The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
Subsidized handsets, rather than locked handsets, should be the focus of regulators. We're not getting good deals, not fostering innovation, and weakening our power as buyers.
Showing results is the best way to win over social business doubters, according to Mary Maida, Medtronic lead information solutions manager. Internet Evolution's Mitch Wagner interviewed Maida at the E2 Innovate conference.
The restaurant chain's Chris Laping describes how the company drives innovation in everything from operations to team uniforms under his leadership. Internet Evolution's Mitch Wagner interviewed Laping at the E2Innovate conference.
Wells Fargo uses social software to replace email chains and help its sales team collaborate more effectively to land deals, according to Kelli Carlson-Jagersma, VP Collaboration Strategy for Wells Fargo. Mitch Wagner spoke with Carlson-Jagersma at the E2Innovate conference
ITRC found that more than 600 security breaches took place in 2012. Flaws were found in some of the nation's most respected companies: Apple, Citibank, and Wells Fargo. So, it seems the bad guys are doing better than the men in the white hats.
Cisco's rumored sale of Linksys suggests we may have problem with innovation and profit at the edge of our Internet, and that could be critical to the evolution of many Internet-delivered services.
Many enterprises view high-speed broadband connections as ubiquitous. Yet in about 20 percent of the country, businesses and their employees do not have access to even DSL connections. This shortcoming diminishes enterprises' ability to support their employees.
Congress is considering a bill to extend a moratorium on Internet regulation changes for two years. But with issues like service quality, cloud performance, and privacy looming, we risk contaminating the Internet with fraud.
The new Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) initiative of operators is being run out of Europe's ETSI and not here in the United States, even though the issues have been here for five years. The US needs to step up; otherwise, it's surrendering leadership.
Marissa Mayer at Yahoo has come out with her strategy on turning the company around: culture, company, calibration, and compensation. But Yahoo needs to have a technical approach to the mobile cloud opportunity, not a management theory lesson.
Twitter's changes are clearly aimed at being more Facebook-like, and this is because both companies are vying to serve the mobile social network market. But can that market work for anybody, given how difficult it is to push ads to social-update readers?
Sean Smith, a US Foreign Service IT manager, gave his life in service of his country and the world. His life and death are a humbling example for all of us who work in IT.
The decision could discourage innovators looking to the past, and require companies to build from the ground up, leading to a new generation of stagnation in the IT world.
Japan and South Korea have a significant lead in terms of embracing mobile advertising. But eMarketer expects the US to become the world's top market for this space by the end of this year
Advances in robotics and Internet bandwidth speed mean that low-wage foreign workers may soon be remotely controlling worker robots in the US and Europe. Companies like VGo, iRobots, and Willow Garage sell robots that may enable workers in India to produce cars in the US.
Healthcare providers have been moving to telemedicine treatments, where the patient and doctor can meet online, but insurance carriers are not required to pay for such treatments. This may change, though, as Maryland recently passed a law mandating that insurers pay up.
Blackhole 1.2.3, the latest version of the most popular black-market exploit kit, apparently has already been used by Brazilian fraudsters to try to perpetrate a scam. The new kit, released at the end of March, can bypass sandboxes in Java, and the Brazilians used it to try to convince accountants they were about to lose licenses.
US counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke, who came to prominence with his prescient warnings before the 9/11 attacks, tells Smithsonian Magazine the US was responsible for the Stuxnet supersmart worm that attacked parts of nuclear reactors in Iran – and in the process, has given away one of the world's most sophisticated cyberweapons.
ICANN is in a crisis. But if it goes away, so will its unique "multistakeholder model," which allows Internet users to participate alongside business, government, and industry.
Internet-enabled learning (online schools) and certifications have combined to produce rich IT talent pools just as the jobs market is starting to accelerate. Win-win!
Jane Williams, technology training manager for Multnomah County, says the ability to share resources is just one of the coming benefits of moving the county's intranet to a Drupal Commons platform hosted in the cloud.
When it comes to Internet-related research, the gap between the real world and academia is widening. Indeed, a few boffins may be up so high in their ivory towers that Earth is invisible. Sadly, some of this research is probably costing the US government – and US citizens – real money.
