Recognizing That Voice Is Just Data (Or How Google Voice Could Be Disruptive)

from the voice-is-data-too dept

Karl Bode, over at Broadband Reports, wrote up a great article a little while back about why Google Voice was more disruptive than anyone (especially the telcos) were willing to give it credit for being. The key underlying point: voice is just a form of data. Once you realize that, you realize that no one needs to be tied to any telco's own dialing system. Your mobile phone service provider really could just be a dumb pipe.

For years, I've always felt that the calls for "triple play" or "quadruple play" was incredibly misleading. All of the different "plays" (voice, video, data) were actually all just data. And when things are all just data, and its on an open network, then anyone can provide the services on top of that data. The telcos recognize this, somewhat -- which is why they've tried to block out others from offering certain telco services (it's why Google Voice was blocked on the iPhone), but it could be really game changing. Imagine if you could just buy a mobile phone that had no calling plan at all -- but it was all in the software? You could even use different dialers (with different numbers?) depending on what made the most sense or was cheapest.

The telcos hate thinking of themselves as dumb pipes, but there's something to be said for focusing on the pipes and making them as strong as possible, while letting everyone else innovate at the service level, and just selling good data plans. The more others innovate, the more valuable those data connections become.

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Friends Don't Let Friends Use FCC Broadband Competition Data

from the amen dept

For many years, we've been among those (helped along by the usually excellent GAO) pointing out that the FCC's "broadband competition" stats were totally bogus. They relied on a rather bizarre way of counting competition. First, if a single household in an entire zipcode got broadband (er, actually not really broadband, but we'll get to that), then everyone in that zip code was counted. On top of that, the definition of broadband was ridiculously low. This has been known for years, and the FCC kept putting out the same bogus stats every years -- sometimes even admitting that it knew the stats were bogus, but it didn't have anything better. More recently, to its credit, the FCC is trying to get better about both how it defines broadband and how it counts things -- but that's just opened up opportunities for the telcos to simply tell the government what sort of coverage they offer, without having to reveal any actual data.

But, still, with the bogus FCC data out there, many folks are trying to claim that there's robust competition in broadband in the US. Thankfully, Julian Sanchez is pointing out that friends shouldn't let friends use FCC broadband data to discuss competition, and highlights the ridiculousness of the claim that 88% of zip codes have "four or more" broadband providers. It's even worse than Julian notes. While he points out that in many cases, some of the providers in question are mobile broadband providers offering up pokey EVDO connections, he neglects to mention that most of these connections cost a ton and come with ridiculously low usage caps -- such that they're not really broadband offerings at all. In fact, most 3G broadband data offerings have explicit limits in their contracts saying they cannot be used as primary broadband connections. But, it doesn't stop the same lobbyists who happen to be paid by the same telcos who make these policies from claiming that there's robust broadband competition.

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US Opens Up All Sorts Of Gov't Documents

from the this-is-good-news dept

While we've been disappointed by some moves by the Obama administration (on copyright, federal shield law, civil liberties, warrantless wiretapping, etc.), one area where the administration has made really big strides is on opening up formerly locked up gov't information. The latest is that the Government Printing Office and the Office of the Federal Register have just opened up the "Official Journals of Government" -- a document that used to cost a mere $17,000/year and is now available for free, online -- and made the Federal Register (basically the list of what the federal gov't is doing every day) XML enabled, so that anyone can do cool stuff with it. Ed Felten's team at Princeton has already created FedThread, which let you not only search the Register, but also annotate and create customized feeds. This is really great...

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NY MTA Realizing That Having People Create Apps For You Isn't Such A Bad Thing

from the about-time dept

Like many other transit authorities, NY's MTA took a ridiculous stance that it owned train scheduling time, and threatened independent developers, demanding large licensing fees for creating iPhone or web apps. This has never made any sense to me. Even if those transit authorities have licensed the data in the past, you can't copyright facts and (much more importantly) the goal of any transit authority should be to get more people comfortable with using public transit -- and if an independent developer is willing to create a useful app that does that for free, it should be celebrated, not met with a cease-and-desist. It looks like some at the MTA are finally realizing this, as they're backing off some of their earlier threats, and letting some apps move forward (thanks ADM for sending in the link). They don't have an official policy on this yet, but do admit that it makes sense to "evolve" to keep up with what people are doing. Later in the article, they basically admit they never really thought about this, and the whole idea that someone else might make an app for them seemed foreign, and thus, they reacted poorly to it. Either way, it's good to see them come around to realizing that opening up data makes a lot of sense.

