Often this involves what’s known in security circles as a Distributed Denial Of Service attack, or DDOS. Basically, it involves using an army of hijacked computers to overwhelm a site with so many requests for attention that it’s unable to respond to legitimate requests and thus becomes unavailable.

It has in recent years become a popular method to make a political or ideological point in which the target is some kind of symbol. Earlier this year, there were reports that the method was used by attackers based in Iran against several U.S. banks. Anonymous, the loose affiliation of hackers, has occasionally tried, and occasionally failed, to carry out DDOS attacks. A few years ago, WordPress.com came under an attack by unidentified attackers. And in 2011, a bunch of people were arrested for taking part in some DDOS attacks against PayPal.

Anyway, there’s some new data today from a security company called Prolexic, saying that the amount of bandwidth that DDOS attackers are able to bring to bear on their targets has been increasing at an alarming rate. During the first quarter of the year, the average DDOS attack totaled 48.25 gigabits per second, which is an increase by more than 700 percent versus the prior quarter. The data is contained in a report the company issued today. It’s worth noting that that’s an average, not a peak.

If you liken a DDOS attack to a fire hose, then what this means is that the amount of unwanted water an attacker is able to spray at a target increased sevenfold in one quarter. Anything in excess of 45Gbps is enough to overwhelm even the biggest enterprises and service providers, said Stuart Scholly, Prolexic’s president.

DDOS attackers are getting smarter and are able to command ever bigger armies of compromised computers, and they have studied closely the plumbing of the Internet to better understand its more tender spots.

And it’s not just the amount of bandwidth, but the overall number of packets with which attackers flood a target that’s causing the trouble. The rate of the average DDOS attack in Q1 was more than 32 million packets per second, and anything above 30 million is pretty nasty and difficult to mitigate.

So where do the attacks come from? China was the leading source; DDOS traced to that country accounted for nearly 41 percent of the total, followed by the U.S., which accounted for nearly 22 percent. Germany, Iran and India rounded out the top five. There are more details, including a case study or two about some recent attacks, contained in the report, and if you’re the kind of person who has to fend off the occasional DDOS attack, it may be worth your while to read it. But the main thing to understand is that the attacks themselves are getting nastier.

nicemonkey / Shutterstock.com

Nevertheless, some critics such as Public Knowledge and the New America Foundation are concerned that this trend may bring higher prices and reduced service. Most recently, NAF analyst Benjamin Lennett asked whether tiered service plans are a plot by cable companies to eliminate Internet-based competitors such as Netflix, which alone generates one-third of all North American download traffic.

But a closer examination shows these concerns are largely exaggerated. Usage-based pricing is not inherently anticompetitive or anti-consumer. Rather, it is an alternative method of spreading costs across a network’s customer base. Unlimited plans are popular because they are simple and predictable. But this simplicity masks significant inequality. Heavy gamers and peer-to-peer file sharers spend much more time online and consume more bandwidth than the grandmother who simply checks her email. Yet in under an unlimited plan, both pay the same monthly rate, which hardly seems fair.

Under usage-based pricing plans, consumers who value the network more pay more. Economists call this price discrimination, and despite its sinister-sounding name, it is a relatively common phenomenon. Airlines routinely charge different rates to students and businessmen; movie theaters charge the average movie-goer more than children or seniors; car dealers give a better deal to consumers who haggle. In each case, two customers face different prices for the same product, based on their willingness to pay. The practice is common and uncontroversial.

But critics claim that tiered pricing for broadband service is somehow improper, because heavier users do not cost companies more than lighter users. Rather, they claim usage-based pricing exists primarily to pad profits. Lennett states that cable companies earn a 97 percent profit on broadband service, citing industry analyst Craig Moffett. But this claim is incomplete (as Moffett himself notes in the next sentence of his report), because it reflects only the daily costs of running the network while ignoring the substantial fixed cost of building the network.

Broadband providers have invested over $200 billion in private capital in the past decade to build our nation’s networks. Moreover, Internet traffic is expected to triple by 2016, driven by Netflix and other bandwidth-intensive services. This means the industry will continue to invest over $30 billion annually to expand and upgrade those networks. When one examines return on invested capital—which Moffett and others argue is a better indicator of financial health in capital-intensive industries—broadband returns are much less impressive and lag companies like Apple and Google.

Thus, while it’s true that, as Lennett claims, the marginal cost of an additional gigabyte of data is pennies, this fact is irrelevant to the question of how to price broadband service. For broadband providers and other capital-intensive industries, the challenge is designing a pricing model that spreads those fixed costs intelligently across the customer base. Lennett’s preferred unlimited flat-rate model is one solution, but a relatively inefficient one. As the FCC has noted, flat-rate pricing forces “lighter end users of the network to subsidize heavier end users.” Usage-based pricing shifts more of those costs onto those who use the network the most.

Tiered plans can also help make broadband more affordable to low-income consumers. FCC Chief Economist Steve Wildman argues that tiered pricing may facilitate cheaper entry-level broadband plans for customers who cannot afford more expensive unlimited plans. A 2010 study of OECD countries showed that residential broadband plans with data caps averaged $164 per year less than similar uncapped plans.

Critics also fear that data caps are designed to protect legacy cable services from Internet-based video competitors. Lennett highlights the 5GB/month Essentials Internet plan that Time Warner Cable is currently test-marketing. He did not note that TWC also continues to offer an unlimited data plan, which will be the plan most consumers choose. TWC’s unusual capped plan targets very light users. Comcast’s 300GB/month plan is more representative of the typical tiered pricing system. Under this cap, a customer could stream 130 hours of HD content on Netflix each month, the equivalent of two feature-length movies each day, or 1000 hours of non-HD content without concern. This tier does not impact average households, but rather online gamers, file-sharers, and others with very heavy bandwidth demands.

Nonetheless, critics may be correct that some broadband providers have incentives to limit data consumption to harm competitors. This is called a vertical restraint on trade, and is governed by antitrust law. Of course, not all broadband providers have video affiliates: Qwest (prior to its merger with CenturyLink), for example, offered tiered plans but did not sell cable service, and Verizon offers cable service without limits on monthly broadband data consumption.

But antitrust law protects competition, not competitors. Our goal should not be to protect Netflix’s profit margins. It should be to protect consumers by promoting competition among video providers. Vertical restraints on trade may be harmful or beneficial to consumers, depending on the context. For example, AT&T’s exclusive agreement to carry the iPhone gave it an advantage over Verizon and other competitors, but this vertical restraint ultimately helped consumers by jumpstarting a sleepy smartphone industry and igniting the mobile broadband revolution.

Ultimately, concerns about tiered pricing are misplaced. The real problem is market power, and more specifically, the abuse of market power in ways that hurt consumers. If a company with market power adopts a particular pricing scheme that harms consumers, regulators can and should use antitrust law to stop the practice.

But we should be wary of calls to change existing law simply to protect favored companies like Netflix. Netflix is not inherently good, and the cable industry is not inherently evil. Rather, they are competitors with different business models. The law should not pick winners and losers among corporations, especially in such a dynamic marketplace.

Daniel Lyons is an Assistant Professor of Law at Boston College Law School.

Image: nicemonkey / Shutterstock.com

While the Théâtrophone was an impressive invention in its day, the subscription model itself has a prolific and fascinating history of enabling innovation throughout the world. Subscriptions have helped companies pioneer new distribution models across a diverse set of business applications; all in the name of seeking efficient annuity revenue streams that outweigh the cost of production and distribution. From an end-customer “subscriber” perspective, the convenience of easy access or repeat consumption can greatly outweigh the incremental cost of subscribing.

Subscriptions have historically also found ways to take on greater social meaning through the signaling of a certain status by way of access to a secret society, social club or charitable organization. In the 1700s, by “subscribing” to become a benefactor to a charitable organization or society, individuals were able to achieve certain significance among their peers. Subscriptions to charity balls and full-seasons of theatre access were as much of a status symbol as they were convenient. Country clubs, yacht clubs, athletic clubs, fraternities and other private clubs have almost always been entirely member funded by way of the subscription membership model. Memberships, dues, donations and even tithing from the Catholic Church were achieved via scheduled “subscription” payments.

During the 18th century, the notion of subscription that we know today arrived when subscriptions to periodicals, magazines, books and theatre events became common. These subscriptions typically included delivery of the printed material and were sold for a specified number of issues or a period of time.

During the 1800s, the idea of pay-as-you-go subscriptions emerged to support the need for staple items such as heating oil, coal, milk, ice and even diapers to be delivered to your home. In Paris, a five-franc annual tariff was levied on all residents for their “subscription” to a hectoliter of drinking water per day.

