Will iPad Be the Fastest-Adopted Mobile Device, Ever?

At this rate, the Apple iPad might wind up becoming the fastest-growing mobile device ever.

Borders Essentially Drops E-Reader Price Before Release

Borders, which will begin shipping the Kobo, its e-book reader, in early July, has joined the round of price cutting going on in the e-book reader space by bundling a $20 gift card with the purchase of its $149 Kobo. Though the originally-planned price remains in effect, the gift card effectively lowers the cost to $129.

But Borders also plans to make its inventory available to other devices such as the iPhone, Android devices and the iPad. The unresolved issue is how the e-book reader ultimately will fare as a way to create and protect a content distribution business, since virtually all the leading readers are moving to application-based delivery in addition to sponsoring their own hardware.

The price cuts come only a couple of months after Apple introduced its iPad, which offers considerably more features than e-readers and starts at $499. Many analysts believe that booksellers will not compete with the iPad but will slash e-reader prices and make up the loss of money by selling more e-books.

U.S. sales of digital reading devices are projected to reach five million units this year from 2.2 million in 2009, according to the Consumer Electronics Association

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Spread Networks Offers New "Lowest" Latency Route Between New York and Chicago

Spread Networks, a privately-owned telecommunications provider has launched a dark fiber private network specifically optimized for ultra-low latency for financial industry customers who communicate between Chicago and New York trading centers.


The TABB Group estimates that the $15 billion spent by financial firms on data centers in 2009 was largely driven by a need to reduce propagation delay by collating servers. But the Commodities Mercanile Exchange remains in Chicago, while trading partners do business in New York and London, as well as with dozens of other financial centers around the world.

That irreducible geographic fact means collocation can solve only some latency issues. Transmission networks must do some of the work as well. That explains why there has been a relative flurry of activity on the Chicago-New York route this year. A single kilometer of optical fiber path adds about five microseconds worth of latency to a connection. So it helps to have the shortest physical route between Chicago and New York.

Over time, the shortest path has dropped from roughly 1,000 fiber miles to 900 fiber miles, now to 825 miles.

In part, Spread Networks can offer unparalleled levels of latency performance because it has built a brand-new, direct route over the shortest possible route from New York to Chicago, 825 fiber miles long, reducing round-trip latency to 13.33 milliseconds. Up to this point, the lowest latency on the New York-Chicago route was about 15.9 milliseconds, according to Brian Quigley, ADVA Optical Networks senior director.

Where other low-latency connections between those cities uses railroad rights of way, Spread Networks has built along alternate routes, to shave distance, and hence delay. It’s just a guess, but if you want to follow the straightest-possible route between New York and Chicago, you’d follow U.S. Highway 80. That would allow a carrier to relatively easily negotiate rights of way agreements with a few entities and obviously allows easy trenching along the medians.

“Spread Networks has established the competitive standard for trading latency between these two important
financial centers,” said David Barksdale, CEO of Spread Networks (Barksdale was Netscape’s CEO) .

Spread Networks provides customers two strands of dark fiber, which are lit using optoelectronics provided by ADVA Optical Networks. Traffic is kept at layer one to avoid the additional latency if the traffic were carried at a higher level of the protocol stack.

The route terminates at 350 East Cermak Road in Chicago Illinois (telX) and 1400 Federal Blvd in Carteret, New Jersey (Lexent Metro Connect).

As part of the service, ADVA monitors the routes, providing real-time latency reporting. Repeater huts are spaced at 120 kilometers and the route uses low-noise optical amplifiers, dispersion compensation, cut-through switches and no protocol conversion or higher-level switching as part of the effort to achieve the lowest-possible latency performance.

How Regulation Can Make or Break an Internet Business

Google and Twitter have weighed in on the 'hot news' doctrine, which grants newspapers in some states a time-limited, quasi-property right over facts they report, arguing that the legal concept is old 'n' busted in the instantaneous Internet age.

The companies filed an amicus brief in the legal case between financial website theflyonthewall.com and Barclays Plc, claiming that Internet chatter cannot be contained and that restricting the spread of news content could hurt the public.

A U.S. federal judge ruled in March 2010 that a news site called "theflyonthewall.com" had misappropriated content from major analyst firms by publishing highlights of new equity research by Morgan Stanley, Barclays Plc, and Merrill Lynch.

The judge agreed that they had invested time and resources into researching the market, and that flyonthewall.com was making money off of their hard effort by offering subscriptions so that users could access The Fly's near-realtime writeups of the analysts' work.

An injunction was issued, but then flyonthewall.com asked whether it was permissible to publish information that already had appeared elsewhere, as for example news reports by Dow Jones, Reuters, Bloomberg or the Wall Street Journal.

Google and Twitter have filed briefs supporting flyonthewall.com's right to publish once the information already has been made available elsewhere on the Internet.

Google and Twitter pointed out that it's nearly impossible to implement some period of exclusivity for news when it can spread so quickly across blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and so on, and that upholding such a restriction could actually hurt the news-consuming public.

It's just another example of the decisive rule regulations and laws can have in creating or destroying a business model.

Google and Twitter pour cold water on "hot news"

Google Voice Now Open to Everyone in the U.S.

Google, Apple, Microsoft Trusted by Half of Adults, Just 8% Trust Media

Nearly half (49 percent) of U.S. adults trust Apple, Microsoft and Google, according to a new Zogby Interactive survey.

About 13 percent of respondents trust Facebook.

Almost nobody trusts traditional media or Twitter, each of which had a trust level of eight percent.

Google And Apple Trusted More Than Facebook And Twitter | jatiN mahindrA doT coM

RIM and Android Eat into Apple's Mobile Ad Dominance

Mobile ad impressions from smartphone devices running Google's Android OS and RIM OS grew in May, while those from Apple devices fell considerably, according to data from Millennial Media.

The mobile ad network reported ad impressions across its network from Apple smartphones fell 14 percent between April and May, while Android and RIM devices saw growth of five percentage points and two percentage points, respectively.

Most people are used to thinking about Google when it comes to Internet-related ad revenues. In the mobile space, Apple is the clear leader, with about 48 percent of impressions.

RIM and Android Eat into Apple's Mobile Ad Dominance - ClickZ