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February 2010

Two New Nominees for Advanced Telecom Board

The president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners has nominated Carlito Caliboso of Hawaii and Robert Clayton of Missouri to become members of a group interested in advanced telecommunications deployment on local, state and federal levels.

NARUC President David Coen has chosen Caliboso, chairman of the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission, to replace a seat left vacant on the Joint Conference of Advanced Services when Michael Moffett of Kansas stepped down from the Kansas Corporation Commission.

The Joint Conference on Advanced Services is a board made up of members of both NARUC and the Federal Communications Commission. The conference serves as a forum for a dialogue for federal and state commissioners and local and regional entities regarding the deployment of advanced telecommunications.

Snow Forces FCC to Reschedule Feb. 11 Public Meeting

The Federal Communications Commission has rescheduled its Feb. 11 public meeting due to the second major snow storm scheduled to hit DC in less than a week. The meeting will now be Feb. 18 at 3 pm. The FCC also announced Tuesday (Feb. 9) that it would have to postpone a Feb. 10 public forum on creating an emergency response center for pubic safety broadband communications.

YouTube Will Kill Flat-rate Mobile Broadband Pricing Forever

Video is driving the projected increase in both mobile and wired broadband — but it's not the proliferation of video that's the problem for mobile operators so much as the relative ease with which consumers can now access it.

Indeed, while mobile operators have long faced traffic congestion at cell sites thanks to peer-to-peer traffic, the widespread availability of video in formats that the average consumer can watch has changed the industry. And that's causing mobile operators to rethink their pricing plans. In short, YouTube may be the death of unlimited mobile broadband on handsets.

Given that mobile resources are constrained by a variety of things, including the spectrum allotted to carriers, it's likely that mobile broadband providers will eliminate flat-rate pricing for mobile broadband as a way to keep profits and network quality up while data use expands. When that happens should we blame YouTube — or profiteering mobile operators?

Feds Will Spur Smart Grid Cyber-Security Investment Growth to $21 Billion by 2015, Report Claims

Utility companies around the world will invest $21 billion in smart grid security efforts between 2010 and 2015, according to estimates released in a new report.

They're being spurred on by the U.S. Department of Energy's smart grid stimulus programs, and the need to secure smart grid deployments that are becoming more and more technology-reliant and vulnerable to infiltration and compromise. The Smart Grid Cyber Security Report, conducted courtesy of Pike Research, a market research and consulting firm focused on clean technology markets, utilities, vendors and world governments are becoming more focused on grid security, which will grow revenue in that sector from $1.2 billion in 2009 to $3.7 billion by 2015.

Open government site hasn't sprouted teeth yet, observers say

A White House Web site for tracking compliance with a 2009 open government directive is not an adequate enforcement tool yet, some open government advocates said after its launch last weekend.

The directive, issued to agencies by the Office of Management and Budget, established several tight deadlines for initiatives intended to make government more transparent, collaborative with industry and user-friendly for the public. The site Open Government Dashboard, was one such assignment due on Feb. 6. "As it stands right now, it's not much of an enforcement tool," said John Wonderlich, policy director at the Sunlight Foundation, a government accountability group. "All they've put together is this initial dashboard, which evaluates agencies on the basis of very basic criteria." "The act of starting a Web site is not something that you can meaningfully judge," Wonderlich said. "You can make a chart for the temperature in any room, [but requirements for] transparency are a bit tougher to get into a system that's measurable and calculable." The administration plans to upgrade the dashboard.

Federal CIO: Budget request includes funds for IT oversight

A significant portion of the $50 million slated for coordinating e-government in the Obama administration's 2011 budget would go toward better oversight of information technology investments, said federal chief information officer Vivek Kundra.

The money would support a recently launched project evaluation system, called TechStat, which cancels, halts or overhauls underperforming IT projects. The administration would use the 2011 TechStat allocation to increase the number of projects evaluated and the frequency of reviews. "This is going to happen with not just me alone, I'm making sure that CIOs across the government" are conducting meetings, Kundra said.

