Internet

U.S. Home Broadband Adoption Hits 63%

June 22, 2009 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

Readers of this blog are skewed toward those interested in internet and web-centric technology and services. As such, the latest findings of the Pew Research Centerâ€™s Internet & American Life Project will be of high interest.

These findings illustrate a departure from the stagnation in home high-speed adoption rates that had prevailed from December, 2007 through December, 2008. During that period, Project surveys found that home broadband penetration remained in a narrow range between 54% and 57%.

The greatest growth in broadband adoption in the past year has taken place among population subgroups which have below average usage rates. Among them:

Senior citizens: Broadband usage among adults ages 65 or older grew from 19% in May, 2008 to 30% in April, 2009.
Low-income Americans: Two groups of low-income Americans saw strong broadband growth from 2008 to 2009.
- Respondents living in households whose annual household income is $20,000 or less, saw broadband adoption grow from 25% in 2008 to 35% in 2009.
- Respondents living in households whose annual incomes are between $20,000 and $30,000 annually experienced a growth in broadband penetration from 42% to 53%.

Overall, respondents reporting that they live in homes with annual household incomes below $30,000 experienced a 34% growth in home broadband adoption from 2008 to 2009.

High-school graduates: Among adults whose highest level of educational attainment is a high school degree, broadband adoption grew from 40% in 2008 to 52% in 2009.
Older baby boomers: Among adults ages 50-64, broadband usage increased from 50% in 2008 to 61% in 2009.
Rural Americans: Adults living in rural America had home high-speed usage grow from 38% in 2008 to 46% in 2009.

Population subgroups that have above average usage rates saw more modest increases during this time period.

Upper income Americans: Adults who reported annual household incomes over $75,000 had broadband adoption rate change from 84% in 2008 to 85% in 2009.
College graduates: Adults with a college degree (or more) saw their home high-speed usage grow from 79% in 2008 to 83% in 2009.

Notably, African Americans experienced their second consecutive year of broadband adoption growth that was below average.

In 2009, 46% of African Americans had broadband at home.
This compares with 43% in 2008.
In 2007, 40% of African Americans had broadband at home.

The Pew Internet Projectâ€™s April 2009 survey interviewed 2,253 Americans, with 561 interviewed on their cell phones.

As I read the report, it was clear that there is an acceleration in broadband adoption which, in my view, is being driven by a number of variables: economic downturn causing a seeking of alternatives, efficiency and cost savings; friends, family and colleagues online, many using social media, creating compelling reasons for others to connect; and a continuing growth of online services in news, information, entertainment and more.

Filed Under: Internet, Media Shift, Social Media Tagged With: collaboration, webconferencing

Skype Awareness Builds

May 20, 2009 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

Forget the AT&T Picturephone shown at the 1964 World's Fair. Dismiss satellite transponder delivery of video (and its huge cost) and instead take advantage of what Skype can deliver…and for proof here's a one hour Oprah show devoted to Skype video sent from planes, submarines and explorations. (via GigaOm).

I know all too well how powerful Skype can be. Two years ago I did an event in Minneapolis for a small group where the speaker came in live from Sydney, Australia over Skype. This man, Malcolm Cohan, directed television commercials in that country so set his lighting — and projected his personal energy — in a way that came across quite well. I setup a video camera so that he would have a great experience (and closer connection to audience members) since I could pan the audience, zoom in on a questioner, and Malcolm could even see them laugh at his jokes (essential feedback when doing thing like this virtually).

Like Oprah did with Twitter, this sort of awareness of Skype is certain to continue its acceleration and its adoption by mainstream users.

Filed Under: Internet

Is “The New York Twitter” the Future of News?

May 11, 2009 By Steve Borsch 4 Comments

I’ve been in dozens of conversations over the last several weeks about how “blogging is dead” and “Twitter is the future of news” to “people only have time for the headlines” and the inevitable, “Of course newspapers are dying, whose got time to read an entire article?”

Oh really? If that’s the case, we’ve got really big problems kids (and they go beyond accelerating panic and fear about swine flu pandemics). If the objective with all of these new communications technologies is to be able to simply skim over the surface of news and information, then expect to see only the skin-deep stuff, the superfluous, and the inane.

It’s one reason why I gravitate toward those on Twitter who add value through linking to articles or posts. Yep…if something intrigues me I’ll go out and read it. In depth understanding is what I try to gain and maybe go off on tangents finding other opinions, perspectives and relevant information.

I reject those who think that we can truly know something through only the headlines.

Filed Under: Featured, Internet Tagged With: Featured, NYTwitter

Would you pay the $20 cost to get 160mbps internet at home?

April 4, 2009 By Steve Borsch 3 Comments

Read an article just now in the New York Times. It seems that there is a very interesting offering being delivered in Japan that makes it all the more apparent that the cable companies are purposely limiting broadband speeds from what I (and many others) believe is a strategic attempt to protect their cable TV delivery franchises by limiting video, TV and movie delivery over the internet.

