Google continued to build on its lead in the U.S. smartphone market as Android increased its share to 51% in the first quarter, up from 47.3% at the end of 2011. According to the latest comScore data, Apple’s iOS grew its share by 1.1 percentage points to 30.7% while RIM dropped another 3.7 points to 12.3%. Microsoft also continued to lose ground, with the Windows Phone falling to 3.9% from 4.7% three months ago. Symbian was flat at 1.4%.
[Commentary] With the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), we're in a political tug-of-war over who should lead the security of our digital borders: should it be a civilian organization such as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), or a military organization such as the Department of Defense (DoD)?
I want to suggest a third option that government need not be involved--a solution that would avoid very difficult issues related to international humanitarian law (IHL) and therefore reduce the risk of an accidental cyberwar or worse. This option models itself on the (admittedly controversial) "Stand Your Ground" law that's rooted in our basic right to self-defense, and it authorizes counter-cyberattacks by private companie, which have been the main victims of harmful cyberactivities by foreign actors to date.
[Dr. Patrick Lin is the director of the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group, based in the philosophy department at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.]
For many American consumers mobile payments are still something to run away from--and fast.
That's what research from the University of California has turned up. A new study there implies that shoppers in the US aren't yet ready for the mobile payment movement. A large percentage of the American citizens questioned in a nationwide phone study called "Mobile Payments: Consumer Benefits and New Privacy Concerns" were found to "overwhelmingly oppose the revelation of contact information (phone number, email address and home address) to merchants when making purchases with mobile payment systems" and "an even higher level of opposition exists to systems that track consumers' movements through their mobile phones." The numbers are stark. When asked if they thought their phones should "share information with stores when they visit and browse without making a purchase," 96% objected to the tracking, 79% said they definitely would forbid it, and 17% said they "probably" wouldn't allow it--meaning just 4% were indifferent or positive about the idea. When the question was instead about information sharing (phone number, address, and so on) at the actual point of sale, 81% objected to phone-number sharing--a mere 15% said they'd probably allow it and 3% definitely so. Similar figures emerged when the information shared was respondents' home address. In terms of email addresses, survey respondents were more inclined to share, with 33% definitely or probably happy to share the transaction information. Still 51% said they definitely wouldn't share email addresses. And overall, 74% of respondents said they are "not at all likely" or "not too likely" to adopt mobile payment systems, while just 24% say they are likely to do so.
Hispanics are early adopters of both tablets and smartphones, and also more likely than whites to go online using mobile devices.
All of that activity will add up to a sizeable pile of cash for device retailers and app stores in 2012. According to December 2011 research by advisory firm Zpryme, adult US Hispanics will spend $17.6 billion on mobile tech devices in 2012, a 30% increase over the previous year. It also estimates that Hispanics will spend $501.1 million on mobile apps by the end of the year. Smartphone penetration was 51.5% among the survey group, which was comprised almost entirely of mobile owners (just 6.1% said they had no mobile phone). This is slightly higher than eMarketer’s estimated 46.9% smartphone penetration for Hispanic mobile users as of the end of 2011. Also, 19% of those polled owned tablets, higher than eMarketer’s estimate of 12.6% for the same period. The high adoption rates for smartphones and tablets among Hispanics are likely due to the fact that they are on average a young group, and more likely to use mobile devices instead of landlines.
The Travis County Commissioners Court (Texas) gave its final approval to a contract with Apple to bring 3,635 jobs to a planned North Austin campus by 2025.
The deal will give the technology giant between $5.4 million and $6.4 million over 15 years and comes more than a month after the City of Austin approved a 10-year, $8.6 million rebate and the state offered $21 million in incentives from the Texas Enterprise Fund. The commissioners voted 4-1 in favor of the deal, which late last week established some minimum salaries for workers. An Apple representative, local and state governmental affairs manager Jason Lundgaard, addressed the court publicly for the first time. Lundgaard responded to questions about the company’s withholding of employee demographic information and the deal’s dropping of a requirement to hire some portion of economically disadvantaged individuals. Lundgaard gave mostly brief answers to questions, primarily coming from Precinct 2 Commissioner Sarah Eckhardt, who was the lone vote against the deal.
