MSNBC 'Wi-Fi' gives cell carriers static

"At first glance, software executive John Baron would seem to be a cellphone company's dream. He subscribes to the slow Internet browsing option on his cellphone, painfully pecking away on the dial pad to type in Web addresses. Lately, though, he has found a better way: When on the road, he uses Wi-Fi, the technology that gives him wireless access to the Internet on his laptop computer, at blazing speeds. "It's brilliant," he says. "The phone stuff is pretty clunky."

ONCE VIEWED as little more than a toy for tech hobbyists, Wi-Fi -- short for wireless fidelity -- is starting to emerge as a serious force in the Internet business."

redux [05.23.02]
News.Com Why 3G should fear the wireless LAN

"To be sure, the technologies may be complementary, but might wireless LANs still whittle away at carriers' 3G revenue?

Wireless LAN operators in so-called hot zones can offer service more cheaply and won't be constrained by spectrum and infrastructure costs. As a result, it will be much easier for them to pass down lower costs to consumers. Cellular operators are trying their best to cut 3G launch costs, but they still don't have the ability to wage a mobile data price war--and won't be in any position to do so for the near future."

Unstrung Why 2.5G Plus WLAN Doesn't Equal 3G

"Now, don't get us wrong -- we here at Unstrung are very excited about the many, many applications of wireless LAN technology. But talk of a combination of 2.5G technology and wireless LAN public access points supplanting 3G is just plain wrong, especially on the old continent."

"However, if carriers do start to roll out WLAN services, Unstrung will make one last bold prediction: You can kiss the idea of WLAN services being cheap or even free goodbye. Despite the fact that WLAN bandwidth is cheaper, carriers won't be keen to eat their cellular margins by offering an inexpensive alternative."

redux [03.17.02]
ComputerWorld Wireless LANs gain over cellular

"A growing number of localities have already decided to sidestep emerging third-generation cellular technology in favor of making creative use of wireless LANs.

Greg Anderson, director of IT for the city and county of Broomfield, Colo., said he plans to cut off his Cellular Digital Packet Data service from Redmond, Wash.-based AT&T Wireless Services Inc. because it's too costly and the data rates are too slow. And he said he has no intention of using the more advanced 3G cellular once he completes his industry-standard 802.11 wireless LAN, or Wi-Fi, installation countywide later this year."

redux [03.04.02]
The New York Times The Corner Internet Network vs. the Cellular Giants
[requires 'free' registration]

"Mr. Pozar, a radio engineer, is a member of the Bay Area Wireless Users Group, an active band of hobbyists who have been building free networks in communities through the region. Mr. Pozar and some of his friends have quietly begun obtaining the rights to place $2,000 wireless network access stations on the mountains and hilltops that encircle San Francisco Bay. If he succeeds, the network will be a starting point for a wireless data network that could eventually spread all over the Bay Area.

Significantly, what will set Mr. Pozar's planned Sunset Network and those like it apart from the commercial cellular networks now being constructed at great expense is that they will "self assemble" -- expanding from one neighborhood to the next as individuals and businesses join by buying their own cheap antennas that either attach to the wired Internet or pass a signal on to another wireless node."

redux [04.14.01]
The Street Can You Kiss 3G Goodbye -- and Still Make a Buck?

"Permit me to throw a stick of dynamite in the room: Third generation, or 3G , wireless is dead before it was even born. And after billions wasted on 3G, it's going to be replaced by free wireless local area networks, or LANs.

A technology that the cell-phone industry is spending untold billions on, 3G promises to deliver high-speed data precisely where you don't need it -- on your phone. On the other hand, homes, offices, coffee shops, airports and hotels are building out cheap and grass-roots wireless local area networks that deliver even higher-speed access where you do need it -- your personal digital assistant and your laptop."

BBC News Hi-tech workplace no better than factories

"Staff in technology jobs work in the white collar equivalent of a 19th century factory. suffering from isolation, job insecurity and long hours, research has found."

"He looked at the characteristics of hi-tech workplaces, which are seen as a potential model for the future of work."

