Several seemingly disparate reports of the past couple of days actually meld into one. PwC released a report on Medical Innovation Scorecard: The race for global leadership.  It notes that the U.S. has long been the leader in medical innovation, but that: “The innovation ecosystem for medical device technology . . . is moving offshore. [...]

All the speculation that Google is going to overthrow the H.264 video compression standard with their own VP8 technology for their WebM standard appears to have been debunked by Google. Google has confirmed that there is no current intention of removing H.264 support from YouTube or Android OS.

Who’s Who in Internet Politics: A Taxonomy of Information Technology Policy & Politics
Robert D. Atkinson
The Next Digital Decade: Essays on the Future of the Internet

Netflix stands to save hundreds of millions of dollars per year on postage as they migrate to digital video streaming. The postage savings allow them to acquire more content licenses for online streaming and grow their subscriber base. The increase in video streaming will grow CDN and broadband infrastructure.

Tuesday all-day and Wednesday morning — the annual State of the Net Conference of the Internet Caucus Advisory Committee, at the Hyatt Regency. As always, it looks like an interesting line-up. Registration is available on-site.

GigaOm has posted this image of some very interesting info regarding Apple’s App store. Certainly shows the digital economy at work! Note that if the monthly December trend continues that Apple is generating $6 billion a year from the app store!

Former Hill staffers along with National Journal Tech Daily Dose Editor Juliana Gruenwald discuss communications policy in the 112th Congress. They take a look at how a Republican controlled House may approach communications policy over the next two years.

Using a variety of sources, Pingdom has put together a list of numbers about the Internet. For example: 107 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2010 (89% were spam). 255 million – The number of websites as of December 2010. 825.1 million – Internet users in Asia (as compared with [...]

By removing native HTML5 H.264 video delivery, Google effectively derailed the imminent universal migration to HTML5. The biggest loser under such a scenario is Apple because they’ve foreclosed on the possibility of supporting Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight which leaves HTML5 the only option on Apple iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad, and that helps Google Android.

Google’s WebM strategy and VP8 acquisition was a masterful bluff to force the MPEG-LA to commit to an indefinite free H.264 license for free video streaming. By removing H.264 from Chrome, Google will likely get a free H.264 plugin from Microsoft the way Mozilla Firefox got a free H.264 plugin and save another $6.5M/year.