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Trust was a big part of the story behind AT&T’s deal with Apple.
The country’s biggest phone company was a sclerotic mess of assets. Its shrinking landline business produced the majority of revenue. Its play on the future was a glitchy, hodgepodge cellular network cobbled from deals past. It couldn’t pass up, as Verizon reportedly did, the chance to usher in the smartphone era with the man who had reinvented the computer and the music industry. “I told people you weren’t betting on a device. You were betting on Steve Jobs,” says AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, talking candidly about the effect of the iPhone deal from his 37th-floor aerie atop Whitacre Tower in Dallas. That one little phone transformed the whole company. AT&T still lags Verizon on many fronts, but since the iPhone deal Ma Bell moves faster, embraces new technologies and partnerships big and small, and has decided to spend big–really, really big–to stay atop the data deluge. Since 2007 traffic on its network has doubled each year, and AT&T has spent more than $115 billion acquiring spectrum and building its network. It claims to have made a greater capital injection into the U.S. economy than any other public company in that time span.
Life After The iPhone: How AT&T's Bet On Apple Mobilized The Company
Two-thirds of companies in the Financial Times and Stock Exchange (FTSE) 100 have websites that are difficult to use on smartphones, a study shows. The research demonstrates that UK blue-chips are failing to keep pace with mobile internet adoption. Most corporate websites are designed for large computer screens and fast internet connections – even though half the population browses the web through smartphones such as the iPhone.
UK companies not ready for mobile Internet
[Commentary] Newspapers and other news publishers are increasingly targeting smaller, more affluent audiences, impelled not by governments, but by their own economics. For years, digital news conformed to one section of the 1984 prophecy of the technology guru Stewart Brand – that “information wants to be free because the cost of getting it out is getting lower.” Now, it is relying on his other, lesser-known maxim – that “information wants to be expensive because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life.”
As paywalls go up, and advertising yields continue to fall, publishers have pinned their hopes on subscriptions. I don’t see why publishers have an ethical duty not to charge for the content they originate. Free news is a recent phenomenon. Newspaper publishers always charged readers, albeit a small amount compared with the cost of newsgathering. Furthermore, nothing will change the fact that people have access to far more information than before the internet. News cannot be patented – once information is uncovered, it spreads rapidly across Twitter and Facebook, and is repeated by rivals and aggregators. Should we be worried? The risk is that news will become slanted in the interests of corporations and the wealthy. So far, there isn’t much sign of that. The news organizations best placed to prosper from the shift – Bloomberg, Reuters, the FT, the Wall Street Journal, The Economist – have high standards. Indeed, the shift towards subscriptions could raise editorial standards, rather than lowering them. Free sites that need to boost page views to gain advertising have an incentive to go downmarket with more gossip and celebrity news; the ones that rely more on subscriptions have the reverse incentive. But the fading era of advertising-subsidized newspapers and free-to-air television was at least democratic. At relatively low cost, everyone could be well informed. In the future, the information superhighway will have both fast and slow lanes.
The superhighway of information has a toll
Google and Yahoo, two Internet companies that have long cultivated relationships in Hollywood, are nevertheless placing ads on sites that feature pirated movies, TV shows and music, a new report says.
USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab ranked Google and Yahoo among the top 10 advertising networks that support major piracy sites around the world, based on the lab's analysis of online ads that receive the most copyright infringement notices. Google took issue with the report's findings, calling its conclusion "mistaken." Yahoo did not respond to requests seeking comment. The report is the first installment of a monthly update that Innovation Lab Director Jonathan Taplin hopes major brands will use to inform their decisions about online ad spending and steer dollars away from sites that exploit film, television and music.
Report links Google, Yahoo to Internet piracy sites
Al Jazeera completed a deal to take over Current TV, the low-rated cable channel that was founded by Al Gore and his business partners seven years ago. Current will provide the pan-Arab news giant with something it has sought for years: a pathway into American living rooms.