SiliconValley.Com Job migration is draining Silicon Valley

"The export of IT jobs from America to English-speaking Third World countries is a worrying new trend. First predicted more than a decade ago in Ed Yourdon's book ``The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer,'', Yourdon went on to suggest that American programmers could avoid unemployment by becoming more productive with the help of software tools. His identification of the trend was correct, but his solution was wrong."

"The export of IT jobs has a permanent vicious cycle effect. As the jobs migrate, there are more and more unemployed people chasing fewer opportunities here."

The Wall Street Journal If TiVo Thinks You Are Gay, Here's How to Set It Straight

"Basil Iwanyk is not a neo-Nazi. Lukas Karlsson isn't a shadowy stalker. David S. Cohen is not Korean.

But all of them live with a machine that seems intent on giving them such labels. It's their TiVo, the digital videorecorder that records some programs it just assumes its owner will like, based on shows the viewer has chosen to record. A phone call the machine makes to TiVo, Inc., in San Jose, Calif., once a day provides key information. As these men learned, when TiVo thinks it has you pegged, there's just one way to change its "mind": outfox it."

redux [02.01.02]
SiliconValley.Internet.Com TiVo Targets Super Bowl Sunday

"For purposes of in-house research, TiVo will do an analysis of 10,000 TiVo-enabled households on Super Bowl Sunday to measure exactly how they use DVR technology and the frequency with which digital set-box features such as rewind, pause, and slow motion are used during programming."

"Representatives for TiVo will issue the results of their analysis on Feb. 4 for consumers, advertisers, and networks to better understand what this segment of TiVo subscribers liked and disliked about Super Bowl programming, and how, if at all, the use of DVR technology is changing the way America watches television."

redux [12.12.01]
Wired News MS TV: It'll Be Watching You

"Microsoft announced on Tuesday it will be using Predictive Networks' technology to track the viewing habits of people who use Microsoft TV interactive television products."

""I don't want my TV taking notes on what I'm watching. I don't want my kid's game console tracking what he's playing. I don't want my CD player collecting data on my music collection," said Kelley Consco, who was shopping for holiday gifts at Radio Shack. "It's just too creepy.""

redux [06.25.01]
MSNBC Is your TV set watching you?

"Are you watching your television set or is it watching you? The same technologies that are threatening privacy on the Internet - including consumer data collection, profiling and targeted advertising - are now being adopted by the U.S. television industry, according a report to be released Tuesday."

"To advertisers, the development of a technology that combines the Web's interactivity with television?s element of dedicated spectatorship is a dream come true for they will now have access to a new breed of couch potato, one that both enjoys the warm glow of the tube and craves the personal touch of the Internet, the report finds."

redux [09.11.00]
Salon When Big Brother knows you watch "Big Brother"

"Even if you've always wanted to be a Nielsen family, ensuring that your television watching habits help shape programming, would you really want a company to know each and every time you flip to "Felicity?"

TiVo's CEO Mike Ramsay wants to use that information to sell targeted advertising and aggregate data to the networks about TV viewing habits. Sure, you'll get some benefits when you buy TiVo's set-top box ($399), and sign up for the monthly service ($10) -- like the chance to search for programs you want, save up to 30 hours of programming and even fast-forward through the commercials. But don't forget: While you're watching your favorite programs, the TiVo is watching you, recording every channel click and timing how long you spend watching "Family Feud" and noting every Pampers ad you skip."

The New York Times Magazine Boom Box
[requires 'free' registration]

"The TiVo and Replay boxes represent the greatest leap of all. They accumulate, in atomic detail, a record of who watched what and when they watched it. Put the box in all 102 million American homes, and you get a pointillist portrait of the entire American television audience. And that raises the second and more disturbing question to which the TV industry must respond: what do you do when you actually know who is watching and why? Already, TiVo and Replay know what each of their users does every second, though both companies make a point of saying that they don't actually dig into the data to find out who did what, that they only use it in the aggregate. Whatever. They know."

First Monday Economics of Personal Information Exchange

"Personal information has become the new currency of online commerce. Decentralized Internet protocols have made computing resources increasingly pervasive, empowering individuals with an unprecedented amount of control. One result is that very few Internet consumers actually pay for network content, instead offering up personal information as they go. Content providers then collect, buy, and sell this information. To bring the Internet economy into its next stage of development, complementary software and legal architectures must be created in which personal information is regarded as a commercial property right, and accorded corresponding monetary value."