Throughout history, we observe some interesting commonality across each of these examples. Whether we’re talking about subscriptions for the purpose of convenience, pay-as-you-go consumption, engagement or status, the underlying business driver has always been that subscriptions provide the ability to generate capital in the form of an attractive annuity revenue stream. From a financial perspective, companies that are able to generate a growing audience of subscribers producing predictable revenue streams are far more capital-efficient than companies that need to acquire, and then re-acquire, each customer interaction. (If you’re ever curious about this assertion, just ask yourself why so many insurance companies occupy the largest buildings across all major cities in the United States.² By definition, insurance is an annuity-based, subscription business.)

Fast forward to today. We are in the midst of yet another explosive expansion of subscription business models. From traditional media moving to digital media, to the rapid adoption of SaaS and cloud-based businesses, mobile and social products, applications and services are all careening toward some form of subscription-based offering. This is largely because the cost of developing and launching new businesses has declined to such an extent that it requires a very different level of up-front capital investment to chase these opportunities.

Why are subscription models everywhere today? The following intersection of trends is powering the recent appeal for subscriptions:

From the business perspective, there has always been a strong appeal in creating a predictable stream of revenue. Beyond that, the notion of maximizing lifetime value from existing customers is something that has always existed, but is now enabled through better visibility into activity. Traditional e-commerce companies like eBay have long focused on optimizing the “Triple A’s” — Acquisition, Activation and Activity. With today’s technology in place, we now have the ability to solve for all of these variables in a way that is not only more palatable to the end customer, but in many respects the optimization is couched in a way that is actually a benefit to the customer. (Think about the recent reminders you’ve likely received from your oil changer, dentist or even hair stylist that it is time for you to come back for your next appointment.)

Consumers have evolved a long way from the cable and magazine subscriber of yesterday as well. Today, consumers expect to have a range of choice in their offerings. They’ll commit to subscribe particularly if they have the ability to select from a range of feature/pricing options that best suit their own preferences.

There exists a psychological minimum. If a service is offered at a price level that feels low enough in relation to the marginal benefit that they receive, a consumer will subscribe. Conversely, they will elect to cancel if the marginal benefit wanes and is no longer worth the cost to continue subscribing. Managing the perceived value of any subscription product or service over time creates a relationship between the consumer and the service provider, each of whom seeks to maximize the value they are receiving from the other.

At the same time, the upfront capital investment required to launch a new enterprise service has declined to such an extent that it affords businesses a greater opportunity to test and learn as they go. As recently as 10 or 12 years ago, during the first dot-com boom, companies raised massive amounts of money not only to signal a coveted first-mover market position, but also to fund the huge amount of investment required to scale out a company. Today, we have cloud services and SaaS/PaaS offerings like Amazon Web Services and RackSpace.

The Web has become too fragmented to sustain ad-only revenue models.
Ten years ago, venture capitalists were inundated with companies seeking funding for ad-supported business models. Today, the Web is far too fragmented to support businesses seeking to aggregate massive ad dollars.

There has been a 100X reduction in the cost of software infrastructure within 10 years.
Here is an example: In just over 10 years, the “rented” application infrastructure model once offered by Kontiki (before it was called SaaS/PaaS) would have cost a customer approximately $100,000 per month to launch a business. Today, the same offering is delivered by Amazon Web Services for approximately $1,000 per month.

The cost of storage has plummeted 16X in the last 10 years.
Today, it costs you $0.085 per GB to store data. Ten years ago, it cost $1.39/GB. This decline in storage costs has created the opportunity for subscription-based file-sharing and backup companies like Box.net and Dropbox.³

The cost of Internet bandwidth “transit” has declined 75X in the past 10 years.
Entirely new business models have emerged due to the proliferation of inexpensive and ubiquitous broadband connectivity. This has allowed companies like Hulu and Netflix to have distribution to large markets at economically sustainable rates.⁴

Open-source software has eliminated the need for expensive licenses.
Ten years ago, companies aiming to deliver a service at scale were likely to sign up for expensive Oracle and Microsoft licenses. Today, startups have an impressive roster of free open-source software to choose from to run their operations.

On the Web today, the confluence of these trends is creating new markets and opportunities. The functional role of marketing has evolved to become increasingly data-driven.

Financial CRM allows the consumer to get what they want, and the business to provide a well-crafted migration path of high-probability options for cross-sell and up-sell options in the future. The management of this path for monetizing users post-sale has become an even more critical discipline for maximizing enterprise profitability than the sexy and creative brand-building efforts on which companies have traditionally focused.

All of these factors combined increasingly lead entrepreneurs to a similar conclusion. It is now far more efficient to offer products and services via subscriptions. Subscription pricing easily attracts customers, eliminates their purchase anxiety and, if designed well, keeps them happily paying over a longer period of time. Subscription models not only allow for attractive and efficient pricing, but also alleviate the need for a heavy-handed sales pitch. Ultimately, customers appreciate that they are in more control — always having the ability to upgrade their service, or to cancel and move on to something better.

Based in San Francisco, Dan Burkhart is the CEO and co-founder of subscription billing service Recurly, Inc. He was also an executive at eBay and NBC Internet.

Background image copyright kentoh

For the uninitiated, the former president is referring to the fact that there are few to no American communities that are hubs of the kind of world-leading bandwidth sufficient to drive next-generation innovation in our economy. He’s referring to the fact that, though international studies differ, the United States does not enjoy bandwidth that is nearly as fast as our peer countries. He’s referring to the fact that, for the first time since American ingenuity birthed the commercial Internet, we do not have a single national wireline provider with plans to deploy a better, faster and bigger network. For most Americans, five years from now, the best network available to them will be the same network they have today. As a result, the best networks — along with the innovations and economic power they enable — will live in other countries as well.

But we should not give up on American ingenuity; as Tom Friedman detailed in a recent New York Times op-ed, upgrading the broadband network in Chattanooga, Tenn., to world-leading gigabit speeds has transformed the community from a “slowly declining and deflating urban balloon” to the fastest growing city in Tennessee, attracting “a beehive of tech startups that all thrive on big data and super-high-speed Internet.” That’s what Gangnam bandwidth can do in America.

That’s why a recent announcement about big bandwidth from Seattle is also big news. The city just announced a plan to bring gigabit service to a dozen of its neighborhoods. Over 100,000 Seattle residents, as well as health care and educational institutions, will have access to world-leading speeds. Not only is the scale of Seattle’s effort impressive, the path it took — smart policies involving rights of way management and dark fiber — can be replicated by other communities that wish to control their own bandwidth destiny.

As America’s National Broadband Plan concluded in 2010, our country needs a critical mass of communities with world-leading networks for us to continue to have the kind of environment that fosters the cutting edge innovations necessary to develop the next generation of world-leading broadband applications. Seattle is not alone in recognizing that bigger bandwidth is an economic development tool. Just as in decades past, when communities had to learn how to benefit from new modes of power or transportation — with electrical, train or air terminal facilities — so it is now with bandwidth. Officials in Kansas City, Kansas and Missouri worked with Google, offering streamlined processes and regulatory efficiencies. Mayor Emanuel in Chicago and Mayor Bloomberg in New York have both recently launched initiatives to enhance their cities’ digital future. Thanks to efforts by their local leadership and a commitment to next-generation networks, residents in Bristol, Virginia; Chattanooga, Tennessee; and Lafayette, Louisiana can already get gigabit speeds. And Gig.U, a consortium of universities and communities looking to accelerate next-generation connectivity in their regions, has, in addition to the Seattle project, helped catalyze ultra-high-speed broadband projects in the past few months: in Orono and Old Town, Maine; Cleveland, Ohio; Gainesville, Florida; East Lansing, Michigan and Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.

Not every community has Seattle’s assets, particularly the strong information, communications, apps development economy and committed local leaders like Mayor McGinn. But Seattle has created a model that every community can follow in improving the environment for the private investment necessary to create a new generation of American broadband leadership. Mr. Friedman proposed a $20 billion fund to bring gigabit connectivity to 200 American cities, arguing that these networks would lead to “a ‘melt-up’ in the United States economy.” While, unfortunately in our view, such a program may not be in the realm of the politically achievable, ironically, it might be the actions of individual cities to catalyze such networks that leads to the kind of growth, debt reduction and surplus that could enable the federal government to once again consider big programs to drive growth and American economic leadership. And this is the kind of policy innovation America deserves.

Blair Levin became Communications & Society Fellow with the Aspen Institute after serving as Executive Director of the National Broadband Planning effort. He is currently Executive Director of Gig.U, a project within the Institute that seeks to accelerate the deployment of next generation networks and services by using university communities as test-beds.

