Former senior Federal Communications Commission official John Flynn has joined the Washington office of the law firm Jenner & Block. Flynn previously served as senior counsel for transactions to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, where he led the FCC’s review of the merger of Comcast and NBC Universal. The joint venture of the two firms was eventually approved with a number of conditions, some of which drew criticism from the GOP.
US authorities are investigating allegations that an Indian government spy unit hacked into e-mails of an official U.S. commission that monitors economic and security relations between the United States and China, including cyber-security issues.
The request for an investigation came after hackers posted on the Internet what purports to be an Indian military intelligence document on cyber-spying, which discusses plans to target the commission - apparently using technical know-how provided by Western mobile phone manufacturers. Appended to the document are transcripts of what are said to be email exchanges among commission members. "We are aware of these reports and have contacted relevant authorities to investigate the matter. We are unable to make further comments at this time," Jonathan Weston, a spokesman for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
In its battle for market share in satellite television, Dish Network is jumping to cross the digital divide by bundling a new broadband satellite Internet service with speeds that are faster than most DSL land-line services.
At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Dish CEO Joe Clayton announced a partnership with ViaSat that will allow the company to offer broadband service with download speeds as fast as 12Mbps and upload speeds of up to 3Mbps. Clayton said that the service would be available as part of Dish service bundles, starting at $79.98 a month. The satellite broadband service opens up a potential market of 8 to 10 million customers in rural areas who currently can't get land-line broadband service, Clayton said. The broadband service is through ViaSat's Ka-band WildBlue, which is tied to the ViaSat-1 satellite—as such, it requires the installation of a second antenna.
The Internet is a great deflator, squeezing out the middlemen and lowering prices. The shifting fortunes of Wall Street brokers and travel agents are good examples. However, the Internet’s deflationary impact is on full display in the international long-distance market, where Skype has started to take away any and all growth from the phone companies. Skype (now a division of Microsoft), which at its very basic level is a people-to-people connectivity service, has become everything the phone companies feared it for. The latest data from research firm TeleGeography shows that international voice traffic — typically the most lucrative part of a phone company’s business — is declining sharply. The declines are coming at a time when the prices of long-distance calls are heading south.
Thanks to Samsung’s ability to build and source mobile components — from memory to processors to screens — the company should be able to become one of the leaders in the smartphone ecosystem. The battle, in fact, will be between Samsung and Apple, something that we have reported multiple times over the past year or so. Lately that battle is actually between the iPhone and the Galaxy brands. Samsung sold an estimated 87.6 million to 94.6 million smartphones in 2011 (though it made a lot less money than Apple, which sold about 58 million iPhones during the first nine months of 2011).
It may not seem obvious today, but in a few years, as the rest of the world moves away from feature phones to touch-enabled, Internet-connected phones, we will see Huawei and ZTE, two Chinese companies, go head-to-head with Samsung. And they are so dominant in Africa and parts of Asia that we are going to see them become major players in the low-to-medium end of the market.
As recent studies conducted by IBM and others have established, global marketing organizations in general and CMOs in particular continue to feel both underprepared and threatened by changes wrought by mobile, social media and the emergence of big data. While the evolving marketplace creates significant challenges for even the most savvy marketers, a disciplined and progressive approach to these dilemmas will be the most effective means to meet the challenges.
Below are five of the key driving forces that will shape the coming year.
Fewer than 15 petitions were actively collecting signatures on the White House's We the People website Jan 10, among the lowest numbers since the site's September 2011 launch.
About 40 other petitions were still posted to the experiment in digital democracy Jan 10, although they already had gathered enough signatures to receive an official White House response. All but five of those petitions date back more than three months to when the threshold for a response was raised from 5,000 to 25,000 signatures.
[Commentary] Last week saw two sets of stories tied to a single report that made bombastic assertions about changing mobile data usage patterns. While the assertions themselves are a bit misleading, they do point to an underlying truth – when using data on the go is easy and useful, people do it.
Everything flowed from a report by Arieso, a company that just happens to sell mobile network management solutions to carriers. Reports focused on two main claims from Arieso’s report. First, that iPhone 4S users use twice as much data as iPhone 4 users. The alleged culprit there is Siri, the digital assistant that is included in the iPhone 4S but not the iPhone 4. Second, that 1% of mobile users consume half of the world’s data. For that we can thank "data hogs." When you look a bit closer, neither of these claims are as surprising as they may appear. As Ars Technica’s Jacqui Cheng discovered two months ago, in all likelihood the Siri service itself uses a relatively small amount of data. That means the data spike does not come from Siri per se. Instead, the spike is facilitated by Siri.
A Q&A with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.
He has been writing for The New York Times for more than a quarter century and has appeared on that paper's op-ed page since 2001, often penning articles about the struggles of people in distant parts of the world. He has even been dubbed the "moral conscience" of his generation of journalists. Less well known is his role as an innovator in journalism. In 2003, he became the first blogger for The New York Times website. Ever since then, Kristof has been a pioneer among journalists in the digital world. He's active on Twitter and Facebook. In 2012, he even plans to venture into online gaming.
Kristof made his mark covering human rights crises around the world: the ongoing protests in Bahrain (he was tear-gassed there last month), to war in the Congo, to the genocide in Darfur (the latter won him a Pulitzer Prize). Kristof and his wife, journalist Sheryl WuDunn, won a joint Pulitzer for their coverage of China's Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989. Despite Kristof's print pedigree, he's not afraid to jump into social media and experiment publicly. For six years, Kristof has been bringing readers directly into his work with his annual "Win a Trip" contest. The student with the winning essay travels with Kristof on a reporting trip to a developing country and then blogs about it. The 2012 edition of the contest recently opened for applications. We spoke with Kristof about how journalism is evolving in a digital world.
Last week, an Indian hacker crew successfully broke into a secured Indian military government network. The group, the Lords of Dharmaraja, posted documents that infer Apple, Nokia, and Research In Motion gave the Indian government backdoor access to their devices in exchange for mobile phone market rights. Indian government officials say the files are forgeries; however, they fit in perfectly with what we know about mobile phone surveillance in 2012.
Fast Company has reported extensively on smartphone and computer security fears. In the documents, which have been posted on multiple mirrors, India military intelligence refers multiple times to a system known as RINOA SUR. According to ZDNet India's Manan Kakkar, the RINOA portion of the acronym refers to “RIM, Nokia, Apple,” while the SUR portion is unknown. The documents describe a backdoor mobile phone surveillance system in great detail. The documents also infer that network access was granted to the Indian government in exchange for the right to sell to Indian consumers.
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