New York subway riders might be able to actually get some work done on the train. Beginning July, free Wi-Fi will be available at a number of stations courtesy of Google. Boingo Wireless, the Wi-Fi provider well known for its wireless service for airports, has teamed up with Google Offers, the search company’s Web page for getting deals, to offer the free Internet. Google is paying for the service from now until Sept. 7.
Parents can now use an array of tools to keep up with the digital lives of their children, raising new quandaries. Is surveillance the best way to protect children? Or should parents trust them to share if they are scared or bewildered by something online? The answers are as varied as parents themselves.
Still, the anxieties of parenting in the digital age have spawned a mini-industry, as start-ups and established companies market new tools to track where children go online, who they meet there and what they do. Because children are glued to smartphones, the technology can allow parents to track their physical whereabouts and even monitor their driving speed. If, a few years ago, the emphasis was on blocking children from going to inappropriate sites on the family computer, today’s technologies promise to embed Mom and Dad — and occasionally Grandma — inside every device that children are using, and gather intelligence on them wherever they go.
Facebook announced that Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer at Facebook, has joined the company’s board of directors.
Sandberg oversees Facebook’s business operations including sales, marketing, business development, legal, human resources, public policy and communications. Prior to Facebook, Sandberg was vice president of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google, where she built and managed the online sales channels for advertising and publishing and operations for consumer products worldwide. She previously served as Chief of Staff for the United States Treasury Department under President Bill Clinton and began her career as an economist with the World Bank. She received B.A. and M.B.A degrees from Harvard University. Sandberg also serves on the boards of The Walt Disney Company, Women for Women International, the Center for Global Development and V-Day.
Along with Sandberg, Facebook’s current board members are: Mark Zuckerberg; Marc L. Andreessen, Andreessen Horowitz; Erskine B. Bowles, president emeritus, University of North Carolina system; James W. Breyer, Accel Partners; Donald E. Graham, chairman and CEO, The Washington Post Company; Reed Hastings, chairman and CEO, Netflix; and Peter A. Thiel, Founders Fund.
Steve Coll has announced his intention to step down as President of the New America Foundation later this year when a successor is selected.
Coll has led the organization for the past five years. Before joining New America, Coll served as Managing Editor of The Washington Post from 1998 to 2004. He is currently a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of numerous books, including his most recent, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power. When a new President is in place, Coll will transition into a Senior Fellow position with New America's National Security Studies Program as he pursues a follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. A Board-led search for a new President is underway and is being chaired by David Bradley, Chairman and Owner of Atlantic Media Company.
European broadcasters are emerging from a period of uncertainty to discover they will have to cede more primary spectrum to mobile broadband operators, but are being offered some concessions over reallocation.
The European Commission, the European Union’s executive body, has been dithering over spectrum policy ever since the surprise decision taken at the World Radio Spectrum Conference (WRC) 2012 to force a second digital dividend out of broadcasters in the spectral region covering Europe, the Middle East and Africa. A group of Middle Eastern and African countries pushed through a commitment to make more spectrum available for mobile broadband in the band around 800MHz in addition to the amount granted in the so called first digital dividend in 2008. At that time, there were variations between member states, but generally 20 percent to 25 percent of the UHF spectrum liberated through analogue switch off was given over to mobile broadband, which was more than the original spectrum allocated for European GSM cellular services.
Two local groups are teaming to create a kind of Wi-Fi cooperative that would tap into Google’s promises of mega-bandwidth Internet connections — splicing them into faster hookups for paying customers and free and fast-enough wireless connections for low-income families.
The Rosedale Development Association and Connecting for Good, a Kansas City nonprofit that seeks to shrink the digital divide by expanding Internet access, are spearheading the effort to bring free or discounted Web access to the neighborhood. Connecting for Good exists partly because of Kansas City’s selection as the starting point for the ultrafast Internet service dubbed Google Fiber. The announcement catalyzed the budding idea for the nonprofit, said co-founder Michael Liimatta. The organization hopes to take the fiber-optic connections at the heart of Google’s service — able to move mighty rivers of data compared to the streams available for homes today — and split them into affordable, widely available conduits to the Internet. It’s also looking to construct a cost-sharing “e-community center” to serve as a hub for using and learning about technology.
A new report from the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights reveals a chilling portrait of sweatshop working conditions within VTech's electronics factory in Guangdong, China. The company is engaging in a sweeping list of labor and human rights violations while manufacturing cordless phones and other low-ticket electronics for US companies like AT&T, Motorola, and retail giant Wal-Mart.
An Indian call center usually conjures up the image of rows of young telephone operators talking politely to customers thousands of kilometers away – not dental workers. Yet in one large outsourcing company outside Bangalore, this is what you find.
Their desks sport models of molars, while teeth X-rays flash-up on computer screens, waiting to be checked against insurance claims filed to a big American healthcare group. India is the world’s leading business process outsourcing(BPO) hub, part of a global industry worth $153 billion in revenues last year, according to Nasscom, an Indian trade body. The health of the sector has also become increasingly important as much of the rest of India’s economy stumbles, with outsourced services to businesses abroad set to grow 12 percent yearly to $16 billion in 2012.
For a window into the fractious state of European federalism, consider the battle of wills taking place between Neelie Kroes, the European commissioner for telecommunications, and the Netherlands over how much mobile phone operators can charge to connect calls on each other’s wireless networks.
On June 13, Mrs. Kroes told the Dutch telecommunications regulator, OPTA, that its proposed level for the fees, known as mobile termination rates, was twice as high as what policy makers in Brussels thought was justified. She ordered OPTA to cut the fees in half, citing the European Telecoms Framework that took effect in May 2011, which supposedly gave Brussels more control over fees set by national regulators. Two days later, OPTA gave Mrs. Kroes its response: Sorry, but no chance. OPTA explained that it had initially supported the commission’s goal of reducing Dutch mobile termination rates to 1.2 euro cents a minute from 2.7 cents, starting Sept. 1. But Dutch mobile operators had challenged those rates in court.
Comcast went public in 1983. Track its share price, and you’ll see that it tootled gently upward as the company expanded its cable television service around the country. Then, in 1997, the share price spiked. This was the year the company began testing a new product—the cable modem, which offered Internet access at a blazing 1.5 megabytes per second, then 50 times faster than dial-up. Comcast didn’t invent the Web. It didn’t invent the cable modem, either. Like other cable operators, it happened to own the right network at the right time. That history is helpful to remember as the Department of Justice begins an antitrust probe into whether Comcast, Time Warner, and other cable providers are now trying to manipulate the way customers use the Internet—specifically, whether imposing caps on the amount of data people can download monthly discourages them from using Netflix, Hulu, and other rival online video sites and steers them to the cable companies’ own video-on-demand services, which aren’t subject to the caps.
Comcast’s defense of its tiered system rests on a semantic distinction: that there’s a difference between watching a movie through Netflix, which exists on what the cable companies call the “public Internet,” and watching the same movie through a provider’s on-demand service, which they say is a private network. In pushing the phrase “public Internet,” Comcast and other Internet providers want customers to accept that they are the proprietors of separate, special Internets.
© 1994-2024 Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. All Rights Reserved.
