Mobile operators might as well give in and work with web companies. But if they are smart they will adapt their pricing before consumers start dumping texting and voice services, so they can still maintain the same wallet share (and maybe higher margins). Read more »
Networking is having its heyday in Silicon Valley, as startups pushing programmable networks raise millions and venture firms are on the lookout for the next big thing in IT infrastructure. Read more »
Both houses of Congress have reached a compromise a few wireless spectrum issues that had the potential to put the kibosh on innovation and competition when it came to both mobile broadband and more unlicensed spectrum. Read more »
Cisco has read the mobile data tea leaves again, and it predicts that next year the global population of mobile users will switch to streaming the majority of their content from “the cloud.” This will represent a shift from downloaded and sideloaded content. Read more »
Tumblr hits 500 million page views a day, deals with 40,000 requests per second and sends more than a terabyte of data into its Hadoop cluster. Here’s how it went from nothing to a startup that needed to serve 15 billion page views a month. Read more »
Texas Instruments will offer a fat radio chip that can offer Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, FM radio, NFC and GPS in one package. But what’s cool about this chip is that it can take some jobs from the brains of the chip so it doesn’t waste much power. Read more »
Is AT&T failing to keep its story straight about the need for more spectrum, or is it just that the popping of the spectrum bubble has taken them by surprise as well? The nation’s second largest operator now sees a data drizzle rather than deluge. Read more »
Want to really embrace the quantitative self? Forget tracking your sleep and start tracking your dental hygiene. Beam Technologies, a year-old startup is set to introduce a Bluetooth-enabled toothbrush and app that will launch next month and retail for around $50 for the base. Read more »
Korea Telecom in South Korea has taken an interesting twist on network neutrality, and is blocking Samsung’s Smart TVs from access the Internet, according to a large S. Korean daily. That’s right, net neutrality isn’t just for applications like Netflix anymore. Read more »
The payroll extension tax before Congress has two surprisingly technical segments related to mobile broadband–namely, will the FCC be allowed to set rules to promote mobile broadband competition in its next spectrum auction and whether the agency can set aside some airwaves for unlicensed use. Read more »
The FCC is trying to get rural Americans online, and to help, later this year carriers can apply for part of a $300 million fund to bring wireless broadband to the heartlands. Only it’s not the heartlands, as the nifty interactive map shows. Read more »
Cisco, an incredibly active acquirer, is ready to start doing deals again, according to John Chambers. We think it should be focusing on the cloud and beefing up its core networking skills by buying some of the companies we list in our story. Read more »
Akamai said it purchased Canadian web site optimization company Blaze. In acquiring Blaze, the content delivery network offers an excellent example of how the web ic changing as we access it from more devices and as the nature of the web sites we visits changes Read more »
Consumer applications have driven the rapid take up of faster broadband services in the U.S. in the last decade. But as Google and others build gigabit networks to see what can be done with them, it’s time to bring businesses back into the innovation cycle. Read more »
Solarflare, the former maker of 10 gigabit Ethernet silicon, has transitioned from making chips to making network adapter cards to speed up the networking capabilities of servers. Now it wants to take that further by doing real-time processing as data comes in from the network. Read more »
Combine the gargantuan information flows from the web and apps available to us everywhere with the small screen and processing power of a smartphone and you get a pretty evident bottleneck. Startup CoreMobile hopes to solve this with its enterprise software. Read more »
Google is ready to start stringing fiber for its gigabit network in Kansas City. The news is a welcome update to the project after the local newspaper reported that Google fiber was delayed over a dispute on hanging its fiber on utility poles. Read more »
Verizon and Redbox are creating a joint venture to provide content online and through Redbox’s physical DVD rental kiosks around the country. The deal is a chance for Verizon to make money from streaming content and show off how awesome its network is. Read more »
Nicira, the networking startup that is not so stealthy but seriously hot, is ready to tell the world what it offers and who is buying its software. The list of customers is impressive. Nicira’s Network Virtualization Platform is used at eBay, NTT, AT&T, Fidelity Investments and Rackspace. Read more »
Just thirty years ago, innovation in almost any category was measured in years, but today it’s measured in weeks or months. That cycle will continue to accelerate, especially in IT. So here’s how to build an IT ecosystem that can keep up. Read more »
Google’s Fiber organization is asking the FCC for the ability to test a residential gateway that has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It’s likely Google is asking the FCC for an experimental licence to test upcoming 802.11ac gigabit Wi-Fi technology inside residential gateways. Read more »
