GigaOM » Om Malik

Rating the legacy of outgoing FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski

Stacey Higginbotham — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 23:19:37 +0000

After almost four years in the role, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said Friday that he was stepping down.During his four years as the head of the FCC, he failed to stop a stunning loss of regulatory authority as a result of a court case started by his predecessor, and made minuscule strides in boosting broadband competition. To top it off he also oversaw regulations that may further diminish the FCC’s authority as we head into the IP age.

He did however, forge better connections between the tech industry and the FCC and managed to stop a merger that would have certainly hurt consumers. He also tried to make more wireless spectrum available — taking on the powerful broadcast industry to do so. But instead of listing his achievements and capitulations, I dug up a list that my colleague Om Malik and I wrote back in 2009 when he was named to the role.

In the post we told him what he needed to focus on during his tenure. Now, it’s time to look back and see what he has accomplished.

FCC Chairman Julis Genachowski

An internet bill of rights: While Genachowski did manage to pass a version of network neutrality regulations in 2010, he did so in a way that leaves those rules in doubt before a lawsuit that has been filed by Verizon and MetroPCS. Instead of addressing the idea that the FCC has no power to regulate things that occur on information services (basically anything that’s delivered via the internet) which surfaced after a court ruling in 2010, Genachowski’s FCC did nothing to try to strengthen its authority before passing those rules. Now, the case is before the same court of appeals that decided against it the first time around. Grade: C

A focus on one key metric for all FCC decisions — namely returning the U.S. to the global forefront of Internet and mobile technology: On the mobile side, the chairman focused on LTE deployments and getting more airwaves for mobile broadband. And U.S. carriers have already deployed LTE networks ahead of many other countries. On the wireline side, it’s a bit mixed. Broadband caps and a lack of wide scale fiber to the home projects are keeping the U.S. far from the top in international rankings. According to the most recent (June 2012) OECD reports, the U.S. isn’t tops in terms of average or median advertised speeds. We were No. 1 in terms of connections, however. Grade: C+

An emphasis on future technologies (mostly wireless) that boost marketplace competition: Here the FCC has done a lot, despite political and unexpected technical hindrances. Genachowski’s FCC attempted to create a wholesale 4G network using satellite airwaves only to see that idea flail as interference with GPS spectrum was discovered. He also stopped a merger between AT&T and T-Mobile that was not in consumers’ best interests while also pushing for more spectrum and setting in motion an incentive auction that could provide airwaves for the carriers as well as for unlicensed broadband. Grade: B

Special incentives to attract new players (and not older companies) that bring broadband to the masses : Genachowski hasn’t done much here except issue press releases, but others have stepped up including Google and Gigabit Squared to bring gigabit fiber broadband to a few cities. Grade: B-

Tax credits for widespread deployment of broadband speeds of upwards of 20 Mbps down and 10 Mbps up for less than $50 a month without caps: That’s not happening. Grade: F

Better and more connectivity to office buildings, especially from newer players: While companies like Webpass or Sonic.net continue to deploy faster services in more places, business broadband wasn’t an issue the FCC has touched. Grade: F

An IP-centric, rather than voice-centric, approach to reforming the Universal Service Fund: This is a thankless task, but the FCC has started on the road to an all-IP world first with universal service fund reforms as well as a current debate on how to make the transition to an all-IP world, as well as what rules the agency should enforce. Grade: B

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.

Policies that bring quality of service into the wireless agenda: Om envisioned this as something like penalties for dropped calls, but I’ll expand it to issues like Verizon’s phantom data charges and the fights between app makers, phone companies and carriers that tended to catch consumers in the middle. The FCC was actually pretty vocal in these cases, even if it only managed to draw attention to bad behavior. Grade: A

An understanding that Google, and other web companies, are not the consumer’s friend, so their agenda shouldn’t automatically be trusted: Politics is a sport for big boys and Genachowski’s FCC was pretty transparent in pitting Google and other tech companies against the cable guys and the telcos and assuming that the resulting middle ground was an okay place for consumers. Grade: D

Final summary

All in all, Genachowski spent a lot of time on wireless, believing that to be an area where the FCC had room and regulatory authority to add capacity and improve competition. He was utterly neglectful on the wireline side, not doing much to strengthen competition, or even address issues such as caps and the virtual standstill on investment in rural areas. He also exits an agency that is weaker on the regulatory front than when he started and may end up weakening it further depending on the rulings in the network neutrality case.

