Cable continues to crush telcos when it comes to stealing broadband customers, according to data out from the Leichtman Research Group. The analyst firm noted that the U.S. market added 1.3 million new subscribers for a total of nearly 80 million subscriptions. Read more »
Arris and Kabel Deutschland, Germany’s largest cable service provider, have managed to field test cable equipment that delivers fiber-like speeds of 4.7 gigabits per second. While those speeds aren’t for the real world, it shows that cable can hold its ground with fiber. Read more »
Technology has helped bring about a retail shift that now means I can buy consumer goods without ever leaving my house, shaving gear without ever thinking about it and now, thanks to True&Co, bras without ever having a tape measure wrapped around my chest. Read more »
Bored with your 100 Mbps connection? Verizon plans to offer customers up to 300 Mbps down via its FiOS fiber to the home service. That’s double Verizon’s current top speed of 150 Mbps down and a slam against cable companies trying to compete with Big Red. Read more »
We’re on pace to send 1.3 zettabytes of data in 2016, about 4 times more than we send today according to data out from Cisco. To put that in perspective, that’s more than 38 million DVDs sent per hour. It’s a 1 followed by 21 zeros. Read more »
The concept of cloud computing has permeated the startup worlds and is steadily encroaching on the enterprise, and the 11 startups we selected as the finalists for Structure LaunchPad competition this year show how far the cloud’s reach has come. Read more »
Dell showed off a box that contains 48 ARM-based servers, joining others making boxes with processors that uses the same architecture as the chips inside your cell phone. The server consumes less power and could find a home in web servers and Hadoop clusters. Read more »
A little more than half of the projects on Kickstarter fail. But understanding those failures can help others avoid the same fate. So, I spoke to one of the founders of a failed project to understand what lessons others might be able to learn. Read more »
It looks like Google is backing off its commitment to an open fiber to the home network, according to my conversations with sources, a reading of the Google blog and evasions by the search giant when I asked about its stance. Read more »
Gigabit Squared broke onto the scene on Wednesday, announcing it would spend $200 million to bring gigabit broadband to six college towns in conjunction with the Gig.U program. But the startup aims higher: It wants to change the economics of delivering fiber to the home everywhere. Read more »
The Gig.U project, which aims to improve American innovation by deploying gigabit broadband networks to college towns, has teamed up with a startup called Gigabit Squared, which will provide $200 million to actually deploy those networks to six unnamed towns. Read more »
Thanks to the addition of multiple undersea cables, there’s more bandwidth capacity around the world, but prices are still relatively high along certain routes. A Telegeography report discovers that prices for bandwidth capacity along certain routes dropped, but not as much as one might expect. Read more »
Brocade joined the parade of vendors, large and small, trumpeting their software defined networking strategies. The company laid out a strategy that offers a Brocade-specific fabric as well as an ability to operate an OpenFlow network simultaneously with an existing network. Read more »
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski reiterated his acceptance of broadband data caps and tiered pricing at The Cable Show. That’s fine, but it would be awesome if he started asking questions about how those caps are set and what impact they have on consumer behavior. Read more »
The cult of Kickstarter and the looming promise of the JOBS Act, have presented an opportunity that Fundable wants to fill. The service, which is part of Virtucon Ventures debuted today with five projects and a goal of helping entrepreneurs raise capital for their businesses. Read more »
At the close of its second day of trading in the public markets, the Wall Street consensus is that Facebook’s IPO was a flop. But it’s actually par for the course to see Wall Street and the tech media hype something and then tear it apart. Read more »
Comcast has released two sweet additions to its home broadband service that allow users to turn their TV into big screen home and life dashboard. Using gesture and voice controls, Comcast’s new Dayview service gives customers on open window to their web services. Read more »
The ongoing patent battle between the dominant smartphone providers, is about to get its prime-time drama moment, when the CEOs of Apple and Samsung will reportedly be brought before a U.S, federal judge for mediation on Monday. Get ready for Law & Order: Silicon Valley. Read more »
Pakistan has blocked Twitter because the microblogging site has refused to block potentially offensive images of the Prophet Mohammed. Facebook apparently has agreed to take down the offending images while Twitter has not, according to a Packistani official quoted by the Associated Press. Read more »
Comcast may have given users a break on Thursday by raising its monthly data cap to 300 GB, but Level 3, the backbone Internet provider and content delivery network, wants people to know that Comcast is still likely prioritizing its Xfinity traffic over others’. Read more »