Salon AOL considers content deal with Time

"Readers looking to get their online fix for popular magazines such as Time or People may soon have only one place to turn -- America Online.

America Online and Time Inc. are in discussions about making Time Inc.'s magazine content available via America Online, rather than the entire Internet, a person familiar with the matter said. Such a deal would bring the two units of AOL Time Warner closer together, while offering a potentially significant lift to the struggling Internet division."

redux [05.24.02]
Online Journalism Review AOL Time Warner: Time to Grow Up, Fast

"Let's forget our stock portfolios for a moment and focus on something that's much more significant over the long haul: the vitality and independence of the news outlets at the world's largest media company.

What impact has the merger had on the news operations of the world's first Internet-powered media company? How is this game of media monopoly affecting the players -- the journalists, the readers, the public?"

redux [04.01.02]
The Washington Post AOL Merger Doesn't Add Up

"As AOL Time Warner Inc. stock sank last week to the lowest level since the companies announced plans to merge two years ago, the biggest merger in corporate history looked more and more like the biggest blunder.

"The merger of AOL and Time Warner was "an absolute mistake," Berry said. "The only reason it went through is that this was during the silly times in the market. Otherwise, there was not a chance in hell.""

redux [01.24.02]
The Economist Who's afraid of AOL Time Warner?

"Only six months ago, the merger of AOL and Time Warner was reshaping the media industry, for two main reasons. First, because of its size: it was more than twice as big as its nearest rival, Viacom, and everybody else was scared of being trampled under the sheer weight of the new group. And second, because AOL Time Warner seemed to be redefining the nature of media itself, through its fusion of old and new. At that time, most activities of other big media groups--whether News Corp's obsession with snapping up DirecTV, a satellite broadcaster (which, for now, it has failed to do), or the attempts by Vivendi Universal, a French media giant, to secure distribution in America (which it has done)--could be explained by their need to stand up to AOL Time Warner..

Today, however, things look a little different."

redux [12.06.01]
News.Com AOL: Just a cog in big media's wheel

"Old media officially took control of new media within the world's largest media company Wednesday, when CEO Gerald Levin unexpectedly announced his retirement. By selecting former Time Warner executive Parsons as his successor less than a year after the AOL-Time Warner merger, Levin disproved many assumptions about the direction of a company conceived at the height of dot-com power--and about the role of the Internet in creating a brave new world of media. Essentially, the establishment neutralized the revolution.

"In its role in a diversified media company, the Internet has a place as does any other medium," said Mark Mooradian, an analyst at Jupiter Media Metrix, commenting on the significance of the power transfer. "The Internet is simply another one.""

redux [07.08.01]
Columbia Journalism Review AOL/TW spells BIG

"Like its earthly manifestation, which also encompasses portions of Rockefeller Center eight blocks downtown and AOL's digs in Dulles, Virginia, the intangible cultural sprawl of AOL Time Warner is also vast and diverse. With content spanning much of mainstream music, movies, television, magazines, and other media; with access to the distribution of cable and online services; with some 90,000 employees including some 17,000 at Time Inc. and CNN; and with a combined customer base 130 million subscribers strong, the new company is dealing with the convergence of old media and new on an incomparably large scale. Because of its sheer size and the strength of its news brands, CNN and Time Inc., the forces and patterns set in motion by AOL/TW may well affect everyone in journalism -- in print, on TV, and in the evolving online frontier."

redux [03.09.01]
MSNBC Frays, both small and big, emerge after AOL, Time Warner merger

"In the Time Inc. division, which is the largest magazine outfit in the U.S., concerns are multiplying faster than staffers initially imagined. Some at Time Inc. are increasingly wary that the magazine business could be threatened by AOL?s lack of journalistic savvy and the huge pressure to meet AOL Time Warner?s extremely aggressive financial goals ? including increasing cash flow 30 percent this year ? amid an ever-deteriorating advertising climate."

"AOL Chairman Steve Case?s answer: The pressure would force people to abandon old ways of thinking and forge new relationships across its various units."

redux [02.21.01]
BusinessWeek AOL Time Warner: Newsstand or Publisher?