Current is available in about 60 million of the 100 million homes in the United States with cable or satellite service. Rather than simply use Current to distribute its English-language channel, called Al Jazeera English and based in Doha, Qatar, Al Jazeera will create a new channel, called Al Jazeera America, based in New York. Roughly 60 percent of the programming will be produced in the United States, while the remaining 40 percent will come from Al Jazeera English. Al Jazeera may absorb some Current TV staff members, according to people with knowledge of the deal who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. But Current’s schedule of shows will most likely be dissolved in the spring.
Al Jazeera Acquires Current TV
A just-past-deadline deal to put off a decision about drastic federal spending cuts until February will provide little solace for government technology chiefs and may be more damaging than if the draconian cuts had gone into effect, observers said.
With no final decision on how or even whether to avert the slate of automatic cuts known as sequestration, agency leaders must spend two more months planning and budgeting for the most austere outcome or risk violating budgeting laws by overspending, said Alan Balutis, a former chief information officer at the Commerce Department and now a director at Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group. The major change resulting from the last minute deal is that if and when a sequestration-averting plan comes through, agencies will have only seven months to rejigger their spending to conform with final budget allowances before the government fiscal year ends in September 2013, Balutis said, rather than nine months if a deal had been reached by January 1, the initial deadline.
No Good News for Government IT in Sequestration Delay
Technology trade groups that represent Google, Microsoft and Cisco lauded the research and development (R&D) tax credit extension included in the final "fiscal cliff" deal. The Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) and the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) said the R&D tax credit is key to maintaining the United States' position as a leader in the global tech industry. The credit was retroactively extended until the end of 2013 in the approved "fiscal cliff" legislation. It expired at the end of 2011. “The R&D credit has been, and will remain, a cost-effective policy for increasing research activity and producing a dollar-for-dollar increase in research spending," TIA President Grant Seiffert said. Tech companies have long supported efforts to make the tax credit permanent.
Tech groups laud R&D tax credit extension in 'fiscal cliff' deal
Middle-class taxpayers aren't the only ones who stand to benefit from the last-ditch deal to avert the so-called fiscal cliff. The agreement in Congress also includes something for Hollywood -- the extension of a tax break for movies and TV shows that shoot mainly in the US.
The provision, Section 181 of the federal tax code, allows qualifying productions to write down the first $15 million of expenses from their corporate tax bill. The program will cost an estimated $430 million in deductions in the next year, according to estimates by the Joint Committee on Taxation. Congress implemented the federal tax incentive in 2004 to encourage productions to stay home rather than flee to Canada, Britain and other foreign countries. It's not clear how effective the incentive has been. Film and television production continues to migrate to foreign cities, including Vancouver, Canada, and London, because of the stronger film tax breaks available there. And while production in the U.S. has increased dramatically in the last decade, most of that has been attributed to various state tax incentive programs.
Hollywood keeps its tax break in 'fiscal cliff' deal
Media companies were among the beneficiaries as the stock market rallied on news that the White House and Congress forged a deal to avoid sending the economy over the dreaded fiscal cliff.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped 308.41 points, or 2.35%, to close at 13.412. Many programmers registered even bigger gains because there had been concerns that falling over the fiscal cliff could lead to decreases in purchases by consumers and lower spending by companies, particularly on advertising. TV networks are starting to gear up for another upfront season, and not having to revise already fairly pessimistic outlooks for ad spending created a more positive atmosphere. Among media stocks, Viacom was the biggest gainer on a percentage basis. Other big gainers were Time Warner and Crown Media, Comcast, CBS, News Corp, AMC, Discovery Communications and Scripps Networks.
Media Stocks Start Year Higher on Fiscal Agreement
Newly-reconfirmed Federal Communications Commission member Mignon Clyburn is committed to working with the Congress to "keep the needs of American consumers paramount."
“It is an extraordinary honor to have the opportunity to serve on the Federal Communications Commission for another term. I am grateful to the President for his faith in renominating me, and am humbled by the Senate’s support in approving my nomination.”
Commissioner Clyburn Pledges to Keep Consumers Her Priority Statement (Commissioner Clyburn)