We are witnessing nothing less than the geopoliticalisation of the world’s oil and gas industry. Governments rather than traditional commercial enterprises are taking control. And those governments have interests hostile to America’s.
CableCards slip into a built-in slot on the newer digital TVs as well as on upcoming DVR models from TiVo Inc. (TIVO ) Hewlett-Packard (HPQ ) also has a similiar product in the works. With a CableCard, you can get rid of your cable box and plug your cable directly into your TV or recorder box.
How will CableCards change the way you view television?
Slow adoption of technology poses the gravest threat to the U.S. health care industry, even more so than soaring medical costs or growing numbers of uninsured patients.
So say health care executives and lawmakers who will attend the World Health Care Congress.
At the event, government officials and health care leaders will press the industry to quickly adopt tech goods and services, both to improve patient care and, eventually, cut health costs.
John Mauldin reviews George Muzea's book The Vital Few or the Trivial Many," which is a study of how to invest with the insiders.
...when there is a divergence between insider selling and public opinion (thus the Vital Few vs. the Trivial Many) it is an indication of major and intermediate tops and bottoms. What we are still seeing today is a very bullish public and insider selling - not a good sign.
In an increasingly networked world, not a day goes by when some company or the other reports problems with its gear. Cisco’s IOS is showing its age, and the number of flaws and vulnerabilities is being reported on a much more regularity. Barely a week after it reported VoIP related flaw, there is news of three more denial of service (DoS) flaws in Cisco IOS, and this involved who the IOS handles MPLS packet processing, IPv6 and border gateway protocol.
Juniper is having its own set of problems. According to Broadband Reports forums, Juniper had to rush out a patch to large ISPs.
Venture capitalist Roger McNamee in his book The New Normal writes,
"In the new normal, neither big businesses nor IPOs will get all the glory. Today, size matters less than at any other time in the past 50 years. Thanks to technology, even small businesses can have a global footprint if they leverage the Internet and available tools that are dropping in price even as capabilities increase."
Lastly, in one of those unintended consequences that governments create, Sarbanes-Oxley and the grand inquisitions of Eliot Spitzer are gifts to startups. Smaller companies can focus. Brain cycles in large public companies go to waste attending to compliance issues and other cover-your-rear work.
Now that Oracle 10g has landed on OS X Server, businesses and institutions have a reason to dig deeper into Apple’s server lineup. They’ll feel safe enough to get educated and excited about 64-bit RISC technology at x86 prices, the vital importance of a throughput-optimized architecture, and the rationale behind Apple’s insistence on reinventing wheels and jumping into markets where the pie is already divided into fat slices.
With cable-TV operators and technology vendors like Microsoft (MSFT ) making a big push into the digital video recorder market pioneered by TiVo, television is poised to flip from an archetypal one-way broadcast service to a Web-like interactive model. A growing percentage of those digital video recorders can pull content from the Internet as well. And last year, over 150 million camera-enabled mobile phones were sold, a number expected to grow to 500 million in four years.
By the end of the decade, therefore, a billion people will have the ability to contribute not just text but photos and video instantly to the global virtual conversation.
Kevin Werbach is an Assistant Professor at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, founder of the Supernova Group, and the organizer of the Supernova Conference
RCN Corporation announced today the launch of RCN WebWatch, a first-of-its-kind home monitoring system that allows customers to remotely view real-time video of their home or business through any PC, which is connected to a high-speed Internet connection. This offering is another example of the quality products RCN can deliver over its MegaBand⠮etwork. The service will be available in RCN’s Boston market immediately, with other markets to follow.
Major consumer electronics companies -- from Panasonic to Phillips -- are re-vamping their lines to make disassembly for recycling, and the remaining disposal as easy, cheap, and safe as possible. Features like low or no-lead solder, modular electronics boards, snap-fit rather than glued joints, and included instructions for disassembly make it easier for the dead product to have a new life. Whether as a repaired item with an easily replaced piece, a consumer disassembled and recycled piece, or one that can easily be scrapped out by more professional disassemblers, either locally, or in Asia. Design for disassembly is hot, and definitely needed.
And it's not just electronics companies who are in on the action; Steelcases's new Think chair is a paragon of fixability and re-recyclability, with nearly 100 percent of the chair composed of easy to recycle or replace single-material pieces. There are all kinds of opportunities for this preemptive strike on waste, and not just in the assembly of the products. Steelcase set up three different factories around the world so that each of its markets could be served locally in order to cut transport costs, and support local economies.