J:Com, a Japanese cable company (with TV, net and telephony services), is delivering 160mbps internet service at a cost to J:Com of network upgrades of $20 per home!

At my office, I have Comcast’s DOCSIS 3.0 service that runs at 50mbps download speed and 10mbps upload speed. While blazingly fast compared to the 16mbps down/2mbps up speed I have at home, it took an installer over an hour to hook up the Cisco box (about the size of an audio receiver) and the modem. Apparently J:Com’s service requires just a modem which is a self-upgrade (they just ship you the modem or you pick it up at one of their stores).

J:Com’s pricing for the 160mbps download and 10mbps upload is 6,000 YEN (US$60) per month with no bandwidth cap.
Comcast’s pricing for the 50mbps download and 10mbps upload is US$139.95. A 250GB monthly bandwidth cap is in force, regardless of which Comcast tier of service you buy.

Makes you wonder about the slow upgrading of current US cable networks — especially if it really is as cheap as $20 per home like the article states — which makes my tinfoil hat paranoid assumption (that the cable companies are protecting their TV delivery franchises over the public good as I stated in this post) all the more valid.

Worldâ€™s Fastest Broadband at $20 Per Home
By Saul Hansell

If you get excited about the prospect of really, really fast broadband Internet service, hereâ€™s a statistic that will make heart race. Or your
blood boil. Or both.

Pretty much the fastest consumer broadband in the world is the 160-megabit-per-second service offered by J:Com, the largest cable company in Japan. Hereâ€™s how much the company had to invest to upgrade its network to provide that speed: $20 per home passed.

Read the full article here.

Filed Under: Current Affairs, Innovation, Internet

Broadband Providers: “Let’s cut ‘em off at the pass!”

April 2, 2009 By Steve Borsch 2 Comments

Even the most naive and casual observer can see that the threat from services like Hulu; both Apple’s TV and movie offerings within iTunes; Joost; and the accelerating number of media center software offerings (providing access to ANY video on the internet), pose a huge threat to the cable companies and other broadband providers.

They are all clearly trying to get out ahead of the user market (and the maturity of video provider business models as well as the open source media center software) and put caps in place before wider adoption occurs.

As a tail-end baby boomer with enough of a geek nature to be involved far too deeply in the ‘net, web and social media in my business, I realize I’m atypical within my demographic on how I, and as a result my family, use our Comcast broadband connection. With Comcast’s 50mbps down/10mbps up DOCSIS 3 setup in my office (Note: we were one of two companies in their Minnesota rollout of this new technology) and 16mbps down/2mbps up at home, I’m dealing daily in video, photos, moving around large Zip files, screensharing, personal publishing, and numerous other online activities. These activities are mission critical to our small business, my wife’s and my client interactions, as well as family activities and connecting with others.

Comcast, one of the largest providers in this space, directly affects all aspects of our digital lives. With my family and my current and increasing use of the internet for an every expanding array of online activities (Skype calling; my son’s video gaming; Flickr and Vimeo for photo/video sharing; online backup of our computers; use of our new Mac mini media center), we are certain to end up violating Comcast’s draconian 250GB bandwidth caps (er, I mean, Network Management Policy).

The kicker? According to Comcast’s executive escalation group, I can’t even pay them more for higher tiers of service with no cap or, as one representative told me in March, “…the cap is the cap, regardless of the tier of service.“

Did you know that, in Comcast’s case, they can simply cut you off for exceeding that 250GB cap with no warning and that their promised metering tools are still missing in action?

Then I read this recently about Time Warner’s laughingly low caps and realized that, if Time Warner gains traction with this approach, Comcast will follow suit and we’ll all have to watch and do whatever these providers allow us to do online.

You’re NOT a Court Jester

April 1, 2009 By Steve Borsch 1 Comment

As someone who carves out time early each morning to scour my RSS feed reader, I'm always aware of what I'm not accomplishing by investing the time necessary to consume input from my trusted sources.

It's one reason why each April Fool's day I cringe on the truly lame attempts by geeks to be funny and how 90% of these attempts are not worth the time to view or read.

That said, there are truly some good ones this year that even I — someone who appreciates people and humor attempts that are well done vs. those from people who should no better than to act the fool — are finding to be worth checking out:

Wow: Qualcomm's Convergence Project

YouTube Upside Down

(Could actually be true!): eBay put Skype on iPhone â€˜to boost price of NSA backdoor'

Even with a few funny ones, remember geeks: if the court jester displeased the King, he was beheaded.

Filed Under: Internet

TV = Brain Off / Computer = Brain On

March 18, 2009 By Steve Borsch 3 Comments

In 2004 Steve Jobs famously said about TV vs. computers, "We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on." It was one of those statements that seemed like a throwaway (and one most of us did the old head bobbing up-n-down about), but it's become more and more true since then.

