Using Open Source development software and a hardware port for Freescale development of Wireless Mesh Networking may just be entering the disruption zone. In one example, the wireless controller for a toy tank was developed in less than 30min. This could be te technical opening to push mesh wireless technology into the datacenter, releiving the necessity for the mish mash of command and control cabling.

(06/24/2008 12:52 PM EDT)

ORLANDO, Fla. — Designing mesh network software for embedded processors using radio-frequency wireless protocol just got easier for original equipment manufacturers, according to Synapse Inc. (Huntsville, Ala.), which said it has re-hosted its Snap Pro 802.15.4 wireless mesh networking protocol for use on any RF module based on microcontrollers from Freescale Semiconductor Inc. (Austin, Texas).

Tapping an embedded virtual machine written in the easy-to-use Python language, Synapse demonstrated that applications could be developed in minutes, instead of weeks, by creating an embedded program during its presentation at the Freescale Technology Forum (FTF), held here June 16-19.

More here.

Man, what can I say? Some CableGuy gets the itch to go fast and this happens.

More pic here.

Well it continues, the long march to tree grinding oblivion. This time reported by the Washington Times. Much was a rehash of our last reportage. But there are some interesting bits –

Tribune, meanwhile, told its employees Wednesday that it hoped to wring more value out of its “underutilized” real estate in Chicago and Los Angeles, extending an asset-selling program Tribune is pursuing to service a $13 billion debt load, much of which it took on from going private.

Tribune already has reached a deal to sell one of its largest newspapers, Long Island, N.Y.-based Newsday, but ran into delays early this month in liquidating Wrigley Field, where the Chicago Cubs play, when negotiations for the field’s purchase by a state agency broke down over financing. Tribune also is moving to sell the Cubs.

Tribune has enough money to meet its debt requirements this year, bond analysts have said, but it must make headway on asset sales in order to meet its obligations in 2009.

Tribune’s troubles reflect broader problems in the industry, where a deepening economic downturn is worsening losses from a long-term shift away from print advertising toward online, especially in classified categories like help wanted, autos and real estate, where rivals such as Craigslist, Move.com and AutoTrader .com are thriving.

So one of the bigger publishers, Times Co., is preparing to sell off assets to fund ongoing operations. Keep in mind that selling off the Cubs is like giving up a license to grow assets. Its a monopoly in 4th largest market in the country. Personally I would keep the team and sell the paper. But I digress….

The die is already cast folks. EBay and CraigsList are already entrenched in the ad space formerly owned by the local papers. I can post an ad for nothing on CraigsList for 30 days vs $9.95 for a week in the same market with the home town paper. Who ya think I am going to pick? The other problem of course is one of the largest ad buyers, auto/transportaton, is taking a heavy hit both with sales and the impact of high gas prices. That venue will probably not come back.

The outlook looks poor for pulp. I will provide an opinion piece later this week on what I think replaces the pulp media.

Linky.

There’s a under reported problem with most of the tech media. They tend to live off of statements from pundits and press releases. Don’t blame them entirely, most have no technical education or background. The limits of their understanding are linked to using a computer, mobile phone and MP3 device. For the tech press, usually devices all three of these are Apple products, which also slants their viewpoint a bit.

In the US, there has been a relentless FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) campaign against Wimax that the tech media has been gulping down like free Starbucks and treats at  San Francisco press conference. The people pushing the FUD are the telcos, their suppliers, and their big investors. With FUD statements flowing so fluidly from these “informed sources” that tech sheep pack is only too happy to endlessly “report” the looming Wimax disaster.

The people pushing the FUD have tied their wireless broadband fortunes to a standard called LTE. LTE’s goals are lofty, and as envisoned LTE could have advantages over Wimax. LTE has two big disadvantages. While Wimax is being deployed,  LTE is still on the drawing board, and the spectrum LTE will be deployed on will not be available for another year.This could be a big advantage for Wimax, so the spin army is in full assault talking down Wimax. They’ve been so successful, that a coast to coast deployment by Sprint via the new Clearwire, was almost not funded.

Now lets look at a real world example of Wimax working well, right now, in the US. The company is Digital Bridge, and they have been offering good, reliable service in under served rural areas. With download speed that is competitive with DSL in most big cities, Digital Bridge is connecting new customers daily at a very healthy take rate. This is not what you would expect to see from a company that uses a unworkable technology.