"From the Web's beginning, in 1995, a debate has simmered over the ethics of online journalism. Most established media have maintained as clear a distinction online as they do in print between news and commerce. Pure dot-coms, by contrast -- and so-called portals, in particular -- have been willing, even eager, to pair editorial and sales in ways that aren't entirely transparent to readers.

"AOL's purchase of Time Warner and its Time Inc. publishing unit -- a prominent ASME member -- has, overnight, transformed the world's largest and most profitable dot-com company into the world's largest and most prestigious magazine publisher as well. It has thus moved the debate over the Web's journalistic ethics from the realm of the theoretical to the intensely practical. The issue is: Whose standards should prevail -- those of AOL Time Warner the publisher or those of AOL Time Warner the newsstand aggregator?"

redux [04.11.00]
USA Today AOL to newspapers: Your future is online

"America Online's president sees home entertainment and communications as a collection of boxes. The TV set is the ''tell-me-a-story box.'' The personal computer - ''the manage-your-life box.'' The CD player? ''The give-me-a-mood box.''

The roles for those machines may be quickly evolving and the lines between them blurring. But Bob Pittman still sees plenty of room in American life for the newspaper out in the mailbox."

"In remarks that were part pep talk, part cautionary tale, he said practitioners of the written page can thrive in the new communications age if they are aggressive about getting their content online and don't defy a consumer-driven Internet culture that wants more and more at little or no cost."

redux [03.21.00]
Online Journalism Review A Post-Mortem, With Great Prejudice, of the Online Journalism Conference

"The choice of Sacks as primary attraction of a journalism seminar -- he's senior vice president and general manager of America Online -- was controversial enough to make one editor of Online Journalism stay home in protest. Yet it was strangely invigorating to hear this smug megacorporation executive lecture on his own importance, and how all journalists will play by AOL/Time-Warner's rules from now on, because, as Sacks said, "We're the biggest guys. We're big, and we're bad."

""If our goal was to publish bad magazines, by the way, we could have done that without a $120 billion merger." Before Sacks finished, he had happily proclaimed, "We do no original news," and described the new world of reporting as "an integrated consumer experience." Gives you an idea about how AOL might cover a famine."

The New York Times Walker in the Wireless City
[requires 'free' registration]

"BRYANT Park is an example of what the geographer Kevin Lynch, in his classic 1960 book "The Image of the City," called a node. Nodes, as he defined them, "may be primary junctions, places of a break in transportation, a crossing or convergence of paths, moments of shift from one structure to another." They help give "legibility" to the city, help us to orient ourselves. Node is also a word synonymous with hot spot -- a junction of Wi-Fi signals -- and the electronic nodes are turning up in the same parks, airports and public gathering places that Mr. Lynch considered physical nodes.

For Mr. Townsend, there is much possibility, and still much to be learned, in the relationship between the physical Bryant Park and its virtual twin. For example, should there be some physical manifestation of the Internet activity in the park, like a light that grows brighter with more users? Should information about park events, dining options and other local information be posted on the Bryant Park portal?"

redux [01.10.01]
Wired News Mobile Phones Redefine Cities

""Anyone who is now designing a public space needs to find ways to allow people to exist in both the physical world of the 'town square,' as well as the 'information space' accessed through mobile phones, PDAs, and whatever else Nokia and Palm can throw at us over the next decade," Townsend said.

He said much of the behavior and structure of the city at an aggregate level is based upon individual behavior.

"So the introduction of this cute little device (mobile phones) would slip under the radar of urbanists, even though it fundamentally changes the way individuals interact -- which consequently alters the behavior of the entire system," he said."

Taub Urban Research Center Life in the Real-Time City: Mobile Telephones and Urban Metabolism

"While mobile telephones are sold as a technology that helps conquer constraints of location and geography, it is increasingly apparent that the time-management capabilities of this new tool are equally important.

