April 2013

Now an integral part of everyday life, GPS makes it easy for users to pinpoint an exact location. This technology has a myriad of applications today, from street navigation to keeping track of your family or family pets. Although three-quarters of smartphone owners are using location-based services such as navigation apps, these capabilities largely have been limited to outdoor use. That’s all beginning to change as companies start to develop innovative technologies to bring GPS indoors. The retail industry is tapping indoor location technology, and ABI Research predicts the retail indoor location market will reach $5 billion in 2018. The technology delivers in-store directions to preferred products and personalized promotions directly to customers. Indoor location services have the potential to impact numerous industries, bringing new opportunities for engagement at every turn.

The Internet might have looked very different than it does today.

When Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina were building Mosaic, the browser that practically created the Web in 1993, they included the ability to annotate any page. Discussions immediately sprang up. But they quickly realized that the server to host the annotations would have had to scale to enormous size, which was not practical. So they took the feature out. What would the Web have looked like if annotation had managed to stay in? Maybe a million conversations would have bloomed, and some of the furious divides that plague this country would have been bridged. Or maybe it just would have been a deafening free-for-all, cranking up all the cranks.

Twenty years later, there is a vast amount of discussion on the Web, much of it in the form of comments and reviews. But it is generally hosted by corporations – Facebook, Google, Amazon – that are selling ads or products, which kind of undermines the democratic spirit of give and take. When the companies fail, like MySpace did, the content simply goes away.

If you're a customer of AT&T's U-verse service or have plain-old DSL Internet access, you may feel like you're stuck in the slow lane, especially compared to your friends and neighbors who have cable Internet access. But you soon may be getting a speed boost.

The difference in speeds offered by DSL providers and cable operators "is pretty big right now and is getting wider," noted Teresa Mastrangelo an analyst at Broadbandtrends, an industry analysis and consulting firm. But she added that next-generation of DSL technologies will "help close the gap." DSL's big boost is expected to come from two technologies called bonding and vectoring. With bonding, a DSL provider sends signals over multiple phone lines rather than using just one. By using two phone lines to deliver DSL, rather than just one, providers can effectively double Internet speeds, industry experts say.

The Federal Communications Commission has adopted an order that would give broadcasters two years to translate emergency crawls into audio for the blind and sight-impaired, and for cable operators to pass those along to their viewers as well. Some in the industry had sought a three-year phase-in, while accessibility advocates had wanted a year. The FCC split the difference. The FCC did not apply the mandate to over-the-top providers or TV Everywhere delivery of video content, but did issue a Notice of Further Proposed Rulemaking asking whether it should do so.