The University Community Next Generation Innovation Project, or Gig.U, is a broad-based group of over 30 leading research universities from across the United States. Drawing on America’s rich history of community-led innovation in research and entrepreneurship, Gig.U seeks to accelerate the deployment of gigabit-speed networks to leading U. S. universities and their surrounding communities. Improvements to these networks drive economic growth and stimulate a new generation of innovations addressing critical needs, such as health care and education. Visit Gig.U online at www.gig-u.org.

The Los Gatos, Calif. Company said that it will provide Cablevision with servers directly in the cable operator’s network to store and manage Netflix’s movie and TV content, a deal that promises an enhanced video streaming experience for Cablevision subscribers. Netflix also said that it has struck similar partnerships with other smaller Internet service providers domestically and some abroad. The announcement was made at CES in Las Vegas.

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Fleur Pellerin, France’s technology minister, said the government is looking at how existing telecommunication regulations could be harnessed to ensure Web giants help pay to roll out and maintain high-speed networks.

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Google’s video service accounts for 22 percent of all mobile bandwidth, reports Allot Communications, a telco outfit that tracks this stuff twice a year (via GigaOm).  YouTube’s global share is up from 17 percent a year ago; not surprisingly, YouTube is the dominant mobile video streaming service, with 52 percent of the market.

That jibes directionally with music video site Vevo’s reports of a boom in its mobile traffic, as well as continued growth from Facebook and Twitter, which happen to be excellent sources of YouTube links. Allot reports that Facebook has seen a 166 percent increase in mobile bandwidth so far this year, while Twitter is up 297 percent.

The policy is effective immediately and is intended to ensure that average data users aren’t negatively affected by the inordinate data consumption of just a few users. Says Verizon, “If you use an extraordinary amount of data and fall within the top 5 percent of Verizon Wireless data users we may reduce your data throughput speeds periodically for the remainder of your then current and immediately following billing cycle to ensure high quality network performance for other users at locations and times of peak demand.”

What constitutes an “extraordinary amount of data”? Verizon doesn’t say, but I’m sure its subscribers will know it when they hit it, because their speeds will drop for almost two billing cycles.

And to think that just a few weeks ago, Verizon was talking up its plan to offer iPhone buyers a $30 unlimited data plan. Evidently it applies to the amount of data only, not the rate at which it’s downloaded.

Verizon says the shift in policy has nothing to do with the looming debut of the iPhone (“There’s nothing magic about the timing.”), which is widely known to tax carrier networks. But the timing here makes it hard to believe. This is Verizon bracing itself for the iPhone data deluge.

For those who need a quick recap, Honeycomb, a.k.a. version 3.0 of Android, is designed with tablets in mind and features improved multitouch and notifications, as well as a new user interface and the ability to have applications span multiple panes.

Here’s the liveblog, and there’s a video at the bottom.

10:00 am: Things are just about to get underway here. Everyone has been let in and is in their seats. Presumably to avoid recent issues, we’ve been asked not to use wireless hotspots but, thankfully, there is Google-provided Wi-Fi.

10:02 am: Andy Rubin takes the stage and is welcoming folks. Rubin promises a demo of Motorola Xoom and then we’re going to hear about the future of Android Market.

10:03 am: Rubin on Android: It’s open source. “We consider ourselves the shepherd of it,” he said, noting how many cool Android products he saw at last month’s Consumer Electronics Show.

“With open source, you don’t really know what is going to happen. All the innovation doesn’t happen in this building.”

10:04 am: Rubin is talking about the central role of the cloud, noting that in the future we’ll see more integration between phones and tablets and Google TV (which is also based on Android).

10:05 am: Now up, Hugo Barra, head of Android products, to show off Honeycomb.

10:06 am: First shots of Honeycomb. The bottom left corner has a home button, a back button and a button that brings up recently used items. The bottom left has a clock and various notifications.

“The rest of the screen is dedicated to applications,” Barra says.

10:08 am: Notifications are designed to be non-intrusive, like on phones, but use the extra real estate to provide a bit more information, such as the photo of the person sending an instant message.

In another example, while a music app is active, one can play or pause music from the notification tray.

10:10 am: The notification area also provides quick access to settings such as Airplane mode and to lock the screen orientation.

Barra said that existing apps that follow Android guidelines should run well without modification. Demos existing version of Fruit Ninja, developed before Honeycomb, running well on the tablet.

10:11 am: Of course, Google wants to encourage Honeycomb-specific apps as well. To do that, Google added a number of new tools and concepts, such as fragments, which let apps be split into various panes. Barra is demoing how this works in a Gmail app.

10:12 am: There’s also improved drag-and-drop capabilities in Honeycomb, as well as an application bar at the top that brings common application commands to the forefront.

10:14 am: Barra says that the company spent a lot of time optimizing performance, particularly around 2-D and 3-D graphics.

Existing 2-D graphics code can be hardware accelerated with just a line of code, while a new framework has been added to speed up animations.

There’s also a new engine, called RenderScript, aimed at 3-D graphics. Barra shows this in action in YouTube carousel and turning pages in Google Books.

10:17 am: Barra also shows 3-D in action in Google Body–kind of like Google Maps for the human body.

Now he brings up a game developer to show. Thomas Williamson, CEO of some game maker whose name I didn’t catch, shows Monster Madness, a PS3 game being brought over to Android.

10:21 am: Demo of new camera app, with new design taking advantage of added screen real estate.

Honeycomb supports video chat natively.

They’ve added image stabilization to video chat to improve quality and save bandwidth.

10:23 am: Barra is trying to demo video chat, but can’t find “lady killer” whom he was trying to chat with. Perhaps that user is out, killing ladies.

Decides to chat with his friend Anand instead.

“Sorry I’m not lady killer,” Anand says. “I’m not bad with the ladies, though.”

10:24 am: Now invites CNN exec to show an app they have built for Honeycomb.

10:25 am: Louis Gump, VP of mobile, showing new tablet version of its app for Android. It uses fragments to allow users to choose categories, dive in and swipe from one place to another.

“This is an incredibly immersive experience,” Gump says. “Consumers love it.”

The app includes audio and live video.

10:28 am: It adds iReport for the tablet, allowing people to view user-generated content as well as capture their own photos and videos and upload them from within the app.

10:31 am: Okay, we’re still trying to reach “lady killer” but moving on nonetheless.

10:32 am: Demo of new Android market features with Chris Yerga, an engineering lead at Google.

10:34 am: Release of Android market Web store. It’s the new way for users to get applications on their devices. Previously had to do so only from the Android device. Now users can go to browser.

From the Web, users can purchase and have the app installed directly on their Android devices.

10:35 am: For those who had “cloud-based Android Market” in their Honeycomb Bingo, please mark your square now. (Google Music, anyone?)

10:37 am: Allows you to install app on one or all of one’s compatible Android devices. Moving to the Web allows more graphics and a better sense of the Apps, Yerga says.

He demos buying an app, putting it “on his Google corporate credit card.”

Android Market Web site also makes it easier for friends to share and recommend apps. Email can take a link direct to that app’s page in the store.

In addition to screenshots, developers can post a YouTube video of their app in action.

There’s also a “tweet” button for each app that creates a deep link to that app in the market.

If you are on a computer, the link takes you to a Web market; from an Android device it will take you to the built-in Android Market client.

10:43 am: Okay, if you had “automagically” in your Honeycomb Bingo card, you can mark that one as well.

Next time, perhaps Mobilized will make up actual Bingo cards.

10:44 am: Developers will also have the option to price their app for different currencies. Currently, apps are priced in one currency and then converted.

This will be rolled out in phases, Yerga says.

(Still no “lady killer,” Yerga notes.)

10:45 am: Support for in-app purchases also coming to Android via a new software development kit.

10:47 am: A Disney Mobile rep is up talking about its Android plans. “That number is about to get a lot bigger,” the rep says, noting that the company is bringing Radio Disney and two other apps to Android.

Also bringing Jelly Car, a physics game, as well as Tap Tap Revenge, the company’s biggest mobile title.

The company waited for in-app purchases to be available on Android before porting Tap Tap Revenge, says Disney Mobile exec Bart Decrem.

10:52 am: That allows you to, say, download the latest track from Bruno Mars, who is apparently a really big deal. (Mobilized is old and has to be told who is big these days.)

10:53 am: Yerga is back. Developer code being released for in-app purchases today, though Google has been testing with a few publishers.

In-app purchases will be released for customers before the end of the quarter, Yerga says.