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Google Helps People Get Their Data Out Of Google

from the the-antithesis-of-evil? dept

Too many companies these days are focused on ways to keep you locked-in somehow or another, so it's quite refreshing to find out that Google is now officially announcing its Data Liberation Front, which does exactly the opposite: systematically helping you to get your data out of Google's services so that it can be used elsewhere. Apparently the group has been working on this for a while, but has only just now been publicly "announced." It's difficult to think of too many other companies that would do the same thing. Of course, it's easy to think of independent or competing companies that might do this -- but we usually hear about the original company suing anyone who tries to free up data. Good move by Google to offer the service itself.

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Nina Paley Releases Some Data On 'Sita Sings The Blues': The More She Shared, The More She Made

from the funny-how-that-works dept

Earlier this year, we wrote about the ridiculous situation that Nina Paley faced in trying to release an amazing film, Sita Sings the Blues. Basically, some copyright holders of the music used in the film put positively insane terms on the use of their music. This made no sense, considering that the music (from the 1920s) was mostly unlistened to these days -- and the only thing the movie would likely do is increase demand for people to get legitimate versions of the music. Eventually, Paley worked out a plan to release the film under a Creative Commons license and put in place a business model like the ones we've talked about for years: give away the infinite, sell the scarce.

And apparently, it's working. Pistol points us to a talk that Nina Paley just gave revealing some of the results. You can see the video here (it's a bit over 20 minutes):

The key quote, on how she describes the business model sounds pretty much exactly like what we talk about here:

The business model -- and I do want to make money -- I very much want to make money, and I chose this because I felt I'd make more money doing this than with a conventional distribution deal. What I'm doing is that I'm not selling the content. The content is free. The content is Sita Sings The Blues. It's digital. It's made of 0s and 1s and 0s and 1s can be copied freely and easily by lots of people.... Containers are not free. And where the money comes from is the containers. And the containers, for example, are DVDs, merchandise, t-shirts, 35 mm film prints, physical screenings. The film is free, but the container of that film is not free. And that's what we're selling...

The more the content flows freely, the more demand there is for those containers. So I want as many people as possible to share Sita Sings the Blues because that drives up the demand for the containers... That was the theory when we started this, and so far it has proven correct. Yes, I love money.

So, how much money? Well, she details all the different areas of where the money came from, and it comes out as follows:

• $21,000 in donations (most at the very beginning)
• $25,100 from the store for merchandise (which cost $8,500). So, net: $16,600
• $3,000 from Channel 13 for broadcasting it (even though they didn't have to pay)

And that's not all. She also talks about a theater that downloaded her film online to show it and then sent her a check for $1,900 (as she said "the dream scenario"), and the fact that her success with the model has created all sorts of paid speaking gigs as well. Oh, and there's other things as well.

She's done some commercial distribution deals in a variety of different regions (and admits that she'd love it if she didn't have to handle all the distribution). So even though anyone can download the content online, actually distributing a 35mm print of the film (the container) uses a full distribution deal -- and, in fact, they've found that many people who downloaded and watched the film, still go and see it in the theater, because it's a different experience to go see it in the theater. Most of those deals are new, so she didn't have data on sales from that yet.

On top of that, she's done deals with DVD distributors. She offers up a special edition (signed) DVD that she distributes herself for $100. Or there's the regular version (sold via Question Copyright) for $20. This is being done to basically prove that you can sell DVDs of content that can be downloaded. In 2 months, they've sold 700 of them -- with no marketing. Then they signed a professional DVD distributor, who put it on Amazon, Netflix and stores... and they were able to sell way more than Nina or Question Copyright -- as you'd expect (though, the distributor got a bit confused and asked about trying to take the film down from YouTube, and had to be told not to do that -- old habits die hard, perhaps). Once again, this shows that having good partners helps, but also shows that just because something is available free (even from "competitors") it doesn't mean someone with a strong marketing effort can't seriously outsell the others.

