This year, I joined the crowd in Las Vegas for the all-important event that kicks off everything tech for the year - the 2013 International CES. It's a week where geeks and geek-wannabes from around the world seek inspiration and recharge their creative juices. Consumer brands of all types came out in full force, even with the noticeable absence of Apple and Microsoft's presence. More than 150,000 attendees made the trek to what became a technology mecca for the week... But why should MSOs care about a "consumer" electronics show? more
Aaron H. Swartz, a computer activist, co-founder of Reddit and co-author of the "RSS 1.0" specification, died in New York on Friday. Swartz, 26 years of age, committed suicide in New York City on Jan. 11, according to his uncle. more
Here are the top ten most popular news, blogs, and industry updates featured on CircleID during 2012 based on the overall readership of the posts for the past 12 months. Congratulations to all the participants whose posts reached top readership and best wishes to the entire community for 2013. more
It is midnight in Dubai and I am listening to the final readings of the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITR). This instrument is the final output of two weeks of negotiations at the World Conference on International Telecommunication (WCIT), a gathering of the world's nations to update the the ITRs. The Chair goes through the document article by article, section by section, and with each passing "thank you", this Conference draws to a close. Many in the room are elated. more
This year Black Friday online sales reached $1 billion for the first time. Of course, Cyber Monday is the busiest e-commerce day of them all. Sales for Cyber Monday reached $1.5 billion this year, a 30 percent increase from 2011... Website providers have been moving to cloud computing so they can instantly scale to meet increased traffic. But what happens when everyone needs to scale at the same time? more
In the spirit of shining more light on how government actions could affect users, Google Inc. in early 2010, began periodically sharing number of government requests received in what it calls the "Transparency Report." more
While the internet has brought about the transformation of whole industry sectors and generated thousands of business models, as well as changing social behaviour, it is at the same time creating its own giants and dominant players. Does this mean that while certain vested interests are demolished, and others transform themselves into smaller sectors and organisations, new conglomerates will surface? Only time will tell more
Internet Society has released a paper today highlighting the importance of understanding what is important and unchanging about the Internet. more
GoDaddy.com has reported today that the Web hosting outage that involved thousands and possibly millions of websites on Monday was due to internal issues and did not involve any attacks by hackers. The outage lasted for about four hours and affected mainly small-business sites. GoDaddy.com hosts more than 5 million websites. more
Sweden has been recognized as making the best use of its Internet access, according to the first annual World Wide Web Foundation's Web Index survey. The Web Index aims to be the world’s first multi-dimensional measure of the Web’s growth, utility and impact on people and nations. more
Five leading group of global organizations - IEEE, Internet Architecture Board (IAB), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Internet Society and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - today announced that they have signed a statement affirming the importance of a jointly developed set of principles establishing a modern paradigm for global, open standards. The group have invited other standards organizations, governments, corporations and technology innovators globally to endorse the principles. more
Like many of us in the technology industry, I am captivated by the growing adoption of mobile. It's changing multiple industries at a pace that would have seemed impossible just a few years ago. And my own interest accelerated when Afilias acquired another Irish company named dotMobi. ...since a mobile domain is not useful without mobile sites, dotMobi developed a site-building tool called goMobi that is used globally by hundreds of thousands of site owners. Because of that, we have unique information about who is using the mobile Web, and how they're using it. more
Does anyone remember the Internet before Google? And no, using Google to ask about the pre-Google Internet is not going to work all that well! For those of you who can recall the Internet of around 2000, do you also recall what debates were raging at the time? Let me give you a hand in answering that question. One big debate at the time was all about the relationship between the carriage service operators and the content providers, and, as usual, it was all about money. The debate was about who owed who money, and how much. Ten years later and it seems that nothing much has changed. more
A new IETF draft has been published that specifies a new HTTP status code for legally restricted resources. That is, if the government restricts your access to the web page, return this code (similar to how something not found is a 404). The error code: 451. From the Internet Draft, if the user tries to access a page, but access to the page is restricted by the government, display the following... more
As we start moving more real-time communications into web browsers with the upcoming WebRTC/RTCWEB offerings, what do we do about congestion control? How do we ensure that all these browser-based communications sessions share the network fairly? With RTC capabilities now already available in builds for browsers such as Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, how do we deal with the expected increase in voice, video, chat and data traffic? more
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