See our article today at RealClearMarkets . . .
Entrepreneurial Innovation and the Internet
by Bret Swanson
As Washington and the states pile up mountainous liabilities – $3 trillion for unfunded state pensions, $10 trillion in new federal deficits through 2019, and $38 trillion (or is it $50 trillion?) in unfunded Medicare promises – the U.S. needs once again to call on its chief strategic asset: radical innovation.
One laboratory of growth will continue to be the Internet. The U.S. began the 2000’s with fewer than five million residential broadband lines and zero mobile …

Earlier last month, I found that YouTube’s HTML5 beta wasn’t even worthy of being beta. Three weeks after that, Jan Ozer ran some CPU performance tests between YouTube Flash and HTML5 on Mac OS X and Safari and found that CPU performance was better on HTML5.

I generally admire the work coming from the SANS Institute, but Alan Paller’s call for software liability (via Deb Shinder) for security vulnerabilities just doesn’t make sense.  That’s because software security is like a bank vault which are rated by the time and effort required to break, but none are rated unbreakable.
While SANS is right to point out the sloppiness of the software industry, calling for software liability is irresponsible.  Even the most secure software in the world can be hacked if there was a sufficient reward.
I can understand holding …

The FCC yesterday announced its plan to create a volunteer “digital literacy corps.” But based on the government’s track record in implementing a similar technology-oriented volunteer plan, the National Emergency Technology Guard, the idea will never meet the FCC’s lofty expectations. Congress authorized NET Guard in 2003, but it took five years just to launch a pilot program.

The shift to the Internet video distribution presents a formidable engineering challenge for the Internet because of the massive bandwidth requirements of unicast video distribution.  Unlike broadcast communication technologies where data is transmitted once to many people, unicasting requires a new data transmission for each recipient.  So while a 15 megabit per second (Mbps) HD television show being broadcast to 100,000 people in a city only requires 15 Mbps of network capacity, a 2.25 Mbps YouTube video being unicast to 100,000 people over the Internet would require 225,000 Mbps which is …

A number of interesting new articles and forums deal with our exaflood theme of the past few years.
“Striving to Map the Shape-Shifting Net” – by John Markoff – The New York Times – March 2, 2010
“Data, data, everywhere” – The Economist – Special Report on Managing Information – February 25, 2010
“Managing the Exaflood” – American Association for the Advancement of Science – February 19, 2010
“Professors Find Ways to Keep Heads Above ‘Exaflood’ of Data” – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education – February 24, 2010

Updated on February 27, 2010 at 10:20 AM: Tim Karr has demanded a retraction with claims that he fact checked his piece.  Upon further review of his claims, and having offered Tim $1,000 for proof of my “deep ties” to Arts & Labs, I have decided to change the title of the post to indicate he was “98% Fact Free”. He did, after all, spell my name correctly.
Updated on February 26, 2010 at 6:46 PM: I had suspected this, but did not know it at the time of the original …

Larry Dignan at ZDNet has done some excellent investigative journalism on the Devil Mountain Software (DMS) scandal and the story gets more bizarre by the minute.  It’s an extremely complex fiasco that needs to be read to be believed, but the gist of the story goes as follows.
It all started with a dubious “Alarming” report from DMS‘ Randall C. Kennedy (AKA “Craig Barth”) claiming that Microsoft Windows 7 consumes too much memory resources on personal computers led to wide scale condemnation from various technology columnists/bloggers.   If the original report which was filled …

According to the Wall Street Journal, Google will lower its Equipment Recovery Fee (ERF) for the Google Nexus One from $350 to $150.  The original $350 fee was unusual and unreasonable because it was on top of T-Mobile’s $200 Early Termination Fee (ETF).  This brings the total early termination fee (including the $200 charged by T-Mobile) to $350 which is the exact amount needed to cover the subsidy customers received for the subsidized Nexus One.
In addition to the unreasonable fees for early termination, Google’s direct retail strategy has also been …

Despite being a Boxee user and fan of the service, (I have been a user of both the Alpha and Beta clients for over a year) I have to call out Ronen for trying to be too clever by half. The fact is, Zucker has the more honest argument on this point. Boxee doesn’t, in fact, act just like a browser.