A few weeks ago when Paul Walborsky, CEO of GigaOM, came to the board and suggested that we should try and acquire paidContent, my fellow board members — Jon Callaghan (True Ventures), Ammar Hanafi (Alloy Ventures) and Kevin Brown (Reed Elsevier Ventures) — didn’t hesitate for a minute. The ethos of paidContent and our company are in sync. GigaOM’s core belief is that as connectivity becomes ubiquitous, it changes everything from society to business to we the people. paidContent from the very beginning has been built on the idea that connectedness is and will change media. It makes perfect sense for us to team up. Since then, Paul and his team worked tirelessly to make it happen.

OK, now you know what. Let me tell you why.

Now, why are we doing this deal, clearly the biggest of our five-and-a-half-year history? Two simple but equally powerful reasons — the first and perhaps most important reason: people. I have been an admirer of paidContent’s editorial team from the very beginning of its journey. Rafat Ali and Staci Kramer were two of my favorite writers in the early days of professional blogging. And while Rafat (who is on our board of advisers) has moved on to new things, I am glad to have Staci join us. She has been instrumental in building ContentNext from the ground up, and in addition to writing, she has been building the company’s event business. I am thrilled to announce that she will remain the editor of paidContent.

Ernie Sander who spearheads the ContentNext editorial operations is the kind of veteran everyone on our team, including me, can learn from. And for that precise reason, Ernie is going to become the executive editor of our sprawling online editorial operations. Our managing editor, Nicole Solis, is being promoted to VP of Editorial Operations. And then there is the most awesome team of journalists — Robert Andrews, Tom Krazit, Daniel Frankel, Laura Hazard Owen, Jeff Roberts and Amanda Natividad. In addition there are a wonderful group of technology, business and sales people who are joining our company. I welcome them all to our growing family and can’t wait to break bread with them in weeks to come.

Location, location, location

These fine folks are actually going to help bolster our presence in New York and help increase our footprint in Europe, a region of key strategic focus for GigaOM. (We will be hosting Structure:Europe in Amsterdam, October 16-17.) With this deal, we are really pleased that one of the most forward-looking media outlets around, Guardian News & Media, will become a shareholder in our business.

As you all know, I am (and will always be) a displaced New Yorker; New York City is my spiritual home. By increasing our footprint in the capital of the world, I would get a chance to go back more often. But it’s not an emotional tug that is driving us to this decision. New York is fast becoming a major technology hub, as Ryan Kim outlined in his recent post. And we want to expand our coverage to Boston — thanks to Barb Darrow who joined us several months ago — and the Washington DC corridor as well. paidContent’s New York City offices are now GigaOM East.

Media is the new Wild West

We are quite strategic about our acquisitions — we acquire media entities only if we love the people and believe that we are at the starting phase of a trend. In 2008, we acquired jkOnTheRun as our tip of the hat to the growing demand for mobile devices and the changes it would bring into society. Later that year, we brought in The Apple Blog because we knew the best was yet to come for Apple. Both of those acquisitions have helped GigaOM cover the issues that matter most to our ultimate customers — you, the reader — in a smart, sensible fashion.

“The question that mass amateurization poses to traditional media is ‘What happens when the costs of reproduction and distribution go away? What happens when there is nothing unique about publishing anymore because users can do it for themselves?’ We are now starting to see that question being answered.”— Clay Shirky

Shirky’s observation means that we are in a time of chaos where the very idea of media is being questioned. And as a Chinese proverb says, from chaos emerges opportunity. I believe the best is yet to come for media.

Over the past few years we have started to see the transformation of media by new technologies, new methods of distribution and newer ways to consume information. Mathew Ingram has been writing about these disruptions on a regular basis, and now we are going to double down on what we think is a great new chapter in the media industry.

I have always believed that we’ve got to stop thinking of media as what it was and focus on more of what it could be. In the world of plenty, the only currency is attention and attention is what defines “media.” Zynga is fighting Hollywood for attention (and winning). Instagram is taking moments away from other media. They have attention. There are old companies that are dying and new ones that are being invented. We’re eager to expand our coverage of social and digital media editorially, in our research and at our events. paidContent is the best chronicler of the media industry, and by blending their coverage with ours, we hope to watch this fast-changing industry ever more closely.

Please join me in welcoming the ContentNext team!

