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Viral videos may be good for sharing ideas and spreading funny foreign pop hits, but they are also leaving millions of deaf and hearing-impaired people out of the loop.
Online video is becoming a more ubiquitous part of American life. Netflix videos made up one-third of online data used in the United States last year. YouTube expects 90 percent of online traffic to be video in the next few years. By 2016, Cisco estimates that 1.2 million minutes of video will be streamed or downloaded every second. That video explosion has been great for small film and TV producers, who are able to reach an audience without a big studio budget, and fans of niche programming. But in some ways, it has left the deaf and hard-of-hearing community starting from scratch after years of advocating for captions on traditional television. “We could be back to square one,” said Christian Vogler, director of the Technology Access Program at Gallaudet University.
Growth of viral video leaves deaf in the dark
President Barack Obama is taking to Twitter to rally supporters behind his push to extend the Bush-era tax rates for all but the wealthiest Americans. The White House is planning to promote a new Twitter hashtag — #My2k — that represents the estimated $2,200 by which middle-class families would see their taxes increase, on average, if Congress fails to extend the Bush-era tax rates. Administration officials will ask supporters to post on the social media network and the White House website about how a tax increase would affect them.
White House promotes 'My2k' Twitter hashtag in tax-rate debate
Rural telecom providers have taken their complaints about the Federal Communications Commission's Universal Service Fund (USF) reforms to the White House, tying the issue to the "fiscal cliff" negotiations.
The USF funds telecom build-outs in high-cost areas where there is not a business case absent the government subsidy. The FCC is moving that support for phone service in high-cost, particularly rural, areas to broadband deployment, the new must-have telecom service, and to reform subsidies to reflect the move of voice to IP delivery. The goal is also to provide a "glide path" for that migration given that the switch-over will take time, though rural carriers suggest it is more like a crash landing for their particular economies. In a letter to President Barack Obama, the Rural Broadband Alliance asked to include language in fiscal cliff legislation suspending some of the reforms and require the FCC to submit them to the Federal State-Joint Board for their recommendations. The carriers say the "well-intentioned but misguided" changes -- part of the FCC's migration of support from traditional telecom to broadband -- has led to job cutbacks and consumer rate increases.
Rural Telecoms: USF Reforms Are Pushing Us Toward Fiscal Cliff
A pair of Clinton-era telecom regulators and “card-carrying Democrats” want to bring back some of the economic magic of the go-go 1990s with an ambitious plan to accelerate growth, shrink the national debt while revolutionizing the delivery of government services, and help slow global warming.
The plan from former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt and his former chief of staff, Blair Levin, is outlined in an e-book called The Politics of Abundance: How Technology Can Fix the Budget, Revive the American Dream, and Establish Obama’s Legacy. It modestly proposes that huge economic growth can be spurred through reconfiguring the way energy is produced, purchased, and consumed. At the same time, the government can generate new efficiencies and savings using broadband applications in health care and education. All it’s going to take is a grand bargain between Republicans and Democrats in which revenue from a big new emissions tax that targets energy generated by nonrenewable sources and from utility regulation reform is swapped for lower personal and corporate tax rates and a reduction in taxes U.S.-based multinationals pay on repatriated foreign profits. It sounds like a pipe dream, but Hundt and Levin think it’s possible. “We did not put one thing in that we thought Republicans would overwhelmingly oppose,” Hundt said at the Hudson Institute in Washington. The two are shopping their plan to policymakers, lobbyists, industry leaders, and think tankers.
Technology Can Fix the Budget Crisis, Say Former FCC Officials
The U.S. and Canada have proposed that the upcoming telecom treaty conference in Dubai deal first with proposals to change the definition of telecommunications or who the treaties apply to before getting down to the details of any revisions. Dealing with those "threshold questions" about the scope of the treaties is a crucial first step, they told the International Telecommunications Union in a joint filing.
Both countries are concerned about proposals by countries including Russia, China and Syria, that would expand the treaties to include broadband, an effort they see as opening the door to more government control of content and new taxes on Internet traffic. They propose that there be a plenary session to deal with any changes to the preamble or Article 1 of the International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs). "If we can resolve those threshold, definitional issues first, it will clarify the terms of the negotiations for the rest of the conference," said Ambassador Terry Kramer, head of the U.S. Delegation.
US/Canada: ITU Needs to Deal With Threshold Broadband Questions First
It’s finally here: the savior of the mobile industry, Joyn, also known as Rich Communications Services or RCS. Joyn lets customers IM each other and ‘enrich’ voice calls by tossing each other videos and files mid-conversation. It’s operator-agnostic, in the sense that you only need to be on an operator that offers it, regardless of the country, and Spain’s the first country in the world where the biggest operators all offer it. pain’s big three – Movistar (Telefonica), Orange and Vodafone – have launched it for their customers. Vodafone Germany also has it, as will Deutsche Telekom from December. In the U.S., MetroPCS has also introduced Joyn.
Spain’s carriers unite on Joyn – is this the future of mobile?
The real opportunity for change is still ahead of us, surpassing the magnitude of the development and adoption of the consumer internet. It is what we call the “Industrial Internet,” an open, global network that connects people, data and machines.
The Industrial Internet is aimed at advancing the critical industries that power, move and treat the world. There are now many millions of machines across the world, ranging from simple electric motors to highly advanced MRI machines. There are tens of thousands of fleets of sophisticated machinery, ranging from power plants that produce electricity to aircraft that move people and cargo around the world. There are thousands of complex networks ranging from power grids to railroad systems, which tie machines and fleets together. This vast physical world of machines, facilities, fleets and networks can more deeply merge with the connectivity, big data and analytics of the digital world. This is what the Industrial Internet Revolution is all about. The Industrial Internet era has already begun. And during a time when the global economy is recovering but remains volatile and where resources are constrained for people, governments, and companies, what we need most is to not lose sight of a real opportunity to create meaningful change around the world. After all, this is what revolutions are all about.
[Immelt is the chairman and CEO of GE]
The Future of the Internet is Intelligent Machines Industrial Internet Will End Downtime, GE Hopes (Wall Street Journal)
There’s no shortage of great minds using big data techniques to improve the quality of our medical treatments, but sometimes they can’t get access to the data they need most. Improving access to genetic data, for example, might just help cure cancer.
Why data is the key to better medicine – and maybe a cure for cancer
Most people view the internet as a place of free-flowing information where people go to learn, develop their business opportunities and can share scientific discoveries. It’s a place where passwords can be shared among family and friends and people don’t use services to cloak their identity, yet it is also where almost half of us lie about relevant personal information. All of this and some other contradictions have emerged from the Internet Society’s Global Internet User Survey. The Internet Society is an organization that tracks the use and influence of the web and releases policy recommendations associated with online access. For its annual survey it asked more than 10,000 people in 20 countries their thoughts on a series of questions. The results in some cases were surprising.
People Trust the Internet but Lie to it Anyway
What does publishing giant Pearson have in common with the giants of the video game industry? Not enough, apparently.
In a conversation at the SIIA Ed Tech Business Forum, Luyen Chou, chief product officer for Pearson’s K-12 technology group, said that as new technology upends the textbook publishing industry, his company needs to become an “Electronic Arts for education.” Clearly, Pearson and its rivals in education publishing need to reimagine their role as the rise of digital content cripples their business model. But look to Electronic Arts as a model? Chou said that to keep up with the changing environment, traditional publishers can’t just digitize the static textbooks of the past, they need to excel at producing high-quality, interactive digital learning experiences and get them into the hands of students.
Pearson exec: we need to be an “Electronic Arts for Education”