Social Media, Connectivity & Communications

The White House’s recent problems archiving e-mail could be solved by emerging technologies.

If WiMAX provides services analogous to a cellphone, Wi-Fi is more analogous to a cordless phone.

If we imagine a true computing cloud, a virtual data center with a million or more host systems linked in some way, with literally trillions of bytes of online storage, where is the information we’re looking for?

"Most of these people came in with a gold rush mentality."

A wireless technology that Sprint Nextel plans to launch within a year makes high-speed and secure Internet access possible from almost anywhere.

The U.S. is outranked by such countries as the Netherlands, Finland, Japan and South Korea when it comes to broadband penetration. But that criterion is misleading, Atkinson said. If U.S. states such as California, Massachusetts and Illinois are examined individually, they rank ahead of most other countries.

"It was rather an insult to one’s sensibilities to have an obvious commercial message sent out over a research network," said computer scientist Peter Neumann of SRI in Menlo Park, Calif., who was one of the 393 recipients of that primordial spam.

The move is bad news for rural cellular carriers that rely on such payments for a substantial part of their revenue, but it benefits big telephone companies such as Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T Inc., whose customers are the largest contributors to the fund.

Learning the right lessons and emulating the right policies here will enable the United States to improve broadband performance faster than in the absence of proactive policies.

Vidyo promises to make low-cost, high-quality videoconferencing an option for more companies.