Formed by a trio of Verizon executives in 2005, DigitalBridge seeks to bring WiMax to cities with populations of up to 150,000. At first, the company focused on bringing broadband to where it wasn’t. That included places like Appomattox, population 1,725, where cable and phone companies didn’t want to invest in building expensive landlines to reach faraway customers.

When it selects a locality, DigitalBridge installs broadcast stations atop cellular towers and tall buildings, which are connected by fiber cable to a regional Internet provider. The stations send a signal as far as three miles. Customers rent a device that looks like a modem and plug it into an electric outlet and into their computer.

DigitalBridge markets its service as BridgeMaxx, starting at $25 per month. It first moved into Rexburg, Idaho, before spreading to other cities and states. DigitalBridge operates in 14 localities, marketing the product through newspapers, radio and sponsorships, including a rodeo in Twin Falls, Idaho. It has a network of 20,000 customers that is growing by about 2,000 a month.(Washington Post)

Hold onto your hat! The world of top level domains is about to explode. Oh yeah, the old .com, .edu, .org and 10 others will remain. But if the Paris round recommendations are approved soon we will have “.disney”, “.apple”, “.nyc”, etc. If you can pony up the $100k for the registration you too could have one. Heck there might even be a “.gates” domain, he can afford it. –

None of the new names is likely to dethrone “.com” as the world’s leader, and critics fear new suffixes will merely force companies and organizations to spend more money registering names such as “microsoft.paris” simply so others can’t. Legal battles are possible over common but trademarked names like “.apple.”

The other proposal before ICANN would permit addresses entirely in non-English characters for the first time. Specific countries would be put on a “fast track” to receive the equivalent of their two-letter country code, such as Bulgaria’s “.bg,” in a native language.

The ICANN board said it would seek public comment on the guidelines before its next major meeting in November.

Demand for such names has been increasing around the world as Internet usage expands to people who cannot speak English or easily type English characters. Addresses partly in foreign languages are sometimes possible today, but the suffix has been limited to 37 characters: a-z, 0-9 and the hyphen.

It had to happen. It was getting crowded as it was. I would have preferred a little more structure however. Having to know essentially a fully qualified domain name for a user to hit a web site might become a daunting task. The other observation is that this will be a corporate phenomenon. With a $100k entry fee it is going to be the retailing giants that go for this. The odd question not answered? If Coca-Cola buys a TLD, “.cola” does it mean they have to give up the .com address they are using?

More at Wired.

Look out Sprint and Verizon. That captive handset you provided can now be reused with Metro PCS. There are plenty of caveats. Forget data service, Metro is voice / text only. Metro’s coverage is spotty and as late comer, they have some of the least effective spectrum. Having said that, if don’t mind a few quirks, you can get dirt cheap month to month service without buying a new phone from Metro.

This week’s announcement by the Dallas-based regional carrier is one of a series of moves in the industry that amount to a gradual opening of the U.S. wireless market, giving consumers more choice over what phones to use on what networks.

Carriers generally sell phones that are locked to their own service. This protects their business model, which is based on subsidizing the cost of the phone by hundreds of dollars, then making that money back on monthly service fees.

MetroPCS’s move threatens these traditional rules. It allows customers with certain models of phones from Sprint Nextel Corp., Verizon Wireless, Alltel Corp. and a few other carriers to bring their phones to MetroPCS stores, where they will be reprogrammed. (Florida Today)

In the markets where MetroPCS  operates, this could actually shake things up a bit. That’s good news for consumers.

As the the death star and the cable guys continue their assault on free online video, Google just added their own take on how to get programing from the desktop to the living room. The app works in conjunction with Google desktop and serves to any UPnP or DLNA certified gadget you may have attached to the big screen.

While many UPnP server solutions already exist for Windows (it’s a pity Google hasn’t targeted Mac users), Google Media Server does bring a few specific features to the table. Namely support for Internet-based content from its photo sharing service Picasa, along with videos hosted on YouTube (using H.264 not Flash Video). From this we can conclude that Google Media Server is designed to make Google’s desktop search application that bit more useful, as well as offer another means of accessing YouTube on a TV. (Last 100)

Anyone who thinks that Google isn’t making incremental moves toward becoming the dominant content indexing and delivery service needs to spend a little time at burning man. More captive screen time, more ads, more profits.

