At a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on AT&T’s proposed purchase of T-Mobile, support was tepid for the merger. And most support associated with the deal was conditioned to a point where the FCC would be put in charge of regulating prices, speeds and perhaps access to devices. Read more »
The AT&T and T-Mo merger will be decided by a DoJ and an FCC playing by the old rules that don’t take into account the future needs of the mobile industry, nor how the relationship between the players in that industry have changed. That’s a problem. Read more »
Akamai has created a partnership with Riverbed Networks to improve the delivery of enterprise applications over both public and private networks, giving Akamai a foothold in the enterprise market as cloud computing heats up. It’s a response to the changes wrought by a more connected world. Read more »
If you didn’t think computing’s future was both visual and mobile, then Nvidia’s decision to buy wireless radio startup Icera clinches it. The $367 million cash deal is setting Nvidia up for a competitive battle with Qualcomm in the mobile application processor market. Read more »
The pressure is on for Google to develop a social strategy. It should leverage the combination of +1 and its users’ Google identities to come from behind on the social graph. With the concept of identity, Google starts it’s social play from a much stronger position. Read more »
Comcast today announced that it will offer a 4G MiFi device, but what I found curious was that in the release about the device and Comcast’s Xfinity Wireless2Go product there’s no mention of the WiMAX protocol, an omission that’s becoming more common. Read more »
As Cisco revealed its somewhat opaque plans to restructure itself, two things became clear: Marthin De Beer will take on a new role and the company is continuing to bet big on its nebulous Medianet strategy. Read more »
Intel has managed to keep pushing Moore’s Law by developing a 3-D transistor that allows the chipmaker to deliver ever smaller chips that will be more powerful, yet consume less energy. The new chip moves Intel ahead of the industry and positions it competitively against ARM. Read more »
A day after Twitter experienced its “CNN moment,” John Adams , the messaging service’s operations engineer, posted a nice slide show on how the company has scaled and the tools it uses. Entitled, “Talk Cloudy to Me” the slide show reviews old insights and offers new ones. Read more »
The brains inside your smartphone are getting more power with the latest version of application processors having two processing cores to help speed up the delivery of web site load times and mobile gameplay. That’s awesome, but startup Adapteva, wants to take that number higher. Read more »
Kaminario, which provides high-performance storage, has raised a $15 million C round of financing. As SSD startups hit maturity and the market for using solid state drives in data centers for high-performance and energy efficient storage heats up, when will we see the inevitable consolidation? Read more »
This evening, as we learn about the death of Osama bin Laden, we’re seeing firsthand what happens when the real-time, immediate notifications of Facebook and Twitter meet real-world events. But how do we decide what’s gossip and what is fact? Read more »
MetroPCS recently met with the FCC about wireless competition, presumably in response to AT&T’s proposal to buy T-Mobile USA for $39 billion. Industry groups, average consumers and Sprint have come out against the proposed merger, and MetroPCS also offered up this slide showing industry consolidation. Read more »
Two research groups in the last few weeks have shown off 100 terabit per second speeds delivered over fiber connections. The advancement in speeds is both unexpected and necessary as we rely on broadband as the interconnect for our increasingly digital lives. Read more »
Spiceworks has raised a $25 million fourth round of funding from Adams Capital and Tenaya Capital to continue building out a community of IT professionals that use the Spiceworks software to monitor their companies’ networks. That community is like a Facebook for IT. Read more »
Demand for mobile data appears to outstrip the supply of spectrum available to provide Facebook or streaming video on our phones and tablets. However, we are ignoring some very promising technological solutions that could turn the spectrum crunch into a capital spending bonanza by telecommunications companies. Read more »
Hot on the heels of its Qwest acquisition, CenturyLink plans to buy Savvis, the data center provider. The $3.2 billion deal mirrors the $1.4 billion Terremark buy that Verizon completed earlier this month as telecommunications providers buy their way into providing cloud and managed hosting services. Read more »
VMware said Tuesday it purchased SlideRocket, an online presentation provider, for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition fits in with VMware’s acquisition of the Zimbra messaging platform in January 2010 and pits VMware against Microsoft, Cisco, Google and other folks in the collaboration space. Read more »
An independent task force that provides recommendations on broadband policy to the FCC has made its first eight recommendations, including one that relates to the FCC’s recent questions about if megabits per second is a good metric on which to judge broadband. Read more »
