Amazing how quickly the industry adjusts to a obvious winner. In this case its Android breaking price barriers. Adobe does not want to be left behind in what will be a clear choice for most –

Adobe has made its Flash technology compatible with the Android smartphone operating system developed by the Google-backed Open Handset Alliance. Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch demonstrated Flash Player 10 running on Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Android platforms — but no iPhone. But Adobe is working on it, he said.

Andy Rubin, Google’s director of mobile platforms, along with Adobe’s Lynch announced the effort Monday at Adobe MAX, the company’s developer conference. The two presented a demo of Flash 10 running on a G1, which is manufactured by HTC.

Linky.

Goodbye pension!

An unspecified number of Verizon Wireless employees snooped into President-elect Barack Obama’s personal cellphone records, the company announced Friday.

Verizon immediately suspended all employees who accessed the records and will take “appropriate disciplinary action” against employees found to have looked at them without authorization.

Obama had a simple flip phone, not a smartphone, meaning the interlopers found only records of phone calls and text messages. The account has been inactive for several months, the company said.

“We apologize to President-elect Obama and will work to keep the trust our customers place in us every day,” Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam said in a press release.

I can tell you from being on the inside you would not want to be where these folks are right now. No there are not ‘Phone Cops’ ala WKRP in Cincinnati. But Verizon does have a security and loss prevention team. I have never experienced it personally but I have seen it go down twice.

First thing they do is bring you into a room and lay the charges against you. Or at least what they suspect. But generally they have the computer records to back up their claims. The second thing that happens is you are personally reassigned. Your old boss is no longer. Your new boss is a security manager. You are now at their beck and call. You don’t show they just discharge you for cause. You of course have access to a lawyer, fact if I were them I would already have one in my back pocket. If the lawyer is smart he will have an order issued against Verizon that they cannot approach you about the case. So you show up for work, if they want you to, and stare at 4 walls 8 hours a day till you quit or lose your case.

Bottom line — Verizon is very tough about improper access to customer records.

[Update] Those who accessed the Obama account improperly have been dismissed. Link to RCR article is here.

As misguided pols prepare to pacify the US’s under served, over charged broadband consumer with “net neutrality” and greater oversight of the existing duopoly, most of us want other options. A new survey on customer churn shows that 3/4 of US broadband consumers are looking for a better deal. I’m betting most of us would flee our current current provider for faster and/ or cheaper quicker than a duopoly lobbyist can say Superbowl tickets.

Three out of every four US broadband subscribers would be willing to leave their current Broadband Service Provider (BSP), according to a survey just published by analyst firm Strategy Analytics. Within this average, Time Warner Cable is the most susceptible to customer defections if a price war breaks out. AT&T and Verizon are both vulnerable to rival offers of faster broadband speeds, while Cox Communications has the most secure customer base.

The survey, “Broadband Satisfaction and Customer Churn: US 2H’08,” focuses on the so-called “three pillars” of customer churn: customer satisfaction levels, propensity to churn, and perceived obstacles to defecting. Respondents were presented with various broadband speed and price scenarios to gauge sensitivity. (Marketwatch)

When do you know an industry is in need of an overhaul? When the top shill of your trade press, Variety no less says its in trouble. Not just fringes, but right down to the core as to why things are going so bad. Link.

An observation from the article –

It’s D-Day for the broadcast networks.

They’ve been living on borrowed time for the better part of two decades, thanks to advertisers willing to toss in more cash each year even as ratings slowly trended ever lower.

But with the economy in a tailspin — and the Big Three auto manufacturers, some of TV’s best advertisers, near ruin — the biz may finally have to pull the emergency cord.

The possible cure? —
More on Progam Licks Picks Stix

Not long ago pure research required a big investment in grad school, a professorship or a research fellowship because of the limited access to expensive large scale computing and data sets. Now, anyone with the knowledge, urge to explore and a Mastercard can access huge data sets and buy scalable utility computing on demand to run the numbers on their latest  hypothesis.  The era of the independent researcher is upon us in the Third Pipe world. The academic hierarchy is not likely to be happy about this, nor are they likely to yeild as much power over raw research going forward.

A new feature for the Amazon’s (AMZN) EC2? The cloud computing community is abuzz today over Public Data Sets coming soon to Amazon’s cloud. Here’s how it works: The human genome is about 3 GB in size, not counting annotations. Rather than have every scientist on the EC2 working with it upload (and pay for) their own copy, Amazon hosts the genome itself, which any EC2 customer can access. Other data sets Amazon will be making public: The U.S. Census, economic databases from the U.S. Labor department, and 80 GB of conformers from the ChemInformatics toolkit (Silicon Alley Insider)

Political chameleon and rabid opportunist Arianna Huffington is out to fill the void left by the vanishing pulp media. Unpretentious about the left leaning bias of her online publication, the point of view found there differs little from that of the old school pulp media.  Ariana recently secured enough funding to keep Huffington Post alive, and in growth mode for a bit longer. There is no shortage of news and opinion on the net. It will be interesting to see if a large, monolithic entity like HuffPo can reach critical mass to become profitable in a new media world dominated by smaller, more nimble players.

