Kansas City (KS) Mayor Joe Reardon led efforts to become a test bed for Google’s gigabit fiber-to-the-home Internet service. Kansas City (MO) Mayor Sly James then partnered with Mayor Reardon to extend the network across the state line. Mayor Reardon says he quickly realized that the fiber project would achieve a “deeper level of success” as a regional initiative.
He and Mayor James had been in talks about the fiber project before James was elected in 2011. The partnership meant that the cities could work together to achieve the same goal. “With ultra-high-speed fiber, if there’s a real value to it, you don’t just want it in one city,” Mayor Reardon said. “You want it to be in a lot of cities.” As a result, the bordering cities have been introduced to Internet access with speed that is considered to be unprecedented anywhere in the US. Google says the new network offers connection speeds that are 100 times faster than what’s currently available in most US communities. The new fiber access has spurred a modern-day Gold Rush for hackers and entrepreneurs to flock to the city with hopes of jump-starting new businesses that can use the fiber network. “When Google came, it was kind of like we got this fantastic puzzle, but it had no picture on the box to tell us what it should look like when it’s done,” said Mayor James. “So we get to decide what it looks like when it’s done.” Since the rollout began, hacker communities have cropped up in neighborhoods already connected to the fiber network.
President Barack Obama loves to watch sports – and the people who want to catch his eye know it. Companies and trade associations are doing something a little strange: they’re buying up airtime on ESPN.
Media strategists tell POLITICO they offer up the all-sports network as an option to clients who want to get their issues in front of Obama and top White House officials, known as big sports fans and rabid ESPN watchers. A strategist said the ads can’t be so obvious that Obama knows he’s the intended audience. “It’s not just targeting Obama, but doing it in a way that is both interesting and will get the attention of the audience, but not so unusual that it will put the client in a bad position.”
[Commentary] Of the many problems with data caps, one of the most pernicious is the way they freeze innovation and the evolution of online services.
The announcement from Kaleidescape that they will begin offering “Blu-ray quality” video downloads illustrates that beautifully. That means that one video weighs in at over 50 GB of data. Usually we embrace services that offer higher quality than their competitors as an important evolution. If the improvement proves popular the market will reward the innovator, all of the competitors will have to adopt the new standard, and consumers’ experiences will improve. But data caps can stop that from happening.
[Commentary] A federal district court in California refused to toss craigslist's claims that it owns its users' postings.
More and more, we're seeing fine print in terms of use ("TOU") agreements and end user license agreements ("EULAs") that try to make copyright claims. Why? Because copyright law is so overpowered that sneaking a smidge of copyright into what should be an ordinary affair can give a business a huge amount of leverage to bully others into doing what it wants. Practically speaking, this means that craigslist can sue anyone who reposts its users' listings—even if the users themselves want them reposted. If I'm trying to sell (or give away) an ancient laserjet printer (it can connect with either serial or parallel cables), I'd want it posted on as many different sites as possible. To the extent that there's anything creative in what I'm writing, I should decide what happens to my post, right? But no.
craigslist isn't so much concerned with the value of the creativity in the post itself; it's interested in maintaining its position as the biggest online hub for classified ads. Building copyright restrictions into its fine print, in this case, is just the easiest way to bring some legal guns to bear on restrictions of what other people have written.
I’m nominating Penny Pritzker to serve as my Secretary of Commerce.
Penny is one of our country’s most distinguished business leaders. She's got more than 25 years of management experience in industries including real estate, finance, and hospitality. She’s built companies from the ground up. She knows from experience that no government program alone can take the place of a great entrepreneur. She knows that what we can do is to give every business and every worker the best possible chance to succeed by making America a magnet for good jobs. And Penny understands that just as great companies strengthen the community around them, strong communities and skilled workers also help companies thrive. So she’s been an extraordinary civic leader in our shared hometown of Chicago. She served as a member of my Jobs Council. She was the driving force behind Skills for America’s Future, which is a program that brings together companies and community colleges to shape and prepare skills-based training programs for workers that are tied into the businesses that potentially will hire them.
As the Digital Public Library of America grows, the founders intend for it to cover a much wider world of material, including works that are still protected by copyright.
One founder, Harvard’s University Librarian, Robert Darnton, has said that they’re working to build “a non-commercial library that would make the cultural heritage of America available to all Americans and to everyone in the world with access to the Internet.” And to do that, the library’s founders, board members, and staff will have to figure how the library will handle works still under copyright. They’ve been thinking about it for two and a half years already, ever since work began on this project. The library opened with only public domain works in its collection. There are plenty of other issues to tackle without getting tangled into copyright quite yet. The DPLA itself doesn’t hold copies of the works it provides access to; it’s a collection of standardized metadata that helps users find what they’re looking for and then directs them to the site where those books, documents, movies, and photos live. Last month’s launch started working out how the DPLA would partner with other institutions and start making its larger ambitions real.
One of the truisms of digital journalism, and one that happens to be true, is that mobile is a big part of the future of news, if it isn’t the future. The latest Pew “State of the Media” report goes on at length about the migration of news to mobile in a section titled, aptly, “Digital: As Mobile Grows Rapidly, the Pressures on News Intensify.” Here are the numbers, according to Pew: Thirty-one percent of adults now own a tablet, roughly triple May 2011 levels; 45 percent of adults own a smartphone, up 10 percentage points from May 2011; Apple sold 65.7 million iPads worldwide last year, around 62 percent of the tablet market, with plenty of competitors accounting for the rest. Pew says that’s a good thing for news. So readers are ready for mobile news. Fine. But are newspaper companies ready to deliver it? For the large majority of them, the answer is no.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency wants “far out” ideas to improve mobile wireless networks, and those ideas should not rely on Internet protocols to relay data between nodes. DARPA, in a notice posted on the Federal Business Opportunities website, said it and other government research organizations want to develop Mobile Ad-hoc Networks software that can scale to between 1,000 and 5,000 nodes. This is likely to be a challenge, as DARPA said “it is difficult to field a MANET with 50 nodes.”
On May 2, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) released its Broadband Adoption Toolkit, a document aimed at sharing best practices developed from broadband adoption and digital literacy projects funded by the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP). The following can be attributed to Benton Foundation Executive Director Cecilia Garcia:
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