He did start the arduous process of reforming the telecommunications regulatory regime to reflect the IP-based future and tackled universal service fund reform. Without a successor named yet, it’s hard to say what the next priorities will be for the FCC, but bringing off a successful auction of airwaves taken from the broadcast industry will be on the agenda as will the issue of how to regulate (and transition to) an all-IP telecommunications network.

Meanwhile, consumer issues such as the high cost of broadband, data caps and the eventual fate of network neutrality are all issues that may or may not change regardless of the new chair. The more things change, the more things still manage to stay the same.

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Kleiner Perkins’ Michael Abbott: It takes two (teams) to build a successful app

Laura Hazard Owen — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 13:54:16 +0000

When it comes to creating a successful app, human interface designers and lead engineers have to work closely together from the beginning, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner Michael Abbott said at the Structure Data conference Wednesday. That can mean thinking about apps in a new way.

“More and more products are being built by having great pairings of those two players,” Abbott, the former VP of engineering at Twitter, told GigaOM founder Om Malik. Engineers need to understand a user’s experience with the app, Abbott said, but designers also have to “understand the limitations of the environment they’re building. It shouldn’t just be a great experience in one small segment,” but an app should work “whether you’re offline or have a bad connection.”

Abbott often sees a “lack of real empathy” between designers and engineers. “The tension on the design side is that it’s never good enough,” he said, “and on the engineering side he or she wants to ship…How do you get that balance? Because you still need to ship.”

Malik raised other issues about apps and empathy: “Uber managed to piss off people every single time they did something interesting — surge pricing, or charging more at the time of Hurricane Sandy…I keep saying, if we are going to build this future driven by data, how do we bring this empathy and humanity into the data?”

“We might be forced into it by some of the reactions we’re seeing to Uber,” Abbott answered. But he pointed out that, when it comes to services like Uber, the way that a user rates a driver is also unique to that user — and that brings up empathy on the user’s end. For example, Uber could infer from data on what a driver’s rating should be, based perhaps on the start and end times of a trip. “Your rating of that driver,” he said, “also ends up building an implicit rating on you, and your ability to rate.”

Check out the rest of our Structure:Data 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the entire session follows below:

A transcription of the video follows on the next page

Go to page 2 (of 2) on GigaOM .

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Commutist podcast: T-Metro, Broadband Caps and Steve Jobs

Chris Albrecht — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 07:01:47 +0000

Is a T-Mobile/MetroPCS merger crazy… or so crazy that it just might work? Is your ISP capping your broadband and what should we do about it? And is it time to let Steve Jobs finally rest in peace? We talk about all this and more on today’s Commutist podcast with special guests Kevin Fitchard, Stacey Higginbotham and Om Malik.

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SHOW NOTES:

Hosts: Chris Albrecht and Erica Ogg

0:00:00 – 0:11:00 – Kevin Fitchard explains everything you need to know about a T-Mobile/MetroPCS merger

0:11:00 – 0:12:00 – Today’s episode is sponsored by the GigaOM RoadMap conference

0:12:00 – 0:25:00 – Stacey Higginbotham breaks down broadband caps, and how they could be capping innovation (and here’s her cap chart)

0:25:00 – 0:36:00 – Om Malik discusses why we just can’t let go of Steve Jobs, one year after his death

0:36:00 – 0:38:00 – Parting gifts

Erica likes the WiThings home blood pressure monitor

And Chris recommends aspiring writers listen to the Nerdist Writers Panel podcast

PREVIOUS EPISODES:
Apple’s iO-Mess, Dirty Data Centers and Tesla

News from the Mobilize Conference

Paul Tough: How Children Succeed and what you can learn from them

The iPhone 5 Event

Come on, Kindle, Light My 4G Fire

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Instagram co-founder: Pick what your app does well, and ignore the rest — for now

Eliza Kern — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 17:36:58 +0000

In hindsight, it sounds obvious that the co-founders of Instagram would focus their engineering talent on getting photos to load quickly. Presumably that’s what users of Facebook’s photo-sharing app would want. But knowing where to focus your talent and what to ignore is harder than people think, said co-founder Mike Krieger.

“A big part of it is figuring out what you want your company to be, and what you want to outsource,” Krieger said Thursday in an interview with Om Malik at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference in San Francisco.

Krieger said in the beginning, none of the Instagram team ever thought their company would get as big as it did, as fast as it did. “At the time we weren’t on any of Amazon’s services, we were just on this tiny server in L.A.”

But Kreiger said the team decided early on that their main priority would be to get photos loaded as quickly as possible so that users checking the app for a minute while waiting at a bus stop or on their commute would be instantly entertained. He didn’t want an app where the download took forever, or the photos wouldn’t appear.

