Author: gordon

Mobile Q1: All Eyes on Tablets, T-Mobile and AT&T

• Colin Gibbs
• Tuesday, April 19, 2011
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Summary:

The first quarter of 2011 saw the continuation of some important trends, but it also some unexpected developments. The biggest story saw AT&T agree to acquire T-Mobile USA in a deal that — if approved by federal regulators — would drastically consolidate the market of tier-one operators. Apple’s hold on the tablet industry, meanwhile, loosened slightly emergence of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab and a few other devices. Competitors of the iPad 2 nonetheless face a daunting challenge. And Verizon Wireless continued to ramp up its LTE deployments. The mobile carrier is potentially poised to capture a base of lucrative postpaid subscribers with this — and perhaps close the gap with the combined AT&T/T-Mobile, should that deal go through. Additional companies mentioned in this report include Research in Motion, Nokia, Google, HTC and Motorola. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

We have affirmed our ‘AAA/A-1+’ sovereign credit ratings on the United
States of America.

The economy of the U.S. is flexible and highly diversified, the country’s
effective monetary policies have supported output growth while containing
inflationary pressures, and a consistent global preference for the U.S.
dollar over all other currencies gives the country unique external
liquidity.

Because the U.S. has, relative to its ‘AAA’ peers, what we consider to be
very large budget deficits and rising government indebtedness and the
path to addressing these is not clear to us, we have revised our outlook
on the long-term rating to negative from stable.

We believe there is a material risk that U.S. policymakers might not
reach an agreement on how to address medium- and long-term budgetary
challenges by 2013; if an agreement is not reached and meaningful
implementation is not begun by then, this would in our view render the
U.S. fiscal profile meaningfully weaker than that of peer ‘AAA’
sovereigns.

The Open Data Foundation (ODaF) is a non-profit organization dedicated to the adoption of global metadata standards and the development of open-source solutions promoting the use of statistical data. We focus on improving data and metadata accessibility and overall quality in support of research, policy making, and transparency, in the fields of economics, finance, healthcare, education, labor, social science, technology, agriculture, development, and the environment. While we see this information as being primarily statistical in nature, it is understood that it can be drawn from a wide variety of sources and therefore may include information not traditionally seen as such.

Data has many sources, the administration of surveys and the monitoring of transactional flows and registers being some of the most common. In order to become useful for the end-user communities, raw data commonly go through various editing, aggregation and analytical stages. While researchers and academics may find the micro-data useful, policy and decision makers and the and the general public are more commonly interested in the easier to manage high-level aggregates. Despite the existence of tools and the emergence of open metadata specifications, it is often not possible to connect the different parts of this information chain together. Such connection, however, is critical in fully understanding the data.

Ideally, it should be possible for a user to easily perform tasks such as:

• Discover the existence of data
• Access the data for research and analysis
• Find detailed information describing the data and its production processes
• Access the data sources and collection instruments from which and with which the data was collected, compiled, and aggregated
• Effectively communicate with the agencies involved in the production, storage, distribution of the data
• Share knowledge with other users

The Open Data Foundation exists to help realize this vision, working in cooperation with standards initiatives and other interested parties.

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DIY #Health! #cool

News.me is a different kind of social news experience that shows you not just what your friends are sharing, but what they are reading as well. Have some friends with impeccable taste in music? Find out about new artists from the same places they do. Curious what Steven Johnson or Nicholas Kristof has been reading lately? Browse through their streams and find out. Everyone curates their Twitter experience to reflect their own unique set of interests, and with News.me you can see their curated view of the world. News.me offers a seamless interface for immersive reading, and uses science to find the most relevant content in every user’s stream.

News.me was developed by bit.ly in collaboration with The New York Times R&D Lab.

the daily you…

More than 15 years ago, a colleague at the time, Greg Grosh, gave me a book entitled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn. I’ve thought a lot about that book lately and have pulled it from my shelf to re-read key passages.

Here’s an excerpt from a review by Nicholas Wade in Science magazine that may give you a hint as to why the book has been on my mind:

“The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a landmark in intellectual history which has attracted attention far beyond its own immediate field…It is written with a combination of depth and clarity that make it an almost unbroken series of aphorisms. Its author wastes little time on demolishing the logical empiricist view of science as an objective progression toward the truth.”

“Instead he erects from ground up a structure in which science is seen to be heavily influenced by non-rational procedures, and in which new theories are viewed as being more complex than those they usurp but not as standing any closer to the truth…Science is not the steady, cumulative acquisition of knowledge that is portrayed in the textbooks. Rather, it is a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions…in each of which one conceptual world view is replaced by another…”

Wow – pretty amazing stuff, huh? Wade’s phrase – “peaceful interludes, punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions” – especially resonates with me. Who among hasn’t been “blinded by the science” of those smooth charts and line graphs in hundreds of PowerPoint presentations documenting the waves of technology in an unerring progress towards whatever the presenter wants you to believe is the next wave?

Kuhn’s essay refutes any notion of this premise in his powerful, book-length essay. Along the way, he writes about how the aggregation of methods, theories, and processes take the shape of what he dubs “a paradigm” and then describes how paradigms resist change.

At this particular moment in history, Kuhn’s essay gives me pause with two concerns: The first concern is that there is an even greater risk for paradigms to increasingly resist change, because the scientific community, its supporting ecosystem (i.e., funders, project sponsors, material supply chain, etc.), and their public observers are magnified by the global reach of social media and instant communications.

You could argue that social media also magnify and amplify the opposing views in a debate. And that’s a fair argument, if you assume that it involves participants from many disciplines. This leads to my second concern, the decline in creativity – for “other” thinking.

Another colleague pointed me to the current story in Newsweek, “The Creativity Crisis,” in which it cites a recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs that identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future. The potential consequences of a decline in American creativity are sweeping, because the necessity of human ingenuity is undisputed.

A combination of right-brain/left-brain thinking proves time and again to yield the best results on big problems. Take a fun, but telling example, like my daughter Lauren’s alma mater, St. Olaf, where its first-year team won the national “Rube Goldberg” competition.  The “secret of their success?”…it was an interdisciplinary team of artists and engineers, social and hard science majors, young men and women.

With the decades’-long reduction in public school arts education and gifted programs, we have brewed a bitter gruel for ourselves, producing kids who are, overall, better performers according to standards in the core subjects of math, science, and language skills, but at the expense of critical thinking and the necessity of ingenuity that are fueled by creative arts.

Companies, large and small, can help to stem and begin reversing this creative decline, not only in their existing workforce, but in the future one as well. Support the creative arts in your community:

• Offer “scholarships” by buying a block of discounted tickets to give to kids, especially those who can’t afford them, for performances at the opera, the ballet, or the museum.
• Take a company outing to a high school or college musical…it’s kitschy, it’s cheap fun, and the theater programs need the support.
• There’s a hundred other ways to support the creative industries beyond this…many of them low, and often no, cost.

We can’t afford to do otherwise, for our economic well-being, competitiveness, and national future. As always, I hope to hear your thoughts on the topic, as well.

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