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June 2014

The Rise of Innovation Districts: A New Geography of Innovation in America

As the United States slowly emerges from the Great Recession, a remarkable shift is occurring in the spatial geography of innovation. For the past 50 years, the landscape of innovation has been dominated by places like Silicon Valley -- suburban corridors of spatially isolated corporate campuses, accessible only by car, with little emphasis on the quality of life or on integrating work, housing and recreation.

A new complementary urban model is now emerging, giving rise to what we and others are calling “innovation districts.” These districts, by our definition, are geographic areas where leading-edge anchor institutions and companies cluster and connect with start-ups, business incubators and accelerators. They are also physically compact, transit-accessible, and technically-wired and offer mixed-use housing, office, and retail. Led by an eclectic group of institutions and leaders, innovation districts are emerging in dozens of cities and metropolitan areas in the US and abroad and already reflect distinctive typologies and levels of formal planning.

In the US, districts are emerging near anchor institutions in the downtowns and midtowns of cities like Atlanta, Baltimore, Buffalo, Cambridge, Cleveland, Detroit, Houston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St. Louis and San Diego. They are developing in Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Portland, Providence, San Francisco and Seattle where underutilized areas (particularly older industrial areas) are being re-imagined and remade. Still others are taking shape in the transformation of traditional exurban science parks like Research Triangle Park in Raleigh-Durham, which are scrambling to keep pace with the preference of their workers and firms for more urbanized, vibrant environments.

Analysis

The FCC's Sisyphean Task

Sisyphus, you may recall from high school days, was sentenced to an eternity of rolling a boulder uphill only to watch it roll back down.

Section 202(h) of the 1996 Telecommunications Act gave the Federal Communications Commission the Sisyphean task of reviewing all of its broadcast ownership rules every two years (later extended to four) and determining whether each of them continue to be "necessary in the public interest."

Judge: NSA doesn’t have to keep all data as part of key surveillance lawsuit

The federal judge that had temporarily ordered the National Security Agency to preserve all evidence in a longstanding surveillance case, including data gathered specifically under the government’s Section 702 program, has now reversed that order.

“In order to protect national security programs, I cannot issue a ruling at this time. The Court rescinds the June 5 order,” said Judge Jeffrey White said.

Why we need to stop freaking out about the NSA and get on with business

A Q&A with Lance Crosby, the executive charged with IBM/SoftLayer’s cloud push. Maybe the National Security Agency did us a favor. Sure, news of its insatiable data snooping got nearly everyone’s knickers in a twist, but seriously, isn’t this a valuable teaching moment?

Crosby certainly thinks so. He acknowledged that customers outside the US often ask about securing their data from government eyes. His answer? Don’t focus on who’s snooping, protect your data from anyone.

“My response is protect your data against any third party -- whether it’s the NSA, other governments, hackers, terrorists, whatever…” he noted. “I say let’s stop worrying about the NSA and start talking about encryption and VPNs and all the ways you can protect yourself. Yes, the NSA got caught, but they’re not the first and won’t be the last.”

Free Speech Or Illegal Threats? Justices Could Say

Messages posted on Facebook and Twitter or sent in e-mails can be tasteless, vulgar and even disturbing. But just when do they cross the line from free speech to threats that can be punished as a crime?

As the Internet and social networks allow people to vent their frustrations with the click of a mouse, the Supreme Court is being asked to clarify the First Amendment rights of people who use violent or threatening language on electronic media where the speaker's intent is not always clear. Most lower courts say determining a true threat depends on how an objective person would understand the message.

Broadband shouldn’t be like cable TV. Why consumers should care about peering.

[Commentary] When you’re curled up on the couch, set to watch the second season of Orange is the New Black, and the video stream pixelates or just stops, it’s the modern-day equivalent of the “all circuits are busy now” message one can still hear on landline phones (or one could, if people were calling on them).

And the issues behind both problems are similar -- somewhere in the network there is too much demand and not enough capacity. But unlike the days of landline phones, when one industry controlled the calling experience (telephone companies that were forced by FCC regulations to connect calls on their networks), our broadband networks and the internet itself is controlled by varied industries and there are no rules around interconnections.

This is why we’re seeing Netflix and various ISPs battling it out in the press. The only broadband that matters is the broadband you have access to at your home. In most places, that’s not a competitive market. And with fights over interconnection agreements and the possibility that network neutrality transforms into paying for priority access, consumers get screwed again.

Take it from me. Having a bunch of bad choices is like having no choice at all.

Al Jazeera Wants Case With AT&T Kept Private

Al Jazeera America is trying to avoid unsealing a lawsuit it filed in 2013 accusing AT&T of improperly keeping the news channel off AT&T's U-verse cable-television lineup.

Al Jazeera got into the US cable market by acquiring Al Gore's Current TV. But AT&T refused to give space to the US version of the Qatar-based channel on U-verse, although it had carried Current TV. Each side said the other breached the affiliation agreement that governs their relationship, but the details on how aren't known because much of the case is under seal.

After being ordered to unseal the complaint, Al Jazeera said it would drop the case, wiping the public record clean of the lawsuit. Journalists, including a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, objected to the sealing.

Verizon will miss deadline to wire all of New York City with FiOS

In April 2008, Verizon signed a franchise agreement in which it promised the New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) that it would build its "state-of-the-art fiber-optic network throughout the entire City by mid-year 2014."

The June 30, 2014 deadline is about to pass without Verizon meeting the requirement. The company is blaming Hurricane Sandy from October 2012 -- even though Verizon was still claiming to be "ahead of schedule" in April 2013.

The Internet of things isn’t about things. It’s about cheap data.

The value that comes from connecting your thermostat to the Internet isn’t that you can now control it from your smartphone, or that it’s a theoretical home for new ads. The value is that you suddenly have access to cheap information about the temperature of your home, and by collating other data points or simple extrapolation techniques, you also have access to detailed information about what is happening in the home.

This can be cool. It can be creepy. And it can be convenient. But as is always the case when we encounter technological shifts, the Internet of things is really a tool. And like a hammer is used to expand the amount of force generated over a small area (allow you to hit something really hard), the Internet of things is a tool is for cheaply delivering and gathering information.

Welcome to the era of big, bad open information. Context needed.

[Commentary] With the amount of data we are generating, we should be thinking about information overload. What will it look like when we have 50 billion devices connected to the Internet and contributing to an already large the data set? Will we eventually be able to extract any useful information?

If big data is on course to transform business and society, then open data has a role to play to make sure information is accessible and shared. And as we make data open we also need to consider adding context.

[Asin is the co-founder and CEO of Libelium, a hardware provider for wireless sensor networks used in Smart Cities and Internet of Things projects]

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