“That minute has to be magical,” he said. “The part of the server that makes sure the photo gets to the app as quickly as possible, that’s what we focused on.”

This decision allowed Instagram to generally hold up to intense traffic, and Malik noted that the service almost never crashed. Kreiger said this is true, but there are also a few benefits of building for mobile, where users expect downtimes and delays.

“If it’s a two minute blip, some people will be like, ‘Oh, Instagram is down,’ but some people will be like ‘Oh, my phone sucks.’”

Check out the rest of our Mobilize 2012 coverage here, and the live stream can be found here.

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The Commutist episode 2: Apple’s event and why an LTE iPhone is a big deal

Chris Albrecht — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 07:01:15 +0000

The Commutist is a weekly GigaOM podcast giving you all the tech news and analysis you need to know on your way into work.

With Apple’s big iPhone 5 event this week, what other tech news is there to cover? We give you the big takeaways and explain why Apple’s LTE move means more than just speed. Also, a quick heads up that The Commutist is now available on iTunes!

Download: gomcom-ep-2-91312.mp3

download

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iTunes

SHOW NOTES:
Hosts: Chris Albrecht and Erica Ogg

0:00:00 – 0:21:00 – Om Malik joins in to give his takes on what this latest Apple event says about the company.

0:21:00 – 0:37:00 – GigaOM writer Kevin Fitchard breaks down everything you could ever possibly want to know about LTE networks and why Apple’s move into 4G is a big deal.

0:37:00 – 0:40:00 – Parting gifts:

Chris brazenly recommends his own timelapse video from outside the Apple event.

Erica likes the Olloclip lens attachments for the iPhone.

Kevin really likes GoJee for making killer meals from what you have.

The Commutist theme song written and performed by Phil Reno.

PREVIOUS EPISODES:
Episode 1: Come on Kindle Light My 4G Fire

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Video: Betaworks’ Borthwick says it’s time to stop thinking about “content”

Staci D. Kramer — Sun, 17 Jun 2012 14:30:53 +0000

Om Malik interviews John Borthwick, founder and CEO, Betaworks.

Betaworks CEO John Borthwick’s advicefor the media industry: think about producing “information” — not “content.”

Why? “Content is very much about the package, very much about the container”, Borthwick said during a Q&A with GigaOM founder Om Malik at our recent paidContent 2012 conference.

The moment you start thinking about it as information, I think people start thinking about it differently, they think less about the container and the structure and a little bit more about the users.

That’s especially important as the concept of “container” changes with the increase in realtime data and sharing across platforms.

The pair also talked about how to use that data (Betaworks has started both Bitly and Chartbeat); how Facebook isn’t making the best use of its data for advertising and the need to break the CPM ad model; why Apple’s app store and Google Play don’t work; and a lot more packed into the embedded video below:

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GigaOM And paidContent Join Forces

Ernie Sander — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 01:00:58 +0000

Yes, it’s true: We are joining GigaOM. And the combined group will be a powerhouse, with more than 20 writers and editors, a strong presence on the East and West coasts and in Europe, and coverage of everything from media and big data, to the cloud and mobile, to book publishing and online video — not to mention the startup scene in various markets.

It’s a very exciting development for us, as ContentNext and GigaOM share so many of the same goals and have such similar cultures. We both believe fundamentally in the power of breaking news and smart, useful content across different platforms, and we both have a core conviction about practicing truth and fairness in our journalism. We also both happen to believe that you can build very profitable businesses if you can execute on those principles.

We have other things in common, too: Both companies’ founders — in our case, Rafat Ali, in GigaOM’s case, Om Malik — turned influential one-man blogs into vibrant media companies by being way ahead of the curve. (A side note: The two founders have also long been close friends.) The chance to work with Om is one that anyone would leap at. He is a true visionary with a unique understanding of technology and a gift for communicating that knowledge. He’s also stacked GigaOM with talented writers and editors who, like him, have a deep curiosity about the intersection of technology and business, particularly innovation. (You can read Om’s post on the sale.)

At a time when so many content companies are groping for sustainable business models, GigaOM has a dynamic approach to making money. Its multiple revenue streams extend from site advertising to conferences to subscription products and beyond; from its online audience of more than 4.5 million monthly unique visitors, to its leading events like GigaOM Structure and GigaOM Roadmap, to GigaOM Pro, which provides research on emerging technology markets from over 110 independent analysts. GigaOM has built a suite of products that can serve a variety audiences, all of which congregate under the GigaOM brand. And now that will expand to include our sites, newsletters and conferences.

