April 2012

Responding to GSA, House easily approves bill to track spending

The House quickly approved legislation that would significantly improve the ability to track how federal dollars are spent, and also cut the travel budgets of federal agencies by 20 percent from 2010 levels. The travel budget cut is a direct response to the General Services Administration's (GSA) 2010 conference in Las Vegas that cost $830,000, and which has drawn criticism from both parties as a waste of taxpayer money. Members of the House from both parties left no doubt that this cut, and the overall need to provide greater transparency on the government's spending habits, are needed steps if taxpayers are to have any confidence in the ability of Washington to manage its money.

Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake Pitches Cash Infusions for Struggling Stations

Federal Communications Commission Media Bureau Chief Bill Lake pitched incentive auctions to an audience of broadcast and cable executives and attorneys, saying the FCC had heard from broadcasters and brokers interested in the auctions, which will compensate broadcasters for giving up spectrum for auction, presumably for wireless carriers who claim to be facing a spectrum shortage now and a crisis soon.

At a Media Institute luncheon, Lake said that while TV stations are doing better than they were in the depths of the downturn three years ago, not all are sharing in that "relative" recovery. Lake said that broadcasters in Las Vegas for the National Association of Broadcasters convention "hammered home" to FCC staffers in conversations that even among the major broadcast groups, economic conditions varied widely. He suggested that some of those groups include smaller, struggling stations, as well as strong ones. Then there were smaller independent stations that faced a "harsher reality" than others. In both cases, he suggested, there was an opportunity to cash in on their spectrum through auctions. "It is exactly this disparity in economic prospects among stations that convinces us that the incentive auctions that Congress has authorized present a real opportunity for some stations," he said.

In Canada, phones poised to challenge credit cards

Thousands of Canadian retailers already have equipment in place to let customers pay for purchases with a swipe of their mobile phones, putting the country in the lead in developing a system that could one day make cash obsolete.

All that's needed is an agreement between banks, credit card companies and telecoms, and that appears to be coming soon, promising to transform how Canadians pay for everything from their morning coffee to a tankful of gasoline. If consumers embrace the system - and that's still a big "if" - clip-and-save coupons, transit passes, library cards and perhaps even driver's licenses could become things of the past.

Cable Operators: No Reason to Stop Clock On Spectrum Deal

Cable operators looking to sell their advanced wireless spectrum to Verizon for just south of $4 billion have told the Federal Communications Commission that there is no reason to stop the clock on its vetting of the deal.

The Communications Workers of America, supported by various deal critics, had sought that break from the action, saying they had trouble with the formats of some documents supplied by the operators and Verizon or did not get documents in a timely fashion. In a response filed April 24, Bright House Networks, Verizon Wireless, Comcast, Cox TMI Wireless, and Time Warner Cable said that CWA's claims were meritless. For one thing, say the companies, the files CWA could not open were in formats -- shapefiles and tables -- specifically requested by the FCC and for which there were free viewers available for CWA to use.

Netflix Streaming Traffic Grew 30% In Last Six Months: Study

The volume of Netflix's streaming-video traffic over wireline broadband networks in North America climbed 30% over the past six months, although the company's share of overall usage has leveled off at approximately 33% of all peak-hour downstream bandwidth, according to a new study.

That means that in North America, Netflix -- which continues to be the largest single source of traffic on fixed-access networks -- drives about one-third of capacity infrastructure costs for cable and telco providers, according to the report from bandwidth-management equipment vendor Sandvine. Factoring in aggregate upstream and downstream traffic, Netflix represents 24.4% of total volume, ahead of BitTorrent at 14.2%. On downstream usage during primetime hours, Netflix accounts for 32.9% of traffic, which is up only slightly from 32.7% in September 2011, Sandvine said.

Are robots and content farms the future of the news?

There was some consternation in the media industry this week when the Chicago Tribune announced that it was letting more than 20 of its journalists go and handing over its local coverage to an outfit called Journatic, which looked to some like a “content farm” not unlike AOL’s hyper-local Patch unit. Meanwhile, Wired magazine wrote about another emerging competitor for the traditional news business — namely, the news-writing robots or algorithms employed by startup Narrative Science, which automatically generate sports and business stories. Is this what the future of the media industry looks like? Robots and content farms?

States Aim to Launch More Mobile Apps

With the proliferation of smartphones in our society — there are 91.4 million devices in the United States alone, according to data compiled by go-globe.com — governments are adapting their presence and offerings to what users want: mobile access.

Many state and local jurisdictions are already on top of things, according to a February 2012 survey of 100 members of GovTech Exchange, an online community of senior-level IT pros from state and local government. The survey found that 38 percent of respondents planned to launch new mobile offerings within 12 months. (Another 23 percent said they weren’t sure.) Of those planning new deployments, 55 percent said they will use responsive design techniques that allow a single source of content to be viewed by multiple device types and operating systems. Roughly half said they’ll create the apps using in-house developers, while the other half planned to work with outside developers.

Twitter Chat Experiment Under Way in the Silicon Valley

Twitter may not be an ideal platform for conversations between city government officials and citizens, given its 140-character limit per post. But despite that limitation, Palo Alto (CA) has found success using the social media tool to host in-depth chats for Silicon Valley residents.

The city held its first Twitter Q&A on Feb. 27. Palo Alto Mayor Yiaway Yeh and City Manager James Keene fielded questions ranging from street planning to high-speed rail issues. A second session was conducted on March 29, which received broader participation and increased media attention. A third Q&A is scheduled for May 2.

Consumers Have Limit To Unlimited Plan Price

There is a limit to what people will pay for unlimited data plans. Despite finding that nearly half of consumers don’t know how much mobile data they use every month, two-thirds of them are unwilling to pay more than $50 a month for their service plans, according to new research from Parks Associates.

Even at that level, unlimited data could become an expensive proposition, says Harry Wang, director of mobile research at the firm. “Consumers’ budgets have a limit, and carriers cannot expect people to pay more for the data,” Wang tells Marketing Daily. “A lot of the current solution – throttling – isn’t doing well with consumers. They hate that kind of experience. At a certain point, they will ask for a certain remedy from the carriers.” It’s time, Wang says, for the wireless carriers to “shift consumers’ perception away from raw data to the experience created by their data services.”

EHR adoption still lags for small, rural practices: researchers

Adoption of electronic health-record systems remains higher among large physician groups and hospitals than among smaller ones, according to two studies published in the journal Health Affairs.

In the first study, government researchers, using funding from HHS' Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, examined data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey from 2002 through 2011. The survey for five years asked whether providers used "any EHR" but in 2007 began asking questions about specific EHR functions to determine whether providers were using a so-called basic EHR. By 2011, 24.2% of physicians in solo or two-physician practices had adopted a basic EHR, compared with 37.1% of groups of three to nine physicians and 60% of physicians in groups of 10 or more. Rural physicians trailed their urban counterparts in EHR adoption as well, with 34.2% of physicians outside of metropolitan statistical areas having basic EHRs in 2011, while 39.4% in metropolitan areas did. Also, specialists lagged behind primary-care physicians in EHR adoption, and the gap for adoption of a basic EHR widened since 2007. Specialists, according to the researchers, had basic EHR adoption rates of 12.4% in 2007 and 30.9% by 2011. Primary-care physicians, meanwhile, had basic EHR adoption rates of 17.1% in 2007 and 40.2% in 2011.

Benton

Search