As a result, the widespread use of these devices is quickening of the pace of urban life and at an aggregate level, resulting in a dramatic increase in the metabolism of urban systems. This quickening metabolism is directly tied to the widespread formation of new decentralized information networks facilitated by this new technology. As a result, new paradigms for understanding the city and city planning in a decentralized context are discussed."

redux [02.28.01]
Context Magazine Location, Location, Location

"The Digital Age, though, has weakened the urban magnet. People no longer have to live amid service providers to have access to their services; many services can be effectively summoned electronically. Telecommunications, moreover, is bringing work back into the home. People now may work in a wired spare bedroom or in a home office in an executive ghetto such as Aspen, Colo."

"For planners and politicians, the dawning Digital Age creates an urgent need to find policies that will create an acceptable level of social equity. For architects and urban designers, the complementary task is to develop an urban fabric that provides opportunities for social groups to intersect and overlap - perhaps using a laptop at the piazza cafe instead of a personal computer inside the gated condo."

The New York Times Magazine Oversimulated Suburbia
[requires 'free' registration]

"Unlike the fictional worlds that flow from the precious prose academies, the Sims world has the feel of real suburban life. It has the same emphasis on money making, shopping, coupling and party throwing. The Sims characters have real-estate fantasies, just as real people do. They have consumer longings. And most of all, they have this desperate need to carve out a place for themselves amid the sprawl.

Unlike people, say, in a traditional Italian village, Sims characters have weak bonds -- if any -- to extended family or past generations, and they feel this intense need to tie themselves to others, to create some local community in which they can be happy. And all the shopping and decorating and party giving and bonding is part of that quest -- the need to create your own roots in a mobile and individualistic world. That doesn't sound so strange for anybody living in modern America. Indeed, it's kind of inspiring. The creative process isn't just for art students and design professionals. It's alive out there amid the subdivisions."

WIred Magazine The Sims Online

"Since online gamers spend a good deal of time text-messaging anyway, Wright's real competition isn't a niche product like EverQuest. It's America Online chat rooms. Like AOL, TSO will take great pains to ease its users into online life: The setting is suburban, the socializing typically takes place at home, and the neighbors can easily stop by on foot.

Internet cafes have sprung up all over Baghdad in recent months, and even in smaller cities such as Karbala, a religiously conservative city 75 miles southwest of the capital. Just last month, the government took another major step, permitting some citizens to have Internet connections at home

Ironically, the game could replace the neighborly interaction it so deliberately emulates. Indeed, The Sims Online promises a particularly unthreatening version of the virtual world Neal Stephenson imagined in Snow Crash, a place people do the socializing they can't or won't in real life. The Metaverse has finally arrived -- and it looks a lot like Main Street, USA."

Taipei Times Gamers likely to shun `the Sims'

"Online gaming trends between Taiwanese and Americans vary greatly, with locals preferring to band together and fight off attackers as opposed to their counterparts across the Pacific who prefer to create a virtual life for themselves."

""Taiwanese players like to play games where they can kill other characters using swords, or band together in a group fighting against others," he said. "First person games, where the player does not see himself and looks at the world as if through his own eyes, are very popular in the US. Third person games, where the player sees his character in front of his eyes, are more popular in Taiwan, Korea and Japan.""

HBS Working Knowledge Where Morals and Profits Meet: The Corporate Value Shift

"Overall, though, my experience has been that probably half, and maybe even two-thirds, categorize ethics mainly as a risk management issue. These managers tend to see corporate values as a tool for preventing misconduct with its incident legal, financial, and reputational risks. Ethics gets their attention because they want to avoid the high-profile missteps and billion-dollar losses experienced by a Salomon Brothers, Bridgestone/Firestone, or Enron.

In recent years, however, I have seen more attention being paid to the positive side of ethics. More managers are waking up to the ways in which positive values contribute to a company's effective day-to-day functioning, as well as its reputation and long-term sustainability."

redux [09.20.02]
Fast Company The Secret Life of the CEO: Do they even know right from wrong?

"Perhaps we understand now. Or we're starting to. The corporate CEO is not the epic hero we once imagined. Now we know: He was never as smart or as right or as, well, together as we had hoped. His teeth aren't perfect either. But let's not go overboard: He's also not an epic sociopath. CEOs are only as culpable for all that has gone wrong with business in the past year as they were responsible for all that went right in the previous years. Which is to say that whatever they have done or failed to do doesn't explain everything. It doesn't even explain most things.