My wife and I often take our laptops upstairs and lie in bed finishing up the days emails, exploring, and increasingly watching "TV". In fact, my brain gets SO turned on that I find it hard to go to sleep…so I've actually stopped doing that in order to relax, quiet down and nod off (and older relatives have cautioned on how "you're going to ruin your marriage" by playing with our laptops at night vs. with each other).

When I first saw the delightful Alec Baldwin Hulu ad on the Super Bowl — with its clear and humorous reference on how TV watching turned your brain into a gelatinous mush they could scoop out and eat (since they're aliens, after all) — the brilliance of the campaign took my breath away.

It did so because of the NBC team's recognition that most of us in the always-on, always-connected participation culture — increasingly turning our attention away from all traditional mediums like TV, radio, newspapers and magazines — view television watching as the mind numbing, brain mushing pursuit it is, but still one we turn to when we choose to be entertained passively.

The team obviously recognized that doing a fun advertisement to get our attention, directly addressing this obvious fact within it and, of course, delivering a service that meets our needs whether we're watching an actual television set or have our brains turned on with our computing devices, they nailed it.

Jobs nailed it too over four years ago with that statement. He didn't say anything about turning your brain on to perform tasks, but rather computers as an extension, a stimulator of our brains.

As we all move away from purely linear, serial tasks and processes toward a world where we drink in information, news, entertainment while connecting with others in a parallel and associative way, I'm eager to live in this time of awakening where more and more of us are living in a perpetual state of having our brains turned on.

Filed Under: Brain/Mind, Computing, Internet, Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness, Media Shift, Social Media, Virtual Worlds

URL Shorteners: Is a Custom One the Solution?

March 13, 2009 By Steve Borsch 1 Comment

When I wrote this story about a Minnesota company, TinyURL, I mentioned some concerns about URL shortening services.

URL shortening, if you're not aware, is a service that takes a looooooooong URL (e.g., like a huge one from Google Maps) and turns it into a short one such as www.tinyurl.com/45hnf.

Now that Twitter is becoming so widely adopted — though has its 140 character message limit — the only way to author a good message and deliver a URL is usually with a shortened one.

Here's the problem. Already I've found dead links from shortened URLs. Spammers are getting wise to using them to mask the end site they're trying to get you to view. In addition, I went to a resource site this week which had every single link a shortened URL!

Concerns have been raised by many people that shortened URLs are weak links that are undermining the integrity of the Web itself (e.g., here and here). To illustrate how pervasive these services have become, well over a year ago Mashable published this post on 90+ URL shortening services! This shortening of URLs process has become laughingly easy for all of us and there are too many uses (again, Twitter, SMS, etc.) where it's a lot easier to use a shortened URL than a long one…so we all do it.

When voicing my concern about this to Kevin Gilbertson (creator of TinyURL), he assured me that these temporary and ethereal pointers to 'real' URLs were not going to "break the Web" but instead were providing a useful service (e.g., to email or Twitter users) where long URLs were a barrier and obstacle to providing others with links. He also pointed out that any publisher, creator of resources online, or those delivering high value which they wish to remain permanently available, are being imprudent if they don't use the original URLs.

Good point. But is there even a better solution? How about a custom one?

Many URL shortening services are able to create custom ones for companies, media publishers and others. My friend, Garrick Van Buren, has a service called "Cullect" and he recently delivered a customized URL shortener for an online news organization, MinnPost, so I've observed how this can be a positive and be within the ultimate control of the organization itself. They 'own' both the original URL and the shortened one so they can maintain the integrity of the linking (disclaimer: another blog I participate in, Minnov8, is the technology contributor to MinnPost).

My recommendation to individual participants is to go ahead and use the URL shortening services, keeping in mind to link to the original URL (not use the shortened one) when creating more permanent pointers on a website, blog or social network. My advice to clients, especially those that have a need to deliver many links in a Twitter stream or through other means, to have a custom URL shortening service created for them so they own, maintain and ensure the integrity of the linking so the Web is not, as many fear, in jeopardy of being ripped apart.

Filed Under: Blogosphere, Conversational Marketing, Internet, Media Shift, Social Media, Web 2.0

Oops…Google is Broken

January 31, 2009 By Steve Borsch 3 Comments

This is troubling. Using multiple browsers (to ensure it wasn't my issue) has turned up an error this morning with Google. It seems that *every* search result is a "…site may harm your computer." The outcome is I'm unable to use Google.

I know no one is perfect — and that Google is still probably in "beta" — but all of our newfound dependencies on the cloud make any hiccups like this a big problem. Especially, when like I am right now, have a deadline in 7 minutes (we're starting a podcast and four of us will be on it so I cannot delay).

Google's Marissa Mayer publishes their mea culpa (and no, clicking that link will not take you to malware!).

Filed Under: Internet