November 2012

Google’s Internet Service Might Actually Bring the U.S. Up to Speed

Google’s effort to install a blazingly fast, gigabit-per-second fiber Internet service in the two-state metropolis of Kansas City—a speed 100 times faster than the national average—is a radical new business direction for the company, and perhaps provides an unorthodox model for how to rewire parts of the United States.

The actual service is a bargain compared to many services that provide much slower speeds. Google’s gigabit Internet service is priced at $70 per month. When bundled with TV, the price rises to $120—and Google is certainly pushing that additional service (see “Searching for the Future of Television” and “Google Launches a Superfast Internet and TV Business”). Users subscribing for a TV service get a two-terabyte storage box for recorded shows and a Nexus 7 Android tablet to use as a remote control.

Apple and the Desire for Control

Apple did not invent the notion of using cellphones to play games and carry out small tasks, but it certainly made the concept its own.

Its app store is the one all developers want to get into, despite the much larger market share claimed by Google’s Android. There are so many competing devices using Android that developers say they have a hard time optimizing their app for that system. Besides, customers are used to spending money for Apple apps, but they tend to want Android apps for free. All this gives Apple power far beyond its operating system’s 20 percent share of the mobile market. At some point, however, that power might be detrimental for the Internet as a whole. The big Internet companies — Apple, Amazon, Google — are all pursuing a “walled garden” approach, where they hope to do so much for their customers that they will never leave. Internet policy experts did not like walled gardens when America Online built one in the 1990s, and they do not like the prospect of another one triumphing now.

Marketing Lessons From Team Obama

[Commentary] An Obama 2012 campaign promise to emphasize education has already been fulfilled in some respects: The president’s team schooled Romney’s on how to run an effective, analytics-driven campaign, and educated marketers on best practices for analytics-enabled marketing using Big Data and social media.

Whatever your political affiliation, if you’re a marketer, it’s worth studying how the Obama team leveraged analytics to win the election.

Treat analytics as a creative force.
Target customers with highest potential.
Drive relevance through analytics to win.
Make testing part of the culture.
Set clear, measurable objectives for social media.
Use robust data and apply context to improve models.
Leverage analytics across all stakeholders.

When the Nerds Go Marching In

The Obama campaign's team of technologists had elite and, for tech, senior talent -- most of them were in their 30s -- from Twitter, Google, Facebook, Craigslist, Quora, and some of Chicago's own software companies such as Orbitz and Threadless, where Harper Reed had been CTO. But even these people, maybe *especially* these people, knew enough about technology not to trust it. "I think the Republicans fucked up in the hubris department," Reed told me. "I know we had the best technology team I've ever worked with, but we didn't know if it would work. I was incredibly confident it would work. I was betting a lot on it. We had time. We had resources. We had done what we thought would work, and it still could have broken. Something could have happened." "We knew what to do," Reed maintained, no matter what the scenario was. "We had a runbook that said if this happens, you do this, this, and this. They did not do that with Orca."

Tribune gets key FCC clearances, plans to leave bankruptcy in next several weeks

The Federal Communications Commission has given the Tribune Company key clearances as it prepares to leave bankruptcy protection and transfer the company to new owners. The FCC is approving the transfer of Tribune’s broadcast licenses to the new owners. It’s also giving the new owners a waiver on a federal ban on owning newspapers and TV stations in the same market. It’s one of the final hurdles in a years-long bankruptcy process that is expected to conclude in the next several weeks.

How much for the antennas atop Hancock Center?

A Boston-based investor that specializes in broadcast and wireless towers has paid $70 million for the antennas atop the John Hancock Center, another step in a plan by the skyscraper's owners to sell off the building's parts piecemeal.

An affiliate of American Tower Corp. closed in late October on the 34,000 square feet of rooftop space housing TV and radio transmission equipment, county records show. American Tower bought the property from a joint venture of Deutsche Bank A.G. and NorthStar Realty Finance Corp., which seized the landmark tower earlier this year after its prior owner, a joint venture led by a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. unit, defaulted on about $400 million in debt. Leased by TV networks, FM radio stations and governments, the Hancock's antennas are second only to the Willis Tower's in a city with limited broadcast capacity, according to David Denton, co-founder of Florida-based Tall Tower Ventures LLC. About nine FM stations in the Chicago market use the Hancock for their primary operations, while most TV stations use it as a backup site and operate from Willis, he said.

Supreme Court rejects plea to ban taping of police in Illinois

The Supreme Court has rejected an appeal from the Cook County state's attorney to allow enforcement of a law prohibiting people from recording police officers on the job.

The justices left in place a lower court ruling that found that the state's anti-eavesdropping law violates free speech rights when used against people who tape law enforcement officers. The law set out a maximum prison term of 15 years. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in 2010 against Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez to block prosecution of ACLU staff for recording police officers performing their duties in public places, one of the group's long-standing monitoring missions. Opponents of the law say the right to record police is vital to guard against abuses.

Estimated Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on Employment and Economic Output from July 2012 Through September 2012

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) will increase budget deficits by about $833 billion over the 2009–2019 period. By CBO’s estimate, close to half of that impact occurred in fiscal year 2010, and more than 90 percent of ARRA’s budgetary impact was realized by the end of September 2012.

The effects of ARRA on output peaked in the first half of 2010 and have since diminished, CBO estimates. The effects on employment are estimated to lag slightly behind the effects on output; CBO estimates that the employment effects began to wane at the end of 2010 and continued to do so through the third quarter of 2012. In this report, CBO provides estimates of ARRA’s impact on employment and economic output in the third quarter of calendar year 2012 (July 2012 through September 2012), as well as over the entire period since February 2009. CBO’s estimates of the economic effects of ARRA for 2009 through 2013 in this report are identical to those the agency published in August 2012. Although estimates of the quarterly budgetary effects of ARRA have changed slightly, the differences are not significant enough to change CBO’s estimates of the effects of ARRA on real GDP, unemployment, and employment.

CBO estimates that ARRA’s policies had the following effects in the third quarter of calendar year 2012 compared with what would have occurred otherwise:

They raised real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 0.1 percent and 0.7 percent,
They lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.1 percentage points and 0.5 percentage points,
They increased the number of people employed by between 0.2 million and 0.9 million, and
They increased the number of full-time-equivalent (FTE) jobs by 0.2 million to 1.0 million. (Increases in FTE jobs include shifts from part-time to full-time work or overtime and are thus generally larger than increases in the number of employed workers.)

Conceived in Haste, India’s Internet Law Now Targeted for Change

Civil rights activists, free speech advocates, lawyers and politicians have spoken out in recent days against India’s controversial Internet laws, after two women were arrested in Mumbai for criticizing in a Facebook post the city’s shutdown after the Hindu leader Bal K. Thackeray’s death. A particular target for criticism is Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, an amendment added in 2008, which, among other things, makes it a crime to digitally send “any information that is grossly offensive or has menacing character.” Even a senior government official acknowledged recently that there may be flaws in the way the law is being used.

Where Europe’s subscribers are – and aren’t

Many content and service operators have settled on the subscription model with which to charge online. That model isn’t new; it’s been practiced by cable TV services for years. But adoption is uneven, and identifying different markets’ existing proclivity toward subscribing is important for any globally-minded operators considering new product launches. So this data showing Europeans’ varying receptiveness to subscription is interesting. The data, which appears in TNS Opinion & Social’s Building the Digital Single Market – Cross Border Demand for Content Services survey for the European Commission, shows that Latvians, those in the UK and Maltese are most likely already to be subscribers, whilst very few Germans, Austrians and Greeks are.

Benton

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