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• What Amazon’s new Kindle line means for Apple, Netflix and online media
• The Internet of Things: What It Is, Why It Matters
• Why Google Android’s Electric Vehicle Deal With GM Matters

“Recently, I’ve noticed a cambrian explosion of data among several of the companies I work with. The number of different numbers being tracked daily is massive. When you walk into their office there are screens full of graphs on the wall. Everyone in the company has access to the trends over time across a number of dimensions. These graphs are pretty, the numbers are dynamic, and there are often blinking lights to go along as a bonus.

A few months ago I stood in the middle of the office of a 30 person company and stared at the flat screen TVs hanging from the ceiling showing an array of graphs. I’m sure my mouth was open as I tried to process the data and make sense of it. I knew this particular company well and could reduce the number of different data points to a small set, but I was completely overwhelmed by the visual display. As I systematically looked at each of the graphs, I realized very few of them mattered much, nor where they particularly helpful in understanding what was going on in the business.

At the moment I realized these were no longer magic numbers. Instead, I was looking at wallpaper. Data porn. The entrepreneurial Aeron chair equivalent of 2012. Pretty, but a bad allocation of resources. The 30 people in the room might be looking at the graphs. They might be looking at one of the graphs. But they probably weren’t seeing anything.” [Brad Feld ]

PS: We will be talking a lot about data with/without context at our Structure: Data conference, to be held in New York on March 21-22. (Register for the event.)

• NowStreet Journal asks, what would have Facebook S-1 (and IPO) looked like had it come out in the days when tech stocks were given the small stock treatment? Also: Why Facebook is failing, Why Facebook’s growth is slowing so much and Evaluating a big network, which isn’t the same as a big product.
• It is time to move on from the social internet and instead dream of what Gideon Rosenbaltt calls place-based networks.
• Brilliant Kevin Kelly comes out with a list of things/trends that are going to be part of modern society in coming years. It is a delightful little post. I am fixated on Mirror Worlds and GlobeNet he talks about.
• Talking of Kelly and Wired magazine people, John Battelle, the founding managing editor of Wired, writes about Google and its recent moves and puts them in context of Facebook. I am not sure I have read a better post on Google than this one.
• I have never been a fan of Davos and Bruce Nussbaum does a good job of articulating why.  The Death of Davos Man–The Death of Davos is heck of a read. Plus 10 things you are not allowed to say at Davos.
• Information doesn’t want to be free, argues Andy Weissman. Instead, information just wants to be distributed friction-free. I totally agree, and I said so in my piece from last year, Old media is being unbundled, just like telecom was.
• Happiness takes a little magic, says Brian Lam. +1 to that.

Emails, tweets, notifications, text and instant messages, Facebook status updates, Path moments — all these are new tools of communication when taken together are notification hell. These notifications prey on human desire for a dopamine fix. And just as we are over-caffeinated, I think the 21st century is quickly making us over-notified. (I think this is my second new phrase of the week – the first one being aspirational escape velocity)

The worst part is that there is nothing we can do about it. Apparently Tweeting and checking emails is much harder addiction to give up that cigarettes or alcohol, according to a study by Chicago University’s Booth Business School. No surprise since they are all about attention gone awry. The dopamine fix, I guess is worse than nicotine. Especially since it is free – while a fine bottle of scotch can cost a pretty penny.

What all this multitasking is doing to our brain is hard to imagine. This video by Chris Crutchfield does a good job of being a mirror to our over-notified selves.

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• Updated: Forecast: global mobile subscribers, 2010–2015
• Carrier IQ and the continued erosion of operator trust
• The mobile backhaul market, 2011-2012: more innovation, greater competition

• The Bottom Line - The initial read-through for ZNGA is potentially a negative indication for ZNGA’s 4Q revenue estimate.
• Assuming ~93% of ZNGA’s bookings are generated through FB (average of first three quarters of 2011), then total net FB bookings for ZNGA for 2011 would be $1,117mm (based on FB’s ZNGA rev of $445mm divided by 30%, generating gross FB bookings of $1,484mm for ZNGA, then multipled by the 70% that ZNGA keeps).  This implies $268mm in total net bookings for the fourth quarter, while our model estimates $302mm in 4Q bookings.  In other words, unless ZNGA has meaningfully diversified its revenues away from FB, it could miss our 4Q bookings estimate.
• Additionally, this ignores the fact that some percentage of FB’s ZNGA revenue is generated by ZNGA’s purchase of FB advertising, thus the actual ZNGA bookings from FB is likely even lower.
• Where we could be wrong – there could be other definitional items around revenue recognition and advertising that we are failing to incorporate into these estimates.

