March 2014

The Federal Communications Commission is reconsidering a rule that would provide Spanish broadcasts of emergency alerts and other important announcements.

The rule was originally recommended in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Back then, groups including the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council petitioned the FCC to require broadcasters to notify Spanish listeners in the event of an emergency. "MMTC filed its petition on Sept. 22, 2005, in response to its perceived deficiencies in distributing multilingual emergency information in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina," the agency wrote. The FCC is reopening the comment period for another month as it considers such a rule. The rule would require certain stations to air all presidential messages in both English and Spanish. To a lesser extent, emergency broadcasts in certain areas may also be aired in other languages, such as French or Mandarin.

Crittercism looked at three billion interactions a day with apps for one month. It’s useful to start by thinking about the overall network, with all its phones and carriers. That would include, say, an Android device being used in India, a BlackBerry on Wall Street, or an iPhone in Germany. Once you take into consideration all of the different phone models (2,582), carriers (691), and versions of operating systems (106), there are over 100 million possible permutations of how a signal might be processed. Then there are the underlying mechanics of each smartphone app. It may appear to be a single piece of software, but most apps change with nearly every load, drawing on new information from cloud computing systems for new data.

Crittercism says that 46 percent of apps rely on six or more different cloud services, like Facebook’s login system, ad placement businesses, or Amazon Web Services, to function. Three percent draw off more than 20 different cloud services to deliver, say, that music app or that mobile game. Then there are the apps themselves. “About two million of those, between Android, iOS and the other stores and downloads,” Andrew Levy, Crittercism’s chief executive, said in an interview. So an unimaginable number of permutations of phones then draw on a huge number of different multimillion-dollar data centers, probably run by different companies. And how long does it take to put all this together, from the time you hit the touch screen until it starts to react in your phone? In the United States, it’s about 320 milliseconds from making a request to the initial response. The real issue for companies, however, is not load times as much as failure rates. When that happens, customers are alienated and no business happens. A company with $1 billion in mobile revenue would lose $2.5 million a month with a 3 percent failure rate. Even losing one one-thousandth of the time is an $82,000 loss.

A new survey from InkHouse and GMI, a Lightspeed Research company, finds that TV is still by far the preferred way to access news by nearly three quarters of all Americans and that TV is still the most trusted news outlet.

Their data shows that 73% prefer to get their news from television, which also ranks first among the most trusted news outlets, followed by news websites (52%), print magazines and newspapers (36%), radio (25%) and social media (23%). Not surprisingly, digital media is gaining ground, particularly among younger demos. Among those aged 25 to 44, 60% chose news websites as their preferred news source and among the 18-34 age group, 41% chose social media. The study also found that email remains the preferred way to share news, with 34% using email, followed by 29% using social media and 8% using text messages. But among those aged 18 to 24, 50% are more likely to share news on social media compared to 45% for the 24 to 35 age group and only eight percent of those 55 or older.

Billionaire Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim has slammed a new telecoms bill before Congress as “confiscatory” and demanded that lawmakers rethink it.

Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexico’s president, sent a bill to Congress to implement the congressional reform passed last year, aimed at levelling the playing field. Analysts said it appeared that the government was intent on reining in the telecoms company’s power. Opposition parties have criticized the bill and it was not clear if it would face changes in Congress. Slim has a roughly 80 percent share of Mexico’s fixed-line market through his Telmex company, and 70 percent of mobile telephony via Telcel. His companies have been identified as the dominant market players by the telecoms regulator, IFT, which means they face being subjected to asymmetric rules to allow other players catch up.