The truth behind the current episode of corporate comi-tragedy has plenty to do with the men ( and they are mostly men ) who are running the show -- but not in the way that we've always thought. All of our post-Enron hand-wringing about CEOs having values and "walking the talk" isn't wrong, exactly. It's just that it's not exactly right either. The truth is more shaded than that."

redux [08.06.02]
SiliconValley.Com As valley boomed, pressure blurred ethical boundaries

"Now it's Sunday morning across the nation, and CEOs are being hauled one after the other to the confessional. But the focus on rogue CEOs leaves out a wider picture: Many executives such as Rodek, who consider themselves honest, say they worked in the middle of tremendous pressure to stretch, if not break, the rules.

In an environment where some buffed the numbers, the price of doing the right thing was high and the payoff small. Companies that kept to the straight and narrow risked seeing their all-important share price doomed to mediocrity, making it harder to keep employees, raise money, compete with upstarts or even survive.

``It's not all greed,'' said Rodek, whose Sunnyvale company makes business software. ``Part of it is just competition. Business is a battle you either win or lose. There is no middle.''"

Salon "Buy, Lie and Sell High"

"Stories of scandal and loss -- big and small, international and local -- have filled the business pages ever since. But lost in the shuffle of the headlines made by the likes of Enron, WorldCom and Global Crossing was an earlier wave of failures, the once promising online startups that crashed to earth with the bursting of the Internet bubble.

Public attention has been fixated on the sorry images of one CEO and CFO after another making a solemn pilgrimage to Congress to account for the loss of billions of dollars in shareholder equity in huge publicly traded companies. But precious little has been offered to explain the social and economic forces that set the stage for their collapse."

redux [07.09.02]
The Washington Post Sleaze and the Slump

"The WorldCom scandal is the latest building block in a new economic mythology. By the old mythology, the Internet and the "new economy" promised a rising stock market and anxiety-free prosperity. The new mythology holds that we've been mugged by corporate greed, which depresses stock prices and devastates "trust." In some ways, this is reassuring. It allows us to believe that purging dishonest executives and enacting the proper reforms will make things right. Unfortunately, it's also false."

"Morality tales are seductive. They express legitimate outrage. They're simple and understandable. It's right vs. wrong. Get rid of the bad guys, and the good guys can win."

"But the very simplicity of morality tales can be misleading."

redux [06.16.02]
SatireWire Remaining U.S. CEOs Make a Break For It

"Unwilling to wait for their eventual indictments, the 10,000 remaining CEOs of public U.S. companies made a break for it yesterday, heading for the Mexican border, plundering towns and villages along the way, and writing the entire rampage off as a marketing expense.

"They came into my home, made me pay for my own TV, then double-booked the revenues," said Rachel Sanchez of Las Cruces, just north of El Paso. "Right in front of my daughters.""

Online Journalism Review The Shrinking Frontiers

"Zittrain and Edelman's work is intriguing for a number of reasons, but most of all, what their research is showing is that the Internet can no longer be thought of as a single, seamless web of practically infinite information, universally accessible to all users and in a virtual space free from the limits of geography. In fact, the virtual world is bound to the real world much more than we usually assume. With the expansion of filtering, the Internet is actually, in the researchers' words, a "mosaic of webs"; the online view you have is dependent on several factors, including, most certainly, your physical location.

Zittrain and Edelman sometimes refer to this location-dependent division of the Internet as "cantonization" of the Web, and China offers much more than a word for the phenomenon."

redux [10.24.02]
News.Com Google excluding controversial sites

"Google confirmed on Wednesday that the sites had been removed from listings available at Google.fr and Google.de. The removed sites continue to appear in listings on the main Google.com site."

""To avoid legal liability, we remove sites from Google.de search results pages that may conflict with German law," said Google spokesman Nate Tyler. He indicated that each site that was delisted came after a specific complaint from a foreign government."

redux [09.26.02]
Online Journalism Review Internet Libel Laws In Limbo

"An Internet libel jurisdiction case currently awaiting a decision in Australia's highest court represents another front in the battle being waged to determine which laws should apply on the Internet.

