June 2010

Indian authorities just wrapped up an auction for the 2.3 GHz spectrum to be used for broadband wireless access (BWA) services; it raised a total of $5.5 billion, roughly half of the $11 billion raised during the 3G auctions.

The biggest winner of the auction was Infotel, a privately held company that won licenses for all 22 regions, thus allowing it to become the largest wireless broadband provider in the country. Interestingly, none of the 3G spectrum owners have a nationwide footprint, which gives Infotel a big leg up in wireless broadband services. This discrepancy alone should raise eyebrows, but so far I've not seen it brought up in the Indian media. What's more intriguing is that right after the auction closed, Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries agreed to buy Infotel for $1 billion and said that it would pay the $2.74 billion Infotel would have had to fork over for the spectrum licenses. Mukesh's estranged brother, Anil Ambani, who owns Reliance Communications didn't win in the BWS auctions, though his company won many 3G licenses.

Google's revamped its search indexing methodology earlier this week. Google late June 9 announced that its search engine was now running on "Caffeine," meaning search results would show more recent information posted on the web as the technology behind it indexes results in seconds rather than weeks. But the allure of Caffeine isn't just the actual real-time search engine, it's the secret infrastructure sauce that Google uses to make a continuing real-time index of the entire web possible. That technology involves custom-built hardware and software that plenty of startups or business analytics companies would love to get their hands on.

[Commentary] Downloadable music files, online radio stations, streaming on-demand song libraries, iPods with mixes ... the music industry hasn't undergone a single tsunami. It's faced a onslaught of natural forces that changed the way we listen to music forever.

But are these technologies uprooting or upholding the experience of music, itself? It's easy to argue that technology's force has been disruptive. The music industry's profits have fallen by 60 percent in the last decade. You know why. When music was made of polyvinyl chloride (aka vinyl), it was hard to steal. Once it could be turned into a file, the price for many listeners fell to zero. Downloading and file sharing services from Napster to bittorrent create an ether market where the cost of gaining ownership of music is equal to the cost of an Internet connection. The impact on the music industry's bottom line is clear enough, but what about the impact on listeners? Half a century ago, the overwhelming choice was to buy and listen to whole albums. Today iTunes, the largest music store in the country, sells individual tracks that listeners can mix and mash in personal audio-collages. We, the listeners, now exert much more control than original artists over the narrative of our musical experience.

Nearly 900 Internet experts and highly engaged users said they expect people who use the Internet will "live mostly in the cloud" by 2020, working primarily through the use of cyberspace-based applications on remote servers that we access through our networked devices.

This does not mean, however, that most think the desktop will disappear soon. The majority sees a hybrid model continuing where both cloud computing and desktop computing take on different functions. The Web-based survey, conducted by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project and the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University, gathered opinions on 10 important issues from a select group of experts and the highly engaged Internet public. Results from this survey are being released in five major 2010 reports; this is the fourth.