October 2010

Eavesdrop on the Internet With Trendrr

Trendrr, a business intelligence site, unveiled a new platform that seeks to answer a basic question: What is the Internet saying about your brand?

What with the countless blogs, microblogs, news aggregators, and video sites people congregate to, filled with countless status messages, chats, posts, and tweets....How could anyone possibly get a read on it all? But Trendrr, founded in 2006, does just that. Trendrr collates publicly available data streams from all over the Internet and assembles it into a series of graphs and charts, letting you know who is influencing the conversation on a given topic, what percentage of mentions are positive, negative, or neutral, and where in the world that topic is most buzzworthy. Coming fresh to a Trendrr page is a bit overwhelming, like seeing the inside of a cockpit the first time. But data-junkies everywhere praise the site for its ease of use.

Feds Disperse $35 Million for LPTV Digital Transition

The federal government has distributed $35 million for transitioning low-power TV stations and translators to digital technology. A total of $44 million was allocated in May, 2009, for helping LPTV and translator stations upgrade their operations. A transition deadline for LPTVs and translators had not been set when the program was put in place, but the FCC recently released a Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking suggesting an end date in mid-2012. The federal grant program is being administered by the Commerce Department through the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. One program was set up for covering conversion technology, and another for upgrades. The first program allowed for grants up to $1,000 for stations to purchase digital-to-analog conversion equipment for converting incoming full-power digital signals to analog for broadcasting. The second program supporting facilities upgrades allowed for grants up to $6,000 to "refit" analog equipment for digital transmission, or up to $20,000 to fully replace analog gear. The NTIA's list of eligible equipment includes transmitting and receiving antennas, translators, line and related equipment.

Aiming to Learn as We Do, a Machine Teaches Itself

Give a computer a task that can be crisply defined — win at chess, predict the weather — and the machine bests humans nearly every time. Yet when problems are nuanced or ambiguous, or require combining varied sources of information, computers are no match for human intelligence.

Few challenges in computing loom larger than unraveling semantics, understanding the meaning of language. One reason is that the meaning of words and phrases hinges not only on their context, but also on background knowledge that humans learn over years, day after day. Since the start of the year, a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University — supported by grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Google, and tapping into a research supercomputing cluster provided by Yahoo — has been fine-tuning a computer system that is trying to master semantics by learning more like a human. Its beating hardware heart is a sleek, silver-gray computer — calculating 24 hours a day, seven days a week — that resides in a basement computer center at the university, in Pittsburgh. The computer was primed by the researchers with some basic knowledge in various categories and set loose on the Web with a mission to teach itself.

NBC Invests in Targeted TV Ads Business

NBC Universal will invest in Invidi Technologies. Terms of the deal aren't being disclosed. A NBC Universal spokeswoman called the investment "small."

Google, Motorola and WPP's GroupM are already investors in Invidi, which targets ads to set-top boxes based on the geographic location of the box and other data. Ed Swindler, executive vice president and chief operating officer for ad sales at NBC Universal, said the company made the investment to be able to test future advertising models. "We would anticipate doing some testing as soon as it becomes possible," he says, adding NBC hadn't worked out any details. The promise of the technology is big: allowing advertisers to show multiple ads during the same commercial slot. It is the kind of targeting that Internet companies continue to brag they can pull off online but hasn't been possible in the TV world. Invidi, along with other technologies companies like Visible World, are trying to change that. But progress has been slow. Invidi was founded ten years ago and has raised around $90 million in financing to date.

India's Internet Promise

India's demographics provide ample reason to get excited about the Internet market's potential for stellar growth there. But if New Delhi doesn't address basic infrastructure snags, this new frontier won't fulfill its high promise.

Consider the opportunity: About 70% of India's people live in villages, and a staggering 84% of them aren't yet aware of the Internet, according to a study by Internet and Mobile Association of India, an industry body. India's economic growth rate is one of the fastest among the world's largest economies, but only 52 million people—just 5% of the total population—were using the Internet in 2009. Still, this is more than double the total three years ago, showing the potential in rapid urbanization and a predominantly young society. The economic payoff could be great. A World Bank study shows every 10 percentage point increase in broadband penetration leads to a 1.38 percentage point increase in per-capita gross domestic product growth in developing economies. Others waiting to benefit include companies offering Indians everything from online travel bookings, recruitment and matrimonial portals.