Finally, there's another interesting element which is worth discussing. For the goods sold directly from Nina's site, they're using a special Creator-Endorsed Mark, so that buyer's know some money is going back to the creator. This is the sort of thing that always freaks people out when we talk about this stuff. They insist that others will make t-shirts and things and who will want to buy the official versions then? Well, it turns out lots of people. Because they want to support the artist, and having the Creator Endorsed mark does that. As Nina says:

It is entirely legal for others to sell unendorsed products. It is entirely legal to sell Sita Sings the Blues t-shirts or sippy cups or whatever, but they cannot claim that the money goes to me, unless they work out a revenue share with me first, they cannot display the creator endorsed mark. We believe that this mark increases the value of the merchandise, because people want to support the artist.

This is really great info, and she notes that within a few months, she'll have a lot more info on the theatrical distribution revenue as well. But, all in all, it looks like she'll easily be able to pay off the $50,000 it cost to officially license the music (no matter how ridiculous it was that she needed to do that), and should be able to earn a nice profit from it. And... I'll bet that her next movie (or whatever she does next) will have a nice built-in audience as well.

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Boston Public Transit Does It Right: Opens Scheduling Data

from the nice-move dept

We were just talking about how NY's public transit authority, the MTA was following in the footsteps of other short-sighted transit groups, by claiming ownership of scheduling data, and trying to squeeze license fees for anyone who uses it. Instead, if they were smart, they'd recognize that their money is made by making it easier and more convenient for people to take public transportation. It appears there are at least a few public transit authorities that recognize this. Rosedale points out that up in Boston, the MBTA is actually taking an open approach to its data. They're opening up all of the data and allowing developers to create their own apps:

"Our priority is to consistently improve customer service for the riders who rely on the T and RTAs everyday to get to their job or their doctor's appointment on time," said Transportation Secretary Aloisi. "With the help of thoughtful technical developers, making this data public will spawn many possible applications to help transit users use their cell phones or laptops to find and use the right bus or train in the right place at the right time for them."

Nice to see at least a few out there who have figured this out.

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Dear AP: The Point Behind A Data Format Is To Make The Data Easier To Use, Not Harder

from the sigh dept

The Associated Press continues its attempt to convince the world to pretend the past still exists, while trying to dress it up in a modern dress. The latest move? It's releasing a new data format to append metadata to news articles. But, it's not to make that news more useful for others to build on, like most data formats. Instead, it's an attempt to make the news less useful, by including different tags on how the content can be used. This is backwards, of course. Data feeds and metadata are designed to add value to users, not take it away. This does the opposite. On top of that, this seems to be based on the idea that people should just agree to follow the usage rules. That probably won't fly. The way most of their content is used now is legal, it's just that the AP doesn't like it. But that doesn't mean anyone has to stop linking to them or quoting fair-use snippets from their articles, just because the AP says so.

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Power.com Says Facebook Can't Block Access To User Data

from the seems-like-a-tough-claim dept

Earlier this year, we had trouble understanding Facebook's reasoning for suing Power.com, a site that tried to aggregate a variety of social network sites into a single interface (something that seems rather useful). However, Facebook insisted that it violated its copyright, and in a slightly troubling ruling in the case, the judge seemed to find that any scraping could be copyright infringement, even if the scraping was just to get at non-infringing content. The court's argument was that in order to get at the non-infringing content, you first have to scrape the infringing content too.

Now the case is getting odder, as Power.com has countersued Facebook, claiming that Facebook is "unlawfully withholding the data that users own (as stated in Facebook’s own ToS)." Of course, if that's true, I'm not sure if Power.com has the standing to make that claim. Wouldn't that be an issue for the user to raise themselves? Besides, I don't think there's any rule that even if a site lets you retain the copyright on content that it needs to make it easy to access. So now we have lawsuits coming from both sides that don't make much sense. The two sites should just learn to play nicely with each other.

