October 2012

The Department of Agriculture announced funding to expand access to broadband and telecommunications services in rural America. USDA’s Rural Development is funding 24 projects through several loan and grant programs administered by the Rural Utilities Service (RUS); Broadband, Telecommunications loans, the Community Connect grant program, and the Public Television Digital Transition. Nearly $5 million in Community Connect grants will provide broadband to six communities currently lacking high speed Internet service.

Minnesota’s bizarre ban on online education isn’t just rankling pundits across the Web, it’s understandably raising questions from the local tech community too.

“If you are a resident of Minnesota, you agree that either (1) you will not take courses on Coursera or (2) for each class that you take, the majority of work you do for that class will be done from outside the State of Minnesota,” said online education startup Coursera. Apparently a 20-year-old policy, which applies to online as well as brick-and-mortar institutions, requires universities offering instruction to Minnesota residents to receive authorization from the state. A policy analyst for the state’s Office of Higher Education said that the law was intended to provide “consumer protection.” It is not Coursera violating Minnesota law but its partner universities, who must pay Minnesota a registration fee to provide courses in state. Considering that Coursera isn’t actually selling courses but providing them for free, and that it isn’t a degree-granting university, the application of the policy makes little sense. Instead of protecting residents, the decades-old policy is just preventing them from accessing free, open courseware. It’s also unclear if this policy extends to other open online platforms, such as edX and Udacity, but given their partnerships with universities, it seems that the ban would apply to them as well.

Google’s Android software versus Apple‘s iOS, says Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, "is the defining competition in the industry today.” The battle in smartphone and tablet technology — to build so-called platform ecosystems of partners, developers and users — is the underlying theme in not only Google’s seemingly disappointing quarterly performance, but also in a string of recent tech company and industry reports.

The once-dominant personal computer platform is in retreat. The quarterly results this week from Microsoft, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices all point in that direction. Yes, there is a product-transition issue as the mainstream PC world pauses while waiting for the upcoming release of Windows 8, Microsoft’s new operating system. But the report from IDC last week showed that even Apple’s shipments of Macintosh computers were off 7 percent in the third quarter. Still, people buying fewer personal computers and more smartphones and tablets is a trend that warms the hearts in Apple’s headquarters. That is a tradeoff the company will take gladly, given Apple’s lofty profit margins on iPhones and iPads. The other mobile technology heavyweight, Google, is making a tradeoff of its own. Yes, its profit margins are slipping a bit as more people increasingly use its search and other services on smartphones and tablets. The price paid by advertisers per click is less on mobile devices than on the bigger screens of PCs. But the mobile ad market is embryonic, although growing rapidly. The business models haven’t been figured out yet. Recall, though, that Google was founded and well underway before it figured out the search ad model that made the company an Internet cash register.

[Commentary] With fewer than three weeks before the presidential election, both sides have ramped up their advertising to an incredible extent.

Over the last three weeks, the Obama campaign has purchased $40 million in swing state ad time, while the Romney campaign has spent $49 million. Overall, the Obama campaign is outspending its competitor, $300 million to $164 million. That said, the advantage shifts when you factor in outside groups: total spending from Team Romney — the campaign and Republican Super PACs — comes to $455 million. By contrast, total spending from Team Obama is $352 million. But the fact that Republicans are outspending Democrats hasn’t translated to actual ad saturation. By the end of last week, Obama and his allies had aired about 5,000 more ads than their Republican counterparts. Indeed, despite speculation that Team Obama was on the verge of conceding states like Virginia, Florida and North Carolina, the bulk of the campaign’s ad spending remains located in two of those states — two of the top six media markets for the Obama campaign are located in Virginia (the Hampton Roads area) and Florida (the Tampa area).