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Google's brand recognition, along with the prospect of higher Internet speeds, has enticed 30 percent of possible subscribers in its Kansas City metro area footprint, coined "fiberhoods," to pay a $10 pre-registration fee, according to original research from Ideas & Solutions. In addition to those pre-registrants, the "Google Fiber Matters: Consumer Demand Study" found another 30 percent of the qualified population expressing interest in Google Fiber's high-speed Internet and video offerings.
Google Fiber Captivates Kansas City
[Commentary] The often-cited expression “When something online is free, you’re not the customer, you’re the product” is compelling and smart and seems to sum up the problem of living in an advertising-supported online world. But it also stops too short. People trot out this line to advocate disengaging from a world of personalization and privacy scandals. The thing is, you can’t. In this day and age, avoiding security cameras and credit-card tracking and traffic pattern analysis and mobile location data would require a massive bulletproof signal-blocking hermit-crab shell. What you can do is actually get value from being tracked — while holding companies to a high standard of responsibility, of course. We give up massive amounts of personal data on a daily basis. In my opinion, it’s darn well time for these services to give back to us by making good use of the data to give us better experiences.
Maybe “Being the Product” Isn’t So Bad: Why Data Harvesting Doesn’t Have to be a Nightmare
Today, there are only a couple of ways in which Amazon’s e-commerce and digital businesses overlap. One of the biggest examples is Amazon Prime, which ties two-day shipping with digital perks like access to free streaming video. A more obscure example is how Amazon enables mobile games to bundle the sale of physical toys with virtual goods. Now an even more obvious use case exists: Amazon is announcing “AutoRip,” a new service that will give anyone who has ever purchased a CD on Amazon over the past 15 years a free digital copy of that album. It also applies to all purchases going forward. This isn’t exactly a huge leap forward for technology, but the service is pretty neat, and will be especially handy for anyone who never bothered to rip their CDs (as long as they bought music from Amazon).
Amazon’s New Deal: Buy a CD and Get the Digital Album for Free
Amtrak, the national railroad which operates 21,000 route miles, is upgrading its Wi-Fi service to 4G on many routes across the country. Amtrak says the aim is to offer increased wireless speeds and greater reliability. Implementation of the upgrades has begun on the Acela Express line that goes from Boston to Washington (DC) and will eventually be installed on other routes, Amtrak says.
Amtrak is upgrading its on-train Wi-Fi service
This week at the 2013 International Consumer Electronics Show, we have reported on personal computer makers' attempts to reinvent the laptop. The wild popularity of tablets has stymied sales of laptops. As a result, PC makers are trying to create machines that combine the best of tablets and laptops. But there's another piece of that trend that didn't make it into our earlier report. That same dynamic is now extending to ye olde desktop PC, which is now in line for its own radical changes.
Sales of desktop computers are also declining. And there's nothing like a looming disaster to encourage companies to take drastic measures. "What’s bleeding over is the motivation to do something different and take risks," said Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst of Moor Insights and Strategy. "And that’s a great thing for the PC industry. Because the last five years, before the threat of tablets, there was not a lot to get excited about." During the Intel news conference, executives sketched out their vision of the future of desktops, or what they have taken to calling "all-in-one" computers. At first they describe what sounds like the evolution of Apple's desktop Macs, with the entire CPU now built into the display. No more separate CPU tower, no more spaghetti strands of wires cluttering the floor, no fans sucking in mounds of dust. Instead, everything becomes wireless, including the keyboard, the mouse, and the Internet connection. But PC manufacturers want to take Apple's lead and try to push past it.
How tablets are changing desktop computers
The Federal Communications Commission wants to do the spectrum incentive auction in 2014 and some involved say that’s possible, but others claim there are too many complications and details that must be worked out to make sure the very complicated process goes smoothly. FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell told a CES audience: “So, while I hope it’s 2014 … folks just need to realistically understand that history tells us that these things can take longer than you hope or expect, especially when you have literally the most complicated spectrum auction in world history.”
Incentive Auction Is Coming, But When?
The Federal Trade Commission announced it has revised the thresholds that determine whether companies are required to notify federal antitrust authorities about a transaction under the Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) Antitrust Improvements Act. These filing thresholds are required to be adjusted annually to keep pace with the change in the level of the gross national product, unlike the pre-merger filing fees, which have not changed in more than a decade. The HSR Act requires companies to notify authorities if – among other things – the value of a transaction exceeds the filing thresholds. The FTC is required to revise those thresholds annually, based on the change in gross national product. For 2013, the threshold for reporting proposed mergers and acquisitions subject to enforcement under Section 7A of the Clayton Act has increased from $68.2 million to $70.9 million. The FTC also announced revisions to the thresholds that trigger a prohibition preventing companies from having interlocking memberships on their corporate boards of directors under Section 8 of the Clayton Act. The Act requires that the Commission revise those thresholds annually, based on the change in the level of gross national product. The new thresholds for the Act’s prohibition on interlocking directorates are $28,883,000 for Section 8(a)(1) and $2,888,300 for Section 8(a)(2)(A).
FTC Announces Revised Thresholds for Clayton Act Antitrust Reviews for 2013
Last month, a majority of the members of the International Telecommunications Union voted for a murky proposal, suggesting that the ITU has the power to regulate the Internet. The proposal was passed despite vociferous objections by the US and other developed countries. In the end, 55 countries refused to sign on, while 89 did sign the resolution. That was seen as a success for the US and its allies, but anyone celebrating the outcome might be doing so too soon. In fact, several of the parties that sided with the US only ended up in that position because of an overreach on the part of Iran, according to one speaker at a CES panel. Ambassador David Gross, who was the US representative to the ITU for several years, said that Iran decided to "meddle in a well-cooked document," adding an unusual "human rights" proposal that suggested a human right to access telecommunications networks. The twist is that this was a situation in which the "human rights" were granted to a government, not to actual humans. The real goal was to strike a blow against sanctions.
Why the UN’s push to control the Internet isn’t over
Former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt, who oversaw the first spectrum auction, says he thinks current FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is doing "a great job" running the current FCC incentive auction, which is currently still in the planning stages.
Genachowski is a former top aide to Hundt. Hundt conceded that one had to be a "game theorist" rather than a "mere lawyer" to understand all the intricacies of the incentive auction -- which is a double-sided auction. But he said the main thing was that it was not difficult to bring about profound change if "you really focus on it." Hundt said the "big change" is that there are "an awful lot of over-the-air broadcast signals that are reaching almost no one from stations that have almost no audience and would be just as happy to be on cable TV."
Hundt: Genachowski Doing Great Job on Incentive Auctions
News, like every other form of content, is with us wherever we go, via any device or medium. This USA TouchPoints analysis shows us where we consume it most using our media of choice.
When major events occur, such as celebrations or disasters, or when our lives slip out of their usual weekly patterns, like holiday seasons, the ebb and flow of news consumption alters. But when looking at data collected over the course of 12 months, it becomes possible to see where people who use a given device to consume news actually choose to do so in an average week (Mon-Fri). That lets us understand the physical context in which they are exposed to the programming and advertising messages associated with it. Over time, such an analysis can also be re-visited to see how trends evolve. News consumption in the home dominates overall and particularly in the case of television.
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