Posts Tagged: "Internet"

A keynote speech delivered on the first day of F8 by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg along with other company executives laid out a 10 year road map for the company. ”We stand for connecting every person for a global community, for bringing people together, for giving all people a voice, for the free flow of ideas and culture across nations,” Zuckerberg said. He supported this with soundbites he has repeated in the past, including the four billion people around the world without any Internet access. Striking some chords of global economic goodwill, he then stated that for every 10 people who gain access to the Internet, one person is lifted out of poverty.

Between August 2012 and February 2013, digital publishing apps saw an average growth in their readership of 200 percent according to a state of mobile tech report released by computer software company Adobe Systems. Online statistics portal Statista report statistics showing that 88 percent of North American newspapers were distributing content on mobile devices by 2010. It’s not just readers that are heading to the digital realm, but advertising dollars are also helping to buoy the nascent digital magazine sector. Forecasts reported by professional services network PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) indicate that digital advertising expenditures should rise from $2.4 billion in 2012 up to $3.8 billion in 2017, when they will account for one-quarter of all advertising spending.

The list of living legends in the history of the development of the Internet sadly lost a member on Saturday, March 5th, with the passing of Ray Tomlinson. Tomlinson is widely regarded to be the primary father of e-mail communications and is the reason why most of us use the ‘@’ symbol nearly everyday. Tomlinson’s ability to engineer a solution to the problem of keeping the lines of communication open among colleagues separated by great distances earned him a spot in the Internet Hall of Fame along with the rest of the first class inducted into that hall in 2012.

Members who pay for a $95 annual subscription to Google Express can have their groceries delivered for $2.99 per delivery, while non-members pay $4.99 per delivery. A customer must order $35 worth of goods to qualify for a Google Express delivery. This new Google Express service directly competes with Amazon Fresh, Amazon’s own same-day delivery service for handling grocery or electronic good purchases. The Prime Fresh membership costs consumers $299 per year, but orders for more than $50 worth of goods are delivered without shipping fees. Amazon is also establishing a global presence for the Fresh service, launching deliveries of fresh fruits and vegetables in the Italian city of Milan and the surrounding region.

The availability of high speed Internet access (HSIA) is a major factor determining consumer satisfaction when staying in hotel or resort lodgings, and it’s this market where Blueprint RF has been stepping into Nomadix’s IP territory. “It’s fairly widely known that Nomadix has patents protecting this technology,” said Doug Muehlhauser, a partner at the Knobbe Martens law firm and the lead litigation counsel for the Nomadix infringement case. Both he and Mark Lezama, another Knobbe Martens litigation partner, were able to offer us more insight into the legal case. This kind of infringement case is exactly why the patent system exists, Muehlhauser said. “People should really be acknowledging the value of this technology, but some participants in the market are not willing to do that,” he said.

While the history of Internet development involves many names and was not reliant on a single discovery, it is also true that certain innovations have done more to enable better networks for all. It is with that idea in mind that we’d like to profile the achievements made by Radia Perlman, the inventor of spanning tree protocol (STP) and a 2016 inductee into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Thanks to spanning tree protocol, switched network environments are capable of connecting bridges and switches with multiple paths for data transmission redundancies without those redundancies causing a network loop, which can seriously degrade network service. Without STP, a single frame looping on an Ethernet network would create out of control data traffic that would prevent communications of all other data. February 4th marks the 24th anniversary of the issue of the U.S. patent protecting spanning tree protocol.

Some states have decided that they can’t wait for a federal response on the collection of online sales tax, prompting them to enact their own measures. In Utah, where less than one percent of taxpayers actually pay the use tax they owe the state for Internet retail transactions, some state lawmakers have collaborated on crafting a bill that would give the state more power in collecting sales tax from online retailers, with or without a physical presence within the state. In South Carolina, January 1st of this year brought about the end of a tax break offered to Amazon for building a distribution center in that state. The collection of sales tax from Amazon sales to South Carolina consumers is expected to bring in about $13.8 million in additional tax revenue through 2016, according to projected revenues released by South Carolina’s tax department. The distribution centers built by Amazon serve as the physical in-state nexus which requires it to collect sales tax from South Carolina consumers.