10:54 am: Almost time for the event to wrap up. But first we have “lady killer,” who is apparently music artist Cee Lo Green. (Did we mention we are old?)

10:55 am: Event wraps up and we are off to the demo room to try to shoot some video of Honeycomb in action.

Update: And here it is:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110202/live-talking-tablet-from-googles-honeycomb-event/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110107/how-to-steal-any-movie-you-want-on-the-web-wall-street-gets-a-how-to-guide/ http://allthingsd.com/20110107/how-to-steal-any-movie-you-want-on-the-web-wall-street-gets-a-how-to-guide/#comments Fri, 07 Jan 2011 16:21:41 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=27741 It’s easier than ever to download any movie or TV show you want on the Web, for free. Just ask Rich Greenfield. Or better yet, let the Wall Street analyst show you, via a helpful four-minute video embedded at the bottom of this post.

And if you don’t want to invest that much time, here’s the super-short version: Head to a pirate review site like Scenesource, look for any movie you want and then look in the comments for links to cloud-based storage lockers where you can grab a copy of the movie, for free.

You may have to try a couple of links, because they eventually get shut down, but it should still be very easy–and more comfortable for mainstream users than dealing with BitTorrent software, which has been the preferred piracy method for some time.

Greenfield’s larger point (registration required) is that the rise of Internet-connected TVs–look around this year’s Consumer Electronics Show and you’ll realize that the next set you buy will almost certainly have a Web connection, whether you want it or not–and cheap bandwidth is going to create a giant headache for big media.

Big media and technology companies can try to fight it with legal and mechanical tactics, or half-steps like UltraViolet, the “everybody but Apple” coalition. But the best long-term answer is to make media consumption incredibly cheap, and incredibly easy, so that it’s more convenient for mainstream users to get it legally than to go through the pirate sites.

That’s an incredibly hard thing to do, because it involves trading big, existing revenue streams for smaller ones down the line. But not doing it can be even more costly: Ask the music labels.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110107/how-to-steal-any-movie-you-want-on-the-web-wall-street-gets-a-how-to-guide/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20101222/no-signal-homes-often-baffle-wi-fi-from-routers/ http://allthingsd.com/20101222/no-signal-homes-often-baffle-wi-fi-from-routers/#comments Wed, 22 Dec 2010 23:55:59 +0000 Geoffrey A. Fowler http://ptech.allthingsd.com/?p=1687 Technology companies are touting wireless homes, where we can download a book in the tub and beam a movie from a tablet to the television set. But too often, that potential doesn’t live up to the reality of sluggish and flaky wireless networks.

My apartment has more than a dozen devices that feed off the network: two laptops, a printer, an e-reader, wireless speakers, two smartphones, an iPad and more. Yet getting gadgets to connect to my two-year-old wireless router is a dark art. I can surf the Web on the street in front of my house, yet can’t get a signal sitting in bed. In desperation, I even tried dangling a router—the equipment that takes your Internet connection and shares it with the devices in your home—from the ceiling in an effort to distance it from interfering walls.

Surely, covering a whole apartment is a problem that the decade-old Wi-Fi industry can solve. So I tested four top-of-the-line home wireless routers, each of which features the latest generation dual-band “wireless N” technology designed to increase performance.

The result was disappointing. None of the routers could deliver a 100% consistent wireless experience that could take advantage of the latest technology, like Apple’s AirPlay media-streaming service.

One came close, thanks to a controversial signal-boosting feature that could potentially interrupt my neighbors’ networks: the Netgear WNDR3700, which retails for $169.99. Another, the $179.99 Cisco Linksys E3000, was runner-up in some tests, but still sometimes dropped out when streaming music.

My tests weren’t scientific studies of signal strength and speed. Every home is a different combination of size, building materials and potential competition for precious wireless bandwidth, such as other Wi-Fi networks and cordless phones. Even pets can obstruct signals. Because of that, router manufacturers won’t even offer estimates on the range their devices can serve.

I conducted real-world torture tests designed to see how the routers might perform in challenging scenarios at completing tasks like streaming media to iPhones and moving large files between computers. I didn’t test devices known as repeaters, which extend the range of an existing network, because I wanted to see how far I could push the routers on their own.

My 100-year-old apartment building features materials that act like kryptonite to Wi-Fi signals, such as metal mesh in plaster. Worse, my urban San Francisco building is surrounded by apartments with their own Wi-Fi networks—25, at last count.

For balance, I also tested the same four routers on my friend Mark’s suburban house, which competes with fewer neighboring Wi-Fi networks, but is larger. In our suburban tests, the routers performed in largely the way they did in the urban environment, though in that setting both the Netgear and Cisco performed admirably. A third model, the $109.99 Belkin Play N600HD, performed adequately.

All the routers I tested, which included the $179 Apple Airport Extreme, feature a technology called simultaneous dual band. This means they really run two networks. Devices that need to receive a lot of data, like video, can use the digital equivalent of a carpool lane, while the rest of your data take the regular highway.

That seems like a good idea, but the technology made little impact in my tests, because many devices don’t yet support the new frequency, 5 GHz. The iPad does, but the iPhone 4 does not, and nor did my older H-P laptop. Moreover, 5 GHz comes with a drawback: its signals usually can’t travel as far through walls as the older technology, transmitting at 2.4 GHz.

Rather than overall speed, the biggest Wi-Fi problem I encountered was getting the network to reach the nooks and crannies of the house. To test that, I compared the ability of each router to stream media to a device like my iPhone in trouble spots, such as my dining room or Mark’s patio.

The results were often stark. To Mark’s upstairs bedroom, the Netgear and Cisco routers could stream a video with ease, but the Apple would sometimes slow to a crawl. When I sent a file over the network to that same spot, the Apple router was sometimes one-tenth the speed of the Netgear and Cisco.

In my urban apartment, only the Netgear router was able without interruption to stream music from an iMac to speakers about 50 feet and five walls away. The music would conk out occasionally with the Cisco router, and quite often with the Belkin and Apple.

And even the Netgear would stumble when I tried the latest feature for the iPhone called AirTunes, which lets you stream media from an iPhone or iPad to the Apple AirPort Express or Apple TV. That technology requires the data to take a longer round trip to its final destination, stressing the network further.

With the Netgear router, I experimented with a setting called “performance mode.” Using it significantly improved the reliability of the network in some parts of my apartment, and put Netgear into a higher class.

But that option, which is sometimes called “channel bonding” or “20/40″ mode, is controversial because it essentially pushes signals from your neighbors’ Wi-Fi networks out of the way.

The Wi-Fi Alliance, which certifies Wi-Fi equipment, said it now requires routers to switch to a neighbor-friendly mode if other networks are around—but this Netgear router was certified prior to that rule. The other router makers say they either don’t offer the option, or automatically downscale when there are neighboring networks.

Wi-Fi technology shouldn’t make me have to choose between my neighbors and my network. A Netgear spokesman told me that in my situation, neighbors aren’t likely to feel an impact, because my impenetrable walls keep the signal from traveling very far anyway.

Being a good neighbor aside, I’d recommend either the Netgear or Cisco routers for users looking to cover a tough space—and hope that the networking industry can come up with even better technology soon. In the meantime, moving a router away from objects that can degrade the signal, like mirrors and refrigerators can help. And the desperate can fall back on a wireless repeater.

---

Apple Airport Extreme, $179
The most pleasing to look at and simple to install, but suffered from slow transfer speeds and frequently struggled to stream music to difficult locations.

Belkin Play N600HD, $109.99
Acceptable and sometimes impressive file transfer speeds, but often dropped the connection while streaming music.

Netgear WNDR3700, $169.99
The least pretty, but most reliable, especially when using the potentially neighbor-unfriendly ‘performance mode.’

Cisco Linksys E3000, $179.99
Fast in most tests, but sometimes cut out when streaming music. A good option for the less technically inclined

---

Walter S. Mossberg returns next week.

Write to Geoffrey A. Fowler at geoffrey.fowler@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101222/no-signal-homes-often-baffle-wi-fi-from-routers/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101220/the-fcc-votes-on-net-neutrality-tomorrow-the-internet-waits/ http://allthingsd.com/20101220/the-fcc-votes-on-net-neutrality-tomorrow-the-internet-waits/#comments Mon, 20 Dec 2010 15:53:29 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=806 The battle over net neutrality–a sweeping, wonkish policy debate concerning the government’s role in telling broadband Internet service providers how they must operate their networks–is coming to a head on Tuesday morning with a vote on the latest policy proposal by the Federal Communications Commission.

There are of course a lot of moving pieces surrounding this debate, and however the chips fall, it’s going to have a long-term effect over how the Internet operates over the next several years.