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What Does Radical Transparency In Government Look Like?

from the well,-this-is-a-start dept

We've certainly complained when the new administration has failed to live up to its "transparency" promises, but the hiring of Vivek Kundra as federal CIO and Aneesh Chopra as federal CTO has put two real believers in transparency and openness in charge of the technology side of our federal government... and we're starting to see the very first results of that. It's still early, but it's actually quite impressive how much Kindra has accomplished in a very short time. Tim O'Reilly details the new federal IT spending dashboards that can be found at USASpending.gov, and it's really impressive for a gov't project put together in an incredibly short period of time. It actually shows each (participating) departments' projects, including goals and how close they are to meeting those goals. Real accountability? In government? Wow. The whole thing is built in drupal and data feeds are open to the public, so others can take the data on build on it. While it may be a small thing at this point, it's a huge step directionally in showing a commitment to more openness and transparency.

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The Battle Over Who Owns Bus Arrival Times

from the questions,-questions,-questions dept

We've had quite a few stories in the past about various public transportation authorities trying to stop others from creating iPhone apps that indicate train/bus schedule information. Often, the transit organizations claim intellectual property over the matter, saying that they want the ability to license the data themselves, or to sell iPhone apps themselves. This strikes many as being incredibly short-sighted. The core business of the transit groups should be to get more people using the trains and buses. Having good iPhone apps out there (often for free) would seem to get more people to use public transportation, and that benefit likely outweighs any money received from selling $5 iPhone apps.

However, a few people have sent in a story from San Francisco, where things are a bit more complex. The basics do seem to be the same, with a guy named Steven Peterson creating an iPhone app called Routesy to tell you when your Muni bus is arriving, only to have it shut down after complaints that it was violating intellectual property. Where it gets a bit more complex, is that it's not the public transit authority, Muni, that's complaining. In fact, Muni claims that it owns the data and says the public is entitled to use it (in fact, it claims to encourage it).

The issue is that Muni teamed up with a private company to put sensors on its buses and trains to note where the buses are and to predict when the buses would arrive. To make things even more confusing, the original company, NextBus, appears to have been separated into two separate companies: NextBus and NextBus Information Systems (I have to admit, the link above is really not at all clear on this). In a separate post, it appears that NBIS (who sent the complaint to Apple and had originally threatened the creator of the Routesy app) is actually claiming that it owns the prediction data.

While this is silly, it is a bit more defensible. NBIS seems to be claiming that since it owns the sensors and the data they produce, and then run it through some sort of algorithm to predict actual arrival times, it owns the predictions. You can't copyright facts... but you could potentially claim copyright over predictions on facts -- and I think that's what NBIS is actually doing here (no one arguing over this seems particularly clear). A big question: is a prediction a "creative expression"? Some could argue that it's not, but that seems to be what the claim hinges on. In theory, Muni could be right that the data on where each bus is can be freely used by the public, but the predictive data may be a bit different. In the end, it probably hinges on what sort of contract Muni signed with NextBus (or NBIS), and then the real question might be why Muni didn't make sure that the predictive data was made to be open to outside developers as well. My guess: when this deal was being done, no one even thought that outside developers would want to do anything like this, so it wasn't even a point of discussion.

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Mythbusters' Adam Savage Discovers Insane Roaming Fees: $11,000 iPhone Bill For A Few Hours Surfing

from the BUSTED dept

Every few months or so there's an article somewhere about an insane phone bill that someone gets because they took their phone out of the country without recognizing the insanity that is international roaming rates. This time, it appears to be Mythbusters co-host Adam Savage, who's been doing a bit of traveling lately. He was recently up in Canada, and used his iPhone to do a little web surfing. And now he got the bill. Apparently AT&T wants somewhere around $11,000 for Adam's surfing and have turned off his phone until he pays. Now there will be some who say that he should have read the fine print, but considering just how often these sorts of stories pop up, at some point it's worth noting that the fine print isn't working. And... even if you grant the "fine print" premise, it's hard for anyone to figure out how these international roaming rates make any sense whatsoever. They're so far off the charts as to be unbelievable.