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• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• Q4 Wrap-up: SOPA and the future of digital content
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

And much like Netscape and Google before it, the $5 billion offering is being viewed as the much-awaited catalyst for the technology industry and is expected to set off a flurry of activity. I have been here long enough to cover the IPOs of both Netscape and Google, and on both occasions, the tailgate effect was enough to pull even the clunkers (read: marginal startups) to the proverbial finish line.

We are already seeing four recently public companies — Pandora, LinkedIn, Zynga and Groupon — ramping up their efforts to buy little startups. Google is competing for talent, and so are other Internet giants. And now Facebook!

I have been wondering whether we would see a slow exodus of Facebook employees, which in turn would force the social networking giant to go out and start acq-hiring people by buying a lot of tiny startups. And if more of these little companies get acquired, more dollars will rush into the startups and thus create a fly-wheel effect. The presence of Facebook millionaires is only going to accelerate angel investment activity.

Nevertheless, I wanted to see how some of the top venture capital investors (whom I deeply respect for their clear and concise views of the industry) were thinking about the landscape.

Fred Wilson, a general partner of New York–based Union Square Ventures and an investor in red-hot companies like Zynga, Etsy, Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr and Kickstarter, emailed me back with this answer:

Yes, I said exactly that on Friday evening at a talk I gave at social media weekend at Columbia University. I think this is great for entrepreneurship, startups, angel investing, etc., etc. because we are going to get a bunch more capital created and entrepreneurs created and we’ll also get more exits.

What this means is that super angels and hacker universities like Dave McClure, Y Combinator and TechStars are going to see a lot more of their companies get acquired. Jeff Clavier, the founder and partner of SoftTech VC, an early-stage investment firm based in Palo Alto, Calif., who recently closed his $55 million fund, had a multitude of thoughts:

Because of the ginormous valuation, it is clear that the number of Facebook employees reaching tens of millions of dollars in (paper) net worth is unusual. Candidly a number of early Facebookers have already taken off and “retired” at the age of 30/35. One of the questions moving forward is how much of a carrot can Facebook give new employees with such a high base valuation.

Remember that Facebook has a very high bar to talent acquisitions, and should not compromise on that. Once Facebook has a public currency, it will make it easier for them to make larger paper acquisitions. Until recently they were not doing that to avoid issues with the 500 shareholder rule (Ed Baker’s Friendly was a rare, recent deal where equity was used).

Brad Silverberg, a veteran of Microsoft and other tech companies and a general partner at Ignition Partners, a Seattle-based venture fund, thinks the IPO could have a corroding influence on the company culture.

One of the biggest challenges Facebook will face is the gulf between the have’s and have-not’s within Facebook.  It can create tremendous internal stress and can result in people leaving to follow their own entrepreneurial dreams. This can be both for early people who made it and love the thrill of the startup, and for later people who are contributing, gain confidence, and now want to go off and make their own fortunes.

I think Silverberg’s point is pretty spot-on. I have seen this haves-versus-have-nots dynamic create havoc at many companies before. I have spoken to multiple people, and there is a general sense in the Valley that there is a large contingent of Facebookers who are ready to bolt. Google in comparison didn’t see an exodus of employees until recently, mostly because of its deep engineering-centric culture. Before it was grafted with the Microsoft genes, Google was a company where the smartest people went to be with the smartest people. It wasn’t till 2007 that the company started to lose its top-rated talent.

Facebook — Mark Zuckerberg’s Hacker Way missive not withstanding — is a lot more mercenary and materialistic. And part of that means employees are likely to cash their chips and run, only to place them on some new startups. And whichever way you look at it, I am pretty sure 2012 is going to be one heck of a ride. Buckle up!

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• NewNet 2012: companies and technologies set to disrupt
• Q4 Wrap-up: SOPA and the future of digital content
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

Christensen was the vice president of emerging opportunities at Skype, a division of Microsoft. In that role, he was responsible for getting Skype into new platforms such as Internet televisions and set-top boxes. He was a big champion of Skype’s platform effort. On the eve of the launch of SkypeKit program, he told us, “One of the key pillars of the communications network is that it follows Metcalfe’s Law, and so to date with things like Facetime we’re talking about services with limited support for devices, while our strategy is to be on Android and everyplace else we can.”

