pronouncements — on social media seemed calculated to make parents terrified of an emerging technology that many of them did not understand as well as their children did. Whether about sexting or online bullying or the specter of Internet addiction, “much social media research has been on what people call the danger paradigm,” said Dr. Michael Rich, a pediatrician and the director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Children’s Hospital Boston. Though there are certainly real dangers, and though some adolescents appear to be particularly vulnerable, scientists are now turning to a more nuanced understanding of this new world. Many have started to approach social media as an integral, if risky, part of adolescence, perhaps not unlike driving.

Benton

Search