October 2012

Twitter at the Town Hall Debate

As the presidential candidates met at Hofstra University to answer questions from a group of self-declared undecided voters, viewers around the country went to Twitter to participate in the debate exchanges and offer their own commentary. 7.2 million Tweets were sent during the debate.

The specific moments that generated the highest amounts of conversation were:

Audience question to Romney on immigration (109,560 TPM)
Obama to Romney: "You're the last person to get tough on China" (108,619 TPM)
Romney's response to tax rates question (107,386 TPM)

With 28% of Tweets sent, the economy was the most-discussed topic this evening. The subject of taxes racked up 17% of Tweets; 16% focused on foreign policy, 13% on energy and the environment, and 8% on immigration.

Why Apple will never bring manufacturing jobs back to the

CNN's Candy Crowley asked President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney "How do you convince a great American company [Apple] to bring that manufacturing back here?" President Obama offered a starker answer: "Candy, there are some jobs that are not going to come back, because they're low-wage, low-skill jobs." Speaking strictly for Apple, Obama's assessment is likely correct.

Apple has said that it directly employs thousands of its own workers in China, and about 700,000 assembly workers at manufacturing contractors like Foxconn put together Apple products. It would be almost impossible to bring those jobs to the United States. Foxconn -- China's largest private employer and the manufacturer of an estimated 40% half of the world's consumer electronic devices -- pays its assembly workers far less than American labor laws would allow. A typical salary is 2500 RMB (U.S. $400), or about $18 a day. But pay isn't the biggest obstacle. The real stumbling block is speed. Unlike U.S. plants, Foxconn and other Chinese manufacturing operations house employees in dormitories and can send hundreds of thousands of workers to the assembly lines at a moment's notice. On the lines, workers are subjected to what most Americans would consider unbearably long hours and tough working conditions. That system gives tech companies the efficiency needed to race products out the door. Plus, most of the component suppliers for Apple and other tech giants are also in China or other Asian countries. That geographic clustering gives companies the flexibility to change a product design at the last minute and still ship on time.

Planet broadband, like the US Internet, is getting faster

Broadband and mobile Internet speeds are slowly and steadily increasing across the world, according to the latest findings of Akamai’s State of the Internet Report for the second quarter of 2012. The US saw a 76 percent year-over-year growth in the number of connections at high broadband levels — speeds greater than 10 Mbps during the quarter.

US broadband had a great summer:

Nine of the top 10 states saw positive quarter-over-quarter changes in average connection speeds, with the largest increase seen in Delaware.
Top 10 states saw average connection speeds increase on a year-on-year basis.
With 41.6 Mbps, Delaware had the highest average peak connection speed.
A total of 37 states and the District of Columbia saw their high broadband (higher than 10 Mbps) adoption levels increase quarter-over-quarter.

Bandwidth Demands Rise as Schools Move to Common Core

From the outside, experts, advocates, and government agencies appear to be placing more than enough attention on schools’ growing demand for better Internet connectivity. As one example, promoting and facilitating projects to bring more broadband Web access to schools and libraries has been a major focus of the Federal Communications Commission during the more than three years Julius Genachowski has served as FCC chairman. Meanwhile, the Washington-based Software and Information Industry Association, or SIIA, in a survey released this past summer, reports that educators are continuing to express a high desire for more robust on-campus Internet connections. And the Glen Burnie, Md.-based State Educational Technology Directors Association, or SETDA, in recommendations it issued last spring for school connectivity speeds, signaled that schools’ demand for connectivity was something that would increase exponentially rather than linearly. But with the Common Core State Standards initiative pushing schools in 46 states and the District of Columbia to administer “next generation” assessments almost exclusively online—with an accompanying commitment to more digital resources—it’s possible schools’ demand for bandwidth could exceed even those projections.

How Obama or Romney Should Have Answered the iPad Question

Under current conditions, which are highly unlikely to change no matter who is president, the job of assembling iPhones and iPads and other consumer electronics, is now done mostly in China by companies that specialize in manufacturing, and will never come back to the U.S. And that’s okay.

The fact is, assembling iPhones and iPads is the final step of a complex process, and is really a low-skill, low-cost kind of job. China has spent decades building much of its economy around these low-skill jobs, in part because it has such a large labor force, and plenty of workers who are willing to do the work. And, frankly, here in America you wouldn’t want to try to support a family on the kind of wages a job like that would pay. I know it sounds harsh, but it’s true. So I know this may sound odd when I say it, but I ask you to hear me out: I’m perfectly comfortable letting those kinds of jobs go to China or somewhere else. In America, when we talk about manufacturing, we should be talking about advanced manufacturing jobs for highly skilled workers that require a solid education and pay wages on which you can support a family. And the fact is, there’s a lot of American work that goes into an iPad or an iPhone or a Mac.

See what the candidates said during the debate.