Anyway... next week on Mythbusters... the insanity of mobile phone bills? Can we see Jamie and Adam try to decipher hidden fees, while Grant, Tory and Kari search for the elusive accurate mobile phone coverage map? Maybe Buster can figure out what the real limits are on unlimited data plans? Hmm... maybe not.

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Senate Opening Up? Offers Up Vote Data In XML Format

from the fun-to-watch dept

There's been a big push lately to get the gov't to be a lot more open with its data, and both the new federal government CTO and CIO have spoken up about the importance of opening up more data. While it may take some time, we are starting to see things happen -- and happen quickly in some cases. Apparently, the Senate agreed (despite some reservations) to make the data from Senate votes available in an open XML format, and just a few days later that data is available. This is absolutely a good thing, but the real test will be seeing what people do with this and other open government data sources. It's nice to report on the government doing something right every once in a while....

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Open Secrets Takes Us One Step Closer To Open Government

from the a-good-step-forward dept

OpenSecrets.org, the website of Center for Responsive Politics has just put over 200 million documents online -- basically the groups' entire archives. Specifically, the data includes info about fundraising, lobbying, personal finance of politicians and information about "advocacy groups" known as 527 organizations. It looks like a treasure trove of information that plenty of politicians and lobbyists probably wish remained hidden behind closed doors.

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Software Audits In India Block Companies From Backing Up Their Data, Claiming It's Infringement

from the yikes dept

Gautam John writes in with a couple of posts concerning software audit "raids" done in India (also common in the US). The first explains how unfair the process is, noting how it's basically court-sanctioned extortion. Outside groups get to basically stop your business for a whole day, harming your reputation among both employees and clients (even if you haven't done anything wrong) and then can squeeze you to pay up. The Associated Press did a big expose on how the BSA, in particular, has a history of using underhanded means to squeeze many small businesses to pay up -- even noting that the BSA keeps the money, rather than distributing it to firms. The most egregious part, though, was where the "auditors" refused to allow the company to back up its data, saying that the data might be created with unauthorized software, and thus, backing up the data would be infringing.

The BSA quickly responded, asking the blog owner to post its detailed response, where it defends the raids. Unfortunately, its defense is incredibly weak. It starts off -- as does pretty much every BSA story -- with it claiming that "independent studies" show how much damage to the wider economy unauthorized file sharing does. That's not accurate at all. We've picked apart the numbers before, showing how the BSA numbers are totally bogus (and, while it's a third party that came up with the numbers, it's entirely paid for by the BSA). A big part of the problem is that the industry only looks at the downside to the economy, and doesn't include any factor to recognize that companies that use unauthorized software also help the economy. Perhaps the downsides outweigh the upsides... but totally ignoring all upsides and then double, triple and quadruple counting the downsides via "ripple effects" does not make for a credible study.

However, the BSA then goes on to defend the practice of not allowing companies to back up their data, by basically saying "hey, that's the law." But, of course, that only supports the original poster's complaint that this is effectively "court sponsored extortion." It does nothing to explain what's illegal about backing up your data (which is not covered by the copyright of the software companies).

Of course, in the end, all these sorts of tactics do is push people to explore open source alternatives, not just because they're cheaper (sometimes free, though, not always), but because they don't have to put up with legal bullying and extortion-like tactics.

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Is Carbonite's Lawsuit Over Lost Data A Bad Idea?

from the reminding-people-that-you-lost-their-data dept

Carbonite, one of a few players in the competitive online backup space, has now sued a vendor it used for hardware whose failure in 2007 led some of Carbonite's customers to lose their data. While you can understand why Carbonite is trying to sue this vendor, you have to wonder if it actually makes business sense. As some in the article note, it's not clear there's a real legal remedy here, and Carbonite may be doing this as a PR move, to make people realize that it wasn't responsible for the lost data. However, as someone who was recently on the market for such a solution, I'd say this lawsuit actually makes me think less of Carbonite. First, it reminds everyone that the company lost people's data. Second, it suggests that the company is unwilling to take responsibility for the loss. The people signing up to use Carbonite are trusting Carbonite to set things up in a way that their data won't get lost. They're not trusting Carbonite's suppliers. It's Carbonite that failed those customers, and simply trying to offload the blame does little to convince anyone that the company is setting things up in a way that will prevent this sort of thing from happening again, no matter who the tech supplier might be.