Here is Skype’s official statement on Christensen’s departure:

“After six years in key leadership roles with Skype, Jonathan Christensen has left the company to enjoy time with his family and get energized for the next phase of his career. At different periods during his time at Skype, JC has led the Audio/Video, Core Library and Skype Developer Program teams, in addition to overseeing our platform and partner initiatives with consumer electronics manufacturers. Skype wishes him every success in the future.”

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• Beyond social: the crowd-based enterprise
• Carrier IQ and the continued erosion of operator trust
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

South Korean and Japanese cities dominate the top 100 cities list. Amsterdam is the fastest city in Europe (ranked No. 33), and San Jose was once again the fastest city in the United States, with an average connection speed of 13 Mbps. It was ranked at No. 13 among the top 100 and was one of the 23 U.S. cities that made the list. Other U.S. cities in the top 100 include Plano, Texas (8.9 Mbps); Fremont, Calif. (8.6 Mbps); North Bergen, N.J. (8.5 Mbps); and Jersey City, N.J. (8.2 Mbps).

One of the biggest trends according to the report is growing mobile broadband speeds. “Average connection speeds on known mobile providers ranged from 6.1 Mbps down to 327 kbps, while average peak connection speeds in the quarter ranged from 22.2 Mbps to 1.4 Mbps,” the report data shows.

Here are some other notable facts from the report:

• The global average connection speed continued to see extremely strong yearly growth, increasing 39 percent from the third quarter of 2010.
• The global average peak connection speed grew 45 percent from the third quarter of 2010 to 11.7 Mbps in Q3 2011. South Korea is the country with the highest average peak connection speed, at 46.8 Mbps. Hong Kong also had an average peak connection speed above 40 Mbps, while Romania, Japan and Latvia were all above 30 Mbps.
• India finally achieved a 10 percent broadband adoption rate, which China had achieved in the second quarter.
• Despite rapid growth, China and India are only two countries with high broadband adoption of 1 percent or less. China stands at 1 percent adoption, and India has a 0.6 percent adoption. Akamai deems connections faster than 5 Mbps as “high broadband.”
• In the third quarter of 2011, global broadband adoption (2 Mbps or higher) grew 1.6 percent to reach 66 percent. The United States now has 81 percent broadband adoption, the report says.
• By average speeds, the Netherlands might be the fastest in Europe (9.5 Mbps), but when it comes to peak speeds, the Romanian city of Timişoara leaves it in the dust at 41.5 Mbps.

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• The future of Wi-Fi in the enterprise
• U.S. Wireless Data Market: Q4 and Year-End 2008
• Mobile Q4: The scramble for spectrum continues

“Program and design from the mobile standpoint first, then extrapolate what could be applied for the PC, television and print experience.” – Michael Bayle, VP and general manager of ESPN Mobile

Apparently, for ESPN, mobile is now “the company’s fourth-largest network” and “has 150,000 people plugged into its mobile offerings at any given time” with “users spending 45% more time with ESPN mobile content in 2011 than the prior year,” according to this report in Media Post.

Those numbers are stunning — but not surprising (to me, at the very least). With more than 400 million smartphones expected to be sold, it makes perfect sense for sports to get the mobile bump. I mean, don’t we want the baseball gossip, score updates or results of the F1 race when on the go?

I have been a firm believer that when it comes to design these days, mobile comes first. That thinking was behind the redesign of my blog. Of course, I saw an increase in mobile visits and decided to go the full monty with my blog makeover. It is good to see that “mobile-first” thinking is spreading: Kayak and others are following the mobile-first approach.

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• Updated: Forecast: global mobile subscribers, 2010–2015
• Carrier IQ and the continued erosion of operator trust
• The mobile backhaul market, 2011-2012: more innovation, greater competition

One such startup, Palo Alto-based Glooko today announced that it has received $3.5 million in Series A funding from a group of investors led by The Social+Capital Partnership, a investment firm started by former Facebook executive, Chamath Palihapitiya. Well known Silicon Valley veterans such as Bill Campbell, Google’s Vint Cerf, and Cisco co-founder Judy Estrin are also investors in the company which has previously raised $1 million in seed funding.

Glooko has developed a MeterSync ($40) cable that plugs into most standard self-monitoring blood glucose meters and the Glooko Logbook app for iOS devices that automatically creates a digital logbook of readings, allows users to review daily blood sugar levels, annotate them and share the results with their physician.

