February 2011

Sen Mark Warner (D-VA) introduced legislation that would authorize the Federal Communications Commission to hold incentive auctions to free up wireless spectrum.

The auctions would allow license holders to return underused spectrum to the government, freeing the space for other wireless uses. Federal officials have estimated that such auctions could generation more than $100 billion in revenue over the next five years. What to do with that money, however, promises to be a divisive political question, said Paul Glenchur, a senior telecommunications analyst for Potomac Research Group. "The debate will be between those who want to use any extra money to decrease deficits, and those who support using it to fund new programs," he said. While the bill does not specify how the money would be used, Sen Warner said the funds could go toward a combination of causes, including deficit reduction, expanding access to high-speed Internet, or establishing a nation-wide broadband network for emergency responders.

Sen Warner said this bill is just one element in his effort to reform spectrum policy. He also plans on introducing legislation to "encourage greater efficiencies in government uses of spectrum as well as creating incentives for other spectrum licensees to vacate underutilized spectrum."

The House passed an amendment to defund the Federal Communications Commission’s so-called “diversity czar.” But the FCC says their diversity chief is actually not a “czar” at all.

Mark Lloyd is a chief diversity officer and associate counsel in the office of General Counsel, not a czar, a senior FCC official said. Conservative critics of Lloyd, who previously worked for the Center for American Progress, dubbed him the “diversity czar” back in 2009 when he was appointed to the newly created position. Glenn Beck has characterized Lloyd as an extremist who wants government control of media, and Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), chairman of the telecommunications subcommittee, has expressed concern about his past. Hardline conservatives have taken issue with his past as a civil rights activist. The FCC defended Lloyd’s work. “For more than 18 months, Mark Lloyd has helped the commission pursue a congressional objective [to promote diversity in communications by] contributing on many important initiatives ­ like working to bridge the digital divide by increasing broadband adoption among hard-pressed Americans,” a senior FCC official said.

Intel will hire 4,000 workers in the United States this year, primarily in product development and research and development.

The company seeks to hire "permanent, highly skilled employees," Intel CEO Paul Otellini said during a speech in Hillsboro (OR) where President Barack Obama toured a microprocessor factory. Intel currently has about 82,000 employees. Intel also announced it would invest around $5 billion to build a chip plant in Chandler (AZ). The plant will be dedicated to making chips for PCs, consumer electronics, and mobile devices, Intel said in a statement. Construction of the plant will begin in the middle of this year and should be completed in 2013, Intel said. The $5 billion commitment is in addition to Intel's investment of between $6 billion and $8 billion to manufacture new chips for PCs, smartphones, consumer electronics, and embedded devices, which the company announced in October last year. Those funds will go toward building a plant in Oregon, and to upgrading factories to make chips using the new 22-nanometer process. Such chips would be faster and more power-efficient than the company's current PC chips made using the 32-nm process. Intel at the time said the $6 billion to $8 billion investment would help create approximately 6,000 to 8,000 construction jobs in the United States during the construction phase, and would eventually create up to 1,000 highly skilled and high-wage manufacturing jobs.

When it comes to the news of the day, newspapers, websites, bloggers, cable networks and aggregators all trip over themselves to be the fastest and the first.

The competition has always existed, but technology has ramped up the rivalries. At this increasingly accelerated pace, is it inevitable that noteworthy events — and the news they engender — will rush lickety-split into each other? What happens when things just cannot occur any faster? What if the rapidity of the newscycle outpaces the news itself and we wind up in some form of warp speed — living life in a wormholish, time-wrinkled world? James Gleick, author of the 1999 classic Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, says, "Everybody thinks there's got to be a breaking point. But the breaking point never comes." Steven Rosenbaum, author of Curation Nation: How to Win in a World Where Consumers Are Creators, believes we will learn to navigate the new world with the help of other navigators. He wrote in The Huffington Post that we are living in "a world where abundance is assumed in the world of content — there's no shortage of content makers of all shapes and sizes. But the avalanche of content makes finding the content you're looking for significantly harder." By choosing to read a certain story or subscribe to a certain blog — and letting others know that we "like" the stories and blogs — we are saving time for those who trust us, according to Rosenbaum.