September 2012

A new study led by researchers at the University of Cincinnati looks at the lessons engineers can learn from color-changing animals like squid, octopus and cuttlefish. They find the secrets of a cuttlefish’s skin could be key to helping build a better e-reader.

[Commentary] Amazon recently began charging sales tax on online transactions made by residents of Pennsylvania and California, which means that 33 percent of the U.S. population is paying sales tax on Amazon purchases. This figure is expected to climb to 44 percent, or 14 states total, by 2016. And at the federal level, three bills are pending that would enact a federal requirement for online sales tax collection. However, just because online sales tax collection is a growing phenomenon among states does not mean it poses a threat to Amazon’s march toward retail dominance, and eCommerce growth generally. In fact, the competitive advantage of ecommerce has little to do with online sales tax. The reality is that according to the Amazon 2011 Annual Report, the company is already collecting sales tax on over half of their revenue, and sales growth is only accelerating. There are no doubt shoppers deterred from buying online in states where sales tax is collected. But with Amazon already collecting sales tax on more than half of its revenue, a national online tax law is unlikely to slow Amazon’s meteoric growth because the eCommerce value proposition extends far beyond the perceived “discount” of avoiding sales tax. Amazon and eCommerce sellers have found many ways to meet shopper expectations better than offline retailers, but avoiding sales tax collection has never been on the list.

[Silverman is director, sales support for etailing solutions]

[Commentary] The "program access" rules have been around since 1992, and are responsible for what competition we have in the video space. Without them, cable would be even more monopolistic, if you can believe that. They're still important, and it's disheartening to hear that the Federal Communications Commission might phase them out. These rules say that incumbent cable companies can't withhold the programming they have control over from competitors--if Comcast creates a sports channel, for instance, it has to sell it to DISH and DirecTV. The program access rules thus allow satellite companies, phone companies, and cable "overbuilders" to offer a full line-up of programming and compete in the video space. Why are these rules important? Well, for the most part wholly independent programmers want to sell their programming to any subscription TV provider that can afford it. But when a programmer is controlled by a cable company, the interests of the cable part of the business might be put ahead of the programming part of the business, and the company might decline to make its programming widely available.

The number of North American households connected directly into fiber networks has hit the 9 million mark, with small incumbent telephone companies continuing to lead the growth in fiber to the home deployments, according to the Fiber-to-the-Home Council Americas.

FTTH services are now available to 21.3 million North American homes, an increase of more than 10 percent over the past six months. RVA found that all but eight of nearly 880 FTTH service providers surveyed have fewer than 30,000 subscribers, with only five having more than 50,000 access lines and 97 percent of them having fewer than 10,000. The most notable of the big FTTH providers is Verizon, which serves more than half of the FTTH households in North America. RVA found that there are now more than a half million households on the continent receiving Internet connectivity at or in excess of 100 megabits per second (mbps), and that tested throughput speeds among survey respondents found FTTH subscribers beginning to pull away from other access technologies in both download and upload capacity. Median tested download speeds were above 20 mbps for FTTH subscribers, compared to less than 15 mbps for cable modem users, while FTTH upload speeds were over 9 mbps compared to about 3 mbps for cable.