Speaking on Friday at the Google Big Tent, a free speech event in Washington, Schmidt said he is “worried” about a “balkanized” internet as governments try to chop up the web just as people in places like Burma are discovering it for the first time.

Schmidt also offered examples, drawn from his just-published book The New Digital Age, of how the internet is helping in some of the world’s most benighted places. He cited women in Pakistan with faces and eyes burned by acid, who could nonetheless have lives as “virtual people,” earning a living and connecting with the world online. He also described smuggling systems for micro SD cards in South Sudan to show how people will go to desperate lengths to get information.

Schmidt’s anecdotes come partly from his extensive tours of scary countries, which included a stop in North Korea that brought criticism from the State Department.

For Schmidt, his travels reinforced how sinister governments are casting a growing shadow over the mobile phone revolution.

“We’ll hear the distinct voices of the citizens of these countries that we haven’t heard before,” he said. “These people are just like us but their governments are not like ours.”

The situation creates moral dilemmas for companies that make technology that connect people but that can also be co-opted as tools for oppression. As Google’s head lawyer, David Drummond, explained at the outset of the event, the most important battles over free speech have shifted from books and newspapers to technology. Drummond warned that bad governments are now turning to the United Nations and international treaties in an effort to exercise control over the world’s telecommunications infrastructure.

The event, which was hosted by Google and Bloomberg and included media executives discussing Chinese censorship, took place a day after the company’s latest update to its Transparency Report on global censorship.

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Last summer, the news organizations published stories that described the billions in wealth held by the family of the Chinese premier. In response, China shut down the Times’ Mandarin news service, blocked its English website and denied visas to journalists. The government also blocked Bloomberg‘s consumer-facing websites, bloomberg.com and BusinessWeek – a block that remains in place today.

Speaking at the Google Big Tent event in Washington on Friday, Bloomberg’s Chief Content Officer, Norman Pearlstine, explained the decision to publish.”We would lose our credibility [if we didn't],” said Pearlstine. He added that, in China, “information is perceived as belonging to the state” and said he doesn’t anticipate this view changing in the near future.

Bill Keller, a former editor-in-chief and current columnist for the New York Times, echoed Pearlstine’s views that news publishers can’t rationalize censorship by saying they would lose money and influence in China. ”They can make life miserable for you,” Keller said of the Chinese government, adding that “this will cost money.”

There may, however, be a bright side to being shut out of China. According to Keller, many Chinese are aware that the Times and Bloomberg deliberately took a financial hit to preserve their brands — and in the long run, this will earn them loyalty and trust.

Keller and Pearlstine spoke on a panel with media executive Mark Whitaker and Google’s Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond, at a Google “Big Tent” event about security and free speech in the digital age.

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1: Customer-to-vendor ratio is getting better.

Mark Muehl, Comcast SVP of product engineering at OpenStack Summit.

But just a bit. Tuesday’s keynotes featured real, live OpenStack users Bloomberg, Comcast, HubSpot and Best Buy. Not bad.

Bloomberg’s Pravir Chandra said his team set some high goals for what they were trying to  build — they needed high availability, no cascading failures and smooth scale down and scale up. They were able to get there by deploying OpenStack along with considerable custom work of their own, both above and below that layer. They ended up setting up the high-availability databases and figuring out how to aggregate logs from the hypervisor level, said Chandra who heads the security architecture team in Bloomberg’s CTO office

Comcast SVP Mark Muehl said the cable giant is using OpenStack to provide real-time programming guides and fast program search. One application quickly locates the NCAA tournament basketball game you want — no easy task — and brings it up for a fast score check. “We are integrating real-time sports feeds. That app would have been impossible to do on our own [older] platform,” Muehl said.

2: Ceph is hot, hot, hot

Based on an informal poll of speakers and attendees, Ceph storage is where it’s at. The Swift storage system?  Not so hot. Best Buy moved from Gluster to Ceph because of the latter’s self-healing capabilities. Ceph offers object and block storage all in one integrated product while Swift handles object storage only. Mirantis EVP Boris Renski said Swift, which comes out of Rackspace, has lots of production installs, but Ceph is viewed as having a more “elegant” architecture. “Unlike Swift, you can use Ceph as the backend for both object and block.” Also, because of a better algorithm for handling data replication, it can promise better scaling, he said, although Mirantis has not fully tested that out yet.

