reports

FCC report remains neutral on wireless competition

A new FCC report has found that the wireless phone market is growing more concentrated, but it did not leave any clues as to how the agency might rule on an AT&T/T-Mobile merger.

It's the second year in a row that the Federal Communications Commission has said the industry is "concentrated." But it did not say whether it finds the industry to be competitive. Last year the FCC reversed years of findings that the market was considered to be competitive.

The annual report released yesterday contained data gleaned from the wireless industry from 2009 … Read more

Google gets most requests for user data from U.S.

Google received 14,201 requests from 25 countries for private user information in the second half of 2010, according to data released today in the company's Transparency Report.

Among the countries listed in the report, the U.S. accounted for 4,601 requests, of which Google complied with 94 percent. The U.S. had the most requests of any single country.

Other countries high on the list included Brazil with 1,804 user data requests, India with 1,699, and the U.K. with 1,162.

The search giant's Transparency Report is designed to shed light on the … Read more

GoDaddy nearing deal to be acquired for $2.5 billion?

GoDaddy, the world's largest registrar of domain names, might be acquired soon, according to a report today.

Private-equity firms KKR & Co., Silver Lake Partners, and Technology Crossover Ventures are currently nearing a deal to buy GoDaddy Group for between $2 billion and $2.5 billion, The Wall Street Journal is reporting, citing people with knowledge of the proceedings.

The Journal said the deal between the companies could be announced next week, but so far, GoDaddy has not signed a definitive agreement to sell its business to the firms.

GoDaddy has reportedly been seeking potential buyers for months. In … Read more

A field guide to the cloud

A gargantuan new GigaOm Pro report titled "A field guide to the cloud: current trends and future opportunities" (subscription only) was released today as part of the Structure 2011 conference in San Francisco.

The report examines the cloud-computing landscape with a focus on five specific areas: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), cloud storage, and private/internal clouds. And despite the relative newness of the cloud market, there is quite a bit going on.

According to the report, IaaS is driving the cloud-computing discussion but has yet to reach … Read more

Friday Poll: Most compelling use for natural user interfaces?

Set in 2054, "Minority Report" revealed a future in which natural user interfaces play a major role. A memorable scene features Tom Cruise controlling a large interactive screen with illuminated gloves, gesturing back and forth to navigate through an NUI.

Less than a decade after the movie hit theaters, we now have Microsoft's $150 Kinect accessory for Xbox 360, which provides a similar experience to the one seen in the movie--without requiring special gloves or a multimillion dollar computer setup.

People have primarily used a mouse and keyboard to interact with computers for decades; this seems silly considering that nearly every other computer component has evolved significantly in the same time frame. Now that the Kinect SDK is available for Windows 7, natural user interfaces have more opportunity than ever to change how we interact with computers.

Supportive technology such as speech recognition (which has already matured greatly, as this week's launch of Google Voice Search for desktop computers highlighted), Microsoft Surface, and 3D Immersive Touch are all stepping stones to something far greater in the evolution of computer interaction. It's inevitable that years from now, aspects of these technologies will work together to free us from pressing keys and clicking buttons.

So, what do you think the most exciting possibilities for natural user interfaces are? Vote in our weekly poll. And please be sure to elaborate in the comments section.… Read more

Facebook going Spartan to take on Apple?

Facebook is working on a new mobile platform designed to take on Apple's App Store, TechCrunch is reporting.

Dubbed Project Spartan, the project will work only on mobile Safari, the social-media blog claims, citing anonymous sources. The new platform, aimed at iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad, will reportedly be HTML5-based, making it compatible with mobile Safari. TechCrunch says that people "familiar with the project" believe Facebook wants to "use Apple's own devices against them to break the stranglehold they have on mobile app distribution."

TechCrunch's report about Project Spartan follows another … Read more

IEEE: Solar could challenge fossil fuel in 10 years

Solar photovoltaics have the potential to be the most cost-effective electricity source and could even challenge fossil fuels within 10 years.

That's according to an announcement made by leaders of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) today as part of the organization's launch of photovoltaic research initiatives.

"Solar PV will be a game changer. No other alternative source has the same potential. As the cost of electricity from solar continues to decrease compared to traditional energy sources, we will see tremendous market adoption, and I suspect it will be a growth limited only by supply,&… Read more

FCC report: Net has helped suffocate local news

Thanks to digital technologies, we have more media sources than ever to get our news from, but when it comes to covering town halls, school boards, courts, and other local news, they mostly suck.

That's the takeaway message (though definitely not in those words) in a behemoth of a report (PDF) released Thursday by the Federal Communications Commission.

The 460-plus page report, titled "The Information Needs of Communities: The Changing Media Landscape in a Broadband Age," is two years in the making and was led by Beliefnet co-founder and former U.S. News and World Report National Editor Steve Waldman.

If forced to sum up the entire report in a single tweet, it would probably be "The Internet has revolutionized how we gather and consume information, but meanwhile local news has been damn near suffocated." Or, as Waldman and company put it on page 262:

There were about 13,400 fewer newspaper newsroom jobs in 2010 than there were in 2006, dropping from 55,000 positions to about 41,600. Over the years, newsmagazines, local commercial radio, and local TV have reduced their newsgathering staffs, as well. At the same time, Internet sites, cable news, and public radio have created new journalism jobs.

So, the Net picked up the slack for the shrinking old media then, right? Not so, says the report. It goes on to estimate that there are roughly 5,000 less reporters covering local "accountability" beats today than there were in 2000, and even back then there weren't nearly enough to cover everything. All told, the report estimates that the number of local beat reporters would need to be more than doubled to do the job right, at a total cost of about $1.6 billion--or $265 million if we just wanted to get back to 2000 levels.… Read more

LTE devices sell fast in U.S.; 3G prepares to explode in Asia

Just about anyone who uses wireless networks for data is hungry for more speed, a new report from ABI Research suggests. In the first quarter of this year, Verizon Wireless alone activated half a million LTE-enabled devices; in Japan, NTT DoCoMo added 25,000 LTE subscriptions, according to the report.

LTE networks are often marketed as "4G" networks, but the term can be misleading because LTE (short for "Long Term Evolution") and all other currently available networks do not fully comply with 4G requirements--they're often more accurately referred to as a pre-4G technology.

Verizon has been selling the LTE service since January and claims data download speeds of between 5 and 12 megabits per second and upload speeds of 2-5Mbps--or roughly 10 times faster than its 3G offerings. AT&T is testing an LTE network in suburban Dallas that it says is capable of nearly 30Mbps.

But regardless of dithering over the nomenclature of 4G and how well the real-world networks deliver on the promise of their underlying technology, more subscribers are signing up for LTE, bottom line.… Read more