October 2013

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) provides this Quarterly Report on the status of the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP or Program). This Report focuses on the Program’s activities from April 1 to June 30, 2013. In 2009 and 2010, NTIA invested approximately $4 billion in 233 BTOP projects benefitting every state, as well as five territories and the District of Columbia. As of June 30, 2013, 163 projects remained in active status, and 61 projects had completed their project activities.

This Quarterly Report focuses on four areas of Program implementation and project oversight:

• Status and progress of broadband projects and Program expenditures. From April through June 2013, NTIA’s broadband grant recipients continued to make strong progress toward meeting or exceeding the Program’s FY13 goals in areas such as building or expanding fiber-optic networks, opening new PCCs, training to drive broadband adoption, and adding new broadband subscribers. This quarter, grant recipients deployed more than 12,200 network miles, bringing the total number of miles to more than 105,000 and exceeding the FY13 goal. This quarter, grant recipients have connected more than 3,600 community anchor institutions, which is an increase of 26 percent from last quarter and brings the total number of institutions connected to more than 17,000 across 44 states, three territories, and the District of Columbia. Through June 2013, 65 BTOP grant recipients have installed more than 44,000 new workstations, exceeding the FY13 goal, in Public Computer Centers (PCCs) across 38 states, one territory, and the District of Columbia. Grant recipients installing workstations also continue to develop and implement training programs and educational courses. During the quarter, PCCs provided 1.5 million hours of training to 350,000 users. Through June 2013, Sustainable Broadband Adoption (SBA) grant recipients have reported more than 613,000 households and 5,000 businesses subscribed to broadband services, exceeding the FY 13 goal. Many of the individuals received digital literacy training through local educational institutions. During the third quarter of FY13, grant recipients spent more than $229 million in federal grant funds. These funds were matched by grant recipient contributions of more than $55 million. Cumulatively, federal outlays for the Program totaled $3 billion through June 30, 2013, representing 80 percent of total obligated federal funds, while total grant recipient matching contributions exceeded $1.1 billion.
• Supporting initiatives, including the State Broadband Initiative (SBI) mapping and capacity-building efforts. ASR Analytics has been developing reports from the visits to 15 PCC and SBA sites and began site visits for 12 infrastructure grant recipients
• Monitoring, grants administration, and closeout efforts for broadband projects and the results of those efforts.
• Program communications supporting outreach with and among BTOP stakeholders.

Google has unsheathed what could be its most powerful weapon yet in the war against Facebook for the hearts and minds of mobile device users: Android.

Google showed off a slew of new Google+ features that automatically enhance photographs and videos in a bid to convert hundreds of millions of snap-happy Android mobile device users into Google+ users. Android could give the 2-year-old Google+ a boost. The search giant says it has 300 million “in stream” monthly active users on Google+ and 540 million active users who take some kind of social action on Google each month, nowhere near the population -- or popularity -- of Facebook with more than 1.2 billion users. Google has tried all kinds of ways to gin up interest in Google+. Yet although many people have signed up for it, they are not as active on Google+ as they are on Facebook and other social networking services. But Android is a powerful tool in its arsenal. The mobile software was on nearly three-quarters of smartphones shipped during the second quarter of 2013, according to research firm IDC.

The UK’s Open Data Institute (ODI) -- a government-funded company that helps to open up publicly-funded datasets and that also incubates startups in the field -- recently said that governments around the world were keen to emulate the model in their countries. This is now happening.

The ODI (which is co-led by web inventor Tim Berners-Lee) announced the beginning of what it said would become a “substantial international open data network,” starting with 13 “ODI nodes” around the world. Two of these are beta-phase national centers of excellence, in the US and Canada, that will work with the public sector, non-governmental organizations and the private sector. Eight (Dubai, Chicago, North Carolina, Paris, Trento, Manchester, Brighton and Leeds) are city- or region-based nodes that will undertake research and development, provide training and publish data with an ODI Open Data Certificate, which is a standardized way of describing the data’s format, update regularity and so on.

Amazon officially launched Kindle MatchBook, its previously announced program that lets publishers and authors bundle print books with discounted digital editions. A little under 75,000 titles are included so far -- up from the 10,000 announced in September.

Readers who bought the included titles in print will have the option to buy the Kindle version for $2.99 or less. Amazon’s release lists some of the “major publishers” making at least a few titles available for the program: “HarperCollins, Macmillan, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Amazon Publishing, Wiley, Chronicle Books, and Marvel,” along with “thousands” of titles by self-published authors. Most of the “major publishers” Amazon cites in its release are making very few titles available to the program. A notable exception is HarperCollins, which is including over 9,000 titles in the program. Just nine of those were published in the last 90 days, suggesting this is largely a play to spur ebook sales of older titles.