July 2012

IPhone’s Russian Carrier Blames ‘Dictatorship’ For $1,000 Price

OAO Mobile TeleSystems (MTS), the iPhone’s biggest wireless carrier in Russia, criticized Apple for not cutting the device’s $1,000-plus price in the country and being too strict about how it’s sold. The phone’s cost makes it a hard sell in a market where rival models go for as little as $120, executives from the Moscow-based company said at an event in New York. Apple also requires that the carrier’s retail locations meet its standards, imposing additional burdens, MTS said. “They’re more in a dictatorship mode where they say, ‘This is what you have to do or you don’t get the iPhone,’” Vasyl Latsanych, the Russian company’s vice president of marketing, said at the event. “Being arrogant with your partners in big markets doesn’t pay off.”

Want Gigabit Internet? You Don’t Have to Move to Kansas City.

If you want gigabit Internet speeds from your own fiber optic line, like the one that Google is offering in Kansas City, you can move to another community that also happens to straddle a state line. It’s called Bristol, and it is situated on the Virginia-Tennessee border.

On the Virginia side of the border, the local power company, Bristol Virginia Utilities, started building a fiber network for its own operations in 1999 after a nasty storm knocked out its operations. The plan was to connect eight substations with a fiber optic ring. When it turned out that adding capacity was cheap and easy, it was a no-brainer to add local government buildings and schools to the network. Bristol area schools have had access to gigabit speeds since 2000, when most schools were happy to have 1.5 megabits. The next step involved offering Internet, TV and phone services to consumers directly, but it ran up against a state law that had the effect of protecting incumbent carriers — basically Charter and Sprint.

In Nashville, once over limit, Comcast will charge $10 per 50 GB

Comcast will start charging $10 per 50 GB from its broadband customers in Nashville, Tennessee, once those customers zoom past the 300 GB monthly bandwidth quota. This new pricing structure is part of various pricing structures being explored by Comcast, currently the largest broadband company in the United States. Comcast is the latest Internet Service Provider to start charging for overages.

E-Reading: A Midterm Progress Report

E-readers have been around long enough now that the novelty has largely worn off. E-readers are simply part of the reading landscape now -- the first Kindle was released almost five years ago -- and it's time for a midterm progress report. How is the technology developing? What has been accomplished and what remains to be done?

One good development in the past five years: more options for reading at night.
LCD screens are as glare-prone as ever: though there are some screen protectors that claim to reduce glare, I have yet to find one that has a significant effect, so if you're going to be reading outdoors the e-ink screens are still your best bet.
E-ink screens today have much better contrast that the earlier ones did.
E-readers still have limited typeface options and do a generally lousy job of handling kerning and spacing.
E-books tend to have far more errors than print books, especially older books that have been scanned using OCR software and carelessly edited (or in some cases not edited at all).

Senate's Top Republican Hails The Fall Of Old Media

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told BuzzFeed that while many of his generation mourn the fall of newspapers, he is celebrating the rise of social media — precisely because of the havoc it has wreaked on an old media landscape that, in his view, favored the Democrats.

“Let me tell you, I think the New York Times monopoly is over,” Sen McConnell said. “Arthur Sulzberger used to have the biggest megaphone in America. And all you have to do is look at the dwindling size of newspapers, even one as big as his.” “To the extent that there isn’t media domination like there was in the days NBC, ABC, CBS the New York Times, the Washington Post, particularly since most people on my side of the aisle feel they had a pretty obvious bias … those days are over,” he said. “I kind of like this new environment. I think its much more competitive, much more balanced."

Ford Foundation gives Washington Post $500,000 grant for government-accountability reporting

A memo from The Washington Post leadership to staff says the grant of a half-million dollars will allow four new hires and expand the paper’s government-accountability reporting at the national and local levels. The one-year grant — with an agreement in principle for two additional years — is part of the Foundation’s Freedom of Expression program, an initiative aimed at promoting journalism in the public interest. This program supports nonprofits, such as ProPublica and National Public Radio.

West Bank’s Emerging Silicon Valley Evades Issues of Borders

The spotless cafeteria is fashionably furnished with fluorescent orange and lime green tables, and there are table tennis and foosball tables in the basement. What else could it be but a tech start-up, even here? The idea, of course, is to give employees something resembling the comfortable, innovation-friendly working conditions that are a hallmark of Silicon Valleys around the world, said Murad Tahboub, 42, the managing director of ASAL Technologies. Because that is what Ramallah, the West Bank city where the Palestinian Authority has its administrative headquarters, has ambitions to become: a hub for the information and communications technology industry. With 120 employees, ASAL is one of the largest companies in the small but burgeoning Palestinian tech sector, which many of those involved say is on the verge of big things. “We are in the right position to have exponential growth,” said Tahboub, looking every bit the part with his slicked-back hair and black-rimmed Lacoste eyeglasses. Compared with other industries that the anemic West Bank economy might look to develop, the information and communications technology sector has an advantage: it is much less affected by impediments to movement, like the barriers, checkpoints and permit requirements that Israel imposes on the territory in the name of security. “This is a sector that has no borders,” Tahboub observed. “You just need electricity and a telephone line.”

Beijing targets online political rumors

A Beijing government official said this week the city would crackdown on Internet users spreading political rumors that attack Chinese Communist party leaders, after authorities arrested 5,007 people suspected of online illegal activities.

The head of Beijing's public security bureau, Fu Zhenghua, made the statements, which were later published in various state-controlled publications on Thursday. The statements came just days after a major rain storm hit the capital during the weekend and left 37 people within the city dead, according to government estimates. Internet users in the country, however, suspect the death toll may be higher, and have complained that authorities did little to warn residents about the impending storm. China, however, imposes strict censorship on anti-government discussion, and has deleted sensitive posts relating to the storm on Chinese blogs and Twitter-like sites in the country.

Fans asked to tweet from Olympics only if it's 'urgent'

This is supposed to be the Twitter Olympics, but tweet- and text-clogged networks appear to have caused problems for broadcasters at the London Games.

Broadcasters complained over the weekend that they were unable to determine the distance between cyclists in Saturday's road races because GPS and communications systems had failed. A spokesman blamed the problems on overuse of Twitter and text messages. "From my understanding, One network was oversubscribed, and OBS (the Olympic Broadcasting Service) are trying to spread the load to other providers," Mark Adams, a spokesman for the International Olympic Committee, was quoted by The Guardian as saying. "We don't want to stop people engaging in this by social media," he added, "but perhaps they might consider only sending urgent updates."

In Defense of NBC: There Are Two Olympics

Attendees at London's Olympic events were asked to avoid sending non-urgent text messages and tweets during those events -- because the resulting overload to data networks was compromising the television coverage of those events. That seems like an apt metaphor for an Olympics that is pitting not just athlete against athlete, but also screen against screen. There are, actually, two versions of the Games this year.

There are the events as we see them on TV, highly produced and heavily narrative and ad-filled and time-delayed; and then there are the events as they play out online, through live blogs and live tweets and athletes' Instagrams and full, nearly real-time recaps. These two versions of the Olympics are the same thing only in the sense that, say, quiche and custard are the same: They take the same basic ingredient and, through cooking them differently, create two completely separate products. It's hard not to read some future-of-television lessons into those Two Olympics.

Benton

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