Faulty Websites Confront Needy in Search of Aid

Three months after the disastrous rollout of a new $63 million website for unemployment claims, Florida is hiring hundreds of employees to deal with technical problems that left tens of thousands of people without their checks while penalties mount against the vendor who set up the site. Efforts at modernizing the systems for unemployment compensation in California, Massachusetts and Nevada have also largely backfired in recent months, causing enormous cost overruns and delays.

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Online Video Could Get a Boost From Proposed Laws

Lawmakers have introduced at least three different bills that would reshape the consumer video market, including online video, similar to efforts used to boost the satellite industry in the 1990s. None of the bills is expected to pass right away, and companies looking to expand in online video remain uncertain how far Congress will open the door for them.

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Big City Community Networks: Lessons from Seattle and Gigabit Squared

We recently learned that the Gigabit Squared project in Seattle is in jeopardy. Gigabit Squared has had difficulty raising all the necessary capital for its project, building Fiber-to-the-Home to several neighborhoods in part by using city-owned fiber to reduce the cost of building its trunk lines. There are a number of important lessons, none of them new, that we should take away from this disappointing news.

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Why Comcast and other cable ISPs aren’t selling you gigabit Internet

Gigabit-class broadband is capturing the imagination of Internet users throughout the country. Cable companies haven't been ignoring this consumer demand… but they haven't done anything to satisfy it, either.

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Video Streaming Continues To Gain Acceptance Among TV Viewers

Streaming video on a connected TV device is now the second most popular way for adults 18-49 to view primetime TV programming behind watching traditional live television, according to a recently completed survey commissioned by Crackle, the unit of Sony Pictures Entertainment that offers ad-supported on-demand streaming video programming.

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Want to know if your ISP is capping data? Check GigaOm’s updated chart

An updated look at how Internet service providers (ISPs) around the US are trying to implement broadband data caps.

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A new way to skin the net neutrality cat

The main trouble with the Federal Communications Commission’s network neutrality rules is that the rules, as written, don’t really address the problem they’re trying to remedy. They attempt to regulate what is essentially anti-competitive behavior by Internet service providers, or the potential for anti-competitive behavior, by treating it as a matter of communications law, instead of antitrust law.

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Twitter’s handle on DC evolving

Twitter, already an established Silicon Valley player and long a DC outsider, may have little choice but to get more involved in the Washington game -- as was the case for Facebook and Google.

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Radio broadcasters face challenge from tech heavyweights

Radio remains the world’s most popular form of media in terms of audience, with listener figures at their highest levels in decades. But broadcasters face some of their fiercest competition for years as the world’s biggest technology companies – including Apple and Google – take aim at their business.

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The Cost of Connectivity 2013

It costs more to purchase 2 GB of data in a US city than it does in any of the cities surveyed in Europe. The new data, in comparing trends from 2012 to 2013, underscores the extent to which US cities lag behind cities around the world, further emphasizing the need for policy reform. Rather than allowing American cities to fall behind, policymakers should reassess current policy approaches and implement strategies to increase competition, in turn fostering faster speeds and more affordable access.

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