Networking

CARLSBAD, Calif.--The D6 conference wrapped up on Thursday with a session on broadband access: Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher interviewed Lowell McAdam, CEO of Verizon Wireless, and Kevin Martin, chairman of the FCC.

Mossberg started by putting a chart up showing how far behind the U.S. is in broadband access, and how expensive our access is. Martin said you need to look at the unique demographics of the U.S., and if you compare some states, like Massachusetts, to Korea, then they'll hold up better. Of course, providing access to less-advantaged areas is still a challenge.

So … Read more

It's still not up to 1.0, but Google on Wednesday announced completion of version 0.8 of OpenSocial, a standard for building social applications on the Web.

One notable difference with OpenSocial 0.8 is the addition of the RESTful API. This addition lets a wider variety of software beside just Web-based widgets running in JavaScript interact with the servers running social applications. For example, it would permit a program running on Windows or on a mobile phone, but not in a Web browser, tap into a social application.

OpenSocial began at Google, but the company won allies … Read more

Last week, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization announced its new XO-2 laptop design, which will likely replace the XO-1 design I've written about before on this blog. There are images of the XO-2 on the OLPC wiki and a video clip from the announcement on Joanna Stern's blog for Laptop magazine.

The new design uses two touch-screen LCDs flanking a central hinge. This approach allows the unit to be used as a book with facing pages (shown here), as a conventional laptop using a virtual keyboard on the lower display, or as a single system shared … Read more

There is no business model behind it, but mesh Wi-Fi company Meraki is offering free Wi-Fi access to San Francisco, one neighborhood at a time, as I discovered when I passed by the company's folksy demo table at my local farmers' market last month (see report from local newspaper). But Meraki is not in the business of just blasting money out the door, which it appears to be doing in San Francisco, and there is a method to this program.

Meraki's business is actually quite straightforward: it sells wide-area Wi-Fi network hardware, and provides the management consoles to … Read more

Delicious, Yahoo's "social bookmarking" site that lets people archive, tag, and share Web site addresses, got its start closely tied to the Firefox open-source Web browser (download Delicious for Firefox). Now Yahoo is branching out to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, too.

The company released a beta version of the IE plug-in Tuesday (available on Download.com). Though there are differences, the IE version is similar, offering users the ability to add and tag bookmarks and to search their own bookmark collection.

"We're very excited about this release, as we have many users who use Internet … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Maybe it was because Google preaching to the social-networking choir, or maybe it was the toasty campfires and hot cocoa, but demonstrations of Google's new Friend Connect service seemed generally well received Monday night.

Google executives showed off the technology, a Google-hosted application that designed to let Web site coders easily add social features to their sites, at the company's third Campfire One event at the company's headquarters here. Previous debuts at the events were of two other significant developer-oriented software technologies, OpenSocial and App Engine.

Program manager Mussie Shore gave the central demonstration … Read more

In this week's Real Deal podcast, Tom Merritt and I try to explain cloud computing in concrete terms. Starting with an utterly opaque description from Forrester Research, we get into the realities of using the "cloud" of Internet-connected resources for data storage and computing. Then we dive into personal clouds of data--like what Microsoft is trying to build with Live Mesh.

Reminder: We record the Real Deal each Tuesday at 3:00 p.m. Pacific Time, and we have a live video feed and chatroom running while we're doing so. You can tune in at www.watchbol.com. … Read more

Today, Syncplicity launches its PC sync tool. Like the old-school FolderShare and the newer SugarSync (review), this product will keep the data on two machines (PCs only) in lockstep with each other. Syncplicity is in the hub-and-spoke camp (like SugarSync), not in the peer-to-peer world (FolderShare). This means that all the data that Syncplicity keeps track of for you is also stored on the company's servers.

There are advantages to this. Since the data is stored on an off-site server, the service becomes a passable backup and remote data access application. Also, the server-based architecture means your PCs don'… Read more

There's a good piece by Saul Hansell over on The New York Times' "Bits" blog.

Hansell describes how Comcast is being criticized for low picture quality on certain broadcasts. That's interesting, especially in light of the contention between Comcast and DirecTV on this very issue, but it isn't the most important point in Hansell's post.

Hansell goes on to give a reasonable explanation of the basic issues involved, and mentions the likely future of cable TV: digital video distributed over Internet-like network switches. Instead of always sending every TV channel to every house, a … Read more