Google is asking the Federal Communications Commission for permission to test a mysterious Wi-Fi and Bluetooth-enabled “entertainment device,” in employees’ homes in four U.S. cities. So inquiring minds want to know, what exactly is it and is Google trying to build its own devices? Read more »
Congress is eyeing the competitive implications of Verizon’s $4 billion deals to buy spectrum from the cable companies. Much like those of us at GigaOM, they are wondering if this is a cease-fire in terms of broadband competition in the air and on the ground. Read more »
HP is following other big systems makers into the world of software defined networking with a line of 16 OpenFlow-enabled switches. That’s a pretty serious commitment to OpenFlow, a protocol that helps take the intelligence associated with routing packets off of the high-priced switching gear and […] Read more »
Machine to machine networks, sometimes called the Internet of things, are the logical extension of today’s connected society; but creating such a network will require multiple technologies; telcos to open up their networks; governments to figure out a way to assign unique numbers for each device on the network and new rules to protect security and privacy. Read more »
SeaMicro, the startup that built out a business in the low-power, microserver market, is taking its server architecture mainstream by adding Intel’s Xeon chips inside its boxes. This is a fundamental rethinking of how servers are built to respond to the needs of webscale operators. Read more »
The activists fighting for less-draconian copyright laws have seized the opportunity afforded to them by the defeat of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act in the U.S. Congress to go after a bigger topic, the exportation of SOPA-style laws abroad. Read more »
Microsoft announced a partnership with TechStars today that will allow it access to more than 400 startups around the world so it can sell its Azure cloud platform. But as Microsoft tries to sell startups on its services, can it compete against Amazon? Read more »
Companies such as Google, PayPal, Facebook and Microsoft have teamed up to create a standard to help boost email security. They are part of a working group to create the DMARC standard, which will help cut down on the number of phishing attacks. Read more »
The Wi-Fi Alliance, the keepers of the Wi-Fi brand, have come out swinging against the characterization of white spaces broadband as Super Wi-Fi. The Alliance issued a press release Friday saying it likes the tech, but the name will lead to “substantial user confusion.” Read more »
Thanks to Google trumpeting its new privacy policy and inviting users to explore their profiles with the search giant, there have been a few giggles as my female friends check their Google ad preference manager to discover that Google thinks they are male. Read more »
The sky is falling again in cellular land, and this time Siri is to blame. At least that’s the assessment form this opinion article in the Washington Post this morning claiming Siri’s piggy ways will destroy our cellular networks. But this assessment is wrong. Read more »
New Hanover County in North Carolina became the first county in the United States to deploy a Super Wi-Fi network, but the real question is will it also be the last? The technology is not as healthy as the pomp and circumstance surrounding the launch indicates. Read more »
The top 20 Internet retailers changed their prices 30 times more often than their peers who had lower sales during the holiday season in 2011, according to BlackLocus, a startup that helps companies set competitive prices online. Its goal is to transform retail pricing with data. Read more »
Dr. Sang Hoon Woo is an internist at Stanford Medical School, and with his own patients’ tales of trying to find health information online. He’s one of several entrepreneurs trying to bring medicine to reach consumers in the online (and mobile) age. Read more »
If Verizon has to visit a copper customer more than twice to repair the line, the communications company plans to just switch the customer over to fiber, said an executive on the company’s annual financial results call Tuesday. Read more »
IBM has teamed up with NEC to deliver an OpenFlow-based controller-and-switch combo that tries to find the sweet spot in software-defined networking between expensive, proprietary gear from Cisco or Juniper and the brand-new, open-sourced stuff that startups and webscale companies are peddling. Read more »
Thin Film, a company that prints memory and logic circuits onto plastic films, has signed partnerships with three companies to create a cheap, disposable temperature sensor. The resulting product could be the start of the stupid web and an initial step to the Internet of Things. Read more »
MegaUpload, the file-sharing community, has had its physical offices raided by the FBI and its site shut down because the U.S. government says it has violated copyright. I asked a few companies that track web traffic to see how it affected the Internet. Read more »
Updated. Sens. Harry Reid and Lamar Smith will postpone the scheduled votes on PIPA and SOPA. The moves are a big victory for the millions that oppose the bills on the grounds that they are too far-reaching in their attempts to curb piracy. Read more »