For readers of ContentNext’s sites — paidContent, MocoNews, paidContent:UK and ContentSutra — there’s nothing not to like about this deal. You’ll still be able to attend our stellar conferences and enjoy our trenchant posts about the industries we cover. You’ll still be getting all the content you know from the writers that you’re used to getting it from. But now you’ll be getting something else, too: more smart voices on different and vital topics, and even more news and analysis.

Under the terms of the purchase, Guardian News & Media (GNM), which bought ContentNext Media in 2008, will take a minority stake in GigaOM. GNM joins existing GigaOM investors including Reed Elsevier (NYSE: RUK) Ventures, Alloy Ventures and True Ventures. The sale is the culmination of a process that began back in the fall, with multiple bidders for ContentNext. The New York investment bank Coady Deimar Partners advised GNM on the deal.

“With our shared commitment to journalistic ethics, GigaOM and paidContent are a natural fit,” said Paul Walborsky, CEO of GigaOM. “paidContent is the leading voice covering the evolution of media, an area that is very important to us. Integrating our teams will enrich our editorial coverage and expand our footprint immediately in two markets that are critical to our growth – New York City and the UK.” GigaOM, which was founded in 2006, is based in San Francisco. ContentNext, whose roots go back to 2002, is based in New York.

The sale ends ContentNext’s three-and-a-half-year run as part of Guardian News and Media. When GNM had bought ContentNext, part of the idea was that it could help the UK publisher gain mindshare in the U.S. as the Guardian expanded there. In recent months, GNM has been focusing its investment activity in the U.S. around the buildout of a new site. “paidContent has a fantastic presence in the tech/media space, and the match with GigaOM, itself a really smart and pioneering company, is a good one. We are delighted to become shareholders in GigaOM as part of the deal,” said Andrew Miller, CEO of Guardian Media Group, the parent company of GNM. “The Guardian’s focus in the U.S. is on building guardiannews.com, but we look forward to seeing paidContent thrive and grow in its new home and wish its staff all the very best for the future.”

We thank the Guardian for their stewardship, and can’t wait to start working with our new colleagues at GigaOM.

See GigaOM’sannouncement of the deal for additional details.

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Square COO: There’s no value in NFC

Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 22:07:58 +0000

The COO of mobile payment startup Square, Keith Rabois, thinks that the mobile payment technology Near Field Communications (NFC) has no value proposition for consumers and merchants, he said at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference on Monday. “I’ve never met a single merchant in the U.S. who says I want this NFC thing,” said Rabois in an interview with GigaOM founder Om Malik.

NFC is a short-distance wireless technology that’s been under development for years, and could be a catalyst for mobile commerce. Some researchers are predicting that by 2014, one in five phones will be NFC-enabled. Companies that have invested in NFC include web firms like Google, blackberry maker RIM, carriers through their network called Isis, handset maker Nokia, chip make NXP, and many others.

But despite the growing ecosystem around NFC, Rabois questions how useful the tech will be to consumers and businesses, and said while NFC makes good PR and cocktail party chatter, it doesn’t offer a value proposition. Even Google’s work with Google Wallet is meant to help Google track behavior, and enhance their business, not to enable small businesses, said Rabois.

In contrast, said Rabois, we’re trying to help small business retain each customer, and have the same level of analytics as larger businesses but at a low cost. It’s hard for small businesses to compete at this level with the large companies, said Rabois. Square focuses its network on small business transactions, like a local merchant selling wares at a farmers market.

Small business owners can use the square plug-in hardware for their iPhones, and then an app that helps them securely make a payment digitally. But don’t expect Square to be a platform or API any time soon — Rabois said that because they are trying to make the transaction as simple as possible, it might not lend itself to an open API.

In addition to rejecting NFC, Rabois doesn’t seem too worried about competition from the bigger players. He called PayPal’s brand “atrophied,” and said that Square looks inward at its applications and services, not outward at competitors. The next new service to come from Square will roll out in October, and December, said Rabois.

Watch live streaming video from mobilize2011 at livestream.com

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Can You Be a Good Parent and a Good Blogger?

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 23:09:57 +0000

[qi:076] That’s my personal struggle, but you could insert many all-consuming tasks — such as starting up a company, or training for the Olympics — for blogging and still get to the heart of my question. Most people believe good blogging is about two things: personality and passion. But where does that leave me, a professional news writer who’s passionate about technology — but not to the point where I want to think about it 24 hours a day?

