Fierce Wireless and Motorola are offering a free ebook Broadband Revolution on strategy for Rural Wireless Internet Service Providers.
Contents:
WordCamp NYC 2010 will bring together the New York community of WordPress-loving web publishers and developers the weekend of October 16, 2010 at Baruch College.
Ticket sales will open mid-September, but for now, mark your calendars!
We are all aware of Paul Allen’s recent moves to sue leading Internet companies over a number of patents held by Interval Research.
Larry Downes, author of The Laws of Disruption, has come up with a novel explanation for Allen’s sudden move into litigation – his ultimate aim is patent reform!
From Paul Allen: When a Patent Troll is an Enigma :
Something tells me there’s something else going on. Patent litigation is an elaborate chess game, and it feels like this is a move deep inside a very long-running game. There’s a great deal that’s broken about the patent system. I’m just not sure yet whether this lawsuit is Exhibit A.
What other answer is possible? Here’s at least one crazy possibility (there are crazier ones, but this one at least is plausible). Maybe Allen is not the world’s most famous patent troll. Maybe he’s out to become the world’s most famous patent reformer. Maybe he doesn’t want so much to win as to publicize how dangerous his patents are.
Perhaps in asserting these patents, with their potential to unsettle so much of what is taken as settled business practices in the digital economy, he hopes to force leading tech companies and Congress to acknowledge that the system is broken and fix it. If he wins, or even if he just wears down the other side, perhaps he’ll demand not financial tribute but actual reform of a system that gives patent holders like him the power to disrupt digital life.
If so, it’s a dangerous gambit. On the other hand, it’s hard to see how the patent system could get much worse than it already is.
ISOC-NY is an At-Large Structure in the North American Regional At-Large Organization (NARALO) of ICANN. Recent structural changes have meant that, rather than a Liason to the ICANN Board, At-Large now has a seat. NARALO has participated, along with the other Regional Organizations, in the long and intricate process of establishing an election procedure. With its conclusion the call has now gone out for applicants. Deadline is Sep 6 2010. Press release below:
(More …)
Google and Verizon’s joint policy proposal for an open Internet is causing an ongoing public discussion. See details and links to commentary here.
Geoff Huston’s latest Internet Society ISP Column examines the Australian scenario where, in the recent election, the vying parties plumped down on either side of the wired vs wireless question. He concludes that, just like the election, there is no outright winner.
He notes the reality that while wireless IP service often actually costs less to provide, users are prepared to pay more for it, giving providers little incentive to invest in wire. But wireless bandwidth scalability is, ultimately, limited. What’s more its inherent unreliability is TCP hostile. However ubiquitous wireless service would be a lot cheaper to implement: $6B (AUS) vs $43B (AUS) for wired.
He then gets to the big question, which all countries including the USA are having to address, namely how much of the taxpayer’s money is worth expending, and to what effect:
Where should public funds be spent? On a comprehensive revamp of the wired access network, replacing the aged copper pair telephone network with a highly capable fibre optic network? Or on improving access in those areas where the copper pair network simply cannot support high speed access by public investment in wireless infrastructure?
In trying to answer this question, we return to a persistent theme in the area of public communications infrastructure. What’s the role of public capital investment and how is that balanced against the role of private capital investment? Is it possible for private investment to fulfill the entirety of a public agenda? Given that a capable, cost efficient and effective public communications infrastructure that encompasses an entire national constituency is seen as a core deliverable of any national communications policy regime, then how is this best achieved today?
To move back from generalities to the specifics of this broadband investment choice, is it realistic to expect that we have further decades of useful life from an already ageing copper pair infrastructure? As a consequence, should current public investment focus on current gaps in the national infrastructure, using a relatively cost effective approach of plugging these gaps using wireless infrastructure where the copper network is simply inadequate, and leave the remainder of the network in situ, as being adequate for the moment Or should we leave such wireless infrastructure investment to private enterprise, given that this technology is enjoying strong consumer attention and there is a continuing investment in wireless infrastructure by the industry actors. Instead, should a public investment program focus on a longer term national program of replacing the copper loop with a comprehensive fibre optic network? From such a longer term perspective perhaps the NBN is the better approach, as we need to concede that the level of investment required for a national very high speed access infrastructure in a fibre access network is probably well beyond the scope of private capital works investment. So far all that the industry has achieved in this space has been the rewiring of the CBDs in the major cities, while the upgrading of remainder of the network has been effectively ignored. It appears that this is, like many major infrastructure projects in the past, one that properly sits in the realm of a public investment program, in the same way that we’ve made investments in national road, rail and shipping infrastructure in the past.
WebMadeMovies is a new Mozilla project to bring scripting to the html5 movie tag. This demo brings in multiple data feeds from the APIs of Google News, Wikipedia, Twitter, and flickr. It also provides automatic machine translation from Google Translate, and attribution data from Creative Commons. More info in the video below.
The Obama administration has announced the recipients of the second round of Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) funding. $1.8 billion from the American Recovery and Investment Act will fund broadband expansion in 37 states, including New York and New Jersey.
Local projects receiving funds include:
[Source: NYConvergence]
The Oppenheimer 2010 Annual Technology, Media & Telecommunications Conference took place August 10-11, 2010 at the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston. A webcast is available of audio of the Fiber Infra Panel (free login required).
The panel included Hunter Newby of Allied Fiber and an extended slideset of his recent ISOC-NY presentation is provided as an adjunct to the audio. Other panelists are Dan Caruso of Zayo, Bill LaPerch of Abovenet,
NiQ Lay of HKBN and Frank Mambuca of US Metrotel.
The New York State Senate today announced availability of “NYSenate for iPad,” the first application in the nation developed by a legislative body for the Apple iPad. The application can be downloaded for free today from the Apple iTunes App Store.
Like its predecessor, NYSenate Mobile for iPhones and Android phones, the app enables users to search for bill information, contact their Senator, review event calendars, read Senator’s blogs, watch archived video of Senate Session, Committee Meetings and Public Hearings, and even submit Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests.
“NYSenate for iPad” was built entirely in-house by Senate staff, at no additional cost to taxpayers. As with all software developed within the Senate, this mobile app has also been released at (see http://github.com/nysenatecio) under dual BSD and GPLv3 open-source software licenses; other legislatures, as well as non-profit organizations, media and small businesses are free to leverage the software to develop their own custom applications for the iPad.
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