Just as we share all sorts of tidbits about our lives over the web, The scientists over at RoboEarth have created an open source network that robots can use to share and reuse knowledge amongst themselves. Called Rapyuta, think of it as an Facebook for robots. → Read More
Playnomics, a San Francisco-based startup that helps mobile game developers earn more from their existing players, just picked up another $5 million in funding from Vanedge Capital and existing investors including FirstMark Capital and XSeed Capital. Vanedge is a Vancouver-based fund co-created by a couple Electronic Arts veterans including former president of worldwide studios Paul Lee. The… → Read More
With the closing of Spin Magazine’s print edition alongside the failure of the print edition of Newsweek (not to mention the shuttering of countless newspapers and magazines around the world) you’d be hard-pressed to say that publishing – particularly in the news space – is doing well. → Read More
Today, the dark day Syria shut down its Internet, web freedom should be at the very forefront of all of our minds. Web freedom was also center stage earlier this week when Stanford Law School hosted an event called “Sticky WCIT: Is This The End Of The Internet.” I asked several of the experts attending the event whether a WCIT meeting next week in Dubai might be a big threat to the free flow of… → Read More
According to multiple Internet monitoring services, Syrian authorities have cut off access to the Internet. The news comes as an uprising has shaken the country for months, with an opposition trying to get together to face president and dictator Bashar al Assad. In the capital city Damascus, mobile services and land lines are affected as well. → Read More
Today, Google announced a new initiative to support an open and free Internet called “Take Action.” The company has set up a website with materials to help educate you on what your rights are and what changes with laws could do to impact the freedoms you enjoy today on the Internet.
After we went through what we did with SOPA, it’s time to listen up so we don’t have to react like that so… → Read More
As you might be aware, Google Fiber has set out to make all the world, or at least Kansas City, have fast and accessible Internet access. Today, the company announced that it is now wiring homes in the area with its high-speed internet.
As we noted previously, 180 out of 202 areas that were eligible for the service hit their pre-registration goals. Now the service is being put in, and I’m… → Read More
I’m not exactly sure who made being a “personal brand” a thing on the Internet, but I’d really like to sit down with them and ask them why they thought that it was a good idea. You see, an entire ecosystem of people looking to make money have cropped up around this notion of helping people become a “brand.” Honestly, it’s bull, and I’d like to see it stop. Why is it bull? Because unless you’re Kim… → Read More
Canadian wireless and internet provider Rogers is currently experiencing a widespread, continued outage of services on both its cellular and cable home internet data networks, according to various user reports. Rogers is the second-largest internet provider in Canada by subscriber count, and the largest cellphone provider with somewhere around 10 million mobile customers. → Read More
Reed Hundt was chairman of the United States Federal Communications Commission from 1993 to 1997. He served under President Bill Clinton and currently serves as CEO of the Coalition For Green Capital.
The government had a critical role in fostering the growth of the Internet during its commercial infancy in the early 90s; I witnessed this first-hand at the FCC, when we worked with Al Gore and… → Read More
Globally, the speed for broadband connections is steadily on the rise: according to Akamai’s Q1 2012 State of the Internet report, it’s now at 2.6Mbps, compared to 2.3Mbps in the last quarter, and a rise of 25% on a year ago and a reversal of the 14% decline of last quarter. South Korea continues to remain the connection king, with an average connection speed of 15.7Mbps. The U.S., meanwhile… → Read More
Google employee and creator of XML, Tim Bray, has proposed a new error message for the web. Rather than hiding censored websites behind a generic 403 error – “the server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it” – these websites would return 451 – “censored.” → Read More
Despite its long and boring name, Cisco’s “Visual Networking Index (VNI) Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update” is one of the more fascinating data-filled reports you’ll read this year. The report examines the dramatic growth we’re seeing in the mobile Internet space, including the massive demands for mobile data, the growth of mobile video, and the rise of the smartphone as new gateway to… → Read More
There’s a war brewing against the Internet, and it’s not just SOPA (the bill in Congress that threatens to break the Internet in the name of fighting overseas content piracy). It is, in the words of Cory Doctorow, a “war on general-purpose computing.” (read his post, “Lockdown,” on BoingBoing if you haven’t already).
What he means is that in trying to clamp down on a very specific problem on… → Read More
“They have Internet in Europe?” my friend in the US joked via Facebook Messenger, as I checked into Foursquare from the Athens airport.
