BlueKai, an advertising startup that hopes to convince users to actively manage their online privacy settings and sell better intent-based advertising information based on such actively managed accounts, has raised $10.5 million in second-round funding from Battery Ventures and return investor Redpoint Ventures. The Bellevue, Wash.-based […] Read more »
Web surfers in the Pacific Northwest will soon join the denizens of Baltimore, Md., in their ability to get WiMAX service. Although those in Baltimore are still surfing under the old Xohm brand offered by Sprint, Clearwire plans to launch the first citywide Clear branded service […] Read more »
A fast new home networking standard was ratified on Friday by the ITU. With the unsexy name G.hn and some quibbles about what the consumer friendly marketing name will be (HomeGrid backed by Intel and Texas Instruments seems likely), writing a headline is hard. But think […] Read more »
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Thanks to the rising number of mobile phones around the world — and likely a loss of fixed lines — the number of international calls made to cell phones has reached about 45 percent of all international phone calls, according to research firm TeleGeography. The firm […] Read more »
Updated: M2Z’s wait will continue, because the FCC canceled its Dec. 18 meeting, leaving the issue of free, filtered wireless broadband a likely topic for the next chairman to tackle. As broadband is a key element in President-elect Barack Obama’s recovery plan, there’s hope. Sen. Jay […] Read more »
OK maybe I’m just cranky today, but Spouse 2.0 Day, when entrepreneurs are advised to buy their significant others a gift for putting up with their hectic work schedules, is just dumb. I’m married to an entrepreneur, and I work with someone who is incapable of taking […] Read more »
Icera, a UK-based semiconductor company, said today that it’s raised $70 million in additional funding in the form of debt and equity; it also said it would cut an undisclosed number of its staff. Current investors Atlas Venture, Balderton Capital, Accel Partners, Amadeus Capital Partners and […] Read more »
Because it’s Friday, and because I absolutely adore these kinds of silly polls, I thought I’d share with you Intel’s findings that 46 percent of women would rather go without sex for two weeks than go without the Internet. Maybe some of these women are married […] Read more »
Today beleaguered telecommunication equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent said it would cut 2 billion euros ($2.7 billion) in costs between now and 2010. It plans to do this by laying off 1,000 managers, 5,000 contractors and cutting costs in areas such as R&D and real estate. While this […] Read more »
Next Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission will vote on the creation of a nationwide filtered wireless broadband network (unless politics cause the issue to be struck from the agenda). The most likely beneficiary if the FCC approves the plan is a Kleiner-backed startup called M2Z Networks, […] Read more »
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[qi:026] The venture capital market has started conserving cash, and now angels are doing the same, according to the annual Angel Capital Association confidence report out today. About 48 percent of angel investment groups surveyed invested less than they had predicted they would at the start […] Read more »
Comcast said this morning it would roll out its 50 Mbps wideband speed tier in Baltimore; Chicago; Atlanta; and Fort Wayne, Ind., in December, with the full rollout in the markets expected to be completed by the first half of 2009. These deployments complete Comcast’s stated […] Read more »
Having determined that its growth in the enterprise has pretty much stalled, Cisco is looking at video to help it sell equipment to carriers. To do that it’s positioning video traffic as the new data — ready to take over the web. Because if you’re going […] Read more »
Cisco, having determined that its growth in the enterprise has pretty much stalled, has decided that video — from teleconferencing to cable — is the answer to its growth problem. To that end, it’s positioning video traffic as the new data — ready to take over the web. And Cisco is betting that cable operators and carriers panicked by the rise of video content are going to start building their own optimized video networks that the company calls a medianet. Read more »
[qi:___wimax] Next year, Verizon subscribers in a few markets may be surfing the web at warp speed as the carrier said on Tuesday that it would begin deploying LTE next year — a year ahead of schedule. Several vendors had warned me that a U.S. carrier […] Read more »
TruPhone just last week released an iPod Touch application that allows for VoIP calls on the device using Wi-Fi and also has such an app for the iPhone. But this morning the company has pushed out an app that allows iPhone users to make VoIP calls […] Read more »
Today Amazon launched its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in Europe, where it joins Amazon’s CloudFront and Simple Storage Service (S3) as an option for European developers. This means companies using Amazon Web Services can host the data and run their applications in Europe, rather than hosting […] Read more »
According to the Wall Street Journal, telecommunications equipment maker Nortel is talking to lawyers about its strategy, including filing for bankruptcy. This is grim news for the vendor and the industry at large. Nortel has a lot of debt ($4.5 billion as of the last quarter), […] Read more »
As cloud computing moves beyond startups and attracts enterprise users, major software vendors are being forced to reckon with a new challenge to their current pricing models. Much like the emergence of software as a service has caused many large software vendors to evaluate existing licensing […] Read more »
In a call today outlining Sun Microsystem’s cloud computing efforts, David Douglas, SVP of Sun’s cloud computing business and Lew Tucker, Sun’s CTO, said the server and software vendor believes that there will be multiple clouds tailored to specific industries, and that more than one or […] Read more »
