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Archive for the 'Commentary' Category

Students Get Free iPhones

Posted by Sam Churchill on August 28th, 2008

Abilene Christian University, in Albilene, Texas, will hand out Apple’s iPhone 3G to two-thirds of this year’s entering class of 950 freshmen.
Students will be expected to use the devices to brainstorm ideas and get virtual handouts and podcasts during class while instructors will use them for such tasks as monitoring attendance.
“This is a [...]

Wired: Why iPhone Beats Android

Posted by Sam Churchill on August 20th, 2008

Wired has a nice piece entitled, Six Reasons iPhone Delivers Where Android Won’t. To summarize:

Celebrity Skin
Early gadget adopters were on it like a seagull on Fabio. Fans, internet junkies and gadget hounds have been lining up outside of Apple stores for weeks and have all signed their name on AT&T’s dotted line.

Contracts
Millions [...]

Google Launches White Space Offensive

Posted by Sam Churchill on August 18th, 2008

Lorne Lutch: You look like a nice enough fella. What are you doing working for these assholes?
Nick Naylor: I’m good at it. Better at doing this than I ever was at doing anything else.
Lorne Lutch: Aw, hell, son. I was good at shooting VC. I didn’t make it my career.
– Thank You For Smoking

In today’s [...]

America to Bomb the Moon

Posted by Sam Churchill on August 15th, 2008

NASA plans to bomb the moon to find water, explains Popular Mechanics.

A team of NASA and Northrop-Grumman engineers aims to solve the mystery of lunar ice in February or March of 2009, by crashing its low-budget kamikaze spacecraft into a crater. The LCROSS spacecraft, (for Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite), would remain attached [...]

2008 Summer Olympics: On Demand

Posted by Sam Churchill on August 6th, 2008

Fasten your seatbelt.

The Olympic flame arrived in Beijing Tuesday, August 5. The last torchbearer lit the fire cauldron at the historic Temple of Heaven in Beijing, marking the beginning of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing (NBC Olympics, NY Times Event Tracker, Sound Slides, Gigapixel images and Olympic Theme, MP-3).
The Opening Ceremony of the [...]

Cable: Born August 1, 1949?

Posted by Sam Churchill on August 1st, 2008

Wired says cable television got its start 59 years ago, today

On August 1, 1949, a secretary at the Federal Communications Commission sends a letter to cable pioneer Ed Parsons in Astoria, Oregon, asking him to explain his community-antenna television system. It’s the first-known FCC involvement in cable TV.
The FCC requested “full information with respect to [...]

Be Your Own Fiber Net

Posted by Sam Churchill on August 1st, 2008

I’mma do the things that I wanna do
I ain’t got a thing to prove to you
I’ll eat my candy with the pork and beans
Excuse my manners if I make a scene
- Weezer: Pork and Beans

Google’s Public Policy Blog says a trial experiment in Ottawa, Canada is trying out the consumer-owned model for fiber on a [...]

License to Print Money

Posted by Sam Churchill on July 30th, 2008

Google’s Sergey Brin estimated that “iPhone users do 30 times as many mobile web searches as users of other devices,” reports Search Engine Watch. Google anticipates search volume will increase as the iPhone and other sophisticated devices encourage mobile search.
As Search Engine Watch explains, “Mobile phones offer less space for mobile advertising. That’s offset by [...]

Municipal Fiber: Fits and Starts

Posted by Sam Churchill on July 29th, 2008

iProvo is the name of the Fiber to the Home service owned and operated by the city of Provo, Utah. It is the largest municipally-owned Fiber to the Home network in the United States. The iProvo RFP [pdf], was issued on April 18, 2007.
Meanwhile, the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency (UTOPIA), a consortium of [...]

Verve: Newspaper Salvation?

Posted by Sam Churchill on July 28th, 2008

I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad.
– Howard Beale

People are increasingly using their phones to surf the Web, says the NY Times. Of the 95 million mobile Internet subscribers in the United States, 40 million actively use their phones to go online, twice the number of two years [...]