December 2014

For China’s Internet czar, a trip to the United States over the past week was a contrast of coasts. In Washington, Lu Wei, the de facto head of Internet policy in China, faced frigid criticism from American officials over Chinese cyberattacks and skepticism about his vision for an Internet governance system in which China should be allowed to censor content and track users. In Silicon Valley, though, he received a warmer welcome from tech executives, including Jeffrey Bezos of Amazon and Timothy Cook of Apple.

The world’s biggest mobile industry group, the GSM Association, released a new report that takes a crack at defining the next big generational shift in mobile networking technologies, which we’ve come to know as 5G.

There’s only one problem: there’s more than one definition of 5G out there. As the GSMA Intelligence paper pointed out, there are two competing views of what 5G should be (no definition or standard has officially been set). The first is a narrow definition that focuses on the creation of a new faster, lower-latency network. The second definition, which the GSMA calls the “hyper-connected vision,” is much more broad. It looks far beyond the specs of the radio network to outline a mobile networking world where old and new wireless technologies blend together, networks and devices become greener, and cellular coverage is expanded to cover the globe’s population and the Internet of things. Oh, and that’s all in addition to the big bandwidth gains and latency drops core to the first 5G definition.

[Commentary] The National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) announced the formation of a task force to help its members increase opportunities for women and minorities. On the surface, this looks like just another news release by an industry under fire; but I think there is much more to it. The NVCA is providing true leadership and challenging its members to clean up their act. NVCA chief executive Bobby Franklin said improving diversity in gender and race was a personal mission for him because it would improve the innovation, productivity, and performance of the companies that the venture community invested in -- and better the overall economy. He agreed that VC firms should be proactive in correcting their gender imbalance and disclosing diversity data, and promised to work towards making this happen.

[Vivek Wadhwa is a fellow at Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University]

[Commentary] A decade ago, TiVo was an obvious thing to own for anyone who took television seriously. TiVo was ahead of the curve: it had basically invented the DVR, after all. It had years of experience on its scattershot competition. The user interface was fantastic. The iconic "peanut" remote felt at home in the hand. But then something happened. Well, actually, nothing happened. TiVo innovated at a pace unbefitting its role as a disruptor; it got weirdly complacent for a company that was facing constant threat from the cable and satellite providers who were creeping on its only game. Behind the scenes, TiVo was effectively becoming a patent-holding firm, treating its shrinking customer base like a sideshow. It kept selling hardware, even as it put that hardware on the back burner internally.