Yogen Dalal, Glooko co-founder and chairman explained to GigaOM that the company is going to use the new funds to focus on supporting more meters and develop an Android app in addition to getting more attention in the market place for its offerings. Glooko is not the only company that is seeking to make a mark in the digital health device business. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2012) there was a noticeable increase in the number of digital health devices.

A growing, global problem

According to the Mayo Clinic, diabetes is a group of diseases that impact how our body uses blood sugar. If you have diabetes, you would have too much glucose (sugar) in your blood and this leads to many complications and serious health problems.  It is one of the fastest spreading diseases in the world.

According to American Diabetes Association (ADA) nearly 25.8 million children and adults in the United States of America who are suffering from diabetes. (More stats here at the ADA website.) The situation is equally worse around the world. According to the Harvard School of Public Health, there are 350 million diabetics around the world.

What you need to know

Those statistics might be numbers for you, but for me it is a fact of life. I am one of those millions who have been afflicted by this disease. I have learned to live with it – and medication is only part of the solution. The key to keeping diabetes under check is to exercise, being careful about food intake and most importantly one has to constantly monitor sugar levels. If I don’t, then in a few years it is pretty clear that more serious complications can arise.

How do I keep on top of things? Using a mix of analog and digital solutions. Every time I tested my blood sugar level, I wrote down the reading in a little black book and also in BloodSugar, an iPhone app. I jot down what I eat and when I eat. I monitor my weight on a weekly basis. And at the end of the month, I enter all the data into an excel spreadsheet, which I share with my doctor whenever I see him. This is a painful and arduous process, but I am betting that one (or more) of these new startups will figure out a way to make my life easy.

For instance, Glooko is making it easy for me to take the daily measurement data right out of my diabetes monitor and making it available via their iPhone app and cable. Just like Glooko, I am excited about the upcoming smart logbook app from MySugr, a company based in Vienna, Austria.

The fact that MySugr co-founders Frank Westermann and Frederik Debong are both diabetics is one of the reasons why I feel that they have a proper understanding of the emotional realities of living with the disease. The company has developed a smart logbook (still in alpha) that uses game-mechanics to keep diabetics motivated in taking better care of themselves.

Glooko and MySugr are by no means the only startups. There are many more out there who are working on ways to deal with this growing epidemic. As someone who lives with the reality of diabetes, I can only but welcome your efforts.

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• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Forecast: the future of the digital music industry
• Q4 Wrap-up: SOPA and the future of digital content

When I was reading The Number by Alex Berenson, it became pretty obvious that the curse of quarterly results is leading to short-term thinking and will be the undoing of the pursuit of big ideas by large companies. That book explains a lot of the problems encountered by the incumbents in today’s fast-changing world.

The second book that I often go back to is The New Normal by Roger McNamee, a longtime technology investor in both public and private markets. McNamee might have become a punch line in Silicon Valley (thanks to his ill-timed bet on Palm), but when it comes to big-picture thinking there aren’t that many who allow themselves to think freely. In his book McNamee argues that we are in a new era and as a result shouldn’t be thinking about the past. Rather, we should face up to what he calls the “new normal.”

McNamee’s argument aligns with my own belief that if you walk looking backward, you are going to run into a pole. Instead, look back, only to see how far you have come. As a chronicler of technology, one of the biggest lessons I have learned is that innovation is almost always unpredictable — in size, timing, scope and impact. In other words, the business of technology is constantly defining what is the new normal. In case you were wondering why I am bringing this up, I will point to some stories I read this week.

An Apple a day . . .

Earlier this month, Apple announced what are essentially mind-boggling financial results for the holiday quarter ending Dec. 31, 2011. The iPhone maker surpassed even its own very generous targets and in the process has confounded its critics and champions, especially in the professional investor community, with a financial performance bettered only by a handful of oil and energy monopolies’.

No one was expecting it. Forget that: No one was daring to imagine it. Why were these professionals unable to make even a prediction of Apple’s success? Because they were always looking back, looking at Apple’s history and listening to the rhetoric of Apple’s rivals and thus making a prediction. I mean, how can Apple, which blew its lead in the PC business and fell by the wayside, do things differently? It couldn’t have learned from those mistakes, right?