Yes Virginia, they do have Internet in Europe, or Greece specifically. In my case I had to buy an expensive worldwide data plan for my iPhone before I left the US, and then watch it like a hawk so I don’t go over my allotted 340 MB of data. $99 to stay… → Read More
It was twenty years ago today/ Tim Berners-Lee taught the world to play/ Although 20 years ago he would have sworn/ That there wouldn’t have been so much porn. That’s right – the world’s first website, a placeholder page written by Sir Berners-Lee way back on August 6, 1991 in the then-nascent Hypertext Mark-Up Language, is celebrating its 20th birthday today. And, on this important anniversary… → Read More
We’ve all been there; You’re at an outing or a dinner table with friends but itching to check your email or Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or Google Plus or Yammer or what ever digital hit of serotonin you prefer. Have you ever “gone to the bathroom” in order to check email or come up with a socially appropriate excuse to pull out your smartphone just so you can check your @ replies on… → Read More
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by (@msuster) Mark Suster, a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners. Read more about Suster at Bothsidesofthetable
Any company who develops products reliant on iOS spends weeks crapping their pants before WWDC. No vacation schedules allowed for weeks before or weeks after. The announcements come out in one day and then even if you survive the annual… → Read More
Are the kids alright? Probably not, if you follow this study from the University of Maryland that says students today all but admit to being addicted to the Internet and media consumption. One student in the study likened prolonged separation from the Internet drug addiction, saying she was “itching like a crackhead” after not using the Internet for a bit. Not healthy, no. → Read More
Sometimes humor is the best mechanism to explain an opaque topic. Public Knowledge, a group that concerns itself with defending consumer rights in “the emerging digital culture,” has released a report today entitled “Peak Bandwidth.” Keep in mind today’s date, is all I have to say. The report says that the “era of plentiful, low-cost bandwidth is approaching an end. The supply of bits… → Read More
The various cases of Internet use may be divided into four different classes. Though each class will be found to have many symptoms in common, yet there are variations so marked that there will be little-difficulty in placing each patient in his proper class for treatment. When this division is made and the characters peculiar to each described, it will be well to give the various local and… → Read More
There are a lot of people we have to thank for our current Information Age, not least Paul Baran, one of the founding fathers of Arpanet, the precursor to the Internet as we know it. While working at RAND in the 1960s, Baran created a system for information exchange called “packet switching” that was able to send “message blocks” from node to node in an electronic network. The packets could route… → Read More
The United States government is now in the business of professional trolling. The Guardian has discovered a program referred to as “Online Persona Management,” the goal of which appears to be to manipulate online conversations so that they’re seen as being more “pro-American.” The Pentagon says the program doesn’t have an English language component, and that it merely exists to combat… → Read More
Australia’s Special Broadband Service has warned that the steady increase in broadband speed, and its increasing availability, may lead to “digital ghettos.” The premise is simple: faster and more reliable broadband means that more and more people can participate effectively online. As affordable broadband access spreads to different ethnic groups, argues the SBS, these communities could form… → Read More
The days of cookies surreptitiously tracking your every movement online could be coming to an end. A European law goes into effect this May that would require Web sites to get “explicit consent” from its users before putting a cookie, or cookies, on their system. A reasonably big deal, yes. → Read More
The complete internet shutdown this week in Libya involved a new way to turn off web access for an entire country. Earlier this year, the total internet blockade in Egypt backfired and emboldened the protesters. China is well known for blocking internet services, but it’s not just China. Of course, having the government turn off the internet could never happen in the United States. We couldn’t… → Read More
Good ol’ government, spreading freedom and whatnot. The U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, said yesterday that the government plans to invest a cool $25 million in order to help people get around Internet “thugs, hackers, and censors.” The money will go toward developers so they can build the tools necessary to fight Internet tyranny across the globe. → Read More
Continuing our series of Valentine’s Day-related posts, let’s take a moment to talk about security. Valentine’s Day is a particularly onerous time of year when it comes to keeping your computer safe from malware and other maladies. “Hackers” (or whatever you want to call the people who craft and disseminate malware, steal private information, etc.) prey upon people’s emotional… → Read More
This is just what Alone Together predicted: people, particularly young people, feeling more comfortable with themselves online than they are offline. Black is white, up is down, and the Mets are a well-run organization. The study comes to us by way of Kidscape, a children’s charity. → Read More
What happened recently to trigger the U.S. government’s sudden interest in Internet-policing? We saw the Department of Homeland Security seizing Web sites’ domain names last week, despite the fact the those Web sites weren’t based in the U.S. Odd. Now there’s word that the U.S. is wheeling and dealing over the right to approve any and all new top-level domains. You know, things like dot… → Read More
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