3: Grizzly brings more maturity and features

Grizzly, the seventh release of OpenStack in three years, brings more features and functions to the table. HubSpot will use Grizzly (with some of its own tweaks) to run images on “full bare metal,” said CIO Jim O’Neill. “That means the same image can run on your cloud of choice … . The application doesn’t need to know or care where it runs anymore.”

And that cloud agnosticism brings huge payback. “We took this single image, picked it up from public cloud into a Rackspace-powered private cloud and saw a 4X increased efficiency running that workload,” he said.

4: Choice is good

The same meme of large companies opting to deploy their workloads on multiple clouds vs. one cloud continued at the show. And yes — I can sense the eye rolls coming — there remains an uneasiness over cloud lock-in. The Best Buy guys put a local traffic manager in front of multiple (unnamed) clouds specifically because “we don’t want to lock into any one vendor,” said Steve Eastham, director of web architecture for the Minneapolis-based retailer.

And even the speakers at this OpenStack event said they will remain flexible in their technology choices going forward if OpenStack doesn’t meet their needs. Asked why Samsung opted to go with OpenStack over CloudStack two years ago, Kirk Kim, cloud CTO for Samsung SDS, said they thought OpenStack would scale better.  ”But,” he added, “given the situation today, we might look at that again.” Hmmm. He could not be reached for follow-up.

5: The subtext: AWS and VMware 

The OpenStack faithful are obviously proud of what they’ve accomplished over the past three to four years. It’s not nothing that all that hundreds have contributed to this project and that some customers — outside the OpenStack community itself — are starting to put this stuff into production.

What was left  unsaid, for the most part,  is that OpenStack continues to be measured against Amazon Web Services in the public cloud infrastructure sector and VMware in the (mostly) private cloud market, where legacy applications are in play. This despite the fact that VMware is now an OpenStack Foundation member.

OpenStack may be growing, but it does not have the field to itself.

Feature photo courtesy of hockleyphoto.com.

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This shift in behavior helps explain Bloomberg’s decision to update its iPad app this week to include deeper research layers and the company’s messaging system which is popular at elite financial firms like Goldman Sachs. Bloomberg said it used eye scanners and heat maps to design the new app, which looks like this:

A Bloomberg spokesperson said the iPad app has been “by far the fastest growing platform” among its subscribers, who each pay around $20,000 for an annual license. In the past, most Bloomberg users licensed a hardware terminal (“the Bloomberg box” — see a 1996 version below) but now two thirds of them opt instead for “Bloomberg Anywhere,” which lets them log in to various devices though a portable finger-print reader.

John Waanders, the Head of Bloomberg Mobile, said the company has been on BlackBerry since 2001 and then expanded to early mobile devices like pagers and WAP browsers. Since then, it has added a Twitter feed and an app store that features an app called “Angry Bonds.”

In the last few years, Waanders said traders have come to seek out the “lean back” experience associated with tablets, and that 38,000 of them are using the iPad app. This represents a little over 10 percent of the company’s estimated 313,000 global subscribers.

Bloomberg would not comment on the ratio of Apple to BlackBerry users among its customers but said that 50 percent of Bloomberg mobile users accessed the service on more than one device.

The company is owned by the mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, and competes with Thomson Reuters to provide financial information to the financial sector.

Clarification: an early version of this story said 80% of users subscribe to “Bloomberg Anywhere”; the number is two thirds.

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The new feature, which Bloomberg announced on Tuesday, comes after the Securities and Exchange Commission updated its disclosure rules to say that public companies can now reveal important news on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

For practical purposes, Bloomberg’s decision means traders will not have to monitor a separate screen to watch for companies or executives that announce news on Twitter. While most market-moving news still arrives by way of traditional news wire agencies or official websites, social media sites are becoming an increasingly important tool for distributing such information.

The SEC’s rule to allow social media disclosures comes after an investigation into Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’ decision to share relevant corporate information through a Facebook post.

Under the new rule, public companies that want to use social media platforms for market-moving news must first tell investors that they are doing so.

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NRG Energy already builds solar panel projects for commercial and industrial building owners. Doyle told me that the company has been “heartened” by the amount of Fortune 300 companies that have wanted to install solar panels on their rooftops. Distributed solar panel systems have been gaining momentum, said Doyle, adding that they’ve been delivering higher growth than utility solar systems. In an interesting twist, that puts NRG Energy in grwoing competition directly with utilities, notes Bloomberg.