No one wants to think about the fact that Apple, like Gucci and BMW, has achieved what I call “aspirational escape velocity.” If the Chinese are ready to line up for a product (the iPhone 4S) and pay a premium for it, even though it is likely that a cousin was involved in assembling it, something must be going right. So why is it then that buying an Apple product like an iPhone or an iPad is the new normal?

Reimagine

Why are we surprised that Apple and Samsung are seeing such huge demand? How hard is it for us to imagine that the cell phone — even an expensive smartphone — is more necessary than, say, a computer was twenty years ago?

Why is it hard to imagine that the world is one giant mesh, and marketing messages from one end of the Earth do indeed have an impact across the planet? If you take that into account then Apple selling more than 40 million iPhones in three months is not as crazy as it seems.

Earlier this month, web measurement and analytics company comScore reported that Pinterest, a tiny company based in Silicon Valley, is now the tenth-largest social platform, with billions of page views.

It propelled itself into a group that included Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. Amazing isn’t it, considering that the service is still at an invite-only stage?

But it shouldn’t be surprising. Remember, with every passing year, the metabolism of the technology industry has increased. It took Yahoo more than a decade to blow past 500 million users. Facebook will hit the billion mark in six years.

What seems incredulous incredible today is par for the course tomorrow. I remember the novelty of email. And now I deal with the nightmare of email. I remember the initial thrill of the instant message, and now I live with its constant interruption. Technology is, and will always be, redefining our future.

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• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Mobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continues
• Report: How Mobile Cloud Computing Will Change Tech

There is a lot of talk about data, 3D printing, innovation, design and user interaction and curation. So this week’s theme is a collection of writing that questions conventional wisdom about these aforementioned themes. Most of them are long — so better get a cup of tea now.

• Data trumps opinion, especially when it comes to design, argues Adapative Path’s Brandon Schauer. He outlines four examples in his post.
• The myth of the new brand new innovation myth: Is that headline giving you a headache? If you look beyond it, the article is a great treatise on innovation, the individual and the team dynamic.
• There is a lot of optimism and hype around 3D printing these days. Christopher Mims over on Technology Review magazine isn’t buying it. He thinks it will go the way of virtual reality.
• After a long break, Rohit Bhargava, one of my favorite writers on marketing, returns with the four principles of delusional economies.
• I am neither an engineer or a designer. However, I do know a great primer when I read one. This is a great design primer for engineers from Michael Loop.
• 7 ways to organize your home office in 2012: Given how cluttered my home office gets, I found this list from Herman Miller’s Cerentha Harris quite helpful.
• As you all know, I am obsessed with Pinterest these days. But here is a fresh and wonderful take from a non-techie, who describes the social aesthetic behind the fast-growing social sharing service.

PS: By the way, in addition to the Om Says newsletter, you can stay in touch with me via Twitter (@Om) or on Facebook (http://facebook.com/ommalik).

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• Forecast: the future of the digital music industry
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• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

During the fourth quarter of 2011 (which ended on Dec. 31, 2011), Verizon lost 103,000 DSL lines. In comparison, it lost 118,000 DSL lines during the third quarter of 2011 (which ended on Sept. 30, 2011) and 127,000 in the quarter ending June 39, 2011. The numbers at AT&T are worse. During the fourth quarter of 2011, Ma Bell lost 636,000 DSL lines, up from 501,000 during the third quarter of 2011 and 451,000 during the three months ending on June 30, 2011.

Now compare this with Time Warner Cable, which added a whopping 130,000 broadband connections, way ahead of the 96,000 lines that Wall Street analysts were predicting for the fourth quarter. And that is one of the worst cable broadband providers in the U.S. It would be interesting to see how well Comcast does when it reports its earnings on Feb. 15.

So why is DSL continuing to nose-dive? First of all, the phone companies themselves are not interested in pushing the envelope on DSL and instead are focusing on their higher-end offerings: FiOS Internet for Verizon and U-verse for AT&T. Verizon added 201,000 subscribers for its FiOS (fiber) Internet service during the three months ending on Dec. 31, 2011. In comparison, AT&T added 587,000 new U-verse broadband subscribers. U-verse uses fiber-to-the-node technology in combination with VDSL2, a variant of DSL. AT&T lost 49,000 net broadband subscriber — mostly DSL.