Counterfeiting has exploded in the last decade or so, paralleling the growth of the Internet and online sales. It’s harder for counterfeiters to get their products into the supply chain headed for brick and mortar stores, but the Internet makes it possible for counterfeiters to bypass physical stores and flourish, as they’re hiding behind the anonymity of a website or an online marketplace. Counterfeit goods are much more likely to be available on ecommerce marketplaces—either on independent sites specifically set up to market fakes, or on platforms such as Taobao or AliExpress. Identifying and taking down these sites requires constant watchfulness and diligence.

Much of the data security world has been abuzz since a blog post at the digital privacy website DataBreaches.net reported the disconcerting news that the personal information of 191 million voters participating in U.S. elections going back to the year 2000 was made available on the Internet by a party who is yet unknown. These records include voter information which is requested at the time of registration, which in many cases includes home addresses, date of birth, telephone number and state voter identification. Making these voter records available online violates confidentiality restrictions on accessing records put in place by California and other states.

Digital piracy was alive and well in 2015. Not surprisingly, the incredibly popular HBO television series Game of Thrones was the most pirated TV show with 14.4 million downloads, far outpacing its TV viewership of 8.1 million American viewers. Game of Thrones also has the distinction of breaking the all-time record for most simultaneous peer shares via torrent with 258,131 peers engaging in simultaneous shares.

New Zealand Judge Nevin Dawson handed down a ruling that would allow the United States to move forward with the extradition of Kim Dotcom, the founder of the former Megaupload.com, one of the world’s most popular file sharing websites at the height of its power. Kim and others involved with Megaupload have been sought under counts of criminal copyright infringement, racketeering, conspiracy to commit money laundering as well as aiding and abetting criminal copyright infringement. The original indictment, filed by the Department of Justice in the Eastern District Court of Virginia back in January 2012, alleged that Kim and other defendants were responsible for $500 million in harm to copyright holders.

Chinese legislators have attempted to enact anti-terror legislation purportedly designed to protect Chinese citizens against terrorist threats. In late December, China passed a law requiring both telecommunications and Internet companies operating in the country to provide decryption, technical interfaces and other assistance to public and state security organizations to conduct investigations of potential terrorist activities. The tech sector has misgivings about Chinese regulations that would force the handing over of sensitive data. Imagine a leak of encryption keys leading Chinese hackers to degrade performance of a foreign tech provider, all in the name of promoting indigenous innovation. That’s a pretty extreme scenario, but one that’s not completely unimaginable considering recent cybersecurity headlines.

2015 was a truly remarkable year for innovation and we saw major trends in self-driving cars, wearable technologies, digital wallets and much more. I hope you will enjoy this top 10 listing, which includes innovations for providing water in arid regions, wireless charging systems for electronic devices and even the collection and retransmission of sunlight. Of course, as with all of these types of lists, the criteria used for inclusion on this list is subjective, based on my own personal preferences. Please feel free to let us know if you saw something particularly noteworthy in 2015.

In 2014, HP placed 20th out of all companies filing patent applications with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, earning 1,631 patents, an increase of more than 10 percent over its 2013 results. The patent portfolio analysis tools available to us through Innography show that HP has earned 469 patents in the most recent quarter and 1,355 so far this year… The visualization of the visualizing conditions information technology utilized by an entire enterprise is the focus of U.S. Patent Application No. 20150304181, titled Visualizing Conditions of Information Technology Environments. It claims a method for visualizing conditions of information technology (IT) environments. This visualization system is intended to improve troubleshooting techniques in IT environments which use a large number of virtual machines having no physical location.

As bleak as the picture looked for brick-and-mortar retail, it was much brighter for e-commerce and online retail, which saw their best day ever. According to global analytics firm comScore, 2015’s Cyber Monday saw $2.28 billion in online spending from desktop computer users, the heaviest day of online spending ever recorded and an increase of 12 percent over last year’s Cyber Monday results. When including sales from mobile device consumers, Cyber Monday sales surpassed $3.1 billion.