I am very critical of Apple’s closed ecosystem and have always preferred open OS ecosystems, whether open source or at least licensed systems like Windows. I avoided owning a Mac for years on that basis. So the fact that I bought an iPhone rather than Android was surprising, even to me, but there was something [...]
Reforming the Universal Service Fund to better subsidize access to broadband is badly needed and the Federal Communications Commission has voted to help bring broadband to millions of families without it: Over the next six years, the new broadband fund will bring broadband service to about 7 million of the 18 million U.S. residents who [...]
Jeff Gould at Seeking Alpha details some of the failures of Google’s attempt to enter the enterprise services field with its Google Apps product, focusing in particular on the delays and failures of the company’s contract with the City of Los Angeles. Heralded by Google as the opening shot in the broader use of its [...]
Last week, Google began encrypting user search data and making it harder for sites you visit after using Google to know what terms were used to find the site– what’s called referrer data which is the backbone of data analyzed by websites for optimizing site visits by users. Seems like a big gain for user [...]
Friday night saw workers at Verizon — still in union negotiations for a new contract — join with anti-Wall St. protesters to march against what they labelled the VeriGreedy policies of a telecom company reporting record profits- in fact doubling its profit margins in its most recent quarterly report. At the same time, Verizon is [...]
That’s the comment of Forbes contributor Eric Jackson, who marveled at Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s attempt to whitewash the animosity of Steve Jobs and Google over the latter’s launching of Android. After Jobs died, Schmidt was all over the media claiming he and Jobs remained friends and even attended private dinners together. Well, Walter Isaacson’s [...]
As consumers load more pictures onto the Internet, it means that new facial recognition technology can suddenly piece together your activities all that easier. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, Chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission yesterday asking them to investigate the “privacy and security implications of facial recognition technology.” [...]
Most people agree that Google and other search engines need to maintain high quality search results. What they don’t recognize is that the search results they see are not just the result of computer-based algorithms. At times, Google decides that a site is bad quality and artificially suppresses its page rank, often taking a site [...]