Earlier this year, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski was dealt an important setback when the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the FCC doesn’t have the legal authority to impose net neutrality rules on broadband providers. In hopes of still finding a way to rein in the providers, he’s since circulated new proposed rules that would require providers to disclose what kind of traffic they intend to throttle and why, giving consumers a little more information so they can make a more informed choice when picking a provider. And in a speech on Dec. 1, Genachowski also expressed support for “usage-based pricing,” which would essentially allow providers to charge variable pricing plans where consumers would pay higher fees for using higher amounts of bandwidth.

Certain Internet companies that aren’t providers, but who rely on having unfettered pipes through which they can deliver their services, aren’t happy with the proposed rules either. Companies like Amazon, Skype and Netflix, want stronger rules that would prevent the providers from slowing down traffic from their sites or blocking them altogether. They’ve even pushed the FCC to reconsider regulating the Internet outright as a telecommunications service, as it does the telephone system today, an idea that Genachowski briefly considered, then abandoned.

No surprise, they’ve been lobbying the FCC heavily, as have the telecom providers. According to Capital Business, a Washington Post publication, 150 organizations have hired 118 lobbying firms to try to influence the outcome of tomorrow’s vote.

The pressure isn’t stopping there. Republican commissioner Robert McDowell has pledged to vote against the rules, saying, as he did in a Wall Street Journal op-ed today, that imposing regulations would threaten everything that makes the Internet a source of innovation. Commissioner Meredith Baker Attwell, also a Republican, has attacked the proposal and similarly pledged to vote against it, arguing that only Congress, not the FCC, has the authority to regulate the Internet.

Congressional Republicans, with their heads full of steam after their November electoral wins, are rushing into the fray. Michigan’s Republican Representative Fred Upton, who will chair the House Energy and Commerce Committee when the new Congress comes into session early next year, wrote Genachowski and called his proposal “the most controversial item the FCC has had before it in a decade.”

Meanwhile, Congressional Democrats are pressing fellow Democrat Michael Copps to vote for Genachowski’s rules, fearing that a vote against them would hurt President Obama politically, as Sara Jerome wrote in Hillicon Valley. In the end, he is expected to fall in line and vote in favor.

Perhaps a harbinger of things to come is the spat between Level 3 Communications and Comcast. Level 3, which operates much of North America’s fiber-optic network, last month accused Comcast of “trying to set up a toll booth” by charging Level 3 recurring fees whenever a Comcast subscriber streamed content that got delivered by Level 3. This happened right after Level 3 cut a deal to become the primary delivery network for Netflix.

The dispute has reached sufficient intensity for Level 3 to ask federal regulators to impose conditions on Comcast in its efforts to acquire NBC Universal, arguing that Comcast’s demand for the fees “adversely changes the nature of the Internet.” The FCC may yet get serious about reviewing the merger, as Politico reported last week.

Comcast for its part has argued that Level 3 is gaming network peering rules, and has “demanded unlimited capacity at our cost.”

Whatever the outcome of tomorrow’s vote, expect lots of unhappy people.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101220/the-fcc-votes-on-net-neutrality-tomorrow-the-internet-waits/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20101217/iphone-app-iteleport-wants-you-to-get-excited-about-vnc/ http://allthingsd.com/20101217/iphone-app-iteleport-wants-you-to-get-excited-about-vnc/#comments Sat, 18 Dec 2010 00:12:03 +0000 Voices http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=34023

In app store terms, iTeleport is as old as it gets. In fact, it actually predates the app store, according to founder J Sherwani.

Today, iTeleport’s update will offer the product free for 30 days, and then switch to $3 a month thereafter or $25 for unlimited use.

So, why would a small, profitable company–Sherwani said there have been a total of about 700,000 devices on iTeleport in its two-plus years in existence–decide to give away its only product for free?

According to iTeleport, it’s the thing to do if you want to change how people think of VNC, or virtual network computing.

Essentially, that means you can use one computer to log in to and operate another.

And this two-man shop might not be alone in thinking there’s a future in bringing VNC-style computing to the masses.

Vishal Kapur, the other iTeleporter, said that he thinks there is an untapped consumer group out there for VNC, especially those using Apple’s iPad and iPhone, and that most users aren’t there yet because there haven’t been consumer-focused products built on the technology.

“They [VNCs] have been around for 25 years, but they have always been an enterprise thing,” Kapur said.

But moves by larger companies, such as the recent demo of OnLive’s new cloud gaming and computing system at the D: Dive Into Mobile conference, indicate that the iTeleport team may not be the only ones thinking the future lies in this direction.

In fact, Mobilized’s Ina Fried reported on enterprise software maker Wyse doing pretty much the same thing–taking its basic VNC app and making it free.

While freer access to a desktop’s files on the go might be great, the bigger question here is: What are the hurdles ahead now that it looks like we might have a race?

Sherwani sees a world where you can share a screen, folder or an online shopping experience with a friend just as fast as you can share a link today.

He thinks the biggest barrier to overcome is the narrative about what VNCs are good for, but admits there are technical limitations too.

Thus, he wants iTeleport to rethink what the VNC is and repackage the whole experience to make using your desktop through your iPhone “as good as, if not better than,” sitting in front of it.

Big ideas are important, but there are also some bandwidth realities to overcome.

Today, VNCs don’t include sound, and depending on your connection speed at both ends–your desktop and mobile device–there is enough lag to make modern games and HD video look like a flip book.

Also, many people turn their computers off (or close the lid) when they leave the house, which renders the VNC connection useless.

Sherwani concedes these are big issues today, but said that the first step is to let more people see what VNC can do, and to let them share stories of consumer VNC experiences.

With little app makers like iTeleport in the mix with businesses in totally different weight classes, the future of VNC, or maybe we could call it “mobile terminal computing,” is interesting, if a bit murky.

Will users either gravitate toward OnLive’s model of taking a tiny piece of a very big cloud, or will there be a more scaled model, where the OnLives and the iTeleports of the world exist together and users simply choose seamlessly between how much computing power and interactivity they require to fill a given need?

Since we aren’t in the heyday of the teleport yet, please accept this video interview with the iTeleport team as a substitute:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101217/iphone-app-iteleport-wants-you-to-get-excited-about-vnc/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101209/palm-boss-talks-past-future-of-webo/ http://allthingsd.com/20101209/palm-boss-talks-past-future-of-webo/#comments Thu, 09 Dec 2010 13:00:44 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=672 After his onstage talk at D: Dive Into Mobile, Jon Rubinstein, head of HP’s Palm unit, sat down with Mobilized to talk more about webOS–its past, present and future.

In the interview, he talked a lot about what had changed in the five months since HP completed its purchase of Palm. A bunch of Palm workers have left, but Rubinstein noted that the unit has made more than 70 new hires and brought over more than 200 people from HP. The company has also shifted its focus to include tablets and printers and other types of mobile devices–something the underfunded standalone company wasn’t even considering doing.

“We were looking strictly at phones,” Rubinstein acknowledged, while maintaining that the webOS itself is designed to scale.

Here is an edited transcript of our conversation:

Mobilized: When you guys were a standalone company, were you focused on phones? Or were you already looking at tablets and other kinds of devices?

Rubinstein: We were looking strictly at phones. We were a small company, but when we designed webOS we designed it to be scalable. To build a great tablet experience on top of it is fairly straightforward. It is work–we’ve got to update the user interface and there are some other things we have got to do.

But the basic system is absolutely scalable to a tablet. While we weren’t working on it, that was one of the real attractions that Palm had for HP, that they could rapidly expand into a variety of different devices.

Obviously their long-term interest isn’t just in tablets and phones even?

Rubinstein: They’ve stated they are moving their printers to webOS. We’re busy working with the guys from the printer division to do that. There are other things going on within various parts of HP that are looking at using webOS or building on top of webOS.

The Labs people are doing some really exciting things. They are very excited to have webOS to build on top of.

What are some of the considerations that come in when you are going to build for a printer or a tablet that just weren’t needed when you were just a phone?

Rubinstein: Well, because webOS was a 1.0 operating system, frankly we hadn’t paid enough attention to machine dependencies. We were doing each product in its entirety. We did have to worry about another division using the code or even having more form factors than a handful at any point in time. So, one of the things we are doing right now is getting webOS to be much more machine-independent.

We were clearly very interested in enterprise, but it wasn’t on as fast a track as we are now. We already had a variety of enterprise capabilities. WebOS 2.0 has got VPN and other enterprise-class features. But we’re significantly accelerating our enterprise capabilities so we can utilize HP’s huge sales channel in the enterprise

You talked about webOS scaling. Is there any reason it couldn’t be powering a low-end notebook?

