May 2010

Speaking at a International Telecommunications Union meeting in India, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski shared some experiences with crafting the National Broadband Plan, but keyed in on the relationship between broadband and education.

"It is hard to identify anything more important than education," he said, "for our children, and no technological innovation in our lifetime has greater potential to transform education than broadband Internet." With broadband, any school library can become a portal to more information than the proverbial library at Alexandria, Egypt. Children living in the poorest and most isolated communities in the world can have access in their classrooms to the best teachers in the world. Up-to-date e-textbooks can replace outdated versions that might well have been written before broadband existed. The expression that the Internet opens up new worlds of discovery is not just a metaphor. In West Virginia, a rural, lower-income part of the United States, a 15-year-old student recently discovered a rare type of star using data from a national observatory. She was able to do so only because her school had a broadband connection. To seize the opportunities of broadband for education, the broadband plan makes several recommendations:
First, ensure that there is a predictable, reliable funding mechanism.
Second, expand the focus from schools and classrooms to students and teachers.
Third, recognize that facilities and infrastructure alone are not enough to seize the opportunities of broadband for education.
Fourth, support public-private partnerships for broadband and education, inside and outside the school.

Citing the recent attempt to detonate a car bomb in New York City's Times Square, Sens. Charles Schumer (D-NY) and John Cornyn (R-TX) announced legislation Wednesday aimed at identifying the buyers and users of prepaid cell phones.

Their legislation would require buyers of prepaid cell phones to present identification and require phone companies to keep that information on file, similar to what they have to do with users of landline phones and subscription-based cell phones, according to Sens Schumer and Cornyn.

[Commentary] We live in a golden age of Pop Technology. Pop Technology is a lot like pop culture, or pop music, except that instead of having a fascination for an object (pet rock), a fashion trend (shoulder pads for women) or a singer (Lady Gaga), the immediate objects of public fascination are standalone Web programs or apps for a device, like an iPhone or an Android. Pop Technology is hip and cool, and may last only for a little while. It's Blippy or Swipely or Billshrink. Some PopTech may catch fire or disappear into a crowded app-scape. My Space was the standard-bearer of social networking until it wasn't. More important, however, is the environment which nurtured the development of all the cool stuff. The crucial question whether those forces will be able to survive or whether they will be beaten into submission.

Facebook's share of online political advertising dollars is quickly growing to rival Google's, online political consultants say.

The ratio of dollars spent directly on Google advertising to those spent on Facebook advertising could be roughly three to two -- even though Google has been around as a political advertising medium for nearly twice as long. The data is only on do-it-yourselfers, omits the spending from the most recent round of primaries, and also does not include the millions of dollars that have already been spent on online ads that were bought this year through consultants, but those same consultants say that the data is in line with their own observations.