Technology isn’t my single-minded passion, mostly because I have this other passion in life — my two-year-old daughter — but anyone else with a life outside of their blog seems doomed to failure under that formula. I suppose I could be a mommy blogger with a heavy focus on technology, but in truth, it really is the hardcore sciences and learning about technology that I love. So my passions are pretty much destined to never meet — unless I want to implant an RFID or GPS chip in my kid. Maybe when she starts driving. On Monday, Om sent over a nice read about what makes a good blog post from 43 Folders that summarizes the personality and passion requirements quite nicely. But I was drawn more to a New York Times article on slow blogging written on Friday. While the idea of posting a few times a month seems self-indulgent for a professional reporter, there’s a lot of value in taking the time to think a post through. Passion and personality are no substitute for innovative thinking and well-researched points of view.

So as I sit down with my family for a much-needed vacation during the rest of the week and let up-to-the-minute blogging slide, I am also taking some time to think about a few topics that really interest me, such as privacy, home networking, broadband pricing and regulation, and where the chip industry might be in the next five years. Feel free to send your thoughts on those topics or tell me how you guys manage to juggle multiple passions — or if you think passion is the key to great blogging, even. Almost a year into this gig, I still haven’t figured it out.

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Meebo's Jen: How to Find Hard-to-Find Talent

Carleen Hawn — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 16:00:44 +0000

At GigaOM’s recent Structure 08 event, Meebo co-founder and engineering chief, Sandy Jen, joined a panel to talk about scaling your computing infrastructure for explosive growth. Jen also spoke with Found|READ, this time to offer founders tips on how to overcome what she calls the internal scaling challenge: hiring.

Meebo launched in September 2005, when it unveiled the first Ajax application that allowed users to access several instant messaging clients (AIM, Jabber, Google Talk, etc.) from its home page. Back then, Jen and co-founders Seth Sternberg and Elaine Wherry were bootstrapping, even using personal credit cards to lease the three servers they needed in order to launch. With no money left over for marketing, they went guerrilla.

“Digg had started about six months earlier, so we said, ‘Let’s just Digg ourselves,’” Jen recalled. “We wrote a quick description of Meebo — ‘Web IM: AIM! Yahoo!; No downloads; draggable windows! It’s free!’— and went to bed. The next morning we had 600 Diggs, and our servers were overloaded.”

Three years later, Meebo has raised $37.5 million in venture capital, has all sorts of new products (and servers), gets 30 million unique visitors a month, and faces its toughest scaling challenge yet: “The No. 1 thing we worry about is hiring,” said Jen. To keep up with user demand, Meebo must grown to 50 employees from its current 30 by 2009 — a 67 percent increase.

In a fast-growing startup, maintaining your core values is crucial. “But how do you hire and keep your small team culture? It’s really hard,” Jen told us. “In the beginning it’s easy to ask your friends and people you trust for names. But eventually you’ll tap out your networks. Then where do you look for talent?”

In order to uncover new recruits — and not just the very talented people, but the right people — for her company, Jen has developed a few tricks:

1. Go to industry events. You want to hire people who are interested in the same things that you’re interested in. That means reaching out to people who attend the same events that you do. Once you’ve seen the same person at four of five events, make your move.

2. Keep track of smart comments in blogs and forums. Pay attention to the people who are commenting smartly on the stories you’re reading — especially if they’re doing so frequently. This is an indicator of their engagement and passion.

3. Look for people through your extra-curricular activities. You want people interested in your technology, but the right cultural fit means finding people who share your other values, too. A good indicator of shared values is a shared extra-curricular activity. Do you rock climb? Play ultimate Frisbee? (Jen does.) Common fun offers opportunities for bonding, which can be a great way to find new staff.

4. Go outside your geographic circle. There’s a lot of talent in the world. One of the first things Meebo did was commission its graphic design from a guy in Italy, whose work they found on an art web site. They hired him on a trial basis; today he’s Meebo’s Agent Icon.

5. Leverage contract arrangements. As Jen acknowledged, getting H-1B visas is a long process and a pain in the butt. But they’re worth it. If you find someone you want on your team, get them in the door, excited about your company and under contract as soon as possible. Meebo usually has six or seven people working under contract at any time.

6. Commit and be generous. Really talented people rarely advertise themselves, at least not as much as we’d like them to. You must court them. There is a lot of competition, so this could mean being flexible with hours or remote work options. And once you decide to hire someone, you have to welcome them with open arms.

7. Fire fast. When someone isn’t working out, have them leave quickly. In three years, two people have left Meebo — one left in three weeks, the other, in a few months. But a bad fit will contaminate your culture. You can’t afford that.

(Photo credit: Lea Suzuki, San Francisco Chronicle.)

For more on how Jen manages Meebo’s infrastructure, check out her interview with Om, below.

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