I’ve long  had the suspicion that the heartburn AT&T and the cable guys get from P2P is more about getting paid more for content delivery and avoiding the necessary investment in infrastructure to accommodate users demands. The fact is ISP revenue is up and the cost of capacity is in free fall. This makes providing more capacity at current prices levels very profitable, just not as profitable as raising prices without making new investments.

In the connected world, bandwidth capacity must continuously increase. At the same time we must find ways to do more with less. Anyone within minimal understanding of technology can look at P2P vs server to client content delivery will discover that P2P is an exponentially more efficient way of delivering a large file or stream. That takes us back to the debate about getting paid more to deliver content and avoiding new investment, which seems to be what the cable guys and the death star are really interested in.

Mark Wegleitner, Verizon’s senior vice president of technology agrees with me on the efficiency of P2P:

Peer-to-peer is a distribution enabler. But often when people talk about P2P, it gets lumped into a category with things that are bad, mainly because it takes up so much capacity on the network. But whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, there is underlying technology for P2P that can be used to everyone’s advantage to get content like video, which everyone is asking for, distributed in the most efficient way.

We conducted some tests with the P4P group and Yale University, and showed that customers have a better experience, and we use fewer resources, when we used the P2P technology. It’s really a win-win situation for us and the customer.(Cnet)

While the debate continues over the actual impact of online viewing on broadcast industry in the US, it’s become the preferred delivery medium for the UK’s comedy fans. Availability of an increasing  connection speed with no fear of reaching a download ceiling will certainly aid the continued growth in this trend. Could it be our American duopoly’s slow connections and threatened monthly download quotas will negatively impacting our entertainment industry?

Here’s something for all you statistics fans out there. Up to 40% of total viewing of BBC3 sleeper hit comedy The Mighty Boosh is via the iPlayer broadband TV catch up service, according to the BBC. 40% - and that’s not including all the students watching the Boosh on YouTube.

Amid all the hand wringing in recent years about comedy disappearing from TV - well the mainstream channels, anyhow - are we overlooking a flippin’ great resurgence for the genre through the medium of online video? (Organ Grinder)

Ruuuh-Roooh is right! The FCC has handed Verizon the equivalent of a cease and desist order on customer retention efforts. It was not a suggestion, or even a tradeoff. It is stop or we the FCC will find some appropriate action –

No more letters. No more presents. No more anything.

The federal government, speaking on behalf of former Verizon phone service customers, yesterday sent the communications company a stern message: Stop trying to woo back those consumers who have opted for a new provider. They’ve moved on.

Verizon had been using its proprietary data to contact former customers and try to persuade them to give the company another try. But a majority of members of the Federal Communications Commission yesterday said such practices are illegal and infringe a consumer’s privacy.

“Today we carry out Congress’s unambiguous mandate to protect consumer privacy,” said Robert M. McDowell, a Republican commissioner. Two Democratic and two Republican commissioners voted against Chairman Kevin J. Martin, a Republican. The chairman had pushed for the agency to rule that Verizon’s use of phone numbers to contact its departing customers was legal, despite complaints from cable service operators.

Verizon yesterday evening requested a stay on the FCC decision.

It is surprising in its action. The FCC usually does not have the commissioners issuing action statements like this. That is usually handled as a parliamentary action by the enforcement bureau. Not only that but issues of customer interaction is not generally handled by the FCC either. So for all these forces to converge in this means that there are many complaints on file and some serious pressure on the Commission from the Hill.

I take this two ways. First, glad to see the Commission act for once rather than worry about political aftershocks. They appear to be taking a consumer oriented action. Second, I have concerns here. The primary one being the primacy of free choice in contract law. If a parting customer wishes to hear the retention pitch, its their right.

The crux of course is Verizon overplayed its hand for sure. If having tendered an offer the parting customer say ‘No’. That should be the end of it. Not the continued barrage of emails and letters. The cable guys should not be to overjoyed by this either. For once having spoken the Commission will have to promulgate rules to support the action. Most likely they will apply to them as well as the Telcos. To do otherwise will run foul of 14th Amendment provisions. Oh, an you can fully expect Verizon to run this into the 1st DC Appeals.

More here.