At issue in the Dow Jones v. Gutnick case is how publication is defined in cyberspace: Whether material is published when it is uploaded onto computer servers, or when it is downloaded by readers. The distinction is important because it helps determine which country or state's libel laws should apply tothe published material."

redux [05.29.02]
News.Com Enforcing laws in a borderless Web

"Certainly, conflicts over jurisdiction have been around for centuries, but the Internet introduces a new set of questions about how to apply cross-border laws. In the physical world, the ground rules are relatively well established, bolstered by years of international treaties, case law and agreements between specific nations that dictate how such laws are applied and enforced."

"But the Web changes the dynamics. When you put up a Web site, virtually anyone can stop by and shop. And often, sites aren't selling items but are merely posting speech that some might find objectionable."

redux [01.04.02]
MSNBC 'Borders' prompt fears for Net future

"FOR MUCH of its life, the Internet has been seen as a great democratizing force, a place where nobody needs know who or where you are. But that notion has begun to shift in recent months, as governments and private businesses increasingly try to draw boundaries around what used to be a borderless Internet to deal with legal, commercial and terrorism concerns.

"It used to be that a person sitting in one place could get or send information anywhere in the world," said Jack Goldsmith, a professor of international law at the University of Chicago. "But now the Internet is starting to act more like real space with all its limitations.".""

redux [08.18.01]
The Economist Putting it in its place

"On the face of it, the Internet appears to make geography obsolete. But the reality is rather more complicated. If you want a high-speed digital-subscriber line (DSL) connection, for example, geographical proximity to a telephone exchange is vital, because DSL only works over relatively short distances. Similarly, go to retrieve a large software update from an online file library, and you will probably be presented with a choice of countries from which to download it; choosing a nearby country will usually result in a faster transfer. And while running an e-business from a mountain-top sounds great, it is impractical without a fast connection or a reliable source of electricity. The supposedly seamless Internet is, in other words, constrained by the realities of geography. According to Martin Dodge of University College London, who is an expert on Internet geography, "the idea that the Internet liberates you from geography is a myth"."

redux [04.02.01]
eCompany Does Geography Matter Online?

""All politics is local," the late Massachusetts congressman Tip O'Neill once quipped. It turns out that the old saw is also true of e-commerce.

Cruise by a Nordstrom in Seattle on a misty spring day and the beige mannequins might be wearing yellow raincoats and duck boots. Three thousand miles away in Boca Raton, the Nordstrom window might showcase dolls dressed in floral-pattern bikinis and sunglasses. But at Nordstrom.com you get the same sell whether you log on from soggy Seattle or sunny Boca.

That's because, in our rush to get online, we've forgotten that some of the rules of real-world selling still apply on the Web. Geography matters -- online and off."

The New York Times E-Commerce: Borders Returning to the Internet
[requires 'free' registration]

"But for auction sites, gambling sites and others, geography is becoming increasingly important, because they must treat people from different locations differently, as is the case with the French government's barring the sale of Nazi-related items to its citizens.

Online advertising companies, too, are increasingly desperate to use geographic targeting tools to reinforce their clients' faith in Internet marketing. In short, for a growing number of companies, this will be the year when the borderless Internet economy becomes an outmoded concept.

"Our customers told us over the past six months or so that it was an absolute requirement that we have geo-targeting," said Mark Joseph, chief technology officer for MediaPlex, an advertising company based in San Francisco."

redux [10.07.00]
Internet Geography Project: Putting place back in cyberspace Overview

"This project arose in response to one of the great myths or the Internet age, i.e. the coming of cyberspace heralds the end physical constraints which will eventually lead to the death of cities. In fact, the exact opposite is occurring. The largest concentrations of Internet users and producers are located in urban areas and many of the most innovative firms in the Internet space are housed in downtowns. There should be nothing surprising about this since, cities have always been the primary source of innovation and will continue to play this role in the future.

Although the power of the Internet does opens up new possibilities for long-range collaboration and even new spaces of interaction within cyberspace it also exhibits much of the traditional unevenness that has characterized urban and economic development throughout history. The fact that information can be easily and widely distributed is often mistaken for an indication that the production of this information is also diffused. In fact, there is a much more complicated dynamic involving the connection of specific places to global networks resulting in a system of production that is both place-rooted and networked at the same time.

