AT&T will cut roughly 1.5 percent of its workforce, primarily among its management ranks, according to a filing Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The move is part of its "next step in streamlining its operations," following its acquisitions of several regional companies in recent years. AT&T expects to take a pre-tax charge of $374 million in the first quarter as a result of the layoffs.
AT&T said that most of the positions will be in areas that have little contact with customers and that it's workforce is expected to remain stable through the rest of the year.
The layoffs come as AT&T prepares to announce its quarterly results Tuesday.
The telecom behemoth said earlier in the year that a sluggish U.S. economy was resulting in an increase in customers disconnecting service, but this was not anticipated to be significant enough to "materially" harm the quarters results, according to a report in MarketWatch
Shares of AT&T were up a slight 33 cents in pre-market trading to $37.90 per share.
Chipmaker Intel has doubled down on China, announcing Tuesday that it has launched its second venture capital fund for the region.
Intel Capital China Technology Fund II is a $500 million fund that will focus on investments in start-ups doing work in areas such as wireless broadband, media, telecommunications, and "clean technology."
Over the past five years, the Chinese government has been trying to promote innovationand is working on developing a Nasdaq-like market for young companies.
"Given the success of the original China Fund--with investments in more than 28 companies--it is time to renew our commitment," Cadol Cheung, Intel Capital Asia Pacific managing director, said in a statement.
Intel plans to use the new fund to participate in larger rounds and even serve as the lead investor, Cheung noted.
Under its China Technology Fund II, Intel has funded two companies: Holdfast Online Technology and Newauto Video Technology.
Holdfast hosts third-party console games that allow gamers to compete against each other over a wide area network, while Newauto develops and markets video equipment, networking software, and system integrations for Chinese TV stations.
The chip giant's latest fund is more than double the size of its original $200 million Intel Capital China Technology Fund, which was founded in 2005.
Intel Capital, prior to creating a fund in China, had been investing in Chinese companies since 1998, either in specific areas such as communications in or regional funds.
WASHINGTON--Residents of apartment and condominium buildings will have to be allowed a choice among telephone providers serving their area, thanks to new rules adopted Wednesday by federal regulators.
The Federal Communications Commission order, which passed unanimously, prohibits telecommunications companies from inking exclusive deals with multi-unit buildings that are primarily residential. It also throws out any exclusive contracts that already exist.
The action builds upon the FCC's move last fall to ban exclusive deals for cable and Internet TV companies in apartment buildings. It also extends a 2000 FCC order that banned exclusive contracts for telephone service in non-residential "multiple tenant environments," such as office buildings and shopping centers.
Commissioners said the step was necessary to provide for consistency across various communications platforms and to encourage greater competition among providers. More than 30 percent of American households live in so-called "multiple dwelling units."
"All consumers, regardless of where they live, should be able to enjoy the benefits of competition," said FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, a Republican.
Telephone companies both large and small, however, have supported the FCC's bans both on exclusive phone and TV deals, arguing they're good for competition.
But the cable industry balked at the FCC's ban on deals for its industry, which opened up the door for telecommunications companies like AT&T and Verizon to come in and provide their own video services without limitations. The National Cable and Telecommunications Association, which represents major cable providers,
The real estate industry--namely the National Multi Housing Council--opposes both orders, arguing there's no evidence that regulation is necessary and that the FCC doesn't have authority to do so.
(Credit:
eComm)
For Luca Filigheddu from abbeynet, the five-minute limit was a natural fit for his topic, "Micro Video-Blogging and the Future of Online Conversation." He managed to squeeze a lot of numbers into his blitz pitch: 75,000,000 videos on YouTube; 100,000,000 existing blogs; 500,000 users on Twitter (he wasn't sure if that's accurate; I'm not either). Referring to 160 characters as the border between blogging and micro-blogging, he argued that 60 seconds might be the new border between micro video-blogging and video-blogging and that "every company ought to have a micro video-blogging strategy."
Filigheddu's presentation was part of larger theme: the socialization of mobile communications or the emergence of the conversation in and beyond telephony. In this vein, Sam Aparicio from Angel.com, in his talk on "Fixing Group Communication," presented some inspiring riffs on the "social phone." My first thought was to discount the notion of a social phone as a contradictio in adjecto, as they used to say in Rome, because phones are inherently subscribed to an individual identity with highly customizable preferences and self-expression needs. But that's exactly where Aparicio was headed: future modes of communication will reconcile personalization and socialization and turn the phone into a group communications tool for both individual and collective use. While today's communication tools are centered on one specific mode of communication and enable a single communication protocol to occur, the future--so Aparicio--belongs to communication devices that support conversations. And by pinpointing the attributes of conversations, he illustrated how far away we still are from such tools: Conversations go on for a long time; they may start anytime, anywhere, with anyone; and other people may choose to join them.