The question is, Can this newer technology make up for the subscriber losses and help Verizon and AT&T grow their overall share of the U.S. broadband market? From the looks of it, I don’t think so. I expect Comcast, which currently is the fastest broadband provider, according to Ookla’s Net Index, to see market share gains. However, this loss of traction by the phone companies in wired broadband makes the recent spectrum deal between Verizon (buyer) and cable companies (sellers) a problematic deal for those hoping to keep broadband competitive. These numbers show how wireless is going to AT&T and Verizon while wireline will go to the cable companies. And apparently the executives at each company are okay with that.

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• Want to watch TV? There’s an app for that
• LTE changes everything; LTE changes nothing
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

The extension is essentially a way to expose the shortcomings of Google search results, now that the results include social sharing input from Google’s own social network (loosely speaking), Google+. It is an interesting thought experiment, though it is hard for me to ignore the fact that it comes from Facebook. Oh, did I mention Ross is Facebook’s Director of Product? As John Battelle points out

I mean, it’s one thing for a lone hacktivist to do this, it’s quite another for a member of the Internet Big Five to publicly call Google out. Facebook would need to vet this with legal, with management (this clearly had to pass muster with Mark Zuckerberg), and, I was told, Facebook wanted to reach out to others – such as Twitter – and get their input as well.

The pot calling the kettle black

Sure, today the extension is being pitched as a piece of software that was collectively cobbled together by engineers from Twitter, MySpace and Facebook. (Twitter says two people worked on the software, though it wouldn’t say for how long, or how much of the final code was their contribution.) Of course, as Battelle points out, the extension was originally a Facebook/Blake Ross production. It now has a new home on the web: Focus On The User.

That is rich, considering Facebook’s record on serving the interests — and protecting the privacy — of its users has more twists and turns than a tapeworm. When it comes to privacy and putting users first, Facebook, depending on how you look at it, is either morally ambiguous or just plain shallow.

Once upon a time, “don’t be evil” meant something

There was a time, back in its early days, Google sure was a true  believer  in its “don’t be evil” motto. Not any more. Google, too, speaks from both sides of its mouth. Any search engine that runs advertisements from clinics promoting pre-natal gender tests is the personification of wrongdoing. And that is but one example.

Either way, what I am saying is that “don’t be evil” is not a product or a slogan or a tagline to recruit employees. From the way I see it, it has to be a belief system for a company. It is a defining attribute of the company and its larger mission. It is a moral lens through which a company makes its decisions. It is about doing the right thing for the end customers.

I think somewhere down the line, Google forgot that its customers are us, the people and decided that advertisers were its customers. Otherwise, why else would it force the Google+ search results on web searchers. Dave Winer put it best when he wrote:

I really don’t like the way Google search is going. It’s becoming more and more laden with strategy taxes. It’s being designed more and more for their competitors, rather than for their users (us) or their customers (the advertisers).

Just like Google, Facebook cannot brandish “don’t be evil” lightly. Instead of putting us the people first, Facebook makes no bones about using all our data, sacrificing our privacy, in an effort to create a system to sell us advertising. So when they name an extension “Don’t Be Evil,” I am sorry, but I do get riled up.

Doing the right thing and finding a business model and obeying Wall Street’s motto of “always be growing” is a balancing act that is hard. It needs corporate leaders who indeed are believers — and so far, despite the lip service, both Facebook and Google have failed that test.

My colleague Mathew Ingram puts it best when he writes:

The reality of this ongoing battle is that both sides have shown they are more than happy to criticize others for being closed or proprietary or otherwise unfair, at the same time as they themselves favor their own content or services, lock up their data or otherwise use their market position to strong-arm their competitors. “Don’t be evil” is a knife that cuts in multiple directions, and both Google and Facebook need to be careful about how — and where — they wave it around.

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We were surprised to find that talking and texting on a cell phone were so disruptive to one’s gait and memory recall of the target location,” says Eric M. Lamberg, PT, EdD, co-author of the study and Clinical Associate Professor, Department of Physical Therapy, School of Health Technology and Management, Stony Brook University.

Although walking seems automatic, areas in the brain controlling executive function and attention are necessary for walking. Dr. Lamberg says that the significant reductions in velocity and difficulty maintaining course indicates cell phone use and texting impacts working memory of these tasks.

Sure it is only 33 participants and needs more study, but still! While I can understand the texting being a massive distraction — that’s why we’re seeing gadgets that disable non-hands-free smartphone activities while driving — I was amazed at the decline in walking speed.

Image courtesy of Flickr user yumanuma

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