The world’s most powerful supercomputer now resides in Japan, but the US would like to reclaim the lead. The Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee, which is part of the US Department of Energy, is building a supercomputer that will be used for such tasks as simulating nuclear explosions.
Free wireless is like tap water in Europe and Asia. Why is the US so far behind? Because of a near-religious commitment to non-government interference in markets, America lacks basic wireless infrastructure and will pay the price competitively.
Who put the "co" in Overstock's "O.co" branding campaign? Colombia, which, like some other countries, is selling its top-level Internet domain to anyone who wants to be a .co. Top-level domains of all kinds may soon be for sale, but the jury's out on whether search engines care about them.
A trip to South America shows me that third-world nations depend totally on mobile broadband because it's too expensive to drive wireline to all. Might we in the First World also be confronted with that issue?
Internet companies have the dubious distinction of comprising about half of the Top 15 Hated Companies in the US. Poor products and mediocre customer service are the reasons for the notoriety.
Is China a threat because it censors US sites, or could it be that the country might have an economic formula that will out-innovate us on the Internet that we invented?
In Brazil, Internet access is regarded as a civil right, and ordinary people are involved in determining the country's digital future. In contrast, in Canada, a government request for input on the future of the digital economy is mainly being responded to by industry. A combined populist/industry approach will give the best results.
Microsoft's browser market share is falling sharply. Apple is being looked at by the FTC. Are we exchanging one market shark for another, or are we worried about nothing? The Internet itself may be policing anti-competitive policies for us.
Once called 'Governor Moonbeam' for his plans for a communications satellite, California's Attorney General talks about the innovation that the state brings to Green Tech... and beyond.
Why does everyone claim their products are transformative? Cisco said its announcement of March 9th would transform the Internet. But it was just a big box. Apple transformed the Internet with a little box, the iPhone, and didn't say they were doing it. Now it's up to Verizon to bring it all together with LTE and broadband mobility.
The United States' taxpayer-funded technology delegation to Russia turns into a mortifying embarrassment for anyone even remotely proud to be American.
Comcast and other broadband providers just might exempt content they own from counting against consumer Internet usage caps. Would that make their broadband services more desirable?
A recent scandal involving a school's use of remotely activated Webcams to locate lost or stolen laptops may portend, not only legal action against the school, but also a loss of trust in video that is critical to developing video collaboration over the Internet.
Free online video was supposed to kill cable. But research shows most people are getting less interested in replacing cable with online video – not more. There are three reasons why, says Tom Nolle.
Telcos are launching their app stores and development programs, but they need to do a lot more if they are to play a meaningful role in the Web applications development chain.
Research shows that the youth of today like Facebook – but not blogging or Twitter. Does that mean Facebook has won, or just that it's not yet out of favor? Will all the services we see today fade into Ovaltine-or-Wheaties status in just a few years?
Good news! The US gross domestic product grew by 5.5% last quarter. But does that number accurately reflect the value created by the information economy?
Data mining of social networks means people might face unforeseen consequences as a result of their seemingly innocuous personal choices and associations.
Both the federal intelligence agencies and the metropolitan police forces are likely monitoring your social networks. So should you lay low, or make it worth their while?
The iPhone has created a new form of the 80/20 rule, according to AT&T, which claims only 3% of iPhone users generate 40% of wireless traffic. But is that really a justification for usage caps and pricing tiers? What did AT&T think was going to happen with the iPhone pricing plan, and are they shoveling something else at us now that we're hooked?
What does a $0.62 refund check from a service provider mean? It could mean that, unlike Google, Amazon, and Apple, telcos aren't ready to use what they know about their customers to sell better, more personalized services.
It’s Alvi and the chipmunks! Eduify CTO Rafat Alvi talks about how distance learning can help entitled Bay Area prepsters learn remotely using their iPhones.
As enterprises are building out their business intelligence solutions and prepping their strategies for 2010, isn't it time to do something about all that redundant data in the network?
Meet Leo Prieto, the "anti-Murdoch" of Latin America, and founder of www.betazeta.com, one of the region's largest and most exciting social networks and content aggregators.
Comparing Internet services is tough because service providers price and market their services based on a best-case scenario connection that most consumers will never enjoy.