I think a netbook is fine. I don’t really want to get into the notebook business. We’ll leave that to Microsoft. The notebook business is partnering closely with Microsoft. We’re not focused on that at all. Our plan isn’t to subsume what Microsoft [does]. That’s not our goal. There is a very, very strong business on both the notebook and desktop space–and server space–that’s Windows-based and that makes sense.

With the HP acquisition you got a lot more resources, but you lost a lot of the people that built webOS.

Rubinstein: Yes and no. There’s a large group of us that built webOS. Clearly, anytime you go through a transition like this you are going to lose some people along the way. We lost some. We’ve also been hiring a lot. Since we closed the deal we have hired over 70 people. Two hundred-plus people from HP have joined us, and other divisions at HP are busy working on helping us make webOS successful. So while yes, we lost a few people along the way, we gained a lot of people.

You mentioned on stage you have a variety of products coming next year in several shapes and sizes–phones, tablets. How important will next generations be for some of those products?

Rubinstein: We’re big believers that the more bandwidth the better. I am very excited to get to LTE and HSDPA+ [two faster cellular networks]. We have some really interesting visions on where webOS can go as you get more and more bandwidth.

You were there the other night when [Qualcomm CEO] Paul [Jacobs] and I were talking. The two big issues, we think, are battery life and bandwidth.

More and more bandwidth will enable more and more things that today we cannot even imagine. And remember, we designed webOS to integrate tightly with the cloud. My personal view is that
it’s not about applications. Applications actually [will] bifurcate to where part of them runs on the device and part of them runs on the cloud.

Are you spending a lot of time thinking about how to synch the data that lives in a webOS device with all of HP’s other products?

Rubinstein: We certainly think that a unifying experience around webOS and the ability to access your cloud data across a variety of devices is absolutely crucial

A lot of data is going to be on laptops and desktops. Do you need to build a cloud device to have webOS talk to them?

Rubinstein: Stay tuned.

How do you get the developers you need to create webOS apps?

We have a lot of really interesting ways to develop for webOS. It’s very easy to develop for, and people like developing for it. We are getting a whole new generation of developers.

We had this developer conference in New York. If you look at the audience, a lot of them were under 17 and they were making enough money selling applications to come from wherever they were–they weren’t from New York–to bring one of their parents or both of their parents to come to the developer conference.

And to grow your share of the big-time application developers in mobile. Do you think it’s just a scale question, and if you guys can sell more devices you will get them?

Rubinstein: We have doubled our application base since, from sometime around the acquisition close until now

We’ve got, and it depends how you count it, 5,000 to 6,000 applications….If you look at the Android store, a lot of that is crapware. We’ve focused on delivering quality. We are going to add a lot more stuff over time as well, because obviously there’s a lot of competition about the number of apps. But at the end of the day they don’t use 300,000 apps–they use that dozen apps that are important to them. We need to make sure we have that dozen apps for a broad set of customers.

But you are not there today?

Rubinstein: We’re not there today. I would say we are well on our way. Obviously we kind of stalled for a bit going through the acquisition.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101209/palm-boss-talks-past-future-of-webo/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101130/palm-qualcomm-chiefs-weigh-wireless-future/ http://allthingsd.com/20101130/palm-qualcomm-chiefs-weigh-wireless-future/#comments Wed, 01 Dec 2010 02:32:02 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=144

Palm-CEO-turned-HP-exec Jon Rubinstein and Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs faced off with Kara Swisher of All Things Digital at a Churchill Club event last night in an entertaining discussion on the future of mobile tech.

If you missed the live video feed of the event, check back with us–we’re working to repost the video. For those who want to read text, here is my liveblog of the event.

6:48 pm PT: We’re just finishing dinner. It was a chicken in some sort of puff pastry. Nothing is happening onstage, as if that wasn’t clear by the fact I am describing the meal. I think they will get started around 7:15 or so.

7:10 pm: Just about ready to go, with intros going on now. (And I just stole Kara’s seat at the head table.)

Kara: They’re both guys. Paul is taller and they work in tech.

7:14 pm: The plan is to talk about the future, but the event begins with a trip down memory lane as Jacobs holds up the Qualcomm PDQ–arguably the first smartphone combining a cellphone and Palm Pilot. For those who don’t remember, it it was bigger than a Palm Pilot and a huge phone strapped together.

7:20 pm: Digital device history continues. We’ve traced the last decade in digital devices, from the iPod through the Treo and iPhone. Don’t forget ringtones and cellphone bowling, Jacobs reminds us, referring to the Brew operating environment that Qualcomm developed.

The iPhone changed everything, Jacobs says, because it showed that the phone makers just weren’t putting enough work into the phone’s user interface.

7:28 pm: Talk is shifting to where we are today. What are the key things that are shifting? User interfaces, touch, etc. “The other things we are seeing is all of our lives are moving into the cloud,” Rubinstein says. On the limitation side, Jacobs points to the limitations of bandwidth: “We don’t have enough spectrum right now,” Jacobs says, adding that the industry and government are working on it. ‘We are just going to have to be more creative about how we get content to the devices.”

The other big limitation, Jacobs says, is battery life. You can do all this cool stuff on your phone, but then the battery dies three-quarters of the way through the day. He puts in a plug for Mirasol–Qualcomm’s low-power display technology.

Rubinstein concurs that battery and bandwidth are the two biggest issues. “Battery technology has not progressed at the same rate as all of the other things we are trying to do,” Rubinstein says.

7:38 pm: What about all the operating systems out there, Kara asks. Rubinstein: “There’s plenty of room in the market for multiple systems,” he says, adding it won’t be like PCs, where one operating system dominates. “It’s just different today.”

Rubinstein says it’s still the infancy of the major transition. Put on the spot to rank the operating systems, Rubinstein says that clearly Apple and Android are going gangbusters. The battle, he says, is for who is going to be No. 3. “We’d sure like to be that.”

Jacobs: “I agree. It’s very early days to be calling winners and losers.” He sees pretty wide diversity of operating systems, at least for the next five years, unless the operators really clamp down. Even then, there are some alternate distribution channels emerging. Either way, Qualcomm’s in good shape as an arms dealer, he points out.

7:45 pm: Discussion of carriers. While they are immensely powerful, Rubinstein says they won’t be the only distribution channel for every wireless device. “They are not all going to go through the carriers,” Rubinstein says.

More and more screens will emerge, Rubinstein says. If I fast-forward enough years, he says, the walls are going to be big displays capable of talking to other devices.

Jacobs notes that people will be able to use their device with any tool they have access to, from a big screen to a headset to a wireless keyboard. He says Qualcomm is working on a technology that would allow wireless headsets that could work in-ear like a hearing aid.

7:50 pm: Talk about some outlandish things. Rubinstein has already thrown out the idea of a headset in your pillow. Rubinstein points out that there will be a lot of sensors, pointing to the Nike+iPod as a really early example of what we can expect a lot more of.

7:55 pm: Augmented reality is also going to be big, the panelists agree. “The (StarTrek) tricorder is going to happen,” Jacobs says. Health care will also tap mobile technology, particularly in emerging countries where there is less regulation, carriers are trusted and there are fewer skilled health care providers available. “It’s a very efficient way to manage health,” he says. “Over the next few years we will see this happen,” he says. Eventually it will come back to developed markets, but today there is too much legacy and too much regulation in places like the U.S.

8:10 pm: Sorry for the delay–we were fixing some issues with the video coding, which hopefully should be solved now. Anyway, Rubinstein and Jacobs have been throwing out things that they expect in the next five years.

Jacobs’s list includes digital networked textbooks, cellphones as gateways for health care, as well as using augmented reality to translate all the signs and menus in a foreign country.

Rubinstein and Jacobs both see a digital wallet becoming a reality, with Jacobs throwing out the idea of an end to checkout lines as the phone could pay and the store could electronically disable the security on goods, allowing the whole transaction to take place without interaction with store personnel.

“Legal shoplifting, that’s interesting.” Kara says.

The technical hurdles aren’t that big, Rubinstein says. “Clearly NFC (near-field communications) is coming.” It’s more of a social problem than a technical one, Rubinstein says.

8:21 pm: Some good audience questions. One, on what does it take to deliver an Apple-like experience. Rubinstein, who has experience as part of Apple and trying to “out-Apple” Apple, says he thinks that the key is delivering an intergrated experience.

“I don’t think Apple is the only one that can do it, but I do think it is important to have all the elements,” he says.

