May 2012

UK Bookseller Welcomes Kindle

Amazon has struck a deal with British book retailer Waterstones to sell Amazon Kindle digital readers, beating Barnes & Noble maker of the competing Nook device, into the U.K.'s biggest bookstore chain. The deal, which will bring Amazon's Kindle to all 294 Waterstones shops in September, emphasizes the growing clout of the Seattle-based Internet book giant whose sale of both physical and e-books has made it a major headache for brick-and-mortar bookshops world-wide. Though Amazon sells the Kindle through electronics and other retailers, the appearance of Kindles in Britain's largest bookstore chain reflects the growing need for physical book retailers to get a piece of the digital business if they don't have a device of their own to offer.

Cornell’s High-Tech Campus Will Have a Temporary Home at Google

The executives of Google are putting their interests in New York City ahead of their old school ties. Larry Page, the chief executive of Google, is scheduled to announce that the company will donate space so Cornell University can have a temporary home for the applied sciences school it plans to build in the city. While the campus is under construction on Roosevelt Island, students and faculty of the new Cornell school will occupy space in Google’s massive building in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. The donation comes despite a connection between Google’s co-founders, Page and Sergey Brin, and Stanford University, which had vied with Cornell for the Roosevelt Island space. Page and Brin started the company while they were graduate students at Stanford; they even made a video pitch to support Stanford’s bid in the competition that the city set up.

From a Facebook Founder Comes a Way to Streamline Work Flow

Facebook’s success has spawned a multimillion-dollar boom in social networking. There are networks for photo-sharers, for children and for workers inside companies. Yammer and Jive, for instance, promise to energize employees and increase their productivity by enabling fast information sharing. Dustin Moskovitz thinks this is a bad idea that won’t fly.

“The first time I looked at Yammer, I thought I was on Facebook,” he said. “Work is not a social network, with serendipitous communications and photo collections. Work is about managing tasks, and responding to things quickly.” Moskovitz does know a little bit about running the operations of a fast-growing company. He helped found Facebook along with Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin and Chris Hughes while at Harvard in 2004. His job was to make sure the computers straining to run Facebook’s expanding network never went down. After leaving Facebook in 2008 with enough equity to make him one of the world’s youngest billionaires, Moskovitz, now 27, works on his own version of company management software for the networked age. He calls it Asana.

Carriers Willing to Live With High iPhone Subsidies for Now

Much as U.S. wireless carriers would like to reduce the high subsidies they pay on Apple’s iPhone, there’s little chance that they’ll do so anytime soon. Why? They’re far too worried about what would happen to their customer-retention rates if they did so.

“We continue to believe carriers would lower iPhone subsidies if they collectively felt that competing devices would drive the same economics as iPhones,” says BMO Capital’s Keith Bachman. But right now, they don’t. And with no other hero handset to mitigate the risks of the spike in customer churn that might follow a reduction in iPhone subsidy, we’re unlikely to see one in the near term.

Falcone’s folly

Philip Falcone’s street fighter instincts and penchant for ultra-risky investments helped catapult him into the gilded club of Wall Street’s elite. But his winning streak ended in Washington, where the founder of Harbinger Capital Partners and former professional hockey player has been bodychecked by regulators.

LightSquared, Harbinger’s $3 billion investment, fell into bankruptcy last week after a dramatic inside-the-Beltway battle to create a wireless network that would compete with titans AT&T and Verizon Wireless. The company was an ambitious bet on unproven technology, and it ran into major technical hurdles. Devices on the proposed network were found to interfere with the Global Positioning System crucial to military and aviation safety. But Falcone’s plan to turn junk airwaves into a goldmine could have worked, observers say, if he had come prepared with a far more low-tech set of tools: The political and lobbying skills needed to close a deal in the nation’s capitol.

FTC names Internet privacy expert as senior adviser

The Federal Trade Commission has named an Internet privacy expert to advise on mobile privacy and competition issues as the agency takes on high-profile investigations of potential harm to consumers by the Web’s biggest firms.

Paul Ohm, an associate professor at the University of Colorado Law School, will begin Aug. 27 as senior policy adviser for consumer protection and competition issues at the FTC’s Office of Policy Planning. “Paul’s keen insights on how the law applies to technology and privacy issues will be invaluable to the FTC’s work in these areas,” FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said. Ohm follows a string of scholars, such as Columbia University’s Tim Wu, to offer advice to the FTC — an agency that has become the nation’s top cop for the Internet industry. “The FTC is the focal point for so many of the important information privacy debates taking place today,” Ohm said in a news release. Ohm specializes in information privacy, computer crime law and intellectual property law.

Five cable giants partner on Wi-Fi

Five of the top U.S. cable companies will partner together on an initiative to expand access to Wi-Fi networks for its customers. The CableWiFi network will give customers of Bright House Networks, Cablevision, Comcast, Cox Communications and Time Warner Cable access to each other's Internet hotspots. Combined, the network represents more than 50,000 hotspots in New York City, Los Angeles, Tampa, Orlando and Philadelphia.

‘Father of the Internet’ warns Web freedom is under attack

“Father of the Internet” Vint Cerf warned that Internet freedom is under threat from governments around the world, including the United States. Cerf, a computer scientist who was instrumental in the Internet’s creation, now employed by Google as its "Internet evangelist," said officials in the United States, United Kingdom and Europe are using intellectual property and cybersecurity issues "as an excuse for constraining what we can and can't do on the 'net.”

"Political structures … are often scared by the possibility that the general public might figure out that they don't want them in power," he said. He sounded the alarm about the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), arguing the group is poised to assume the role of global Internet cop. “There is strong indication that the Internet will enter the picture [for the ITU]," Cerf said at the Freedom to Connect conference.

Senators urge Google to cooperate with European antitrust regulator’s probe

Sens. Herb Kohl (D-WI) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) urged Google to address the concerns of a European antitrust regulator.

“We are pleased that the EU is working with Google to develop a set of voluntary solutions to the search engine’s problematic practices, including those that we identified at our September 2011 hearing," the lawmakers said in a joint statement. "We are hopeful that Google will be a willing partner with the EU’s Competition Commissioner. We continue to urge the FTC to investigate the concerns we raised at our hearing and to ensure a competitive search market where consumers can fairly pick the winners and losers in our online economy.”

David Turetsky Named FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau Chief

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski named David S. Turetsky as Chief of the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau (PSHSB). Turetsky is a senior communications lawyer with decades of leadership experience in the public and private sectors. He will begin after Memorial Day. David Furth, currently serving as Acting Chief, will resume his role as Deputy Bureau Chief.

Turetsky brings a number of years of senior U.S. government experience, including serving as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust in the U.S. Department of Justice; and business experience as a senior lawyer and officer for Teligent, a fixed-wireless telecommunications and broadband services company. He joins the FCC from Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP, where he was partner. At the firm, he focused on a wide range of regulated industries, including telecom, media, satellite, energy, and transportation. He was twice appointed by federal courts and the FCC as the Management Trustee of rural U.S. mobile wireless businesses required to be divested as a condition of a merger approval. In this role, Turetsky oversaw all aspects of the businesses, including management, day-to-day operations, strategic planning, and emergency response. During his time in the Clinton Administration Antitrust Division, Turetsky was deeply involved in the shaping of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. He has also been a member of the State Department Advisory Committee on International Communications and Information Policy, and serves as co-chair of the State Enforcement Committee of the American Bar Association Antitrust Section.

Benton

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