A 110-page congressional report issued today takes current Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin to task for allegedly suppressing and manipulating public records, not carrying out some of the jobs allocated to the FCC and generally being, well, a jerk (his “heavy-handed, opaque and non-collegial management […] Read more »
Updated: Today Sprint offered the lineup for its upcoming mobile developer’s conference on Dec. 10-12, which will include a keynote by Rich Miner, Google’s vice president of mobile technology. While we’ve known that Sprint was considering Android, this fall Sprint CEO Dan Hesse apparently told a […] Read more »
[qi:010] As the recession deepens and the telecommunications industry braces for some tough quarters, Level 3 said yesterday it will lay off 450 U.S. employees — or 8 percent of its work force. The reduction affects employees at all levels, will take place before the end […] Read more »
StrataScale, a subsidiary of colocation services provider company RagingWire, is expected to announce on Tuesday the general availability of a managed hosting product called IronScale. Surprisingly, unlike many of the companies that host data center hardware, IronScale is not a cloud, but a managed server offering. […] Read more »
The latest tale of woe out of the VC industry appears today in the Wall Street Journal, on how the limited partners who invest in venture capital firms are backing out of their commitments to fund individual VC funds. The end result of LPs failing to […] Read more »
Broadcom released a new chipset today that integrates Blueooth, an FM radio and Wi-Fi (in the 802.11n flavor) for mobile devices. Broadcom is trying to own the segment of the market that wants multiple radios on a chipset, while Texas Instruments tries to keep up. The […] Read more »
Cloud computing management software provider RightScale has scored $13 million in second round venture funding. Index Ventures led the round and was joined by returning investor Benchmark Capital, which led a $4.5 million round in April. Index Ventures partner Danny Rimer has also joined the RightScale’s […] Read more »
When you’ve got to grow a $40 billion-a-year company, sometimes there’s just no way to do it other than to capitalize on fear. In the case of Cisco’s medianet concept, defining a series of networks transporting video, launched today, the company seems to be capitalizing on […] Read more »
Speaking today in his weekly radio address, President-elect Barack Obama listed upgrades to the information superhighway as one of the essentials of his economic recovery plan. Decrying our nation’s rank as 15th when it comes to broadband adoption (he’s using OCED numbers), Obama seems willing to […] Read more »
Wi-Fi, because of its ubiquity, familiarity and low cost, is leaving the home office and taking over the home networking environment. In the second segment from my visit to the home of Kelly Davis-Felner, marketing director of the Wi-Fi Alliance, we talk about Wi-Fi in relation […] Read more »
As the economy has crumbled and the telcos have watched their customers cut cords and retrench, cable companies have benefited from being perceived as a safer investment option. Since this time last year, shares of Comcast, which trades on the Nasdaq, have fallen by 12 percent […] Read more »
Facebook has postponed its employees’ stock sale, perhaps indefinitely, the Wall Street Journal reports today. Facebook’s postponement is an understandable bow to market reality — and it prevents the company from setting an official valuation that the social networking site’s investors would consider too low. The […] Read more »
[qi:058] The UK telecommunication regulatory agency Ofcom has issued its own broadband bill of rights — perhaps we should call it the broadband Magna Carta? Starting today, British Internet service providers that have signed up to the code have to tell customers which speeds they can […] Read more »
Want fiber to the home? If you’re not in FiOS territory, it’s going to cost you. I’ve been following the various research projects over at Google and up in Canada debating the benefits and business models of building fiber to the home, and wondered how much […] Read more »
These days, everyone’s looking for another way to cut costs. One relatively painless way is to make the switch to a prepaid cell phone plan. According to 2008 data from the Cellular Telephone Industry Association, of the 262 million cell phone subscribers in the U.S., only 16.9 percent of them are on prepaid plans. Here are five reasons that a prepaid plan might be right for you. Read more »
Like me, the Wi-Fi Alliance is based in Austin, so I asked them if they wouldn’t mind setting up a home tour that would allow me to see the future of Wi-Fi in action. In the segment below, I sit down with Kelly Davis-Felner, marketing director […] Read more »
[qi:004] With the change in administration it’s time to stop pussyfooting around the issue of broadband access in the U.S. It quite honestly sucks. Yes, some people have access to FiOS, but others have access to speeds that rank even lower than the lame 768 kbps […] Read more »
As expected, the FCC said today it will take up the issue of creating yet another wireless network, and set rules on cable pricing and programming, at its Dec. 18 meeting. As commenter Tom Evslin pointed out, the alternative wireless broadband network proposed is slow, will […] Read more »
Japan’s second largest wireless carrier, KDDI, has taken the plunge into the Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard, by building an LTE overlay on top of its existing CDMA network. KDDI is using equipment from Nortel and Hitachi for the fourth-generation wireless network, which will be operating […] Read more »
In a measurement of statewide web-surfing speeds, Nevada came out on top with speeds of a mere 781 kbps, and that was far above the not-even-broadband speeds of 322 kbps experienced by users in New Mexico, the lowest ranked state, according to PCMag.com. The technology magazine […] Read more »
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