May 2011

Parks Associates is predicting that TV Everywhere will be nearly everywhere by the end of 2011. In its report, "TV Everywhere: Growth, Solutions and Strategies," the Dallas-based market research company said that 81 percent of U.S. and Canadian pay TV subscribers will have access to TV Everywhere by the end of the year. The report said that traditional fast-follower Comcast is the market leader as it seeks to glue subscribers to its service and fend off outsiders such as Netflix which continue to whittle away at its basic video subscriber base.

[Commentary] Whether you look at Amazon’s outage, Sony’s network breach or the drama around Apple’s location data collection policies, you see that in all of them, the common thread was “we the people.”

Our fears, our desires and our needs were behind the huge outcry around these problems that seemed to impact millions of us. This mainstreaming of technology has opened up new opportunities, but it has and will pose a brand new kind of challenge to companies in Silicon Valley. If the hue and cry over Apple’s location data collection methodologies is any indication, then are we the people becoming the limiting factor in the evolution of technology and its adoption? Will the idea of what computing can do and what it will be in the future be limited by our collective ability to grok these changes? I mean, things aren't exactly getting less complicated. The social web is about connecting people. On some networks it is real people (Facebook) and on some networks the web connects assumed identities (Twitter). If CPU, memory and storage defined the capabilities in the PC era, then in the Internet era, we saw software being defined by processors, memory, storage and bandwidth. The Internet era eased the way to the social web. In the social web, the software and with it the frontiers of technology being defined by the marriage of network connectivity, PC-era staples and social identity.

[Commentary] Do you believe in fairy tales? AT&T wants you to.

The phone giant is trying to make everyone believe that its takeover of T-Mobile would be good for jobs, innovation and the economy, while saving you hundreds of dollars on your smartphone. The opposite is true. But that didn't stop AT&T from making these claims in a 381-page FCC filing that was so filled with half-truths and fantasies that the Los Angeles Times said it came from Alice in Wonderland. "The wireless marketplace will be more competitive," AT&T claims in the filing.

For those keeping score, the phone company is actually saying that consumers will gain more choice among mobile phone carriers by subtracting T-Mobile from your options. So should it be left to Washington and one exceedingly powerful company to decide the fate of our communications? If Congress, the Federal Communications Commission and Department of Justice hear from enough people like you and me, they can muster the courage to ask the right questions of AT&T.

This is the year that billions of dollars in government incentive payments are set to begin flowing to the nation’s doctors and hospitals to encourage them to adopt computerized patient records. The goal, of course, is to help improve the quality of care and curb costs. But what about the environmental impact? That was the question asked by researchers at Kaiser Permanente, a giant health-care group, which covers 8.7 million people in nine states and the District of Columbia. Kaiser used its own system — 454 clinics and 36 hospitals, using electronic health records — as its laboratory. The answer, published in the journal Health Affairs, is that the potential environmental benefit is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions as much as 1.7 million tons a year. That’s the pollution equivalent of taking more than 300,000 cars off America’s roads.