The most interesting point he made, though, was that conversations can start in one medium and continue in another. Imagine a conversation via IM that continues in e-mail (Gmail allows for that already), or a Wiki entry that continues on Twitter and then on the mobile phone before it ends on Facebook. This transgressive, transmedia type of communication that supports all kinds of communication artifacts poses a huge challenge to the industry and requires the solution of the "identity issue"--the portability of a single-user ID across different platforms and media. David Recordon from Six Apart provided a good overview of the current attempts to establish community standards in this regard. From OpenID to hCard parsing to Mobile OAuth to DiSo (distributed social networks), and OpenSocial--the conversation will be televised, telephoned, teleconferenced, and it will just have one name.
The existing bandwidth between Asia and North America is crowded. Following FCC approval of a U.S.-China link last month, Google and five other companies have announced a Japan-U.S. link to be completed in early 2010.
The $300 million fiber-optic cable will stretch approximately 10,000 km (6,214 miles) under the Pacific. "Google's partners in the consortium, dubbed Unity, comprises Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, KDDI, Pacnet, and Singapore Telecommunications," Yahoo News reported.
Internet users in East Asia are familiar with sometimes sluggish speeds on transpacific transmissions. In my experience, connections are for some reason faster in Beijing than in Shanghai, but everywhere I've gone in China there's been some lag. (Speeds in Tokyo were very fast when I was there in late 2004 and 2005.)
The previously announced cable, dubbed the Trans-Pacific Express, is scheduled to be partially operational before the Beijing Olympics begin on August 8. It will be the first direct connection between the United States and China.
[h/t: Kaiser]
You've heard of the New York Stock Exchange. Now there's the New York Talk Exchange.
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised a new kind of map for the city of New York to show how its residents are connected to the rest of the world. MIT "Senseable City Laboratory"--or a team of researchers focused on charting technology's effects on cities--has taken real-time data from AT&T on the phone and Internet traffic to and from New York to show the communication patterns of residents with other people around the globe. (The study solely reflected traffic and not the content of phone calls or Internet activities, according to MIT.)
Manhattan-ites, for example, are often on the phone to Frankfurt, Tokyo, and London; while residents of Queens are much more likely communicating with people in the Dominican Republic, according to MIT's map.
"The striking piece of evidence coming out of this project is that global talk happens both at the top of the economy and at its lower end. The vast middle layers of our society are far less global; the middle talks mostly nationally and locally," according to Columbia University Professor Saskia Sassen, author of the book "Global Cities," who examined the data.
Graphical interpretations of the data will be on display at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York beginning February 24 through May 12, in an exhibition called "Design and the Elastic Mind." They're also available online at MIT's site.
The project, which is sponsored by AT&T, was led by Carlo Ratti, director of MIT's Senseable City Laboratory and associate professor of the practice of urban technologies. "The aim of the project is to reveal some hidden structure of the city that wasn't possible to see before."
Ratti said that he and his team started the project 18 months ago to explore New York as a global hub of communication. They sought to analyze how New Yorkers' connections with the rest of the world change by neighborhood, throughout the day, and in comparison with London, New York's rival on the global stage.
The team came up with three maps of the data. One is Globe Encounters, a 3D animation of New York's ties to other cities in real time. Pulse of the Planet is a second map depicting how those links change over the course of the day, through different time zones, and truly shows how New York is a 24-hour city. The third map shows the global connections inside of New York's five boroughs.
Toronto is the most popular place for Manhattan residents to call during the day, but it accounts for only 1 percent of outbound calls from the Bronx, according to MIT's findings. In contrast, Mumbai is much lower on the speed-dial list (24th) for people in Manhattan vs. residents of Queens (11th).
The project also showed that New York is a larger global hub than London, based on a wider reach of communications from New York to places like Beijing, Bogotá, and Riyadh. MIT, which analyzed high-level data from British Telecom, showed that London has much more reach into Europe and the United States.