Another question is on the future of mobile TV–a question that prompts Jacobs to cover his face (Qualcomm spent a bundle on its MediaFlo mobile TV service that saw very limited consumer uptake and Qualcomm is now evaluating what to do with it).

Too few people liked what the service had to offer, Jacobs says, referring to limits on content, screen size, etc. Jacobs said it appears that probably broadcast makes sense for live events, while streaming with TiVo-like controls makes sense for everything else.

“I actually believe strongly in mobile TV, still,” he says.

8:30 pm: Okay. That’s a wrap from me. Thanks for tuning in. If you want to hear more from Rubinstein, he will be speaking at next week’s D: Dive Into Mobile conference.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101130/palm-qualcomm-chiefs-weigh-wireless-future/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100907/former-google-china-head-and-now-start-up-whisperer-kai-fu-lee-talks-innovation-works/ http://allthingsd.com/20100907/former-google-china-head-and-now-start-up-whisperer-kai-fu-lee-talks-innovation-works/#comments Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:10:30 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=33435

Last Friday, former Google China head Kai-Fu Lee (pictured here) dialed up BoomTown from that country for a chit-chat interview about his life since leaving the search giant one year ago and plunging into the world of incubation, recruiting and early-stage funding for start-ups there.

Being president of Google’s China operations is far different from being CEO of Innovation Works, which just celebrated its first anniversary.

And, although he left Google (GOOG) on tense terms, said many sources, Lee complimented it as still having the best technology in the world.

Nonetheless, he also added it will only become harder for any U.S. company to compete in China over the next few years for a variety of reasons.

Lee would not specifically talk about Google’s fight with China over censorship issues, but said the bigger problem for it and other U.S. Web companies was actually that they are not local or nimble enough to beat out an increasingly trained Chinese tech workforce.

According to Lee–as well as explained in an interesting deck he sent me that is embedded below–Silicon Valley can no longer rely on a tech edge that it has long had, and China units of U.S. tech companies still will not empower their Chinese employees enough to compete.

“In China, there are a mass of very talented engineers who can attack a long-tail opportunity very quickly,” he said. “This kind of speed is critical in this market now.”

That’s why–unlike most Silicon Valley venture firms with a presence in China–he decided to focus Innovation Works on early-stage companies.

“We see it as a unique opportunity to provide a refreshing accessibility for small, but promising, Chinese companies,” Lee said. “There are a lot of inefficiencies.”

With a heavy focus on mobile–which Lee considers the key arena in China, much of it based on versions of Google’s Android mobile operating system–Innovation Works has focused on a dozen start-ups, including:

Tapas: An Internet smartphone operating system–based on Google’s Android–tailored to Chinese users.

Wonderpod (Wandoujia): A software “assistant” for Android phones to download applications, videos and music without consuming expensive mobile bandwidth.

Umeng: An analytics tool for mobile developers in China.

Photo Wonder: Mobile phone software for enhancing and sharing photos.

Ascending Cloud: A game publisher built on proprietary technology for developing and publishing social and Web games for over 30 countries.

Lee said now that the strategy and investments are in place, next year’s focus will be on nurturing the companies Innovation Works has invested in.

While he said he knows that it is still early, Lee–who has also worked at Apple (AAPL) and Microsoft (MSFT)–said he thinks that China, specifically Beijing and Zhongguancun, could become the next Silicon Valley.

“There are 300 million Chinese using mobile devices and there is no one or two dominant player, as is the case in the U.S.,” Lee said. “It’s the same across a variety of areas, so the landscape for small, scrappy start-ups is wide open and huge.”

We’ll see how it all turns out. but here is the must-see deck from Lee, as well as a press release on Innovation Works’ first anniversary and a detailed description of it:

Innovation Works Overview (US Press)

Sep 8 Press Release

Incubation Programs

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100907/former-google-china-head-and-now-start-up-whisperer-kai-fu-lee-talks-innovation-works/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100817/wikileaks-gets-on-board-with-the-swedish-pirate-party/ http://allthingsd.com/20100817/wikileaks-gets-on-board-with-the-swedish-pirate-party/#comments Tue, 17 Aug 2010 23:08:28 +0000 Beth Callaghan http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=28451 Wikileaks has made new Web-hosting arrangements with the Swedish Pirate Party, which will supply bandwidth and hosting free of charge to the whistleblowing site. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange met with the group over the weekend in Stockholm. The Party, which was founded in 2006 to campaign for more freedom on the Internet, views the partnership as part of its political mission.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100817/wikileaks-gets-on-board-with-the-swedish-pirate-party/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100702/why-youll-pay-to-watch-ads-on-the-iphone-and-ipad-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20100702/why-youll-pay-to-watch-ads-on-the-iphone-and-ipad-2/#comments Fri, 02 Jul 2010 18:20:47 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=21287 The new iAds that Apple (AAPL) launched yesterday are interesting. But they had better be: You’re going to pay to see them.

This isn’t news, exactly. But consider it a reminder: AT&T’s (T) switch from an unlimited data plan to a tiered model means that everything iPad and iPhone users stream down to their devices via the carrier’s wireless network comes at a cost, measured in bytes.

So: Streaming a video to your iPad from Netflix (NFLX) or Hulu will chew up a lot bandwidth, and downloading an app will chew up much less. And clicking on an “in-app” ad, like the kind Apple is rolling out with iAd, will cost something, too: Each time you click on an app’s ad, the app makes a real-time call to Apple, which serves up a download.

How much will that cost you, bytewise? Web video producer Eric Spiegelman guesstimates that a tricked out iAd like the Nissan spot that debuted yesterday could require five megabytes.* Translate that into AT&T’s data plans, and you’re looking at something like six cents to 40 cents worth of data per iAd, depending on the package.

So not a bank-breaker! And again, no different than anything else you download to your iPhone or iPad. But maybe, depending on your use case and data plan, worth thinking about before you click.

If the idea of spending any of your precious data budget on ads really rankles you, by the way, you do have a choice. Either make sure you’re connected to a Wi-Fi connection before you click, or go completely offline, and you won’t see the iAds at all.

*Anyone else want to weigh in on the size of iAd downloads? Happy to hear your thoughts.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100702/why-youll-pay-to-watch-ads-on-the-iphone-and-ipad-2/feed/ 19 http://allthingsd.com/20100702/why-youll-pay-to-watch-ads-on-the-iphone-and-ipad/ http://allthingsd.com/20100702/why-youll-pay-to-watch-ads-on-the-iphone-and-ipad/#comments Fri, 02 Jul 2010 18:20:47 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=21287 The new iAds that Apple (AAPL) launched yesterday are interesting. But they had better be: You’re going to pay to see them.

This isn’t news, exactly. But consider it a reminder: AT&T’s (T) switch from an unlimited data plan to a tiered model means that everything iPad and iPhone users stream down to their devices via the carrier’s wireless network comes at a cost, measured in bytes.

So: Streaming a video to your iPad from Netflix (NFLX) or Hulu will chew up a lot bandwidth, and downloading an app will chew up much less. And clicking on an “in-app” ad, like the kind Apple is rolling out with iAd, will cost something, too: Each time you click on an app’s ad, the app makes a real-time call to Apple, which serves up a download.

How much will that cost you, bytewise? Web video producer Eric Spiegelman guesstimates that a tricked out iAd like the Nissan spot that debuted yesterday could require five megabytes.* Translate that into AT&T’s data plans, and you’re looking at something like six cents to 40 cents worth of data per iAd, depending on the package.

So not a bank-breaker! And again, no different than anything else you download to your iPhone or iPad. But maybe, depending on your use case and data plan, worth thinking about before you click.

If the idea of spending any of your precious data budget on ads really rankles you, by the way, you do have a choice. Either make sure you’re connected to a Wi-Fi connection before you click, or go completely offline, and you won’t see the iAds at all.

*Anyone else want to weigh in on the size of iAd downloads? Happy to hear your thoughts.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100702/why-youll-pay-to-watch-ads-on-the-iphone-and-ipad/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100622/analyst-9-million-iphones-on-verizon-in-2011/ http://allthingsd.com/20100622/analyst-9-million-iphones-on-verizon-in-2011/#comments Tue, 22 Jun 2010 14:52:58 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=43193
Amid long-running and persistent rumors of a Verizon iPhone, one analyst has bravely stepped forward to put a date on the device’s market debut. Barclays Capital analyst James Ratcliffe says we’ll see it in early 2011, and he’s sure enough in his prediction that he’s building it into his forecasts for AT&T (T) and Verizon (VZ).