The Possible Privacy Violations of Verizon's Cell Phone Tracking Program

Capitalizing on all the information we put into our cell phones, Verizon Wireless is selling all our app usage and location information to marketers. Part of what it calls the Precision Market Insights initiative, Verizon is not only tracking consumers, it is sharing that information with other companies, and possibly linking it to databases with more of your personal information.

"We're able to view just everything that they do," Bill Diggins, U.S. chief for the Verizon Wireless marketing initiative, said at an industry conference earlier this year. "And that's really where data is going today. Data is the new oil." If it sounds creepy, that's because it might not be legal, even though Verizon did the bare minimum to make it sound that way by only selling the information in aggregate and also providing an opt-out feature. Still Paul Ohm, a professor at the University of Colorado Law School, who works at the Federal Trade Commission said this might all violate federal wiretapping law because it digs deep into our cell phone transactions. As this stuff gets kind of murky, we spoke with Ryan Calo, an affiliate scholar for the Center for Internet and Society and Assistant law professor at the University of Washington, who explained how exactly this could violate the FTC's privacy guidelines (and also creep you out).

Monopolies: Antitrust Law Protects Consumers Not Competitors

[Commentary] In the presidential debates 100 years ago, the key issue debated was how to handle the industrial monopolies of 1912: companies like Standard Oil and the American Tobacco Company. The incumbent (Howard Taft) campaigned on breaking up the monopolies; the opposing party (Woodrow Wilson) campaigned on regulating competition to prevent monopolies from developing in the first place; and the third-party campaigner (Teddy Roosevelt) argued we should actually welcome monopolies while regulating their activities. Wilson won, and ended up signing two major antitrust laws to supplement the existing Sherman Act: the Clayton Act and the Federal Trade Commission Act.

From search and books to online TV and operating systems, antitrust affects our daily digital lives in more ways than we think. Consider two antitrust cases that have just re-surfaced in mainstream consumer awareness: The FTC is preparing to sue Google over search. And three publishers reached a settlement regarding fixing prices for e-books, as many people learned from e-mails this weekend telling them about a credit coming their way. Here’s what we often forget, though: regardless of the industry, antitrust law is meant to benefit consumers – not competitors. The key question, of course, is whether a particular monopoly is harming consumers – or merely harming its competitors for the benefit of those consumers.

TiVo Says It’s Owed Billions From Google Over Patents

TiVo said it may be entitled to billions of dollars in damages should it win its patent-infringement lawsuit against Google’s Motorola Mobility unit over digital-video recording technology.

“Motorola’s massive production of infringing DVRs dwarfs the numbers of accused products at issue in TiVo’s previous cases,” TiVo said in a filing in federal court in Marshall (TX). “TiVo’s damages claim is likely to run into the billions of dollars.” TiVo disclosed the figure in a request to consolidate the case against Motorola Mobility with one involving Cisco Systems to address pre-trial issues, saying it would speed the process and conserve resources. The companies make set-top boxes for Time Warner Cable, which is a defendant in both cases. TiVo said it also will seek an order to force Motorola Mobility to stop selling products that infringe TiVo patents.

One in Every 10 Political Ad Dollars Spent on Demonizing Banks

[Commentary] Every election cycle, some corporate brand or sector becomes a punching bag for politicians of all stripes. Inevitably, it unfolds like this: A certain sector or company is seen as acting in a way that threatens hardworking people's health, livelihoods or nest eggs. These actions were enabled by some combination of too little self-policing, government regulation or enforcement. Cue campaign-trail outrage and talk of more industry oversight. For the demonized industries, the sums spent on political attack ads may be a blip compared to their own marketing budgets. But the ads are aimed squarely at the politicians who, if elected, will decide the companies' regulatory fates and the voters to whom those politicians must answer. Most of the ads air around local news, not exactly a favorable audience for big business. (If it's a presidential year, some may even air during NBC's Summer Olympics coverage, always the highest-rated pre-election programming with a national reach.) Election cycle after cycle, the volume of such ads is rising and the naming of names becoming more commonplace. Add in the overall marked increase in ad spending in the 2012 elections, and the financial-services sector has a new risk to evaluate -- its own continuing reputational and regulatory risk in being the target of such advertising.

[Wilner is VP of Kantar Media CMAG, which tracks and analyzes political TV advertising content, placement and spend]

Facebook has 220 Billion of Your Photos to Put on Ice

How many photos of your drunken nights out does one social network really need? Facebook currently stores 220 billion, its infrastructure engineering VP Jay Parikh said.

“We are getting about seven petabytes of new photo content every month and that’s growing,” said Parikh. “We get 300 million photos up every day from our users. All of these trends are just getting bigger every day and every week.” The figures show how Facebook now dwarves dedicated photo services like Flickr, which last year said it stored a total six billion images, and its own Instagram, which has four billion. Parikh lifted the lid on how the demands are about to get seasonal: ”Halloween is one of our biggest photo upload days of the year – we’ll probably get between one or two billion photos uploaded in a single day.” Consider how Facebook doesn’t immediate trash even deleted images and you’ll get a sense of the social network’s storage challenge.

Benton

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