Cumulus Media, the nation’s second-largest broadcaster, has sold 55 stations and gained 10 others as part of an effort to move into larger, more closely clustered markets.
The company announced that it would sell the stations — in 11 small cities in Maine, Texas, North and South Dakota, and elsewhere — to Townsquare Media for $116 million and 10 of Townsquare’s stations in two Illinois cities, Bloomington and Peoria. Cumulus, which last year paid $2.4 billion for a rival broadcaster, Citadel, has about 570 stations, second only to Clear Channel Communications. (CBS Radio, however, which has fewer stations, is the second-largest radio group by revenue.) Most of Cumulus’s stations have been in small to midsize cities. But it has been moving into bigger markets and has also begun to challenge giants like Clear Channel with its programming, like a talk show featuring Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate. Townsquare has about 200 stations, also mostly in small markets.
Verizon and four cable companies are willing to reformat documents they submitted to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to prevent technical issues from derailing the agency's review of their $3.6 billion deal.
The Communications Workers of America, the largest union for telecommunications workers, asked the FCC last month to delay its review of the deal, saying Verizon and the cable companies had not made important details available to third parties. Other opponents of the deal, including consumer groups Public Knowledge and Free Press, as well as Sprint and the Rural Cellular Association, echoed the union's complaints. he groups said Verizon had not made some of its documents available in electronic form and would have charged them thousands of dollars for paper copies. Verizon and the cable companies revealed they had met with top FCC officials on April 27. In that meeting, the companies all offered to provide the documents in PDF form and to create an electronic index to sort through the materials. The companies insisted that they had already "complied with the technical and formatting specifications contained in the commission's instructions," but that they were willing "to take certain additional steps to facilitate third-party review of the materials."
Google and its board were sued by a shareholder who wants to block the company's stock split plan because it entrenches the Web search company's co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, according to court documents.
Google announced the surprise stock split plan earlier this month, in which shareholders would get one new share of non-voting "Class C" stock for each existing "Class A" share. As a result, Google will be able to issue new shares for acquisitions and employee compensation without diluting the 56.3 percent voting stake enjoyed by Page and Brin or diminishing their "iron-clad grip" on Google, according to the complaint.
In this document, the Federal Communications Commission (Commission) announces that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has approved, for a period of six months, the information collection requirements associated with certain of the provisions of the rules adopted as part of the FCC’s Lifeline and Link Up Reform and Modernization Report and Order (Order). The FCC submitted revisions to those information collection requirements under control number 3060–0819 to OMB for review and approval, as required by the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) of 1995 (44 U.S.C. 3501–3520), 77 FR 13319, March 6, 2012. The revisions as updated were approved by OMB on April 13, 2012.
Sections 54.202(a), 54.401(d), 54.403, 54.405(c), 54.407, 54.416, 54.417, 54.420(b), and 54.422, published at 77 FR 12952, March 2, 2012, are effective May 1, 2012 and § 54.410(a) through (f) is effective June 1, 2012.
As the head of a bandwidth assessment group at the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and past chairman of the IEEE's task force on 40 Gigabit and 100 Gigabit per second Ethernet, John D'Ambrosia is among the people who will help guide the world toward 400 Gigabit and even Terabit per second speeds. But will our capacity to deliver bandwidth keep up with the human race's ability to consume it?
"That's the question that keeps me up at night," said D'Ambrosia, who is also chairman of the Ethernet Alliance industry group and an engineering executive at Dell. "When we were doing the 100 Gigabit project, people were saying as soon as you get 100 Gigabit done, you need to start working on the next speed. We're past that knee of the curve and we're getting into real exponential growth." An estimated one-third of the world's population is online now, a proportion that is sure to grow. More users, more devices that connect to networks, and more data-heavy services to ride over the pipes are causing a “bandwidth explosion,” D’Ambrosia said. The data reviewed by his IEEE committees over the past few years indicates that bandwidth demand is growing faster than our capacity to deliver it. But plenty of organizations are at work on the next generation of Internet and networking technologies, and they provide reason for optimism. The data explosion may not become a giant bottleneck thanks to continued research of the kind profiled below, which has already led to big advances in undersea cables, software-defined networking, and the research-oriented Internet 2 network.
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