National Mall Gets Free Wi-Fi

The District of Columbia has launched Wi-Fi along the National Mall.

The new free, wireless hotspots from the project "DC Wi-fi" cover the mall from 3rd Street on the east to 14th Street on the west.

D.C. Offers Free Wi-Fi Along National Mall

Wal-Mart Gets Deeper into Mobile

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said Monday that it is introducing the first cell phone plan that uses the chain's own branding, Associated Press reports.

The Wal-Mart Family Mobile service will run on T-Mobile USA's network. Unlimited calling and texting will cost $45 per month for the first line and $25 for each additional line for the family. The service will be offered starting next week in most of its stores across the nation.

breaking news

When Kindle Shines

If you absolutely must read your tablet or ebook in bright sunlight, Kindle has an edge. Of course, most of us in the northern hemisphere will not need to do so for a while.

The Struggles of the Middle Class (comScore Voices)

The August 2010 government jobs report showed that unemployment remains stubbornly high at a level of 9.7 percent of the civilian labor force and rose marginally by 0.1 percentage points from July.

The loss of jobs during the current recession has been deeper and more prolonged than was seen in any other recession since World War II.

It isn't yet clear whether there is a "structural" element to the job losses, or whether something "merely" related to continued uncertainty about the business environment which is causing the unusually-deep and protracted job loss pattern.

One suspects there is a structural element, at one level related to recoveries after "financial" induced recessions. The other possible structural element is akin to what happened in many countries as economies changed from "agricultural" to "industrial" stages, and are continuing to evolve from "industrial" to "information" based forms.

The Struggles of the Middle Class (comScore Voices)

Gaming Might Improve Decision Making

There's a significant controversy over the value of games that are designed to improve people's mental faculties, as some studies have indicated that brain training only helps prepare you for similar tasks, while others indicate that general improvements are possible.

But there turns out to be a type of game that is known to boost a variety of skills, from decision making to tracking multiple objects: standard action games. A study, released today by Current Biology attempts to explain how these video games can produce such wide-ranging improvements.

The authors of the study argue that the root of all these tasks involves making a probabilistic inference, where complete information is missing, so people have to make a best guess based on known odds. Video gaming, in their view, increases the efficiency at which people can process the odds and make an accurate decision—gamers simply can do more with less. As a result, any task of this sort sees benefits.

Gamers make faster decisions than nongamers, are just as accurate

More Tweets From Mobile Devices

Since April this year, the number of people using Twitter has risen 27 percent from 106 million to 145 million.

The driving force behind the growth has been the addition of clients that make mobile access easier.

"We quickly understood that we were doing users a disservice by not having a great client on each of the major mobile platforms," said Twitter's CEO, Evan Williams. "So, we took a similar approach with Twitter for BlackBerry and Twitter for Android."

Twitter's mobile site, mobile.twitter.com, was used by 14 percent of users and Twitter's SMS option was used by eight percent of users. Twitter iPhone apps represented eight percent of usage and the BlackBerry app represented seven percent of usage.

More Tweets via mobile

iPad headed to Target?

Will the Apple iPad be sold in Target for the Christmas selling season?

iPad headed to Target on October 3rd? -- Engadget

E.U. Wants to Release Local TV Spectrum to Mobile

The European Commission is poised to back a plan that would divert a portion of the TV broadcast spectrum to mobile operators by 2013.

The proposal is part of a package of broadband changes drafted by Neelie Kroes, the E.U. commissioner for telecommunications, that would require the 27 members of the bloc to set aside the 800 megahertz frequency band for mobile broadband by Jan. 1, 2013.

E.U. to Back Plan for Pan-Euro:

Goulsby Cannot Say When Unemployment Will Fall Appreciably

Austan Goolsbee, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, has no idea, or "won't say" when unemployment will move appreciably below 10 percent.

Our Government Is Now So Huge That It's Choking The Private Sector

Bigger government leads to slower growth, this chartfor France suggests.

It shows the ratio of the private sector to the public sector and relates it to growth. The correlation is high.

That is not to say that the best environment for growth is a zero government. There is clearly a role for government, but government does cost and that takes money from the productive private sector.

Our Government Is Now So Huge That It's Choking The Private Sector

U.S. Users Spend More Time on Facebook Than Google

"U.S. Web surfers are spending more time socializing on Facebook than searching with Google, according to new data from researchers at comScore Inc.
In August, people spent a total of 41.1 million minutes on Facebook, comScore said Thursday, about 9.9 percent of their Web-surfing minutes for the month. That just barely surpassed the 39.8 million minutes, or 9.6 percent, people spent on all of Google Inc.'s sites combined, including YouTube, the free Gmail e-mail program, Google news and other content sites.

