April 29, 2002
Broadband doesn't run through it
Quotes from the just-issued Digital Rivers Report on broadband deployment in the Pittsburgh area:
"The team discovered that broadband access technologies are available today to deliver the necessary bandwidth, but telecommunications companies are unable or unwilling to build the necessary network infrastructure universally."
"This research suggests that broadband deployment patterns are independent of affluence, a common misperception in discussions of the Digital Divide. Rather, significant service gaps exist where broadband alternatives are simply not available."
"Unless local politics change drastically – along with a turnaround in the current economics and regulatory climate – a large-scale private deployment of high-speed broadband capacity throughout the Pittsburgh Region is unlikely to occur without help from the public sector."
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 5:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The End of an Error
What if a company lost $54 billion and nobody noticed? That's what happened last week with AOL Time Warner. It reported the largest quarterly loss in corporate history, a truly mind-boggling evaporation of wealth. Despite this, AOL's stock actually went up after the announcement. What's going on here? More...
UPDATE: This column is also running on CNet News.com.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 24, 2002
XTremeSpectrum CEO Martin Rofheart writes:
XTremeSpectrum CEO Martin Rofheart writes:
I wanted to alert you to yesterday’s news that the FCC issued its First Report & Order on ultra-wideband. The FCC’s First Report & Order was made available yesterday and constitutes formal approval of unlicensed spectrum between 3.1 GHz and 10.6 GHz for ultra-wideband technology. We are thrilled with this ruling, which caps a three and half year effort by the FCC. After review of the First Report & Order, we are pleased to announce that XtremeSpectrum will maintain its aggressive product launch and expects to deliver the industry’s first commercial ultra-wideband device in the next couple of months.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 6:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
For the past day, I've
For the past day, I've been at a small workshop on spectrum policy hosted by the Aspen Institute. Aspen regularly assembles key figures from the government, private sector and academia to frame emerging communications and Internet policy issues. This one was interesting. I was there to advocate open spectrum and unlicensed wireless technologies, like 802.11/WiFi. It was heartening to see the level of awareness about WiFi among the lawyers, economists, lobbyists and policy-makers. They realize something important is going on here. Still, most of them were shocked when I mentioned there are now 1.5 million WiFi cards being sold every month.
The conceptual shift remains difficult for many people to make. Thanks to advances in technology, we don't necessarily need any mechanism to assign wireless spectrum bands to particular companies. The "tragedy of the commons" isn't inevitable if devices are smart enough to coexist with one another. WiFi is taking off in large part because equipment vendors and users don't need to go to a service provider for permission to set up networks. They just do it.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 5:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 22, 2002
Stat o' the Day
MSNBC (from Reuters): "China trails only the United States in the number of people with Internet access at home, with more than 56 million people able to connect from their residences, according to a report released on Monday."
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 6:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Wall Street Journal: "Corporate spending
Wall Street Journal: "Corporate spending on computers, software, storage and communications gear fell 8.4% last year, the first annual decline since 1958, according to government statistics." Yowza!! After death, taxes and Moore's Law, few things have been more certain than increasing corporate IT spending. This statistic confirms we're experiencing more than just a hangover after the Internet boom.
The article goes on to say that things look only marginally better this year, with many enterprises cutting IT budgets even further than in 2001. That tracks with what I've been hearing from startup enterprise software companies. Solutions that have a clear, quick return-on-investment, and that address a tactical pain point for customers, can still be sold effectively. No one wants to hear the big vision story -- that can wait.
Large enterpise application and networking vendors may actually be worse off than the startups in this climate. When you're small, two or three deals this year will keep you on track. But if you're Siebel or SAP, you're effectively a proxy for the market.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 2:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
AllNetDevices: Nokia and IBM Global
AllNetDevices: Nokia and IBM Global Services are teaming up to deploy WiFi wireless LAN hotspots.
The unlicensed wireless public access market is going to be huge, and in a few years it will be dominated by established players such as wireless carriers and ISPs. There will be room for newer aggregators such as Boingo, Sputnik and Joltage, though they will quickly have to get big or find a defensible market niche (or get acquired).
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 11:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
New York Times: Google has
New York Times: Google has come up with a clever way to get around the Church of Scientology's efforts to use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to make it harder to find anti-Scientology sites. Google is removing the sites from its database, but adding a link on the results page to chillingeffects.org. Chillingeffects.org is posting the Church's DMCA complaints, which include links to the target pages.
This shows what a mess the DMCA has created. At best, it adds pointless friction to the Net, because its restrictions are hard to enforce. In many cases, though, the chilling effects are real, and companies are reluctant to launch innovative services because of concerns about legal action. The tension between cyberspace and intellectual property needs to be addressed. Unfortunately, the DMCA is part of the problem, not the solution.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 11:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 17, 2002
My WindowsXP user profile somehow
My WindowsXP user profile somehow got corrupted. When I booted up my laptop a few minutes ago, all the configuration I had done (Themes, folder settings, IE preferences, bookmarks, etc.) were gone. I wonder if all this is hidden somewhere, or if I just need to manually reset everything.
This is a case where bundling IE with Windows is affirmatively bad. Just because Windows screwed up on of its config files doesn't mean my browser should lose the link buttons in the toolbar that I used to click on about fifty times a day.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
I was wondering when Dave
I was wondering when Dave would find this site....
For anyone visiting, that line about being under construction is true. I want to do a bit more work on this site before officially announcing it.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 16, 2002
Titles don't mess up links after all
It looks as though, contrary to what I wrote last week, turning on Radio's item title and link option doesn't make it impossible to include links with descriptive names. That must have been a transient bug.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 7:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 10, 2002
So much for using voice
So much for using voice mail for sensitive conversations because email is so insecure and easy to forward....
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 6:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Cloudmark, a stealth startup, plans
Cloudmark, a stealth startup, plans to offer a new approach to automated spam filtering soon. Part of it is an open-source technology called Vipul's Razor that has been around for a few months. One of the founders, Vipul Ved Prakash, is speaking at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in mid-May. Spam is an increasingly serious problem, and existing solutions such as Brightmail are of limited effectiveness. It will be interesting to see what Cloudmark brings to the table.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 4:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 5, 2002
This is the pre-release version
This is the pre-release version of my personal Weblog. Please be patient while we get everything set up.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 2:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack