If you’re a regular AllThingsD reader, you’ve already been introduced to the world’s most power supercomputer: It is the Fujitsu K Computer, which the Japanese computing concern disclosed earlier this month, and it runs in Japan’s quasi-public research institution RIKEN. That’s it in the picture above.

It’s capable of performance as high as 10.51 petaflops, or 10.51 quadrillion floating point operations per second. The same machine had been rated in the top spot on the list before, but was less powerful then, because it was still being assembled, and then capable of only 8.16 petaflops.

The machine is based on SPARC chips — the chips for which Sun Microsystems, now part of Oracle, gained such renown. Fujitsu has been building SPARC chips under license and using them in its own servers and supercomputers for years. In this case, there are 705,024 SPARC64 processing cores in action. And if my memory is correct, the chips in question each have four cores on board, meaning there are 176,256 individual processing chips in the machine.

It’s the first machine on the Top 500 list to venture past the 10-petaflop milestone; however, work is underway in the U.S. on a machine known as Titan, which will supposedly break the 20-petaflop mark sometime next year.

In the meantime, the second most powerful machine in the world is in China. The Tianhe-1A system took the top spot on the list a year ago — and in the process, caused President Obama such consternation about the state of American leadership in innovation that he mentioned it in his State of the Union address to Congress. Its performance reaches 2.57 petaflops and it’s powered by a combination of Intel-made Xeon processors and Nvidia graphical processing units.

In fact, the supercomputers in the top 10 spots on the list are otherwise unchanged from the list released in June.

At No. 3 is Jaguar, the system at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory that is being rebuilt into the machine called Titan, which I mentioned before. It’s a system built by Cray primarily around Nvidia GPUs and Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices. Its current performance is just shy of 1.8 petaflops.

The No. 4 system is in China. It’s called Nebulae and is at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzen. Its performance is just short of the 1.3-petaflop mark. No. 5 is called Tsubame 2.0, and is at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan.

Chip companies in particular like to crow about the use of their products in the systems that wind up on the list. That makes this a banner day for Intel. Of the 500 systems on the list, 384 of them — 77 percent — use Intel chips. Chips from AMD, Intel’s main rival, are in 63 systems.

It’s a banner day for Nvidia, too. Its GPU chips can be found in 35 systems, more than double the number from the previous list. GPUs were invented to make the graphics in computer games more stunning and realistic; as such, it meant they were, from the beginning, pretty good at performing a certain type of math problem known as a floating point operation. It turns out that the people who run supercomputers do a lot of floating point operations — or FLOPs — too. So as GPUs have gotten more powerful, they’re finding their way into an ever-larger number of the world’s top supercomputers. Two supercomputers on the list use GPU chips from AMD’s graphics chip unit, ATI. Two more use IBM’s PowerCell architecture, which is a sibling of the Cell processor chip found in the Sony PlayStation 3.

President Obama shouldn’t feel so bad about the U.S. not being in the top spot. For one thing, practically all of the systems on the list are built on American-made technology. And among the systems that can reach 1 petaflop in performance or more, the U.S. has five, more than any other country. China and Japan have two each, and France has one. And the U.S. has more supercomputers on the list than any other country: 263. European countries have a combined 127; China has 75 and Japan has 30.

Intel may furnish more chips to the Top 500 list than anyone, but the king of the systems vendors on the list is unquestionably IBM, followed by Hewlett-Packard. IBM built 223, or more than 44 percent, of the machines on the list; HP built 140 of them. IBM also led the performance pack: Its machines are responsible for more than 27 percent of the total. Fujitsu, which made the list-topping K Computer, was in second place, with 14.7 percent. Cray and HP were in a statistical dead heat, with about 14 percent each.

Here’s a link to the full list, and a bunch of other things related to supercomputing.

Today it was Fujitsu’s turn. The Japanese computing giant teamed up with RIKEN, the quasi-public Japanese research institution, to announce that they had built a machine they call the K Computer, which can perform 10.51 petaflops, or 10.51 quadrillion floating point operations per second.

And while all that may sound very impressive, it’s not quite as muscular as the Titan machine being assembled in the U.S. at the Oak Ridge National Labs, which can — or will — perform 20 petaflops.

The machine (pictured) is made up of 864 racks with 88,128 interconnected CPU chips, all of them based on the SPARC architecture for which Sun Microsystems, and therefore Oracle, are best known, though Fujitsu has long been a SPARC licensee. The new K Computer is basically an improvement and extension to the same K computer that took the top spot on the last Top 500 list in June, supplanting in the process a Chinese machine that had taken the crown last November.

Never mind that it contained all U.S.-made chips, the Chinese feat caused the leader of the free world to kvetch about the apparent sorry state of U.S. supercomputing, thus prompting, perhaps indirectly, the Titan machine at Oak Ridge.

It’s not as though China hasn’t been heard from on the supercomputing front recently. Last week its Sunway BlueLight MPP raised eyebrows not for its performance — a relatively pokey 795 teraflops — but rather for the fact that it’s built using all Chinese-made components.

So what will it be used for? Weather simulations, research into drugs and solar cells, and simulating earthquakes and tsunamis.

Here are the more formal descriptions from the announcement:

–Analyzing the behavior of nanomaterials through simulations and contributing to the early development of such next-generation semiconductor materials, particularly nanowires and carbon nanotubes, that are expected to lead to future fast-response, low-power devices.

–Predicting which compounds, from among a massive number of drug candidate molecules, will prevent illnesses by binding with active regions on the proteins that cause illnesses, as a way to reduce drug development times and costs (pharmaceutical applications).

–Simulating the actions of atoms and electrons in dye-sensitized solar cells to contribute to the development of solar cells with higher energy-conversion efficiency.

–Simulating seismic wave propagation, strong motion, and tsunamis to predict the effects they will have on human-made structures; predicting the extent of earthquake-impact zones for disaster prevention purposes; and contributing to the design of quake-resistant structures.

–Conducting high-resolution (400-m) simulations of atmospheric circulation models to provide detailed predictions of weather phenomena that elucidate localized effects, such as cloudbursts.

So what’s a petaflop anyway? A FLOP is a floating point operation. Its a type of mathematical function that involves decimal points. Adding 5.6 and 11.21 is a floating point operation and is therefore slightly more complicated from a computing standpoint than adding 11 and 5. But in computing, even day-to-day computing, it’s massively more complicated than all that.

A top-of-the-line NVidia GeForce GTX 590 graphics card, which specializes in floating point operations, can run about 2,400 gigaflops. Since a gigaflop is a billion flops, I guess that technically puts the GeForce GTX 590 into the teraflop, or trillion-flop range.

Petaflops are then in the quadrillion-flop territory, which as I noted before makes them fun because they’re among those rare numbers that are larger than the U.S. national debt. So 10.51 quadrillion flops gets written like so: 10,510,000,000,000,000. Didn’t I say this was fun?

All this is leading up to a big supercomputing conference starting in 10 days in Seattle. So expect lots more supercomputing news in the coming days!

And these aren’t the kind of cyber attacks carried out by bumbling troublemakers like the LulzSec gang, which make headlines but really only cause a nuisance for companies like Sony. In these cases, networks were compromised by remote access tools — or RATs, as they’re known in the industry. These tools — and they are tools, because they have legitimate uses for system administrators — give someone the ability to access a computer from across the country or around the world. In this case, however, they were secretly placed on the target systems, hidden from the eyes of day-to-day users and administrators, and were used to rifle through confidential files for useful information. It’s not for nothing that McAfee is calling this Operation Shady RAT.

McAfee says the attacker was a “state actor,” though it declined to name it. I’ll give you three guesses who the leading candidate is, though you’ll probably need only one: China.

Dmitri Alperovitch, McAfee’s Vice President, Threat Research, makes a statement in his blog entry on the discovery that should give everyone minding a corporate or government network pause: “I am convinced that every company in every conceivable industry with significant size and valuable intellectual property and trade secrets has been compromised (or will be shortly), with the great majority of the victims rarely discovering the intrusion or its impact.” He further divides the worldwide corporate landscape into two camps: Those who have been compromised and know it, and those who simply don’t know it yet.

This has been a particularly nasty year on the cyber security front. (I hate to say it, but I told you so.) Prior to this, the big attack whose full impact has not yet been fully sized up was the one against the RSA SecureID system, which uses popular keychain devices that create a constantly changing series of numbers that in turn create a second password for access to system resources. They’re widely used in government and military circles and among defense contractors. Google has been a regular target in recent years.

The RSA attack and Operation Shady RAT are examples, Alperovitch says, of an “Advanced Persistent Threat.” The phrase has come to be a buzzword that, loosely translated into English, means the worst kind of cyber attack you can imagine. Unlike the denial-of-service attacks and network intrusions carried out by LulzSec and its ilk, which require only minimal skill and marginal understanding of how networks and servers work, an APT is carried out by someone of very high skill who picks his targets carefully and sneaks inside them in a way that is difficult to detect, which allows access to the target system on an ongoing basis that may persist for years.

How did these attacks happen? Its very simple: Someone at the target organization received an email that looked legitimate, but which contained an attachment that wasn’t. This is called “spear phishing,” and it has become the weapon of choice for sophisticated cyber attackers. The attachments are not what they appear to be — Word documents or spreadsheets or other routine things — and contain programs that piggyback on the targeted user’s level of access to the network. These programs then download malware which gives the attackers further access. This all happens in an automated way, but soon after, live attackers log in to the system to dig through what they can find, copy what they can, and make a getaway — though they often leave the doors unlocked so they can come back for repeat visits.

Alperovitch notes — correctly, to my mind — that the phrase has been picked up and overused by the marketing departments of numerous security companies. His larger point is that too often those attacked in this way refuse to come forward and disclose what they’ve learned, thereby allowing the danger to continue for everyone else.

Alperovitch says that the data taken in Operation Shady RAT adds up to several petabytes worth of information. It’s not clear how it has been used. But, as he says, “If even a fraction of it is used to build better competing products or beat a competitor at a key negotiation (due to having stolen the other team’s playbook), the loss represents a massive economic threat not just to individual companies and industries but to entire countries that face the prospect of decreased economic growth.” It’s also bad for a target’s national security, because defense contractors dealing in sensitive military matters are often the targets. The best thing that can happen is that victims start talking about their attacks and sharing information with each other so that everyone can be ready for the next one, which is surely coming.

But when you consider that the federal government collectively buys more information technology than any other organization on the planet, technology companies that hope to win some of that business sit up and take notice.

This year, the government will spend $80 billion on IT, at agencies as varied as the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Department of Health and Human Services, and on non-classified sections of the US Department of Defense. As slices of government spending go, this is not huge, amounting to about 2 percent of the federal budget, but not trivial either. As has usually been the case, the government spends more (about $3.8 trillion in 2011) than it brings in via tax revenue (about $2.2 trillion in 2011). With Congress and the President wrestling over extending the debt ceiling, every dollar spent becomes a politically-charged particle of a wider debate over the appropriate role of government in our society.

The one thing that pretty much anyone–whether they’re a politician, a member of the Washington bureaucracy, or a humble taxpayer–can agree on is that when a dollar is spent, it should be done effectively and productively. Kundra’s job is to whip government agencies into shape around IT spending, and make them think more like private companies in planning that spending.

A keystone of his plan is to push federal agencies to embrace, where possible and appropriate, the cost-savings and efficiency that come from cloud computing. Today he’s released exclusively to AllThingsD a list of 78 different government projects and services that have been identified for a shift to the cloud. Requests for proposals–RFPs, the documents through which government agencies seek bids from the private sector–are either already written or soon to be released. The list is embedded below.

In it you can see the breadth of the federal commitment to the cloud. For example: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would like to move 25,000 email and calendar accounts to a cloud service. The Department of Homeland Security would like to move 100,000 email accounts and 90,000 collaboration accounts to a secure private cloud-based system. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives wants to move 7,500 users based in 260 offices to a cloud-based system.

For a glance at the inner-workings of government, the list is enlightening reading, because the needs are so workaday. We often hear about the costs of multi-billion-dollar weapons systems that the Department of Defense wants for fighting wars both underway and imagined in the future. But even generals have to watch their travel budgets. What does the DOD want from the cloud? Among other things, a Web-based trip-cost estimator.

Kundra says the 78 items identified amount to the first batch of what, when combined with many more systems to be identified later, amount to a combined $20 billion worth of IT spending now. At minimum, he expects that the agencies involved will save a minimum of $5 billion in the next year by making these changes, but he really hopes they’ll save a lot more. And you might think that $5 billion saved is $5 billion that no longer has to be spent. It’s actually more complicated than that. Dollars saved from unproductive projects can be moved toward more productive ones. The demand for IT in government, as in every other aspect in life, is not going down anytime soon. We talked about this yesterday.

AllThingsD: So a lot of people don’t know that the U.S. has a CIO. What does the CIO of the United States do?

Kundra: One of the things President Obama did right after the election was set up a transition team that focused on technology information and government reform. He created the first CIO role which I’m honored to serve in. And I’m basically managing four big areas. One, I make sure we’re effectively managing the $80 billion we spend on IT every year, and that we’re going after wasteful spending. We were able to save $3 billion by terminating poorly performing projects and turning around those that weren’t working. Second is to run the operation efficiently. Here’s an interesting data point. The number of data centers the federal government runs grew from 432 in 1999 to 2,094 this year. I just announced two weeks ago that we’re shutting down 137 of them this year, and we’ll shut down 800 data centers by 2015, cutting the number by 40 percent. That’s going to fundamentally change how we deploy technology as we shift services to the cloud. My third big area is cybersecurity. I’m very focused on making sure we’re protecting federal systems, and in the context of a world with nation states that target federal systems and organized crime going after critical infrastructure that we have in place policies built around actively protecting our systems. Fourth, I’m focused on creating an open and transparent and participatory government.

So tell me about your goals and expectations by moving government IT projects to the cloud?

First let me give you a little context. On my first day on the job, I convened a CIO Council made up of the CIOs from all the federal agencies, from the Department of Defense to Health and Human Services to the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Homeland Security. I stated as an administration priority to move away from an IT model based on owning the assets to a model that is focused on service provisioning. Later, in September of 2009, I flew out to the NASA Ames Research Center in California, and I challenged the private sector, by saying that we are looking to lower the cost of government operations and are interested in innovative technologies in cloud computing. I was trying to answer a simple question: I was seeing all these innovations in consumer technology and how low-cost it was compared to what was happening in the federal government, where for years we had been spending billions of dollars and had little to show in terms of productivity gains. The great thing about competitive markets was that companies like Google, Microsoft and IBM all came forth with .gov cloud products. And companies that had never competed for federal business before like Amazon and Salesforce.com all started coming in and disrupting the traditional IT model.

That must be ruffling feathers. I think pretty much everyone assumes that the federal government IT establishment is this big lumbering inefficient giant that’s slow to embrace change and innovation.

Absolutely, and unfortunately it has led to billions of dollars in wasteful and duplicative spending. And we haven’t benefited from the innovation that is taking place in the private sector, especially in the consumer space. Just to give you a data point, on something as simple as email: The General Services Administration, which is in the process of moving to Google Apps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture which is in the process of moving to Microsoft Azure, just by moving email to those cloud services we were able to save $40 million. Imagine what we can do if we start moving billions of dollars worth of spending on other things like our financial systems. Imagine what we might save if we fundamentally re-think how we deploy IT across the federal government.

So you’ve selected some agencies that are moving various aspects of their operation to the cloud?

Yes. I required every department to pick three systems that they could move to the cloud within the next year. So what you’re seeing in this document is the list of 78 systems that these agencies are going to be moving. (Document below.) You can see the diversity of the projects, whether it’s capital planning software, to geospatial solutions to collaboration to human resource management solutions. This is a very exciting time in the public sector. We’re unleashing the cloud revolution and we’re backed by billions of dollars to do it.

So how much do you think you can save?

We’ve identified up to $20 billion worth of IT spending that can move to the cloud. That’s out of the total federal IT budget of about $80 billion. So out of that we’ve identified about $20 billion worth of spending that can move to the cloud. And we won’t know how much we’ll save until the procurements are done because you have to go through the competitive bidding process, but we think that out of that $20 billion we could easily save $5 billion or more. So that’s the minimum in savings we’re looking for.

Now I say this as the son of a retired career federal employee: Government projects, especially around IT, never quite go as planned. They always seem to be late, they always seem to go over budget. Is that a likely scenario here?

There’s lots of examples like that. There’s the Department of Defense’s enterprise human resources system that took 12 years and a billion dollars to build and it never worked. What we’re doing here is moving to a new model that adopts consumer technologies. If you go back to the 1960s, the government was the center of gravity when it came to innovation and technology. You would come to the federal government to get access to the most groundbreaking and innovative technologies. In the 1980s that leadership role moved to the private sector, where enterprises had the best technologies. In 2005 you started to see all the megatrends around storage and software converge in the consumer space, whether it was around mobile communications or search technology or financial systems. Part of what we’re trying to do is make sure the federal government isn’t frozen in time.

So in an age where everyone in government is concerned about cutting budgets right and left, you’ve got a big $80 billion piece of the federal budget in your portfolio. Where would you like that number to be ideally?

Here’s the biggest challenge. We spend $80 billion right now, and part of it is that we’re spending it in the wrong place. It’s not that we’re spending too much. If you look at the American people, how they interact with the federal government, it isn’t as convenient as buying a book on Amazon or booking a restaurant on Opentable or making a flight reservation on Expedia. And that’s because everyone is spending all these dollars from the departmental perspective on redundant and duplicative infrastructure. Part of what we’re doing is moving away from that and moving toward high value work. Second, if you look at the next five years, the federal governement and society in general is going to create more digital content and information than it has since the dawn of human history. So the demand for IT is growing exponentially. The demand is going up.

So how do you measure progress? The White House has always portrayed this administration as being very data-driven, and intent on pursuing work that shows productive results. What determines success?

There’s the $3 billion saved from terminated projects that we talked about, and then the $5 billion or more from cloud projects. Then more savings from shutting down and consolidating our data centers. And we’re going to sell off the assets and real estate that we’re not using. We’ve also committed that we’re going to either turn around or terminate one third of the IT portfolio that is under-performing. These are projects that are millions of dollars over budget or years behind schedule. There’s no time to continue projects that aren’t yielding dividends that the American people have a right to expect.

IT Reform Agency Cloud Migrations

According to comScore, the number of U.S. visitors to Web-based email sites in November 2010 declined six percent compared with the previous year. Email engagement declined even more. Meanwhile, the number of people accessing email from cellphones and the like increased by 36 percent to 70.1 million. And the number who accessed it daily from a mobile device grew 40 percent to 43.5 million. The trend, then, is clear: Mobile email is going mainstream, and fast. Which is great news for companies, such as Apple and Google, that offer standalone mobile email apps, and potentially worrisome for those who don’t.

Not that Web mail is going anywhere. ComScore notes that it remains one of the most popular activities on the Web, reaching about 70 percent of the online population in the States each month. Still, there is a shift occurring. Said Mark Donovan, comScore senior VP of mobile, “In a relatively short period of time, adoption of mobile email has reached 78 percent of the smartphone population, which is very similar to the penetration of Web-based email among Internet users. These findings demonstrate just how quickly channel shifts can occur and why it’s now essential for media brands to have a strong presence in both arenas.”

Mobile messaging is also big, though in most parts of the world young women are far more likely than young men to send text and picture messages. There were some exceptions, such as India, where men were twice as likely as women to send texts and four times more likely to send pictures.

The Nielsen research was conducted in 19 countries, though the report broke out results only for the U.S., UK, India, Italy, Brazil, China, Spain, Russia and Germany. In most countries Nielsen surveyed 5,000 young people, though in the U.S. it surveyed 75,000 youths. In some countries the research was done face-to-face and in others the survey was done online.

In most countries across the globe, young men are more likely than women to have smartphones, though the U.S. is an exception with young women making up 55 percent of smartphone owners between 15 and 24. The adoption of smartphones versus feature phones also varies widely. In India, for example, feature phones outnumber smartphones 9 to 1 among young people, while in Italy smartphone adoption is nearing 50 percent among the younger set.

Advanced data usage was highest in the U.S and China, where about 17 in 20 young people did more than just make calls and send text and picture messages. That type of data use was least common in India, where only 13 percent did so, However, another 51 percent of Indian youths used their phones for text and/or picture messages.

The Nielsen study also looked at other patterns including use of more than one SIM card and whether phones are prepaid or postpaid, although those trends seemed to have more to do with how the country’s cell phone industry is set up as opposed to indicative of trends among youth.

Clearly, Google rules the mobile ad market in the States in much the same way it dominates search. That said, it’s important to note that the mobile ad market as defined by IDC includes both search and display ads and that the advertising business of some of the companies figuring in IDC’s report doesn’t extend to mobile search.

Apple, for example.

In the mobile display market, Apple claims an 18.8 percent share, which basically puts it neck and neck with Google with its 19 percent share. A short distance behind, Millennial Media has 15.4 percent. And behind Millennial, Yahoo has 10.1 percent.

And in front of them all: “Other,” with 20.5 percent (click image to enlarge).

So the leaders of mobile display advertising have yet to be decided, though Apple and Google have staked the largest claims to date. But while the the two companies are essentially tied right now, IDC’s Karsten Weide tells me Android’s growing presence in the mobile space means it will likely overtake Apple in display as well.

“Even if display was decisive for the war, I expect Google to outgrow Apple there in the coming year, primarily because Android devices will outsell Apple’s iOS devices,” Weide said. “More devices means more mobile Internet traffic, means more ad inventory that can be sold to advertisers, means more revenue. That said, search will remain more important than display in mobile and may well increase its market share even more. A lot of the mobile traffic is about finding things while being on the road: shops, restaurants, hotels…and that means search traffic, be it in traditional search queries or map searches. Google stands to benefit from this.”

The engine for that spike in sales? Samsung’s Galaxy S phones, which the company distributes through six U.S. carriers, among them AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile. Samsung says it has now shipped three million Galaxy S smartphones since the line’s mid-July launch.

And how did other Android vendors fare in Gartner’s rankings? Motorola placed second, HTC came in a close third and LG a very distant fourth.

U.S. RANKINGS: ANDROID

1. Samsung
2. Motorola
3. HTC
4. LG

Seems Motorola’s alliance with Verizon is finally beginning to cost it a bit of market share.

“Motorola, by launching its key Android devices on Verizon Wireless, was able to gain significant market share in the U.S. but is now in a difficult position as their Android business is too reliant on Verizon Wireless with roughly 40-50% of their worldwide Android sales coming from Verizon,” Gartner analyst Hugues De La Vergne told me. “With a rumored iPhone coming to Verizon in Q1, Motorola is the hardware vendor that has the most to lose.”

The General Services Administration–which oversees government procurement–will soon become the first major federal office to move to cloud-based email and calendar apps on an agency-wide basis. And it’s chosen Google Apps to do it.

A hard-won victory for Google, which beat out Microsoft for the $6.7 million five-year contract, leaving the folks up in Redmond more than a little peeved to see Office’s ubiquity in government threatened in this way.

“We are disappointed in the GSA’s internal e-mail decision,” the company said in a post to its “Why Microsoft” blog, adding that it is nonetheless “gratified that so many federal, state & local governments have chosen Microsoft to meet their business needs.”

You can almost hear the gritting teeth, can’t you? The horror of 15,000 GSA employees all using Gmail….

So again, a coup for Google, which has been working hard to push its cloud computing suite of messaging and collaboration apps to the government.

Interestingly, sources close to the negotiations tell me that the RFP (Request for Proposal) for the GSA contract was amended midway through the process to allow for offshoring of government data outside the United states–as an accommodation for Google.

Which is odd, because you’d think that if the United States government is embracing cloud computing, it would prefer the clouds in which its data is stored to be within its own borders. That Google requested and was granted the option to store GSA data offshore isn’t necessarily troubling (it must meet GSA security requirements regardless), but it is…interesting.

Google wouldn’t tell me the reason for its request, although I’ve heard it may have something to do with how the company segregates data and apps geographically. It was, however, quick to insist that it isn’t planning to offshore any U.S. government data entrusted to it–at least, currently.

Said spokesman Andrew Kovacs, “The government’s starting with Gmail and Calendar, and their data will be stored in a segregated system located in the continental United States that is exclusively for our government customers.”

Unsurprisingly, Symbian is the leading mobile OS worldwide. It’s dominant in some 100 countries and accounts for more that half of all mobile Web usage in 75 of them. It essentially owns the Mideast and most of the developing world, thanks to those regions’ affinity for Nokia’s cheap mobile phones.

Apple’s iOS is the second most used mobile OS worldwide, with its iPhone and iPod touch claiming the most mobile Web traffic in 30 countries. In 21 of them, those devices accounted for more than half of all mobile Web traffic. IOS appears most popular in Canada, Cuba (!), Switzerland and Australia, where it claims over 70 percent of all mobile Web traffic. Interestingly, it’s quite a bit less popular in the United States, where it garnered a little over 35 percent.

Research in Motion’s BlackBerry OS leads four countries, with one–the Dominican Republic–where OS usage is over 50 percent. Shockingly, in its home country of Canada, it accounts for a paltry 3.6 percent of mobile Web traffic.

And Android?

It leads just one country, South Korea, with a 78.3 percent share of all mobile Web traffic. Presumably, that’s thanks to Samsung, which is based in the country and sells a number of Android phones. So while Android is surging ahead, thanks to Google’s strategy of flooding the market with multiple handsets on multiple carriers at a wide range of price points, there’s still a hell of a lot of market share that it hasn’t even come close to touching.

[Image credit: Chart and data courtesy Royal Pingdom]

The iPhone exclusivity deals are fast becoming an anomaly, with Apple inking more multi-carrier distribution agreements in markets it first entered with a lone partner. The latest to undergo the transformation: Germany.

Come November, Deutsche Telekom’s three-year run as the iPhone’s exclusive German carrier will end, as rivals Vodafone and O2 add the device to their smartphone lineups.

Which means iPhone carrier exclusivity is a phenomenon now limited to countries like the United States and China, and even there it seems to be on its last legs.

Rumors have been circulating for months now of new partnerships with China Telecom and Verizon (VZ) that would make both countries multi-carrier, which is in Apple’s (AAPL) best interests financially as it tends to dramatically increase sell-through.

Financial terms of the acquisition are not being released.

It’s worth checking out an article in the New York Times today that points to a very questionable, but–as it turned out–politically savvy angel investment made by former eBay CEO and now Republican candidate for California governor Meg Whitman.

The piece, by Michael Luo, alleges that Whitman’s $1 million investment in late 2008 in a Hollywood entertainment company called Tools Down! Productions was made to ease a prominent Republican strategist away from working for her rival for the GOP nod.

That would be Steve Poizner, who lost to Whitman in the recent primary and who was close to working with Mike Murphy. Instead, with a little help from the piles of cash Whitman made from eBay (EBAY) stock, Murphy never took the job.

Well, not the Poizner job, at least. After telling people he was sick of politics and then getting the Whitman money days later for his still credit-free movie production company, Murphy became an adviser to Whitman a year later.

The bigger story the Times is touting, but does not quite deliver, is the advent of super-rich candidates in races this round, including another tech exec, former Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) CEO Carly Fiorina. She won the California GOP Senate primary.

This kind of thing has happened before, of course.

But what’s interesting is to see Silicon Valley’s digitally enabled moneybags step up to the very stained political table and jump right into the game.

What’s next? Google (GOOG) co-founder Sergey Brin buying everyone in San Francisco lattes for life to become mayor? Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s bid for president of the United States, via the leveraging of embarrassing photos from the social networking site?

And thank goodness Bill Gates of Microsoft (MSFT) never wanted to run for office.

The Whitman campaign told the Times that the investment was disclosed and justified in that she had ample entertainment interest from her days as a strategic planning exec at Disney (DIS) and also as a board member of DreamWorks Animation SKG (DWA).

Which is exactly what they would say, of course.

Thus, perhaps it is time to take a moment with Jimmy Stewart in a video clip from the classic film “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” of his most potent “Lost Causes” scene:

This afternoon, Walt posed a similar question to current FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. Here’s his answer:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100602/d8-video-fcc-chairman-julius-genachowski-on-the-broadband-problem/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20100528/ipad-likely-to-outsell-mac-internationally-too/ http://allthingsd.com/20100528/ipad-likely-to-outsell-mac-internationally-too/#comments Fri, 28 May 2010 21:01:36 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=41741 After a false start, Apple’s iPad made its international debut Friday and by most accounts, it was a strong one. Indeed, some analysts are already saying the launch went better than expected.

Noting that the nine countries in which the iPad debuted today are among Apple’s strongest international markets, RBC Capital Markets analyst Mike Abramsky said he expects the company to sell more iPads than Macs internationally–600,000 to 700,000 or more in the third quarter of fiscal 2010. Abramsky figures international Mac sales will come in at around 500,000.

Makes sense. As I noted here last week, iPad sales in the United States are believed to be outpacing those of the Mac and closing in on the iPhone 3GS.

“Industry contact feedback and previously published surveys point to strong International demand, supported by media reports of long lineups at Apple stores, and strong demand for iPads,” Abramsky wrote in a note to clients today. “iPads appear to be stocked out already at some stores and resellers, particularly in countries like Japan, Australia, and UK.”

With that in mind, Abramsky reiterates his earlier estimates for iPad sales. He believes Apple (AAPL) will sell 2.5 million iPads in Q3 and 8.1 million in calendar year 2010, adding, “Early healthy sell-through and rampant PR buzz–as it has been doing in North America–is expected to further raise demand and accelerate sell-through beyond early adopters….Over the upcoming months, we believe Apple will further ramp production to overcome initial supply shortages.” (Click on table below to enlarge.)

[Image credit: Gizmodo commenter modestmouse and RBC Capital Markets]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100528/ipad-likely-to-outsell-mac-internationally-too/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100526/admob-april/ http://allthingsd.com/20100526/admob-april/#comments Wed, 26 May 2010 15:14:04 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=41494 Android may be outselling Apple’s iPhone in the United States, but it has a long way to go before it rivals the device in market penetration (see charts; click to enlarge).

In the U.S., AdMob’s latest Mobile Metrics Report shows 10.7 million iPhones (or 18.3 million iPhone OS devices, e.g. the iPhone, iPod touch and the iPad) on its mobile ad network during April, versus 8.7 million phones running Google’s (GOOG) Android OS.

Worldwide, AdMob shows 27.4 million iPhones (or 40.8 million iPhone OS devices) in its network, versus 11.6 million Android devices.

So while Android is making some impressive gains against Apple (AAPL), it is far outnumbered by the iPhone. For now, anyway.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100526/admob-april/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100525/google-to-u-s-economy-youre-welcome/ http://allthingsd.com/20100525/google-to-u-s-economy-youre-welcome/#comments Tue, 25 May 2010 19:20:18 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=41418 How much was Google worth to the United States economy in 2009?

$54 billion.

This according to the search sovereign itself in a paper released today quantifying its economic impact on the country, state by state.

In California, the company, which reported $23.7 billion in revenue last year, claims responsibility for more than $14 billion of economic activity, and in New York, $6.3 billion. These figures were calculated by adding the profit generated by businesses that use Google AdWords, the monies Google paid out to AdSense publishers and the in-kind grants the company doles out to nonprofits in each state.

“We conservatively estimate that for every $1 a business spends on AdWords, they receive an average of $8 in profit through Google Search and AdWords,” the company said in its report.

Which is something to think about–particularly for federal regulators concerned that Google’s growing market power is becoming anticompetitive. And that, I imagine, is the whole point of this exercise. What better way to counter perceptions that Google (GOOG) merits antitrust scrutiny than to highlight its positive effect on the national economy?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100525/google-to-u-s-economy-youre-welcome/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100520/apple-selling-more-ipads-than-macs/ http://allthingsd.com/20100520/apple-selling-more-ipads-than-macs/#comments Thu, 20 May 2010 13:19:09 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=41056

Here’s a stunner of a data point: Apple is selling more than 200,000 iPads per week. Which means, according to RBC Capital Markets analyst Mike Abramsky, that sales of the company’s new device have outpaced those of the Mac in the United States and are closing in on those of the iPhone 3GS.

“Checks indicate that US iPad sales remain strong post-launch, driven by rising consumer visibility to iPad’s user experience, sustained PR/word-of-mouth marketing, 3G iPad launch, and broadening iPad apps/content,” Abramsky wrote in a note to clients this morning. “We believe Apple is now selling >200k iPads/week, greater than US Macs (est. 110k Macs/week) and just below US iPhone 3GS first quart (246k/week).”

Evidently, there’s quite a bit of pent-up demand for the device. Retail checks in mid-May showing widespread iPad stockouts at Apple (AAPL) stores and Best Buy (BBY). The 3G iPad is sold out at many Apple stores, and about 25 percent of them now have only Wi-Fi iPads available. Waiting lists are not uncommon.

With that in mind–not to mention the device’s forthcoming international launch–Abramsky raised his global iPad outlook for 2010 from five million to eight million.

Abramsky’s is one of the most bullish iPad sales estimates to date, though it certainly has company. Earlier this year, Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi predicted sales will hit five million units in the first year, while Morgan Stanley (MS) analyst Katy Huberty said they’d likely exceed six million. (Click on table and chart below to enlarge.)

One last point: Before we go jumping to conclusions about cannibalization of Mac sales, recall Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster’s remarks after reviewing NPD’s April sales data for Apple:

The iPad launched in US Apple retail stores on 4/3, impacting nearly the entire month of Apple’s sales in April. As a result, April NPD data gives us the first sign of the degree to which the iPad cannibalizes iPod or Mac sales. From the early NPD data, it appears that the iPad has a minimal cannibalization impact on Mac sales, and could be slightly cannibalizing iPod sales.

[Image credit: Gizmodo commenter modestmouse and RBC Capital Markets]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100520/apple-selling-more-ipads-than-macs/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100514/google-street-view-cars-collected-wifi-payload-data-for-3-years/ http://allthingsd.com/20100514/google-street-view-cars-collected-wifi-payload-data-for-3-years/#comments Fri, 14 May 2010 21:23:37 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=40702 Responding to questions about its Street View data collection practices in an April 27 blog post, Google said that it captured only publicly broadcast Wi-Fi network names and their MAC addresses and nothing else–certainly not “payload data,” the personal information being sent over those networks.

Well, guess what Google (GOOG) has unwittingly been collecting these past three years?

That’s right, payload data. And it has been collecting them from Wi-Fi networks not protected by passwords–in the United States, Germany, France, Brazil, Hong Kong and elsewhere.

“It’s now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) Wi-Fi networks,” Google Senior VP of Engineering and Research Alan Eustace said in a post on Google’s official blog Friday.

“So how did this happen?” he asks, quickly supply the answer: “Quite simply, it was a mistake. In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental WiFi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google’s Street View cars, they included that code in their software–although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data.”

But they captured it just the same. And now Google is in the uniquely uncomfortable position of sitting on a pile of exactly the sort of customer data that privacy advocates worried that it was collecting. Until the company figures out what to do with the information, Google has temporarily grounded its Street View cars and promised to stop collecting Wi-Fi network data entirely.

“The engineering team at Google works hard to earn your trust–and we are acutely aware that we failed badly here,” Eustace concluded. “We are profoundly sorry for this error and are determined to learn all the lessons we can from our mistake.”

I’m sure the European privacy commission and regulators in the United States will make quite sure of that.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100514/google-street-view-cars-collected-wifi-payload-data-for-3-years/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100512/htc-sues-apple/ http://allthingsd.com/20100512/htc-sues-apple/#comments Wed, 12 May 2010 17:58:03 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=40405 HTC has finally added some teeth to its “strong disagreement” with Apple’s allegations of patent infringement. This morning, the company filed suit against Apple for violating five of its patents and appealed to the U.S. International Trade Commission to halt the importation and sale of the iPhone, iPad and iPod in the United States.

“As the innovator of the original Windows Mobile PocketPC Phone Edition in 2002 and the first Android smartphone in 2008, HTC believes the industry should be driven by healthy competition and innovation that offer consumers the best, most accessible mobile experiences possible,” said Jason Mackenzie, vice president of North America, HTC Corporation, in a statement announcing the litigation. “We are taking this action against Apple to protect our intellectual property, our industry partners, and most importantly our customers that use HTC phones.”

The intellectual property to which Mackenzie refers here isn’t clear, since the company has not disclosed the patents it believes Apple (AAPL) violated. Which is a little odd, considering the breadth and heft of Apple’s 20 patent claim against HTC.

That HTC hasn’t announced the patents it believes Apple to have infringed seems…unusual. Unless, of course, there’s not much to them, in which case it might make sense to make a big splash with a press release that prevents observers from assessing the viability of the claims it’s making against Apple. Also unusual, the fact that HTC hasn’t yet filed a lawsuit in federal court, which might suggest a lack of confidence in its case.

HTC declined to provide me with a copy of the suit or a list of the patents involved.

Reached for comment, Apple declined to offer one, referring me to its original complaint against HTC, which can be found here.

UPDATE: Here’s a copy of HTC’s suit.

Further Reading:

• Apple Sues Nexus One Maker HTC Over iPhone Patents
• Apple Sues HTC [Complete Court Filings]
• Apple vs. Google: Game On
• HTC May End Up Bringing Knife to Apple Gun Fight
• HTC to Apple: We Built a Touchscreen Phone Before You Did

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100512/htc-sues-apple/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100512/blackberry-losing-to-droid-piper/ http://allthingsd.com/20100512/blackberry-losing-to-droid-piper/#comments Wed, 12 May 2010 15:29:02 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=40372 Research in Motion’s BlackBerry is the leading smartphone brand in the United States thanks to its vast core demographic of enterprise power users. But as the smartphone evolves into the standard for the broader consumer market, RIM (RIMM) may see that lead eroded by rivals with sexier devices.

In a research note to clients today, Piper Jaffray analyst T. Michael Walkley says his checks this month and last suggest the BlackBerry is losing momentum at the country’s largest wireless carriers, mostly to handsets running Google’s (GOOG) Android OS.

“While BlackBerry remains a leading smartphone brand, our checks indicate potential sell-through share losses at AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile,” Walkley writes. “In fact, we believe the Bold 9700 continued to lose smartphone share at AT&T following a price increase last month to $199.”

There’s worse. “In addition, our checks indicated further share losses to Android products at T-Mobile and Verizon. At Verizon, our checks indicated slowing RIM sales, as sales managers continue to push Android products such as the HTC Incredible and Motorola Droid. At T-Mobile, our checks indicate weaker BlackBerry sales due to strong sales of Android products such as the HTC MyTouch and the Windows based HTC HD2.”

But RIM’s situation isn’t dire. RIM is one of the five largest mobile phone manufacturers in the world and it makes only smartphones. Still, these market trends are worth keeping an eye on, particularly the likely arrival of a new iPhone at AT&T (T) this summer and a handful of slick new Android smartphones at Verizon (VZ).

While the new Blackberry Bold 9650 and the Pearl 3G might fend off those devices in the enterprise market relatively easily, they’re likely to have a harder time of it in the consumer market.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100512/blackberry-losing-to-droid-piper/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100511/apple-on-npd-android-outselling-iphone-claim/ http://allthingsd.com/20100511/apple-on-npd-android-outselling-iphone-claim/#comments Tue, 11 May 2010 16:57:07 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=40275 So NPD says smartphones running Google’s (GOOG) Android are outselling Apple’s iPhone in the United States.

What does Apple think about NPD’s claim?

Not much. Apple (AAPL) spokeswoman Natalie Harrison tells me the company isn’t at all worried by the suggestion that Android sales in the U.S. might have leapfrogged those of the iPhone–particularly after IDC’s report last week showing Apple as the third largest maker of converged devices in the world.

“This is a very limited report on 150,000 US consumers responding to an online survey and does not account for the more than 85 million iPhone and iPod touch customers worldwide,” Harrison said of IDC’s report.

“IDC figures show that iPhone has 16.1 percent of the smartphone market and growing, far outselling Android on a worldwide basis,” she added. “We had a record quarter with iPhone sales growing by 131 percent and with our new iPhone OS 4.0 software coming this summer, we see no signs of the competition catching up anytime soon.”

Interesting points, though lumping sales of the iPod touch with those of the iPhone seems a bit of a stretch, even though the two devices do run the same operating system. The touch might run a smartphone OS, but it’s no smartphone.

And Ross Rubin, executive director of industry analysis for consumer technology at NPD, tells me the company’s survey measured only smartphones. In other words, it excluded not only the iPod touch, but non-smartphone Android devices like the Archos 5 as well.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100511/apple-on-npd-android-outselling-iphone-claim/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100510/the-secret-life-of-chatroulettes-hacker-founder/ http://allthingsd.com/20100510/the-secret-life-of-chatroulettes-hacker-founder/#comments Mon, 10 May 2010 15:23:59 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=19244 Can’t read enough about Andrey Ternovskiy, the kid who built Chatroulette? You’re in luck: This week’s New Yorker has an excellent profile of the Russian teenager.

The piece seems to have been primarily reported this winter, just as Chatroulette was becoming a phenomenon and shortly before Ternovsky lit out for the United States. If you’re interested in digital media investing, there are a few tasty tidbits, like Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson’s assistance in arranging a visa for Ternovskiy, and the programmer’s disdain for Digital Sky Technologies’ Yuri Milner.

And there’s a tiny bit about Chatroulette’s finances, at least as of a couple months ago: Since Google (GOOG) wouldn’t get cut him an AdWords check, Ternovsky’s sole source of revenue was Mamba, a Russian dating service. But that was enough: He was generating $1,500 in advertising a day, which he said covered his costs. Still, there’s not much in the way of “news” here.

But make a point of reading Julia Ioffe’s story, which paints a compelling portrait of Ternovsky’s Moscow childhood. It’s going to seem both familiar and alien to a lot of you.

He was born on April 22, 1992, less than four months after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and grew up in a tidy apartment in a typically dingy Moscow high-rise. His mother, Elena, is a talented mathematician who works on differential equations at the élite Moscow State University. His father, Vladimir, is an associate professor of mathematics at the same university, and dabbles in cybernetics. Their household was loving but turbulent. The couple fought and frequently separated, and Vladimir started a parallel family, an issue that was never openly discussed. (“It’s a little game we play,” Elena said of the arrangement.) Andrey retreated to his room, where, thanks to Vladimir’s belief that “the future would have something to do with computers,” there was always a machine, as up to date as the family could afford. Vladimir invested great effort in Andrey’s upbringing, engaging a Chinese tutor, a weight-lifting coach, and a chess teacher. But most of Andrey’s learning occurred alone, with his computer. He started with games, usually of the reality-simulating variety. By fourth grade, he was writing code.

Like many young Russians with programming skills, Ternovskiy turned to hacking. When he was eleven, he came upon zloy.org (which translates as angry.org), a hacker forum led by a young man named Sergey (a.k.a. Terminator), who trained his followers in cyber warfare. Using the handle Flashboy, Ternovskiy soon mastered the art of the denial-of-service attack, wherein a target system is paralyzed by a mass of incoming communication requests. Next came Web-site and e-mail hacking, a service he gladly performed for girls who asked nicely. By 2007, at the age of fifteen, Ternovskiy had learned about what hackers call “social engineering”–getting what one wants through deceit or manipulation. Posing as a teacher, Ternovskiy got access to some practice tests before they were delivered to his school.

You can, and should, read the rest here.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100510/the-secret-life-of-chatroulettes-hacker-founder/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100510/chill-out-obama-doesnt-hate-your-ipad/ http://allthingsd.com/20100510/chill-out-obama-doesnt-hate-your-ipad/#comments Mon, 10 May 2010 10:30:53 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=19225 First things first: We already knew that Barack Obama is a Blackberry/PC guy, right? Perhaps even a Zune guy? So his “admission” that he doesn’t know how to work an iPod shouldn’t be a total shock.

More interesting: Wouldn’t it be weird if the President of the United States gave a speech about the education gap, made a passing reference to technology’s ability to distract us, and then the short-attention-span media made it look like he was coming for your Twitter account?

Not weird, you say? Just kind of predictable?

Okay. So here, for the record, are Obama’s prepared remarks for his commencement address at Hampton University yesterday (below). They clock in at more than 2,000 words (the speech he actually delivered was a tiny bit longer), but if you slug your way through it, you’ll find that your iPad is probably safe.

Don’t like to read? No problem–you can also watch the 22-minute speech. The White House posted it on its Web site last night.

Good morning, Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms here today, and thank you for inviting me to share this special occasion with the Hampton community. Before we get started, I just want to say, I’m excited the Battle of the Real H.U. will be taking place in Washington this year. You all know I’m not going to pick sides. But it’s been, what, 13 years since the Pirates lost. As one Hampton alum on my staff put it, the last time Howard beat Hampton, The Fugees were still together.

Let me also say a word to President Harvey, a president who bleeds Hampton blue. In a single generation, Hampton has transformed from a small black college into a world-class research institution. That transformation has come through the efforts of many people, but it has come through President Harvey’s efforts, in particular, and I want to commend him for his leadership.

I also want to recognize the Board of Trustees, faculty, alums, family, and friends with us today. And most importantly, I want to congratulate all of you, the Class of 2010–I take it none of you walked across Ogden Circle.

We meet here today, as graduating classes have met for generations, not far from where it all began, near that old oak tree off Emancipation Drive. I know my University 101. There, beneath its branches, by what was then a Union garrison, about twenty students gathered on September 17, 1861. Taught by a free citizen, in defiance of Virginia law, the students were escaped slaves from nearby plantations, who had fled to the fort seeking asylum.

After the war’s end, a retired Union general sought to enshrine that legacy of learning. With collections from church groups, Civil War veterans, and a choir that toured Europe, Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute was founded here, by the Chesapeake–a home by the sea.

That story is no doubt familiar to many of you. But it is worth reflecting on why it happened; why so many people went to such trouble to found Hampton and all our Historically Black Colleges and Universities. The founders of these institutions knew, of course, that inequality would persist long into the future. They recognized that barriers in our laws, and in our hearts, wouldn’t vanish overnight.

But they also recognized a larger truth; a distinctly American truth. They recognized that with the right education, those barriers might be overcome and our God-given potential might be fulfilled. They recognized, as Frederick Douglass once put it, that “education…means emancipation.” They recognized that education is how America and its people might fulfill our promise. That recognition, that truth–that an education can fortify us to rise above any barriers, to meet any tests–is reflected, again and again, throughout our history.

In the midst of civil war, we set aside land grants for schools like Hampton to teach farmers and factory-workers the skills of an industrializing nation. At the close of World War II, we made it possible for returning GIs to attend college, building and broadening our great middle class. At the Cold War’s dawn, we set up Area Studies Centers on our campuses to prepare graduates to understand and address the global threats of a nuclear age.

Education, then, is what has always allowed us to meet the challenges of a changing world. And that has never been more true than it is today. You’re graduating in a time of great difficulty for America and the world. You’re entering the job market, in an era of heightened international competition, with an economy that’s still rebounding from the worst crisis since the Great Depression. You’re accepting your degrees as America wages two wars–wars that many in your generation have been fighting.

Meanwhile, you’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t rank all that high on the truth meter. With iPods and iPads; Xboxes and PlayStations; information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment. All of this is not only putting new pressures on you; it is putting new pressures on our country and on our democracy.

It’s a period of breathtaking change, like few others in our history. We can’t stop these changes, but we can adapt to them. And education is what can allow us to do so. It can fortify you, as it did earlier generations, to meet the tests of your own time.

First and foremost, your education can fortify you against the uncertainties of a 21st century economy. In the 19th century, folks could get by with a few basic skills, whether they learned them in a school like Hampton, or picked them up along the way. For much of the 20th century, a high school diploma was a ticket to a solid middle class life. That is no longer the case.

Jobs today often require at least a bachelor’s degree, and that degree is even more important in tough times like these. In fact, the unemployment rate for folks who’ve never gone to college is over twice as high as it is for folks with a college degree or more

The good news is, all of you are ahead of the curve. All those checks you wrote to Hampton will pay off. You are in a strong position to outcompete workers around the world. But I don’t have to tell you that too many folks back home aren’t as well prepared. By any number of different yardsticks, African Americans are being outperformed by their white classmates, and so are Hispanic Americans. And students in well-off areas are outperforming students in poorer rural or urban communities, no matter what color their skin.

Globally, it’s not even close. In 8th grade science and math, for example, American students are ranked about 10th overall compared to top-performing countries. African Americans, however, are ranked behind more than twenty nations, lower than nearly every other developed country.

All of us have a responsibility, as Americans, to change this; to offer every child in this country an education that will make them competitive in our knowledge economy. But all of you have a separate responsibility, as well. To be role models for your brothers and sisters. To be mentors in your communities. And, when the time comes, to pass that sense of an education’s value down to your children. To pass down that sense of personal responsibility and self-respect. To pass down the work ethic that made it possible for you to be here today.

So, allowing you to compete in the global economy is the first way your education can prepare you. But it can also prepare you as citizens. With so many voices clamoring for attention on blogs, on cable, on talk radio, it can be difficult, at times, to sift through it all; to know what to believe; to figure out who’s telling the truth and who’s not. Let’s face it, even some of the craziest claims can quickly gain traction. I’ve had some experience with that myself.

Fortunately, you’ll be well positioned to navigate this terrain. Your education has honed your research abilities, sharpened your analytical powers, and given you a context for understanding the world. Those skills will come in handy.

But the goal was always to teach you something more. Over the past four years, you’ve argued both sides of a debate. You’ve read novels and histories that take different cuts at life. You’ve discovered interests you didn’t know you had, and made friends who didn’t grow up the same way you did. And you’ve tried things you’d never done before, including some things I’m sure you wish you hadn’t.

All of it, I hope, has had the effect of opening your minds; of helping you understand what it’s like to walk in someone else’s shoes. But now that your minds have been opened, it’s up to you to keep them that way. And it will be up to you to open minds that remain closed. That, after all, is the elemental test of any democracy: whether people with differing points of view can learn from each other, work with each other, and find a way forward together.

I’d also add one further observation. Just as your education can fortify you, it can also fortify our nation, as a whole. More and more, America’s economic preeminence, our ability to outcompete other countries, will be shaped not just in our boardrooms and on our factory floors, but in our classrooms, our schools, and at universities like Hampton; by how well all of us, and especially us parents, educate our sons and daughters.

What’s at stake is more than our ability to outcompete other nations. It’s our ability to make democracy work in our own nation. Years after he left office, decades after he penned the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson sat down, a few hours’ drive from here, in Monticello, to write a letter to a longtime legislator, urging him to do more on education. Jefferson gave one principal reason–the one, perhaps, he found most compelling. “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free,” he wrote, “it expects what never was and never will be.”

What Jefferson recognized, like the rest of that gifted generation, was that in the long run, their improbable experiment–America–wouldn’t work if its citizens were uninformed, if its citizens were apathetic, if its citizens checked out, and left democracy to those who didn’t have their best interests at heart. It could only work if each of us stayed informed and engaged; if we held our government accountable; if we fulfilled the obligations of citizenship.

The success of their experiment, they understood, depended on the participation of its people–the participation of Americans like all of you. The participation of all those who’ve ever sought to perfect our union. Americans like Dorothy Height.

As you probably know, Dr. Height passed away the other week at the age of 98. Having been on the firing line for every fight from lynching to desegregation to the battle for health care reform, she lived a singular life. But she started out just like you, understanding that to make something of herself, she needed a college degree.

So, she applied to Barnard–and got in. Only, when she showed up, they discovered she wasn’t white like they’d thought. You see, their two slots for African Americans had already been filled. But Dr. Height was not discouraged. She was not deterred. She stood up, straight-backed, and with Barnard’s acceptance letter in hand, marched down to NYU, where she was admitted right away.

Think about that for a moment. A woman, a black woman, in 1929, refusing to be denied her dream of a college degree. Refusing to be denied her rights. Her dignity. Her piece of America’s promise. Refusing to let any barriers of injustice or inequality stand in her way. That refusal to accept a lesser fate; that insistence on a better life is, ultimately, the secret of America’s success.

So, yes, an education can fortify us to meet the tests of our economy, the tests of citizenship, and the tests of our time. But what makes us American is something that can’t be taught–a stubborn insistence on pursuing a dream.

The same insistence that led a band of patriots to overthrow an empire. That fired the passions of union troops to free the slaves and union veterans to found schools like Hampton. That led foot-soldiers the same age as you to brave fire-hoses on the streets of Birmingham and billy clubs on a bridge in Selma. That led generation after generation of Americans to toil away, quietly, without complaint, in the hopes of a better life for their children and grandchildren.

That is what has makes us who we are. A dream of brighter days ahead, a faith in things unseen, a belief that here, in this country, we’re the authors of our own destinies. And it now falls to you, the Class of 2010, to write the next great chapter in America’s story; to meet the tests of your own time; and to take up the ongoing work of fulfilling our founding promise. Thank you, God Bless You, and may God Bless the United States of America.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100510/chill-out-obama-doesnt-hate-your-ipad/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100506/hbo-on-your-ipad-there-wont-be-an-app-for-that-for-a-while/ http://allthingsd.com/20100506/hbo-on-your-ipad-there-wont-be-an-app-for-that-for-a-while/#comments Thu, 06 May 2010 17:35:30 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=19134 Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could buy a subscription to HBO without having to pay for cable? You could just beam the shows straight to your laptop or iPad or whatever.

Not going to happen. At least not anytime soon, says Jeff Bewkes. The Time Warner (TWX) boss was asked about that scenario during yesterday’s earnings call and promptly batted it down. The short version goes something like this: The cable business is a very good business for us. Why would we want to screw with that?

The longer version, via Seeking Alpha, is worth reading, too:

Don’t get ahead of yourself. I would say, yes, HBO could easily do that. The question is, is whether it would in its interest to do that. Remember, HBO GO means that all the HBO subscribers in the United States are going to have HBO programming on demand across every device for no extra charge. So that is a powerful offering. And that will mean, if they want to access it on the broadband device, including any device made by any company, could be Korean, could be Apple, when they turn the thing on, they’ll be looking at HBO. So they don’t need to make a deal or an arrangement or diffuse some of the money or leverage to a device maker because they’ll view on every device for no extra charge. It’s a very powerful position. Not only HBO will be in that position, every network on the dial is going to be in that position, and so is every magazine.

There’s a twofer buried in there:

• A reiteration of the “TV Everywhere” strategy Bewkes champions, whereby paying cable subscribers–but only paying cable subscribers–get to watch their shows on the Web, too.
• And some chest-pounding about not letting Apple (AAPL) or anyone else dictate how Time Warner distributes its stuff.

Still! Note that Time Warner’s Time Inc. unit is falling over itself to rush out magazine apps for Apple’s iPad. Apple has a great deal of say over how those apps work, and it gets to collect 30 percent of the sale price. So Bewkes’s position has plenty of flexibility.

In fact, I wouldn’t be shocked if HBO does market an online-only subscription in a couple of years, especially if cord-cutting moves from apocryphal trend to documented fact.

The cable guys won’t like it, but the cable guys didn’t like it when HBO and other networks began selling their stuff to the satellite guys back in the 90s. As long as Bewkes can tell the cable guys that he’s selling his online stuff at the same price as his offline stuff, there’s not a lot they can do.

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