The emergence of the solar lease, or other financing options for solar, has helped unlock huge growth in solar panel rooftop installations in recent years. Essentially a third party, like SolarCity or Sungevity, raises a few hundred million dollar fund from a bank or a big company like Google, and uses that money to provide the up front capital for a home roof top system, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars to install. The homeowner doesn’t have to pay that upfront cost, but pays the solar leasing company a monthly bill that is usually lower than its former utility bill. Over time the bank or “the Google” gets paid back with a return that can be around ten to twelve percent.

As I reported last month, three quarters of the solar panels installed on home roofs in 2012 in California were financed and owned by these solar service companies, and not the home owner. These “third-party owned” solar systems collectively generated $938 million in revenues last year.

It’s one of the more lucrative businesses in the solar market these days. So why wouldn’t NRG Energy want to be in it. SolarCity, a former startup that has helped pioneer the business, went public in December 2012 at $9.25, saw its stock soar 40 percent on its debut day, and has now more than doubled to $18.57 Monday morning. Other companies that offer solar financing options include Sunrun, and Clean Power Finance.

The emergence of NRG Energy in the solar leasing business could be a real threat to the companies already operating in it. NRG Energy earned $1.59 billion last year, which was a decline from the previous year, but which is clearly far larger than the fairly new companies like Clean Power Finance and Sungevity.

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The mismatch is a problem on a variety of levels. The “big five” state-owned utilities that operate many of these power plants are financially exposed to the water constraint, particularly because the Chinese government has set a cap on the country’s growing water use. And making these coal plants consume less water with the standard technology could ironically decrease the plants’ power efficiencies and boost their carbon emissions.

But the water constraint will only continue to grow unless the utilities do something about it. The report says that by 2030 the amount of water used by China’s power sector could grow to 124 billion cubic meters — or even 190 billion in an aggressive estimate — from 102 billion cubic meters in 2010, due a potential tripling of the country’s power plants. 190 billion cubic meters of water would constitute a quarter of the country’s capped water supply in 2030.

The good news is there are some options for the utilities. They could build more of their future power plants outside of the North and particularly in some of the more wet regions. In addition, clean power like solar panels and wind turbines don’t require as much water resources, so these renewable technologies could start to look more competitive to utilities. These options could also be more attractive than retrofitting the plants to the more water efficient, but more power inefficient, kind which would cost them collectively $20 billion for 100 GW.

There could also be next-generation technologies that could help solve this water, power plant problem in China, too. Are any of the cleantech companies out there working on innovative solutions that could help?

As the world gets 9 billion people by 2050, and countries like China, Brazil and India start to consume more energy per capita, water will become an increasingly constrained resource. New water management, conservation, and recycling technologies will emerge to meet this challenge.

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Key highlights in this report include:

• For publishers, the first step to monetizing something is to be able to measure it. The analytics tools now available make it possible to track the spread of content on social platforms closely.

• Until now there has not been a marketplace where those potential buyers and sellers of content could meet. Nor were there adequate tools to enable verifiable transactions between them. Tools like Cascade and Ricochet are helping put the foundations of such a market in place.

• Both publishers and licensees will need to seize the sort of ad hoc syndication opportunities that arise online and on social media networks. One of the major tasks facing publishers over the next three to five years will be to structure their repositories of content so they can be searched, sorted, customized, repackaged, and accessed in real time via standardized APIs.

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In a short order issued on Thursday, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit granted the media groups fifteen minutes to participate in a hearing scheduled for March 26. The groups also include Bloomberg, the Washington Post, Dow Jones and the First Amendment Coalition.

At the hearing, the tech companies will ask the Federal Circuit to overrule a lower court’s order that granted the media companies’ initial request to unseal various filings in the patent dispute. The documents are significant because they are likely to disclose sales and revenue figures that Apple and Samsung would prefer to keep secret while they hash out damages figures related to a massive $1 billion jury verdict.

Although court filings are public, companies sometimes ask to file confidential information under seal. In recent years, however, Apple has asked to seal documents on a nearly routine basis, which led the Reuters news agency to mount a successful court challenge this summer.

The controversy over the sealed documents has led other news agencies to take an interest in the issue. The media outlets’ participation at the upcoming hearing is likely to draw more attention to the Apple-Samsung documents, an unwelcome development for the companies.

This week’s order is below. Here’s the full list of media outlets who signed the application to attend the hearing: the New York Times, Bloomberg, the Washington Post, Gannett Co., Dow Jones, the First Amendment Coalition, Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, the Society of Professional Journalists, and the American Society of News Editors. The filing was first spotted by Reuters.

Fed Circuit Grants NYT Permission to Intervene in Apple Samsung

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