Says Ratcliffe: “Channel checks by our communications equipment and semiconductor research partners give us greater confidence that Verizon will get an iPhone in early 2011, and we are now incorporating that belief into our models for AT&T and Verizon.”

Interestingly, Ratcliffe doesn’t see the end of AT&T’s iPhone-exclusivity deal with Apple (AAPL) heralding a subscriber exodus at the carrier. While he acknowledges that perception issues with AT&T’s network quality will inevitably drive some customers to flee to Verizon, he believes that many will stay put.

All told, the analyst expects approximately 500,000 to one million “switchers,” a relatively small portion of the nine million iPhones he says Verizon will activate in 2011 (click on charts below to enlarge).

“We don’t believe that the addition of a Verizon iPhone will be a seismic event in the wireless competitive environment, although we do expect it to result in a modest spike in AT&T churn, as customers who love their iPhones but have become unhappy with AT&T’s network take advantage of the alternative,” Ratcliffe writes.

“Overall, however, we believe that smartphone customers are relatively sticky, particularly given that (a) 70% of AT&T postpaid customers are on family plans (which would necessitate a group switch), (b) switching cost for customers currently in contract would be $375-525 per handset, (c) approximately 40% of handsets are covered under corporate discount arrangements, many of which may not have VZ equivalents, (d) for many, if not most iPhone customers, the service quality being delivered on the AT&T network is in reality comparable to what they’d receive on Verizon’s network, and (e) switching will likely result in accepting a bandwidth-capped data offering, since (we believe) that Verizon is likely to launch tiered bandwidth pricing prior to the launch of an iPhone.”

So, while the expiration of AT&T’s iPhone-exclusivity deal certainly won’t be good news for the carrier, it’s not going to be a disaster. Ratcliffe figures the carrier will still activate six million iPhones in 2011, which is quite a bit fewer than the 10 million he says it will activate this year, but a sizable number nonetheless.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100622/analyst-9-million-iphones-on-verizon-in-2011/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100611/the-iphone-net-neutrality-and-the-fcc/ http://allthingsd.com/20100611/the-iphone-net-neutrality-and-the-fcc/#comments Fri, 11 Jun 2010 21:25:48 +0000 Andy Kessler http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=25953 AT&T’s (T) Picturephone, shown at the 1964 World’s Fair, was a huge flop. Apple’s (AAPL) new iPhone 4, announced this week, has a front-facing camera for video chats. It might succeed, except that AT&T isn’t providing enough bandwidth capacity.

First, the company won’t allow two-way video to work over its data network. Second, AT&T just made bandwidth-intensive video expensive by dropping iPhone and iPad’s $30 per month unlimited data plans and replacing them with a two-tiered plan of $15 a month for under 200 megabyte usage or $25 for two gigs. Not that I have a problem with AT&T charging me or the two percent of its customers who are heavy data users. I can always sign up with a competitor. Oh, wait. There are none. AT&T has an exclusive contract with Apple.

AT&T can easily build out enough capacity to handle heavy data users. But it may be playing a game of chess with the FCC over its attempt to impose “network neutrality” rules. The FCC (plus Google and friends) wants all users to have free rein to do what they want on the Internet and smart phones. AT&T just wants users to pay for excess bandwidth.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100611/the-iphone-net-neutrality-and-the-fcc/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100607/netflix-coming-to-iphone-if-att-and-your-phone-bill-can-keep-up/ http://allthingsd.com/20100607/netflix-coming-to-iphone-if-att-and-your-phone-bill-can-keep-up/#comments Mon, 07 Jun 2010 17:55:34 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=20210 Here’s another bright, shiny object for Steve Jobs to brandish in front of iPhone owners: News that Netflix is bringing its streaming video service to the iPhone.

The app, demoed onstage at Apple’s developers conference by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, will be available later this summer. Like the company’s iPad app, it will be free, though you’ll have to be a Netflix (NFLX) subscriber to actually access the company’s catalog of digital movies and TV shows.

And like the iPad app, the app will stream video via both Wi-Fi and AT&T’s wireless service. I checked with Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey to see if Apple (AAPL) or AT&T (T) would limit the amount of bandwidth the app could chew up, and he said no: “Same catalog. Unlimited. It will be Netflix as you know it and love it, but in your pocket.”

No caching, though. Like the iPad, you’ll need to be connected to the Web to use the app.

But that’s still pretty cool. And it’s also going to be a lot of strain on AT&T’s network. Which is, um, still pretty strained. I doubt many of you are going to watch all of “District 9” on your phones, but you may well watch an episode of “Weeds” (first couple seasons are pretty good, but then…). And if the carrier can’t handle phone calls, how is it going to keep up with that?

So: Either AT&T really is going to resolve its capacity problems by the end of this summer, as Steve Jobs semi-promised last week at D8. Or everyone involved assumes that AT&T’s new data plans will cut down on the number of people using iPhones to do all the cool, cutting-edge stuff Jobs showed off today.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100607/netflix-coming-to-iphone-if-att-and-your-phone-bill-can-keep-up/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100506/cable-stocks-fall-after-news-of-fccs-internet-plan/ http://allthingsd.com/20100506/cable-stocks-fall-after-news-of-fccs-internet-plan/#comments Thu, 06 May 2010 18:51:48 +0000 Jennifer Valentino-DeVries http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=24759 Cable-company stocks fell Thursday on concern about the Federal Communications Commission’s plan to regulate Internet lines.

Comcast (CMCSA) shares were down almost four percent in early afternoon trading, while Time Warner Cable (TWC) fell by nearly six percent. Cablevision (CVC), which also reported earnings Thursday, was down more than six percent as well. Telecom companies, which also could be affected by the plan, fared better, with Verizon (VZ) down less than one percent and AT&T (T) down about one percent.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski proposed adopting “net neutrality” rules, which would prevent Internet providers like the cable companies from restricting traffic to certain sites, the Journal’s Amy Schatz reported Wednesday.

The Internet providers want the ability to limit traffic to sites that use a lot of bandwidth, or to charge for bandwidth usage. Consumer groups and companies such as Google (GOOG) favor net neutrality, fearing that without it cable companies would degrade access to competitors’ sites or boost access to sites of partners.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100506/cable-stocks-fall-after-news-of-fccs-internet-plan/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100415/clickers-jim-lanzone-talks-about-tv-on-the-web-and-shows-off-l-a-digs/ http://allthingsd.com/20100415/clickers-jim-lanzone-talks-about-tv-on-the-web-and-shows-off-l-a-digs/#comments Thu, 15 Apr 2010 13:58:27 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=26741

During my recent sojourn in Los Angeles, BoomTown dropped in on the Melrose Avenue HQ of Clicker, the Web site trying to make search sense of premium video on the Web.

I had a chat with Jim Lanzone, former CEO of Ask, the fourth-place search service owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI), about whether such a service could survive with giants like Google (GOOG) around.

Lanzone is certainly trying to differentiate Clicker, which aims to steer clear of both copyright issues and huge bandwidth costs by simply being a helpful friend to consumers in search of good video from television, movies and the Web itself.

As Katherine Boehret’s review of the Clicker service in November described it:

[Clicker is a] free Web site that aims to be the TV Guide for all full episodes available to watch on the Web. It searches over 1,200 sources, so it can index some 400,000 episodes from 7,000 shows. Results include television programs as well as “Web originals,” or shows that are native to the Internet and are of broadcast quality. Clicker either plays the video on its site or links you to where this content is shown on another hosting site–like NBC or Hulu. If a show isn’t available online, Clicker tells you so you don’t have to keep hunting all over for it.

To try to improve its Web search efforts, Clicker raised another $11 million in venture funding in February in a round led by Jafco Ventures, with participation from earlier investors Benchmark Capital and Redpoint Ventures. The funding follows an $8 million round announced last fall.

Here’s the video of my interview with Lanzone, who also gave me a short tour of Clicker’s HQ:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100415/clickers-jim-lanzone-talks-about-tv-on-the-web-and-shows-off-l-a-digs/feed/ 14 http://allthingsd.com/20100331/youtube-saves-money-with-text-only-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20100331/youtube-saves-money-with-text-only-video/#comments Thu, 01 Apr 2010 06:14:20 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=17969 I’m down on this stuff in general, but have to admit I liked this one quite a bit. It helps if you’re into writing about the business of Web video, I guess: A memo from Google (GOOG) CFO Patrick Pichette explaining that the company has figured out how to save bandwidth costs at YouTube.

The rest of it is self-explanatory. But if you don’t want to read, you can go check out this sample video I’ve queued up for you.

Note that this doesn’t work on all of YouTube’s videos. And I can’t figure out how to make it embeddable. Enjoy.

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