Comcast plans to raise its broadband cap to 300 GB per month as it trials two new types of caps. The move is welcome one, but it neglects to address some of the net neutrality complaints that have arisen in the last few weeks about Comcast. Read more »
Researchers at Rice University have built a chip that sacrifices accuracy in exchange for faster performance and energy efficiency. The chips is 15 times more energy-efficient that normal chips and will be in the real world next year in hearing aids. Read more »
Software defined networking made a big splash last week at the Interop show in Las Vegas with a variety of vendors pitching their vision of how abstracting out networking from the physical hardware will change the overall way IT services are implemented. But the most disruptive ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Everyone may not get excited about open APIs or 3-D printing (what is wrong with y’all?) but everyone loves food. Here are four novel ways the tech world interacts with food (or even food prep). So grab a snack and read on. Read more »
Can a niche player build a business offering an offshore cloud to rival Amazon’s infrastructure as a service? Calligo wants to try. The startup has formed on the Channel Islands to provide an offshore cloud option for enterprises and eventually, an offshore personal storage account. Read more »
Comcast, once again, has some explaining to do. An engineer has conducted experiments that he says show the nation’s largest broadband provider is prioritizing traffic– something it’s not supposed to do under the conditions the government imposed when the cable company bought NBC-Universal. Read more »
Qualtrics, a decade-old marketing research company has raised a $70 million first round of venture capital. This isn’t a growth capital deal, despite Qualtrics’ age and the large amount. This is designed to scale Qualtrics like a startup — from 200 to 450 employees. Read more »
LightSquared’s bankruptcy is the conclusion of a process that is rigged against broadband competition. Maybe it would have failed for economic reasons, but before it got the chance it fell victim to politics, spectrum warfare, and interests that don’t want more wireless competition. Read more »
Welcome to the concept of the superstack — which acts to circumvent the openness that the Internet and the digitization of content has enabled and once again lock consumers into a single platform for their content determined in part by the hardware they choose. Read more »
Verizon Communications has had a history of standing up against publishers seeking to subpoena information about its subscribers and their downloading habits, so it’s not a big surprise to see Big Red telling John Wiley’s lawyers to stuff it. Read more »
What if you could know everything about your network? And instead of getting snapshots you could see the path of every packet and run analytics on that stream of data in real time? It’s the difference between watching a cartoon and viewing a flip book. Read more »
With 10 terabytes of data generated everyday, AddThis (formerly called Clearspring) has access to a social graph that rivals Facebook. But unlike the social networking giant, AddThis wants to share its data. So I asked them how they can handle real-time processing on that many terabytes. Read more »
T-Mobile is still struggling after its planned acquisition by AT&T fell through. In the first full quarter after the proposed merger was scuttled, the nation’s fourth largest carrier managed to gain only 187,000 customers; most from lower revenue businesses, such as prepaid and M2M. Read more »
Derek Collison, the guy who built VMware’s CloudFoundry service, left the hypervisor giant in mid-February with an idea to make platforms as a service even better. His startup, Apcera is the result. Now, with $2.2 million in funding Collison is ready to begin. Read more »
Go read this article in the New York Times. It articles the problems we have with U.S. broadband and where those problems come from. Not evil ISPs, but a weak regulatory environment, and to fix that we need to get politicians to talk about broadband. Read more »
Every year at our Structure 2012 conference we host a Launchpad of startups. This year, we decided to give the 10 finalists more than stage-time: We teamed up with venture firm Sequoia to give them a hands-on training session at Sequoia HQ. Read more »
We’re at a flashpoint in the evolution of television, and the battle lines are becoming more clear. What’s also becoming clear is that Comcast is playing to win. Here are seven things the nation’s largest cable company is doing to keep its pay TV customers. Read more »
The investment team at the Kauffman Foundation believes the venture capital industry is broken and they — or rather investors in VC funds — are partially to blame. The report condemns venture firms for being to big, not delivering returns and not adjusting to the times. Read more »
Elemental Technologies has raised $13 million to expand internationally, but the cool story behind this company is that it is selling its GPU-transcoding servers to everyone from HBO Go to Comcast. This makes Elemental an arms dealer in the war over the future of TV. Read more »
The humble text message turned 20 years old this weekend, and other than an excuse for cake, the birthday is a great chance to look at how carriers innovate and why they are getting crushed by over the top services now that times have changed. Read more »
