March 2013

Free Press is not assuaged by the Federal Communications Commission's support of a proposed diversity study by the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council that will look at the advertising market and the impact of proposed FCC media ownership rules changes on diversity.

According to an FCC filing, in a phone conversation late last week with an aide to FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, Free Press policy director Matt Wood said he had serious concerns that the study's ability to provide the kind of analysis required by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals when it remanded FCC rules back to the commission for better justification of proposed diversity efforts. He also suggested that the study was far from an independent analysis. "[W]e contend that a study endorsed by the broadcast and newspaper lobbies, and carried out by an analyst who has on several occasions expressed support for weakening the very rules he seeks now to evaluate, cannot be substituted for independent research and agency action."

Using data drawn from queries entered into Google, Microsoft and Yahoo search engines, scientists at Microsoft, Stanford and Columbia University have for the first time been able to detect evidence of unreported prescription drug side effects before they were found by the Food and Drug Administration's warning system.

Using automated software tools to examine queries by 6 million Internet users taken from Web search logs in 2010, the researchers looked for searches relating to an antidepressant, paroxetine, and a cholesterol lowering drug, pravastatin. They were able to find evidence that the combination of the two drugs caused high blood sugar. The study, which was reported in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association on Wednesday, is based on data-mining techniques similar to those employed by services like Google Flu Trends, which has been used to give early warning of the prevalence of the sickness.

Technological advance in the mobile space have produced a paradigm shift in business practices and etiquette. Gone is the eight-hour workday. The good news? You can do this work from afar. The bad news? You can do this work from afar.

The swelling number of workers who tote smartphones and tablets can connect to work from the car, the kitchen table, a kid's baseball game, a remote island or 30,000 feet in the air. The skyrocketing use of mobile devices is upending much of what we know and experience in our work lives. Just as the desktop computer made time sheets, purchase orders and other physical documents virtually obsolete, mobile-based programs and cloud computing will make working solely at one desktop computer seem as outdated as tapping away at a typewriter. Indeed, while media, business and our greater culture are adapting to the opportunities and challenges of a digital lifestyle, users are going all mobile all the time, leaving the traditional web and the desktop world in the technological dust.

Despite some handwringing over Apple’s somewhat slowing iPhone growth, its share of smartphone subscribers has continued to rise in its biggest market: the US.

ComScore published a report taking the temperature of the smartphone market in Apple’s home country and it is at No. 1 with a 37.8 percent share of the market. Samsung, Apple’s biggest rival, is in second place, but isn’t really that close behind with a 21.4 percent share. Apple’s share represents 3.5 percent growth compared to the last time ComScore issued this report in October 2012. And unless you missed Apple’s earnings results from the December holiday quarter, you won’t be surprised at that growth since Apple sold 48 million iPhones worldwide between October and December. But while the company is leading in hardware sales, iOS is still far behind the Android juggernaut. Even though it fell 1.3 percent between October and December to 52.3 percent share, Android still is the most popular smartphone operating system in the U.S. Apple’s share grew 3.5 percent to a 37.8 percent share of mobile operating systems among smartphone owners, says ComScore.