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Stanford Creates Database Of Patent Litigation

from the looks-useful dept

Over at Stanford, some law professors have been putting together a database of IP litigation from the past few years, called the Stanford IP Litigation Clearinghouse. The Law.com article claims that there are "surprising" facts already coming out of the database, but they don't seem to be any different than what's been known for a while (specifically, that the number of patent lawsuits has been relatively constant over the past few years). Of course, part of the reason is that more infringement lawsuits have been filed against many defendants at once, rather than against just one or two. In fact, the database does show a big jump in the number of defendants.

Also, it's worth noting that the database leaves out all of the folks who paid up a settlement because it's simply not worth going to court or (even worse) those who never even bothered to create a product due to chilling effects from those claiming IP ownership. Still, it's good to have more data and to have that data more widely available for analysis.

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It Ain't Easy To Get A Newspaper To Provide Useful Data

from the not-their-thing dept

We've discussed in the past the idea that newspapers today need to get beyond reporting the news and also move towards opening up their data such that others can make that data useful. Newspapers have access to all sorts of interesting and useful data -- but traditionally, they've hoarded it and only used it as a resource for editors and reporters in creating stories. However, by opening up that data to others, it could make those news organizations much more valuable. We're seeing some movement in that direction, and recently noted that the NY Times had come out with an API for the campaign finance data it had.

However, one thing that seems clear is that very few newspapers have the resources necessary to do this on a regular basis. The NY Times (and, to some extent, the Washington Post) seems to be willing to invest in this area, but for many newspapers, the entire concept seems foreign. Writing for OJR, Eric Ulken from the LA Times discusses how much effort it took to get the necessary resources just to build a homicide map to go along with a blog that planned to chronicle every homicide in the LA area. If Ulken's experience is any indication, it seems pretty clear that very, very few traditional news organizations are going to be able to pull this off. They're just not set up to do such things.

It seems increasingly clear that these types of innovations are more likely to come from newer news organizations who actually recognize the value of data in addition to straight reporting, and the concept of openness compared to being a gatekeeper.

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British Goverment Loses A Computer A Week, But What About The Data?

from the data-is-all-that-really-matters dept

New stats from the British government show its various departments lost an average of one computer per week over the past year. The good news is that the government says only one of those losses put any personal data at risk -- although it's hard to verify the claims of some departments that the data on their devices was encrypted or otherwise made safe. It's hard to get too upset about the missing devices, since it seems inevitable that any any organization with a large number of employees carrying laptops and other devices around will lose some or have them stolen. The issue isn't the devices, or at least it shouldn't be; the issue is data. It may be an easy way to score political points by pointing out how often physical devices are lost, but the value of a $2000 laptop or $500 smartphone pales in comparison to the value of the data, or the data it can access. Care must be taken to ensure that security policies and procedures don't place importance on securing physical devices at the expense of securing data. For a start, it would be nice to make people accountable for data they have, but that's probably a stretch.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Facebook Sued For Patent Infringement

from the welcome-to-the-big-time dept

It's pretty much a rite of passage for any tech company these days, as you get larger and more recognized, some company that has an overly broad and probably obvious patent will sue you for patent infringement. For the company in question, the lawsuit is as much a publicity event as it is an attempt to squeeze revenue from an actual innovator. The latest example of this is with an Ohio company no one's heard of called Leader Technologies, who is suing Facebook for patent infringement, and was kind enough to send out a press release announcing this before Facebook even got to see the lawsuit. Clearly, this is a publicity stunt.

As for the patent itself, it basically describes the rather obvious process of associating a piece of data with multiple categories. It's almost surprising that the company is suing Facebook instead of Google. While I'm not a heavy Facebook user, I'm not sure where Facebook uses such a system. Google, however, has made widespread use of a similar idea with its Gmail "labels." The idea is that rather than sorting data into a specific folder or category, it can be associated with multiple categories. If that seems rather obvious and ridiculously broad, well, that's the patent system for you these days.

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