October 2013

Cards provide captioning for deaf at stadium

The Arizona Cardinals and the Arizona Sports and Tourism Authority have devised a new strategy to accommodate deaf and partially deaf fans at University of Phoenix Stadium this season. The organizations are providing text captioning on video boards so that football fans who have difficulty hearing the public-address system can read the play-by-play information as games are in progress. The captioning system is the result of a year’s worth of planning and refinement, shaped in large part by a lawsuit brought by Michael Ubowski, a Mesa resident and advocate for the deaf.

Now That Uncle Sam Is Back, What's Next for the FCC, FTC?

Within minutes of President Barack Obama signing the deal that reopens the government through Jan. 15 and raises the debt ceiling to Feb. 7, the Federal Communications Commission's website came back online. The Federal Trade Commission took a little longer to get back up to speed. Its website came back online around 9:15 a.m. So what's next?

For a while longer, the FCC and FTC will chug along and tackle the backlogs that mounted up during the 16- day shutdown with less than five commissioners. The FCC was already forced to postpone its Oct. 22 monthly meeting because of the shutdown. There is also plenty of fretting that the auction of wireless spectrum could also suffer a delay, pushing it to 2015. With less time to prepare, many wonder if the FTC will decide to delay upcoming workshops on the Internet of things (Nov. 19) and native advertising (Dec. 4), a new issue for the agency. Now more than ever, the advertising lobby will need to keep up the work to preserve the advertising tax deduction. The next big date is Dec. 13 when the Congressional negotiating committee is supposed to issue budget recommendations for funding the government beyond Jan. 15.

FCC Suspends Filing Deadlines Through Oct. 21

The Federal Communications Commission has reopened for business, including its website, which was shuttered during the government deadline. However, it has suspended all filing deadlines other than network outage reports until further notice. The FCC signaled before the shutdown that those filings would be due the business day after the government re-opened, which would have been Oct. 18. The FCC also noted that it would offer further guidance "soon" but recommended that nobody file any submissions seeking additional relief until then.

People in Silicon Valley yawned at the shutdown. They shouldn’t have.

"If companies shut down, the stock market would collapse," venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya said in a recent podcast with Jason Calacanis. "If the government shuts down, nothing happens and we all move on, because it just doesn't matter. Stasis in the government is actually good for all of us."

This view is surprisingly common, especially in Silicon Valley. But it's wrong: Washington's growing dysfunction is a big problem for everyone, even high-flying technology companies. It's true, of course, that Washington isn't a major source of new innovations the way the San Francisco Bay Area is. It never has been and probably never will be. But what governments provide are stable, predictable platforms on which innovative companies can build. But we've now gone way beyond the point when gridlock in Congress can be beneficial in fostering democratic deliberation. Now it’s not just preventing the government from making disruptive changes, it's actually becoming a source of disruption in its own right. Shutdowns, poorly-targeted spending cuts, and filibusters are preventing the government from performing basic services that they've performed without difficulty for decades.

Greenwald’s new venture shows brands still matter. But they can be personal brands.

“While no one has found the formula that will bring old media into a profitable future, I’m guessing that Bezos understands an old truism: brands matter,” commented Chris Hughes, who bought The New Republic, on Jeff Bezos’ purchase of The Washington Post. So, to Hughes, the name recognition of the news outlets he and Bezos purchased was a key factor in deciding if those organizations were worthwhile investments.

But eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar’s investing in a start-up news organization with Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald and company suggests that there is a tipping point where a big enough personal brand can bring a similar level of credibility to an upstart organization. Sure, Omidyar is investing in a commercial brand, but it will be built on the personal brands of journalists Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill. And that's not a bad investment.

Non-profit news could use more Bezos’ too.

Recent high-profile acquisitions of big name and community newspapers have been the talk of the news industry in recent months. Unlike the far-more publicized investments of the likes of Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and John Henry, investments in nonprofit news outlets have been far more modest. But the nonprofit news sector could benefit from more investment from people of means.

How Cookie Alternatives From Microsoft and Google Stack Up

Both Microsoft and Google are eyeing their own technologies to track people's digital behaviors -- the sites they visit, the apps they use, the videos they watch, etc. How might the longtime rivals' odds stack up?

Microsoft's cookie replacement would trace users across Microsoft-owned devices and services and target ads within those environments. Details on Google's plans are scarce, but it would likely retain the current cookie's functionality and apply it to both the desktop and mobile web as well as mobile apps to track a single anonymized user across the various devices.

Netflix Still Ranking ISP Streaming Speeds

Netflix continues to track which Internet service providers offer the best Netflix streams despite changing a policy that now lets its subscribers access the Netflix “Super HD” library whether or not their ISPs are members of Open Connect, a private CDN initiative that installs private caches at the edge of the network. Before that change, Super HD streams (including 3D content) were offered only to Netflix subscribers who obtained broadband from ISPs that were part of Open Connect.

What we know (and don’t) about eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s ambitious new media startup

It was leaked that star Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald, who broke the news on the National Security Agency scandals, is leaving the paper for what he described as “a once-in-a-career dream journalistic opportunity that no journalist could possibly decline.” It was soon revealed that the backer of that opportunity is billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. So what’s the new venture going to look like?

Here’s what we know so far: It’s totally digital, no print component, New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen reported. Omidyar is willing to pump a lot of money into it. Also on board so far: Filmmaker Laura Poitras and The Nation journalist Jeremy Scahill. The site won’t just focus on surveillance and security, though. It will be a general news site. And a few things we don’t know: The site’s name, though apparently it has one already, and the site’s business model (beyond Omidyar’s millions).

UK surveillance probe goes public — sort of

The UK government has until now put up something of a wall of silence around its intelligence services’ surveillance activities, but there are signs that this wall might be partially dismantled.

In July 2013, a month after the PRISM scandal broke, the British Parliament’s intelligence oversight committee announced that the country’s spy services had not illegally used the American program to “access the content of private communications” of UK citizens -- they knew this because the spy services, namely NSA counterpart GCHQ, told them so. That said, the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) conceded that the laws it was talking about were a tad fuzzy and perhaps out-of-date, so the investigation quietly continued. Now, after months of further surveillance revelations that point to GCHQ itself as a major data-hoover, that inquiry is set to widen. The ISC said it would also look into the impact on people’s privacy, and would even hear evidence from the public. The reaction from privacy activists has been cautious, and understandably so.

Benton

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