Ms Huffington launched HuffPo, which has about 2.5 million bloggers contributing to it regularly, in May 2005 with $2 million of seed capital. She then raised $5 million in August 2006 from venture capital firms including SoftBank Capital and Greycroft Partners, as well as individuals such as Bob Pittman, the former AOL executive. In a second round of fundraising in September 2007, HuffPo raised a further $5 million. (Times Online)

Lobbyists and rank and file house members rejoice, the telcos will be spreading the wealth inside the capitol next year. A lot of noise will be made about what will be done to them, but in the end there is still a vote, and the telcos will buy the votes needed to keep things the way that they are.

It will be entertaining though. Henry Waxman, the unrivaled master of holding hearings that do little more than dominate  airtime on Cspan will be pointing his nostrils towards the twisted pair when his reach is extended next year. There will be a lot of talking, a lot of money spent, and nothing will change in the end.  I’ll be around to tell you we told you so when it happens.

Yesterday Rep. Henry Waxman ascended to the head of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce — which you may remember for its investigation into how web firms use consumer data — and convened two hearings into online privacy.

As the head of that committee, Waxman has considerable influence over its agenda. The Wall Street Journal speculates that Waxman will delegate many telecommunications issues to Rep. Ed Markey, of Massachusetts, who has already pushed for a Net Neutrality bill, and has a fondness for consumer issues. (GigaOm)

By the way, if your interested in fixing the duopoly problem, it’s time to think local. More on that in a future post.

The Boss covered the demise of the pulp PCMag here. So yes, long live PCMag.

Well consider this a bump and followup. Would you like to receive a free 1 year subscription to the online version? No strings other than a registration to Zinio. Well here’s your chance. Go to the ReadGreen site here. They will lead to to Zinio. You will get your digital copy of PCMag there. You have the option of either reading online thru a Zinio reader or downloading and reading offline.

Enjoy!

If you are a regular reader, you already know that I think a new net neutrality law is likely to give us the opposite of what it claims.  You simply can’t make a duopoly behave. The real problem is the last mile, and it belongs to us - both in the wireline and wireless mode of delivery, yet we have laws and regulations that have given control of it to one or two companies in most localities. If we need any new national laws, we need to reinforce the right for all comers to access public right of ways.

Looking deeper into the real danger of net neutrality legislation, I would like to call your attention to a piece from Timothy B. Lee at the Cato Institute. Yes he’s a staunch libertarian, but so are the very founding principles of our internet (and yes, it also belongs to US).

New regulations inevitably come with unintended consequences. Indeed, today’s network neutrality debate is strikingly similar to the debate that produced the first modern regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission. Unfortunately, rather than protecting consumers from the railroads, the ICC protected the railroads from competition by erecting new barriers to entry in the surface transportation marketplace. Other 20th-century regulatory agencies also limited competition in the industries they regulated. Like these older regulatory regimes, network neutrality regulations are likely not to achieve their intended aims. Given the need for more competition in the broadband marketplace, policymakers should be especially wary of enacting regulations that could become a barrier to entry for new broadband firms. (cato.org)

The pulp dailies, weeklies and monthlies have hoped that maybe there is a light at the end of the tunnel for their venue. Well that may not be the case. 2008 may end up being their last best year even though it appears abysmal. –

Over the next six months, not only will ad spending be down, but the feeling among advertisers and their agencies toward media such as broadcast TV, national newspapers and magazines is growing more pessimistic. The dreary outlook is courtesy of the new Advertiser Optimism Report by Advertiser Perceptions.

But while the outlook is somewhat bleak for the aforementioned ad media, others like online, cable TV and mobile are likely to attract more of marketers’ money.

The report shows a large percentage of the advertisers polled (68%) said they plan to increase their ad spending online. Still, that number is down four points from 72% six months ago. The numbers were also slightly down for cable TV (27% vs. 28%) and mobile (51% vs. 53%) over that same period but remained on the “optimistic” side of the scale.

Advertisers were more pessimistic on broadcast TV, with only 16% saying they would increase their ad spending on broadcast. That is down from the 22% who said they planned to increase their broadcast TV budget a year ago, and only slightly better than the 14% who were planning to increase their broadcast spending six months ago. National newspapers, which were already low six months ago at 10%, dropped into the single digits at 9%, while magazines saw a more drastic drop from 22% to 18% over the same time period.

What surprises even me is the telegraphing of a downturn for even broadcast TV and radio. I would have expected a shift to that medium from the funds being pulled from pulp. The only way I can assess this is the following:

• Advertisers still want to attempt to reach their regional or national audience. No pull backs on breadth of coverage.
• To do so they must look at cheaper number of impressions per customer. TV though it provides plenty of eyeballs has traditionally had a higher cost per impression.
• TVoIP I suspect is gathering some traction that provides the TV experience to the viewer and lower costs to the advertiser.

Given that kind of market thinking TVoIP, Web Ads and regional radio placements are probably going to face a boost in usage. On that basis, we could see widespread carnage in the pulp providers more than even I anticipated. Hang on to your hats. The ripple affects could be sizable.

Linky.