LG, the South Korean makers of phones televisions, household appliances and a variety of other consumer devices has licensed the ARM-based chip cores that can be found in devices from handsets to set-top-boxes. Once again, a vendor has forgotten to invite Intel to the party. Read more »
If there’s a cloud for compute, for storage and any other variation under the sun why shouldn’t there be a VoIP cloud to deliver telephony over the Internet? With the launch of Whistle, the 2600 Hertz Project will make building a VoIP cloud cheaper and easier. Read more »
Food is the next frontier for mobile, big data and web services to change our lives, but in order to make that happen we need open standards, or any kind of standards for identifying ingredients, importing recipes and tracking nutritional data. Read more »
AT&T’s strategy for pushing through its $39-billion purchase of T-Mobile, thus consolidating further the majority of the mobile subscribers, 4G-capable spectrum and revenue in the U.S. is fantastic. Let’s take a look at the promises, the changes in strategy and the continuing issues. Read more »
If you want to change something, first you have to measure it, and when it comes to energy consumption and generation we don’t have the tools yet to do either. But as Saul Griffith said at Green:Net, we’re still in the dark ages for energy literacy. Read more »
Updated: Today, Amazon’s Web Services have hit some bumps in the road, taking down a variety of popular sites such as Foursquare, Quora and Paper.li. Since clouds do fail perhaps the best thing to do is provide information and maybe a dollop of humor. Read more »
I’ve noticed an irritating trend in the startup world: After adding my email to a launch page, I get asked to submit a few of my friends’ email addresses in exchange for a higher place in line or earlier access. It’s annoying, but it apparently works. Read more »
Dogster, the old-school social network for dog and cat owners has been purchased by Say Media in the first deal for the recently created content and advertising company. Say Media was created last September when blogging platform SixApart was swallowed by video ad network VideoEgg. Read more »
Seagate today agreed to buy Samsung’s hard drive business in a deal valued at $1.375 billion in a deal that highlights how broadband adoption, the cloud and mobility are changing the dynamics of the storage industry. Read more »
The angels who wrote the first check to Google were also the first backers of startup IO Turbine, which comes out of stealth mode today with details about its fundraising, its founders and its planned product for speeding up I/O bottlenecks on virtualized servers. Read more »
With its plans to bring gigabit broadband to Kansas City, Google is changing the fate of that city, but it’s also setting out to build a next generation ISP, one designed for the type of world where connectivity is an irrefutable aspect of our lives. Read more »
LightSquared, the company trying to create a wholesale fourth generation wireless network is thinking about an initial public offering. Is the company is planning to take investors for a ride using the current spectrum crisis as cover for a questionable business plan? Read more »
Cord cutters or those who want to watch American Idol in real-time or some of their home sporting events on their connected devices will soon have a new option thanks to Bamboom, a startup that said it raised $4.5 million today in seed capital. Read more »
The FCC and the DoJ’s review of the $39-billion buy of T-Mobile by AT&T began today. The good news is there’s now a place to file a complaint and the bad news is it’s unclear if the government will stand up for consumers on this deal. Read more »
This week, the broadcast industry is meeting in Las Vegas. However, amid this collegial gathering of industry folks a $33 billion fight is brewing. The fight is nothing short of an entertainment battle royal with TV on one side and the iPhone on the other. Read more »
Leap Wireless, the company behind the prepaid Cricket prepaid service, will transition to a 4G Long Term Evolution Network in the second half of this year, but is dubious about the technology being ready for customers. Leap’s CEO thinks devices will achieve “critical pricing” in 2012. Read more »
Netflix has become the new scapegoat for Internet Service Providers eager to cap, tier or otherwise make broadband more expensive for their customers in the guise of chastising bandwidth hogs. Data out from startup Mu Dynamics drives the streaming site’s pariah status home. Read more »
VMware has entered the cloud game by offering an open-source package called Cloud Foundry, a platform as a service that should strike fear in the hearts of its compeitors, especially the likes of Salesforce.com, Microsoft and Rackspace. Read more »
We decided to rebuild our dashboard framework in server-side Javascript, using node.js. This decision was driven by a realization: the LAMP stack is dead. In the two decades since its birth, there have been fundamental shifts in the web’s make-up of content, protocols, servers, and clients. Read more »
Level 3 Communications agreed to buy Global Crossing in a transaction worth $3 billion. The deal is a sign of consolidation as broadband becomes the connecting fabric of our lives. But the question isn’t why this deal between two telecommunications backbone providers happened, but why now? Read more »
The biggest deal about Facebook’s open compute project isn’t the project, it’s the wave of innovation this can bring forward at the systems level — which will affect everyone from the chipmakers to the giant systems vendors and data center operators. Read more »