New Media Great surge in online radio listening

"A recent MeasureCast study shows that time spent listening to online radio has jumped 159 percent since last year.

Blame it on the demise of Napster, which means one less centralized location to download free music. Or chalk it up to improved broadband technology that makes streaming music sound almost like its traditional radio cousin. Whatever the reason, it's good news for some of the world's largest channels."

Salon Jesse Helms: Web radio's hero

"For the noncommercial Web broadcasting community, mostly composed of politically left-leaning independent and college radio stations, an unlikely ally has emerged to help in their fight against potentially crippling royalty payments. He is Jesse Helms, the Republican senator from North Carolina, and while his actions may very well be motivated by the interests of small conservative Christian Internet broadcasters, his support for the Small Webcasters Settlement Act (SWSA) has compelled some noncommercial station backers to feel for him what they never imagined they could -- gratitude."

redux [10.01.02]
Forbes U.S. House cancels vote on Webcasters royalty rates

"The House of Representatives canceled a vote on Tuesday that would have postponed royalty payments for Internet radio broadcasts, after industry players said they could settle the issue on their own."

" A lobbyist for a performing artists' union said the deal could set a separate rate structure for smaller mom-and-pop Webcasters, or could cover large players like Clear Channel Communications Inc."

Salon Radio killed the radio star

"Radio execs share an almost palpable tenet that holds that radio is bulletproof. They see the medium as we see cockroaches and Twinkies: indestructible.

Jim Boyle, a Wall Street analyst for Wachovia Securities, moderated the panel at which Reese spoke. He comes from a family that's been in the radio business for 45 years, and he summed up this particular philosophy nicely when he told me: "Radio is 82 years young. It has survived a lot of new media, survived a lot of different options inside the car space: you've had CB radios, you've had cassettes, you've had eight-track cartridges, you've had six- and now 10-CD changers in the trunk. You've had satellite radio that's shown up ... so it does seem to be a situation where 10 years from now, 20 years from now, there's still gonna be radio."

In their "experiments," radio execs have starved their stations of manpower and research and music testing and polluted them with extra commercials and digital disc jockeys. They're betting it will all work out just fine."

redux [06.21.02]
The New York Times Internet Radio Criticizes Rate on Royalties
[requires 'free' registration]

"Under the ruling, radio companies will pay the recording industry 0.07 cent each time they play a song over the Internet. Webcasters, who have been slow to find advertisers despite drawing large audiences, had hoped that the rate would be set at a percentage of revenue, a move that they argued would allow them time to build a new outlet for music.

"For a lot of independent Webcasting companies, this is going to take them out," said John Jeffrey, executive vice president of Live 365, a network of 47,000 stations. "There's going to be less music put out on the Web, and that's not good for artists or anyone else.""

USA Today Neither side happy with Net radio royalty rates

"Webcasters like Live365, a network of about 30,000 radio stations created by individual Internet users, wanted a rate based on a percentage of revenue to pay performers and record labels. Webcasters, like over-the-air radio stations, already use such an arrangement to pay songwriters and composers.

But the Copyright Office said that because many webcasters have such small revenues, there would be little compensation for those who own the copyrights to songs."

redux [04.03.02]
Salon The battle over Web radio continues

"Now to your propaganda about webcaster finances. First, you point out that most webcasters are either out of business or on shoestring budgets. For those out of business, I assume you'd agree that royalties had nothing to do with it because they'd never paid a dime (e.g., NetRadio went out of business before the royalty rates were even announced thus denying record companies and artists in the millions of dollars). For the others, you claim that most are using Shoutcast or other free software. But they still must be either paying for bandwidth costs that would generally exceed their royalties, or having someone like live365 pay on their behalf. Live365 participated in the CARP proceeding (and actually hired two different high-priced law firms to represent them!). In the proceeding, live365 submitted evidence demonstrating how their costs for bandwidth, employment, sales and marketing, and hardware and software were many, many times their revenues."

"We understand that hobbyists are different. We are prepared and intend to work with true hobbyists to find a solution."