The Associated Press: Facebook inches past Google for Web users' minutes

Brazil Presents the Highest Mobile Broadband Penetration in Latin America, Finds Frost & Sullivan - Yahoo! Finance

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Brazil-Presents-the-Highest-prnews-3247506883.html?x=0&.v=1

AT&T, Sprint, Verizon to carry Samsung tablet

Samsung Electronics has struck deals with AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel Corp to carry its new tablet computer, the Wall Street Journal says.

Samsung is scheduled to unveil the Galaxy Tab in the U.S. market at an event at New York City's Time Warner Center on Sept. 16.

The Galaxy Tab is essentially a larger version of Samsung's new Galaxy S smartphone.

Twitter Displacing RSS?

Many users appear to be abandoning RSS readers as a way to read the news. Hitwise, for instance, tells us that visits to Google Reader are down 27 percent year-over-year, while visits to Bloglines are down 71 percent year-over-year.

Real-time news increasingly seems to be something people think they can get from Twitter, or maybe Facebook. It is clear that real-time search has become more crucial now that real-time content services have gotten more popular.

The Death Of The RSS Reader

Remember

Multichannel Video Providers Might Be in For a Tough Time

Bernstein Research says the cable and satellite industries face a "new normal" of years, perhaps decades, of reduced discretionary consumer spending, compared to the "boom" times that preceded the economic meltdown.

That is going to pose quite a management challenge, since the annual price increases service providers have been able to push through will be much more difficult.

Bernstein Research Senior Analyst Craig Moffett notes that video subscribers have recently declined for the first time in recorded history and said that it was likely more than just the downturn in new housing.

Some think a few more quarters of data will be needed to confirm a possible trend, but if the slowdown does continue, service providers and programmers alike are going to have to rethink their prospects.

Up to this point, programmers have said they need higher fees from distributors to fund the cost of more original programming. Fees paid to sports programmers have been a salient example of the trend, but not the only example.

If distributors cannot raise their prices, there will be new questions about whether the higher fees can be paid to the programmers, and new questions about whether the annual price increases can be counted on to fuel continued distributor revenue growth as well.

That will make the business case for broadband access investment more difficult, as entertainment video has become a significant part of the revenue mix for fiber-rich telco access networks.

To compensate, distributors might have to turn to higher broadband access prices, higher voice prices, or both. You can make your own guesses about what consumers might do if voice or fixed-line broadband access prices rise.

Moffett: Where Will Money Come From For Pay TV Price Increases?

Laptops are Most Common Mobility Tool

Laptops are the most widely provided enterprise worker mobility tool, but only 28 percent of employees have one provided to them by their employer.

Similarly, mobile phones, smartphones, PDAs, netbooks and tablets are reserved for only a small minority of the work force.

Click on image for a larger view.

Yankee Group :: Research Report

21% of Enterprise Employee Time is Away From Primary Location

Employees spend more time away from their primary office than you might think. While heavy business travel is restricted to a minority of employees (only 11 percent spend more than 20 percent of their work week traveling for business), employees have a host of other reasons to spend time away from their office and colleagues.

Click on image for a larger view.

On average, 21 percent of employees’ work week is spent away from their primary work location (not including the daily commute), and that number rises to 37 percent for executives.

Whether taking a business trip, using public Wi-Fi in Internet cafes and libraries or working remotely from home, employees are spending an increasing amount of time working in mobile and indeed multiple locations.

Yankee Group :: Research Report

JPMorgan to Test iPhone, Androids as Alternatives to BlackBerry

JPMorgan Chase & Co. may soon let employees use iPhones for corporate e-mail, making it an alternative to Research in Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry at the bank for the first time.

JPMorgan is testing the Apple Inc. device and smartphones based on Google Inc.’s Android software. The bank is the second-largest in the U.S. by assets and has about 220,000 employees worldwide.

It's just another sign of changing times in the smartphone business.

JPMorgan Said to Test IPhone, BlackBerry Alternatives

People Want Behaviorally-Targeted E-mails

Few consumers ever say they "like" advertising. But most are willing to put up with it if there is some tangible reward for doing so.

Email marketing, for example, can be "spam."

But consumers say they want emails that are relevant to them. Information on sales and promotions for products the customer is interested in has been one of the most popular and easily-implemented solutions.

Click on image for a larger view.

Based on research e-Dialog recently completed, consumers also ranked behaviorally-targeted or 'task-based' e-mails as something they want to receive. These range from abandoned shopping cart messages to alerts from financial services companies about account balances or even reminders.

People Want Behaviorally-Targeted E-mails