"The AT&T and BT data comparison hints at an interesting parallel: in an age of globalization, perhaps London's relationship to Europe is analogous to what is conventionally believed to be New York's relationship to the whole of the United States," Ratti said.
He added: "Our visualizations demonstrate that in the Information Age, urban life is as global as it is local."
Jeanette Symons, a luminary among women in technology and co-founder of tween social network Imbee.com, died in a plane crash with her young son on Friday.
Symons, a practiced pilot, was en route to her home in Steamboat Springs, Colo., from a ski trip in Maine when the plane she was piloting crashed several minutes after takeoff, according to an article from the San Francisco Chronicle. Symons, 45, and her son Balan, 10, died in the crash. She is survived by her 7-year-old daughter, Jennie, and her mother, father, and two brothers.
Symons is known for her work in telecommunications. She founded telecom-Internet networking companies Zhone Technologies and Ascend Communications, which was sold to Lucent Technologies in 1999 for $24 billion. In recent years, Symons co-founded Industrious Kids, a privately held company in Emeryville, Calif., that promoted secure environments for kids online--an issue close to Symons' heart with two young children of her own. In 2005, the company introduced Imbee.com, one of the first private social networks for kids ages 8 to 14.
Symons regularly commuted from her home in Steamboat Springs to Emeryville in her own jet.
Google has demonstrated experimental technologies to the Federal Communications Commission in an effort to pressure the agency to open up unused wireless spectrum between TV channels for broadband Internet use.
Google, Microsoft, Intel, Dell, and EarthLink formed the White Space Coalition earlier this year to lobby the FCC and Congress to open up the empty and unused channels in the broadcast TV bands, called "white space." They believe this unlicensed spectrum could be used as a wireless broadband pipe into homes, serving as an alternative to cable and DSL.
But TV broadcasters oppose the move, arguing that unlicensed devices in that spectrum would interfere with television broadcasts, potentially affecting the federally mandated move from analog to digital TV service.
Google's test results last week "demonstrate that digital televisions (DTVs) and wireless microphones can be amply protected from harmful interference by unlicensed personal/portable devices, using reasonable power levels and sensing thresholds," Richard Whitt, Google's Washington telecom and media counsel, wrote in a letter to the FCC.
Google also is bidding on 700-megahertz band spectrum, which like white space spectrum, can cover long distances and penetrate walls, thus making it ideal for wireless broadband.
Google representatives first demonstrated broadband spectrum technologies that reliably detect digital TV signals "well below the noise floor," the letter said. They also demonstrated interference mitigation technologies utilizing short-burst transmissions.
The ubiquity of the cell phone has finally prompted AT&T to pull out of the pay-phone business, the company announced on Monday. By the end of 2008, AT&T says, it will have exited the business completely.
The nation's No. 1 wireless-network operator, AT&T says it expects independent operators to pick up service contracts on its pay phones, which, over the past 10 years, have shrunk in number to about 1 million nationwide from 2.6 million.
For some local operators, AT&T's exit could be good news because, in a few cities, at least, pay phones still generate revenue--though not necessarily from calls. As noted in a New York Times article published in August, New York's still-abundant pay-phone kiosks generate considerable cash from advertising, and the city gets a hefty share of it.
Since 2001, pay-phone revenues from ads have exceeded revenues from calls, of which the city gets a 10 percent cut. The city gets a bigger cut--26 percent--of the ad money. Last year, the article noted, the city took in $13.7 million of the $62 million in annual revenue from ads posted on the kiosks.
IBM and Cisco Systems are sitting down at the table again. And this time the table is bigger.
The two technology behemoths are expanding their near-decade-old alliance, enhancing the focus on telecom carriers and their customers. As part of the expanded alliance, announced Thursday, the duo will offer a centralized service to identify, manage and reroute network traffic when trouble arises.
Cisco will combine its Network Management Platform with IBM's Tivoli Software for Service Assurance and Fault Management. That, in essence, strives to help carriers manage IP-based services and reduce implementation and maintenance costs.
Next month, Cisco plans to dish up a new offering that's a result of this expanded relationship with IBM. The Cisco Assurance Management Solution is designed to aid carriers with deploying and managing a range of network equipment for existing and advanced services. Carriers, for example, will receive a single view of multivendor, multiservice networks.
The alliance between the two tech giants has spanned nearly a decade and has included industries such as emergency services.
And for their next trick...
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