CNNMoney

For all the amazing things smartphones can do, they're still not great at actual phone calls. Sprint's hoping to change that. The wireless carrier is rolling out new "HD Voice" technology to improve the quality of grainy cell-phone calls.

It's already available in a handful of cities, and should go nationwide by "mid-year," Sprint said.

Most people can hear within a range of ten octaves, but current cell phone calls span only four. That's why taking a call from an iPhone owner can sound like listening to someone through a set of tin cans.

High definition Voice expands a cell phone call's range to seven octaves. It also includes technology to eliminate background noise, giving voice calls a fuller, more natural sound. For the technology to work, both callers need to be Sprint customers using HD Voice-enabled phones.

The massive data centers that power services from Google, Facebook, IBM and other tech giants are big-time energy hogs. But researchers around the world are starting to turn them into an energy source.

In the United States, data centers are responsible for more than 2% of the country's electricity usage, according to researchers at Villanova University. If the global cloud computing industry were considered to be a single country, it would be the fifth-largest in the world in terms of energy consumption, according to Ed Turkel of Hewlett-Packard's Hyperscale Business Unit. Nearly half of the energy data centers consume goes to cooling the equipment using fans and other methods.

That's "just wasteful," said Jill Simmons, director of Seattle's Office of Sustainability and Environment. That's why the city of Seattle is working on a project to make use of the heat data centers produce. The city plans to route heat from two local data centers to to help warm 10 million square feet of building space in the surrounding area. The project is still in the conceptual phase, but Simmons said the city hopes to have it in motion "within the next year." The plan is to take the water that cools the data center and pipe it out to buildings nearby. The system will also rely on water heated by energy from sewer lines and electrical substations.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said he called President Barack Obama to express frustration about the government's spying and hacking programs.

"When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we're protecting you against criminals, not our own government," Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post.

His concerns are based on the latest reports from investigative reporters at The Intercept, which reveal that the National Security Agency has weaponized the Internet, making it possible to inject bad software into innocent peoples' computers en masse.

Zuckerberg took to Facebook to decry the tactic, saying it runs counter to the company's attempts to protect its users. He noted that Facebook encrypts users' communications, uses secure software and encourages people to use safer sign-in procedures.

"The US government should be the champion for the Internet, not a threat," Zuckerberg wrote. "They need to be much more transparent about what they're doing, or otherwise people will believe the worst.

[Commentary] The future looks like a mash-up of these two modes of viewing -- a bundle of channels that are streamed via the Internet to any and every screen.

Lowell McAdam, Verizon's chief executive and others call the concept "over the top," and the idea came closer to fruition when The Walt Disney Company -- the owner of ESPN and ABC -- and Dish Network joined forces. If lots of people dropped the TV subscription, Time Warner Cable (which is trying to merge with Comcast) could respond in a few ways. It might raise prices on broadband to compensate. It could promote new discounts to keep me paying for both broadband and TV. Maybe it would sell its own "over the top" service, or try to distinguish itself with exclusive content.

[March 7]

[Commentary] Facebook might have actually gotten WhatsApp for cheap. In many ways, WhatsApp's users are just the kind of customers Facebook is looking for.

They are extremely active, sending more than 600 million photos a day -- more photos than Facebook users upload. A whopping 70% of WhatsApp users are active every day. By way of comparison, 62% of Facebook users are active daily. People around the world send 19 billion WhatsApp messages per day, including 200 million voice messages and 100 million videos. Crucially, WhatsApp has a strong presence internationally, particularly in Europe, India and Latin America. Those are regions where Facebook is trying to grow its base of users. WhatsApp and other mobile messaging services also are widely used by teens and tweens, a group that has notoriously been ditching Facebook for rival services, including text message services and Snapchat.

"Facebook users were complaining dearly about the lack of one-on-one personalized socializing and sharing, which WhatsApp clearly has been successful with," said Vidya Nath, research director at Frost & Sullivan.