E-Piphanies

Strickling To Incumbent Carriers: Put Up Or Shut Up

In a small but important victory for public-private applicants, National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) chief Larry Strickling told incumbent carriers that they'll have to prove their cases just like everyone else if they want to challenge broadband grant proposals from smaller players.

"The good guys win one," said Craig Settles, a broadband and mobile strategy consultant. According to Settles, this new interpretation of the rules represents a "major win for communities and smaller service providers, and for those of us fighting several of the rules that put consumer interests at a disadvantage."

To read more, please see Strickling To Incumbent Carriers: Put Up Or Shut Up on my Government IT bog at InformationWeek.

Why Is Network Solutions Covering Up Breach News?

Richard Nixon taught us that the cover-up is worse than the crime. Tylenol taught us that everything is forgiven if you’re willing to fess up.

So I have two questions for Network Solutions management:

1. Why did you wait almost two full weeks before announcing that you suffered a data breach that affected your merchant customers?
2. Did you do something different on June 9 to prevent further transactions from being affected, or did the attackers simply stop?

To read more, please see Why Is Network Solutions Covering Up Breach News? on my Technology Insights blog on BNET.

Apple's October Surprise A Christmas Gift For Google?

Apple is set to launch a tablet-like device in October, in time for the 2009 holiday season. If it’s anything like what’s expected, its native features plus those that could be annexed from Google would be enough to swamp Microsoft on a number of fronts.

The most comprehensive report, from the Financial Times, casts it as purely an entertainment device for showing movies, playing movies and acting as an ebook reader that, according to one observer, is to the Kindle what color TV was to black and white.

To read more, please see Apple's October Surprise A Christmas Gift For Google? on my Technology Insights blog at BNET.

Obama's Twitter Conundrum

It turns out the White House doesn't hate Twitter as reported, or at least not as much, or at least not for very much longer.

President Obama has disappointed many supporters for a variety of reasons from trivial to vote-alienating, but none has been noted as soon or as often as his wavering commitment to Web 2.0.

This makes sense on some level: Obama's mantra was change, and transparency and more open communications are critical harbingers of change.

To read more, please see Obama's Twitter Conundrum on my Government blog at InformationWeek.

Four Ways Google Is Killing Microsoft

Google has engaged Microsoft in a long-term death-match on a series of fronts, as Dan Frommer and Nicholas Carlson at Silicon Alley Insider noted this morning, in a piece on ten areas that Google and Microsoft are fighting it out.

But I disagree with four areas where their handicapping doesn’t do Google’s strength enough justice.

To read more, please see Four Ways Google Is Killing Microsoft on my Technology Insights blog at BNET.

Internet Isn't Killing Papers, We Are

Blame fraudulent circulation numbers and editorial salaries that are still inflated by stock options to nonexistent profits on the dot-com era for the demise of the news industry, but whatever you do, don't get deluded into thinking newspapers are going out of print because of free Web sites. As it turns out, news has always been free.

When newspapers and magazines first launched Web sites, the Internet was supposed to create a new revenue stream for the publications, sort of like e-commerce becoming a new channel for retailers. Papers should have been able Internet ads to print ads and subscription and newsstand revenue, all while modernizing their business models.

Instead, they lost classified ads to Craigslist and began losing money on their print operations that they couldn’t offset with online business. What happened?

To read more, please see Internet Isn't Killing Papers, We Are on my Tech Business blog at The Faster Times.

Is Technology Killing The Corporation?

If you've had an uneasy feeling over the past decade or three that things are going to hell in a handbasket, there might be some empirical evidence to support you.

According to a report published by former Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) guru John Seely Brown, U.S. companies have generated an ever-declining return on assets (ROA) since 1965, despite increased labor productivity. ROA is now 75 percent lower than in 1965, despite the fact that labor productivity -- the goods and services that a worker produces in a given amount of time -- is now double what it was in 1965. And in case you're wondering, this doesn't apply to poorly-managed companies:

To read more, please see Is Technology Killing The Corporation? on my Digital Life blog at InformationWeek.

How Google Could Stymie Apple

Something few people could have foreseen is the impact that apps have on smartphone and feature phone sales; as the iPhone has demonstrated, apps really are the tail wagging the handheld dog.

Not just here in the U.S., but everywhere it sells the iPhone, Apple has promoted the apps more than the device itself. Put aside the original adds demonstrating the touch-screen and the pinching effect and some ads for the 3G S, the focus of iPhone ads have been on apps.

To read more, please see How Google Could Stymie Apple on my Digital Life blog at InformationWeek.

SAP Claims 'Security Breaches At Salesforce.com'

Incredibly, SAP would still rather talk trash about software-as-a-service (SaaS) than bring its own innovative products to market.

During an interview on SAP TV (approximately 57 seconds into the video), SAP’s CTO, Vishal Sikka, tried to portray SaaS as the “cheap” and unreliable bastard child of surviving dot-com era companies. Then, about two minutes into the sit-down, Sikka talks about “the problem of integrity. The other day, two days ago, Google mail went down for a long time. We have heard about security breaches at Salesforce.com.”

To read more, please see SAP Claims 'Security Breaches At Salesforce.com' on my BNET Technology Insights blog.

Google Wave: 'Like Real-Time E-Mail. On Crack.'

Developers are finally getting their hands on the developer preview of Google’s Wave, which means we can finally get some first-hand accounts of what it’s really like to use, unfiltered by Google’s own programmers.

Ben Rometsch, a developer with U.K. Web development firm Solid State, blogged that, it’s “probably the most advanced ‘application in a browser’ that I’ve seen.”

According to Rometsch, the user interface is nothing like a typically minimalist Google search, Gmail or Google Docs UI. ” It feels a lot more like a desktop application that just so happens to live in your browser,” he writes.

To read more, please see Google Wave: 'Like Real-Time E-Mail. On Crack'" on my BNET Technology Insights blog.