Rupert Murdoch's plan to use micropayments to charge for access to his global network of 'news' sites won't actually work. But that doesn't mean that other media organizations can't learn from it.
IE travels to Santiago to meet Ricardo Escobar, Commissioner of Chile’s Internal Revenue Service, which has succeeded in getting an astonishing 98% of the country’s population to file their taxes online.
Companies used to be confident they'd know exactly what a cellular OS would look like out of the box. Today, that confidence should be fading. Reiter discusses how a cellphone OS's looks could be deceiving, and why businesses need to understand it.
Imagine being able to use your mobile phone to pay taxi and mass transit fare; use vending machines; make retail purchases; and check in at hotels. Every day, millions of citizens in Japan, S. Korea, and soon Singapore do so simply by waving their mobile phones in front of point-of-sale terminals using near-field communication or related technology. But, while the technology is readily available in the US, it will be some time before Americans can use their cellphones as mobile wallets.
Cellular operators, netbook manufacturers, and, of course, techies, have been eagerly awaiting a hands-on experience with Nokia's new netbook, the Booklet 3G. Reiter's got his hands on one, and tells you whether it's worth the wait.
Does your organization use cloud computing? Even if you aren’t aware of it your employees might be... right behind your back. But don't fret. Use this as a learning opportunity.
Industry initiatives and government stimulus funds are giving enterprise software vendors a great opportunity to help build out and manage smart grid technologies.
The problem with telepresence is that it's not universally accepted, because video calling isn't. While we can all do video calling, we also apparently worry too much about how we look. If we want HD telepresence in our future, we have to dress down, mess up our hair, and dive into our online life.
The US loses about $20 billion a year on pirated software, movies, and music. But public policy can help stem the tide of digital theft. For example, France has recently passed a 'three strikes and you’re out' law, whereby if after two warning letters an individual continues to download pirated software then his Internet access will be cut off. US policy makers should consider adopting similar policies.
When Reiter gets incensed over incompetent Verizon FiOS order-taking and support, he broadcasts it via Twitter. Did it do any good? How should your company offer Twitter support? Watch this for all the answers.
Evidence shows that you can tweet too much. Sites and services like Twitter and Facebook are a good place to reach your audience, but think quality over quantity.
Routesy is an iPhone application that uses the phone’s GPS to let the user know where and when the next train or bus is coming. The application’s developer, Steven Peterson, talks about why a mobile application makes sense, especially given that this transportation information is already available on the Web.
The big news at the Web 2.0 Summit was that Twitter partnered with Google and Bing, enabling the search engines to show Tweets in search results. This couldn't possibly be less interesting.
The city of San Francisco is on the leading edge of using the Internet to provide government transparency. It is providing WiFi for its have-nots, and its DataSF.org initiative is putting the city's valuable data back in the hands of its citizens, with innovative results.
Net neutrality is pitting fuddy-duddy telco types against the hipster-doofus Web developer brigade. What are telcos going to do with all the DPI and policy gear they've been so busy deploying over the past year? And whose side should Internet users be on?
Now that Bing has struck a deal with Twitter, its search service will have to process a tsunami of Tweets, many of which are worthless junk. Stefan Weitz, director with Bing Search, explains to Michael Singer how his service will make sense of the Twitter mayhem to provide relevant results to end users and enterprises.
Bing, Microsoft’s search service, has struck a deal with Twitter. Here Stefan Weitz, director with Bing Search, talks through how the deal will work from a technical perspective, and what’s in it for users.
A new poll shows that a majority of Americans don’t like behavioral targeting on the Internet, even when it’s done anonymously. But the poll is seriously flawed in that it did not ask Americans about the tradeoffs involved. If we are to make good public policy with regard to the Internet and privacy, it’s important to have a debate that explores all aspects of the issue. This poll failed to do that.
The FCC is throwing money at rural broadband empowerment, but it's dealing with the wrong problem. The real issue is how we get users who could get broadband but choose to reject it to change their minds. The answer lies with mobile technology – but it may surprise you!
The IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Monaco kicked into high gear today, and we've already begun to see news emerging from that lovely city-state by the sea.
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