All Things Digital

The Free Press issued a report this afternoon casting doubt on the theory of network congestion that has been cited by ISPs as the reason behind P2P blocking or broadband caps, and offering more rational solutions for dealing with sporadic congestion. It also claims that tiered broadband and limitation pricing–in which a carrier charges per gigabyte fee after users exceed a certain cap–is unlikely to become reality. Prior to the report coming out, I had spent the afternoon asking people about this issue, trying to figure out if our series of tubes is really clogged or if the carriers are merely seeking financial and/or competitive gain.

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The New York Times today finally got around to noticing that when Web sites go down, people are increasingly likely to get mad and generally react the way I might if I drove to my favorite bar and found it closed for a private party. I might be miffed and share a few choice words with members of my party before deciding on a new locale. However, when we write blogs or tweets (if Twitter is up), the inconvenience and our subsequent vitriol is archived forever and transmitted around the world rather than just to our friends. And because millions of other people want to go to that same bar, the chorus of curses grows quickly.

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Many entrepreneurs today have their heads in the clouds. They’re either outsourcing most of their network infrastructure to a provider such as Amazon Web Services or are building out such infrastructures to capitalize on the incredible momentum around cloud computing. I have no doubt that this is The Next Big Thing in computing, but sometimes I get a little tired of the noise.

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Yesterday, while I was returning from San Francisco to Austin, AT&T was letting folks know that it plans to move its headquarters from San Antonio to Dallas. A big part of the blame was laid on the lack of direct flights to other big cities, a fact I could appreciate after my indirect, 6-hour journey home. Ironically, as technology (powered in no small part by AT&T ) allows us to innovate anywhere, the financial woes of the airline industry that lead to fewer routes make it much more productive for those who travel to live in large cities.

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The New York Times had an article today about the loss of women in the science and technology fields as they hit their 30s and beyond. It cites a report that blames a macho culture intrinsic to those fields. But it’s possible that readers in the tech field missed it, as it only ran in the Style section of the paper’s Web site rather than the Technology section. Because apparently the loss of female programming and engineering talent has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with the latest swimsuits. An article on the Wii Fit, however, was deemed worthy of appearing in both sections.

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We often cover semiconductors that require less energy, but we rarely talk to the companies behind those chips to find out what else they might be doing to reduce their power consumption. However, Norm Fjeldheim, chief information officer for Qualcomm, recently shared a few tidbits about what the cellphone chip maker is doing to keep corporate consumption down–and it all starts with information technology (not everyone is jumping ship to build “cleantech” firms).

While it was some 20 years that the Qualcomm IT department instigated a recycling effort that’s still in effect on the Qualcomm campus today, it is within the last five years that Qualcomm has made its biggest strides. In 2004 it began construction on a new corporate building and attached a data center to the corporate offices.

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Last Friday, four executives of satellite holding company TerreStar Networks suddenly resigned, leaving just three people behind to fill the void. I don’t expect this lack of management to last for too long, but until TerreStar calls me back with details, I’m betting that the change in management signals a change in TerreStar’s strategy in that it’s no longer looking for a larger partner to help it build and finance a combined 4G satellite and terrestrial network, but is preparing to move ahead alone.

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This winter holiday season, visitors to Best Buy will be able to purchase televisions and DVD players with the ability to transmit wireless video in high definition. But before getting too excited about dumping your cords, you should know that there are currently four different ways one can watch wireless HD, and it’s unlikely all of them will be built into consumer devices.

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After wandering around at CTIA (usually hopelessly lost) I’ve decided that I was wrong. I need a touch screen and I need it bad. When the iPhone came out, the EDGE network, crappy AT&T coverage in Austin and the hype factor kept me away. Plus, the touch screen on my husband’s Treo had always flustered me. I liked the tactile element of hitting keys.

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New data from M:Metrics for the month of January confirms that folks who own an iPhone tend to do more entertaining things on their devices–such as watch video and visit social networks–than those who own smartphones. However, February data from mobile ad network AdMob points out that iPhone users are still a relatively small part of the overall mobile phone market in the U.S. Good thing, otherwise we’d never get anything done.

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