Jury orders Apple to pay $625 million in patent suit

A jury in Texas has ordered Apple to pay $625.5 million for violating patents owned by a firm founded by a computer science professor. Apple is challenging the verdict from the federal court saying the court has not yet looked at some of its counterclaims. If upheld, the verdict would be one of the largest in a patent suit. The plaintiff is Mirror Worlds, a company founded by David Gelernter of Yale University to commercialize his ideas. The patents cover characteristic Mac features such as Cover Flow, which lets the users skim through album covers or other content as if they were leaves in a book. Another is Time Machine, which performs automatic backups.

Senators urge FCC to keep an eye on wireless industry

Sens. John Kerry (D-MA), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Mark Begich (D-Alaska) have written to the Federal Communications Commission urging the FCC to keep an eye on billing practices by wireless companies after Verizon announced that it had overcharged millions of customers. The incident, they said, reveals "the confusion consumers often experience with wireless billing practices" and "highlights the need for the [FCC] to remain committed to vigorous oversight of billing practices in the wireless industry."

FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn released a statement saying Verizon's announcement "clearly requires further explanation. I expect the company will continue to cooperate fully with the Commission and I look forward to the results of the investigation. The fifteen million overcharged consumers, identified by Verizon Wireless, deserve more than refunds. They deserve answers and steps to assure that such errors will not happen again. We cannot and should not let them down."

Jones warns organized crime is increasingly tech-savvy

National Security Advisor General James Jones told a gathering of Russian officials that the US and Russia must work together to combat organized crime syndicates that increasingly rely on technology to conduct their operations.

Speaking at a security council gather in Sochi, Russia, the NSA's Jones told the audience that many international organized crime groups have used technology to extend their activities internationally without fearing reprisal from domestic authorities. He said industries that rely on intellectual property such as music, media, and software firms have the most to lose. "Using bribery, fraud, violence, and state relationships, enhanced by technology, transnational criminal organizations will increasingly damage the ability of legitimate businesses to compete in the global market space," Jones said in his prepared remarks. "They will continue to develop their alliances with corrupt and complicit state officials, undermining the rule of law and enabling criminals to dodge regulation and flood the world market with pirated -- and sometimes deadly -- products that threaten industries dependent on intellectual property such as fashion, pharmaceuticals and technology." Jones said many of these criminal organizations as recently as the 1990s were limited in their use of technology and had minimal links to other organizations such as drug cartels or terrorist groups. Thanks to the spread of the Web that has changed, and now Jones warned that such criminal groups are rapidly expanding and diversifying their operations.

Local Startups Seek 'Future of Journalism'

The growing presence of neighborhood news sites backed by broadcast stations and newspapers or national companies like AOL make securing local online turf a tough prospect for independents, most of which don't have big bucks to put into promotion, sales and staff.

"I've seen many of them fall flat," says Gordon Borrell, of Borrell Associates, which tracks the online media business. "You'll get crushed unless you have several million dollars in assets." Borrell estimates that there may be more than 1,000 independent hyperlocal sites. But most are "run by what could be called gadfly hobbyists or perhaps disgruntled former journalists living on the fumes of severance pay." The number of sites "of any note" -- that are actually generating significant advertising revenue -- is between 100 and 150, mostly in large markets, he says. Many independents have virtues that corporate-backed hyper-locals don't, like news-savvy staff and community roots, but lack of business know-how puts them at a disadvantage, he said.

Consumers Willing to Upgrade, but Slow to Embrace Super-Fast Technology

Consumers are willing to pay a large amount to upgrade their Internet access speeds from slow to fast, but are more reluctant to upgrade from fast to super-fast, according to a research paper discussed at the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference last week.

Gregory Rosston of Stanford University discussed research addressing the value of consumers' high speed Internet access. Consumers are as greatly interested in reliability as they are in speed, he said. The research also found that experienced users are much more willing to pay for higher speeds while inexperienced users are willing to pay for basic access. Additionally, consumers are willing to pay for high-speed access but demand reliability over a super-fast speed.

Benton

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