KLAS questions vendor claims on health information exchanges

Vendors may suggest that many successful health information exchanges have been built with their technology, but the reality is different, according to a new report from KLAS. A small number of vendors - with Axolotl among the top - have risen to the challenge enough times to claim a proven, repeatable model, the Orem, Utah-based research firm found. In the report, KLAS validated 89 live HIE organizations that use commercial technologies to share patient data that is viewed by doctors. The HIEs included in the study had to be exchanging data among facilities that are not owned by the same organization.

In Haiti, Practicing Medicine From Afar

In the desperate days soon after the earthquake in Haiti last month, foreign medical volunteers relied on improvised, low-tech devices for consultations and coordination. But American doctors are switching to more sophisticated technology to help improve public health in Haiti, one of the world's poorest nations.

Telehealth, better known as telemedicine, is an offshoot of the space program; it was developed by National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the 1960s to serve the astronauts. In the live, real-time version, it involves a video hookup between a patient on the scene and a doctor or other health professional in a hospital or office. Sometimes a doctor or nurse on the scene will consult via telemedicine with a specialist elsewhere. At the University of Miami's 240-bed tent hospital near the airport in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where volunteer surgeons from the United States have performed 1,000 operations since the Jan. 12 earthquake, doctors should soon be able to consult via satellite with specialists in Miami and other medical centers.

The satellite connection should provide sufficient bandwidth for telemedicine consultations; meanwhile, the Haiti field hospital is making do with high-speed Internet connections donated by a Miami philanthropist and connections through Access Haiti, a wireless regional network linked through the neighboring Dominican Republic.

More Content Shared on Facebook Than Ever, but User Activity Is Falling

There's a surprise buried deep within the statistics Facebook has revealed about its user base's activities on the social network: Sure, more content is being shared than ever before. But the percentage of sharers has shrunk.

The statistic that captured much of the media's attention was that Facebook now has over 400 million active users. But VentureBeat points out another: Five billion pieces of content (photos, Weblinks, notes, and such) are being shared among the userbase every single week. As well as being a phenomenal figure all by itself, this represents an astonishing growth in just six months: In July, the comparable figure stood at just a billion, five times less. So Facebook's continual system tweaks plus services such as Facebook Connect are really helping transform the company into a content-sharing network rather than a meeting place for college friends. Five billion pieces of shared content is exactly the kind of statistic Facebook will use to leverage its position as a supplier of real-time status updates to search engines like Google and Bing (where it's trying to follow Twitter's lead.) But, while the raw number of items being shared has gone up, exactly how many of these pieces of content are shared to everyone on Facebook (as it would love us all to do, thanks to its most recent privacy changes)? This isn't revealed, and it's probably a more vital measure of how Facebook is changing into a content-sharer. Furthermore, while items like Weblinks (which must count as "shared content") are being broadcast by Facebookers to their friends, one wonders how much of this is actually sourced outside Facebook.

Twitter crackdown in Baltimore Circuit Court

[Commentary] During the November trial of former Mayor Sheila Dixon, journalists and others watching the proceedings sent a constant stream of short updates to Twitter and other social media platforms about every twist and turn of the case.

Those updates bounced instantly around the web from one circle of acquaintances to another as ordinary citizens added comments and debated one of the most important events in recent Baltimore civic life. When the jury finally delivered its verdict, the stream of tweets and re-tweets multiplied into the thousands within minutes. Everyone was interested, and everyone had something to say. You might call that civic engagement.

But the Baltimore Circuit Court called it unacceptable. The day after Ms. Dixon agreed to a plea that included her resignation from office, Marcella A. Holland, the administrative judge for Baltimore City, issued an order banning "the use of any device to transmit information on Twitter, Facebook, Linked In or any other current or future form of social networking from any of the courthouses within the Circuit Court for Baltimore City."

The order is predicated on the assumption that posting to Twitter is effectively the same as having television cameras broadcast court proceedings, which is already banned throughout the state. That analogy is false, and it exposes a misunderstanding of social networking and of the reasons why the courts have been justified in placing limited restrictions on the media in the first place.

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