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Technology companies tend to target markets teeming with highly educated professionals. But this week, Google Inc. turned that tradition on its head. After a yearlong search for a place to build a super-fast Internet network, Google eschewed places like Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle in favor of blue-collar Kansas City, Kansas.

Google is planning to launch the service in a city where only one in eight residents over the age of 25 had a bachelor's degree, and one in four failed to graduate from high school, according to U.S. census data. In 2008, the median household income in KCK, as the city is known, was $39,000, well below the Kansas average of $50,000.

The unlikely nature of Google's choice was perhaps most deeply appreciated across the state line in three-times-larger Kansas City, Mo., home of art museums, professional sports teams and high-tech companies. Until recently, "Kansas City, Kan., was disparaged as the armpit of the metro area—if not all of Kansas," said a Thursday column in the Kansas City Star, based in Kansas City, Mo. Yet the Google decision represents the latest in a series of comebacks for a city that 15 years ago was on the brink of disaster. The closing of steel plants and meatpacking factories reduced KCK's population to below 150,000 from a 1970 high of 168,000. Its public finances, meanwhile, were so strained that residents voted in 1997 to merge the city and county governments, largely to cut costs. Meanwhile, the rest of metropolitan Kansas City was largely thriving, thanks in part to high-tech companies like Sprint, based in a prosperous suburb called Overland Park. Then the leadership of KCK began offering tax incentives for businesses and entertainment companies to develop the city's western acreage, and the balance of power in metropolitan Kansas City, home to about two million people, started to shift. A racetrack featuring Nascar competitions opened, followed by a shopping center, hotels and amusement parks. Suddenly, 10 million visitors annually, many from several states away, began pouring into KCK.

Four Hollywood movie studios are heading for a showdown with America’s largest cinema chains after they agreed to make their films available on pay-television two months after their theatrical release.

Warner Brothers, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Studios and 20th Century Fox have signed up to release their films on a “premium video-on-demand” basis with DirecTV, the satellite operator. Consumers will have to pay about $30 to watch a particular film. With DVD sales – once Hollywood’s biggest cash generator – facing inexorable decline, the studios have created the premium video-on-demand release “window” to squeeze more money out of each title. The new release window comes as cinema admissions in the US have dipped. Revenues from admissions have held steady, thanks to ticket price increases, but the number of people paying to watch films in cinemas fell close to 10 per cent in 2010. If the premium video-on-demand window is a success it could potentially change the economics of the film business, creating a new revenue stream between a film’s theatrical release and its eventual release on DVD and Blu-ray. But the new window has angered the National Association of Theatre Owners, which represents cinema chains. It released a terse statement saying it had “repeatedly, publicly and privately, raised concerns and questions about the wisdom of shortening the theatrical release window to address the studios’ difficulties in the home market”.

[Commentary] A Pew Research Center study finds a continuing decline in newspaper readership, as well as viewership on all three cable news channels. But the report found some newsworthy signs:

• The number of people who say they get their news online at least three times a week has surpassed the number who get their news first from newspapers.
• Nearly half of readers (47%) use a cellphone or tablet computer to get "at least some local news and information."
• "Online news hires may have matched newspaper cuts for the first time."

What disturbs me is that as the news media make this major transition to fully expand onto online and mobile devices, diversity of staffing seems to be getting lost in the shuffle. Curiously, the news media remain largely white and male, even as the stories dominating the news pertain to diverse communities. That is, at least, from what we can see. Richard Prince of The Maynard Institute, a non-profit that promotes diversity in the media, reports that some online news organizations have declined to participate in an American Society of News Editors (ASNE) diversity survey. In a business that prides itself on transparency and factual accuracy, the unwillingness to supply a simple staff breakdown is troubling.

Ofcom, the UK's telecommunications regulator, proposed a tougher oversight regime for BT by saying the price of its flagship wholesale products should rise by less than the rate of inflation over the next three years.

Ofcom said its proposals should result in consumers securing real term reductions in the price of their phone and broadband services. This is because Ofcom expects TalkTalk and British Sky Broadcasting to pass on savings, that they secure on BT’s wholesale products, to their retail customers. Ofcom imposes price controls on the products provided by BT Openreach, the telecoms group’s subsidiary that provides rivals with access to its infrastructure. TalkTalk and BSkyB are among BT’s most important wholesale customers. They rent parts of BT’s network infrastructure, in a process known as local loop unbundling, so as to provide phone and broadband services to their retail customers. BT’s wholesale customers pay £89.10 per year for each landline that they rent from Openreach under the local loop unbundling process. Ofcom’s approach to the new price controls for Openreach’s products is tougher compared with the watchdog’s existing oversight regime. In 2009, Ofcom said the price of Openreach’s flagship products could rise above the rate of inflation. Ofcom’s new approach partly reflects its view that Openreach’s weighted average cost of capital has fallen from 10.1 per cent to 8.6 per cent. BT said it was crucial that it was able to secure a “fair rate of return” on its investments in telecoms networks.