Carl Weinschenk

Few State and Local Governments Prepared for the Impact of the Big Five IT Trends Tom Wheeler, the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), released a statement yesterday signaling the agency’s way forward on net neutrality – or whatever the government can come up with to take its place. It’s possible to feel […]

Top Five Vulnerabilities that Enable Phone Fraud The government seems to be hot on the trail of smartphone kill switches. The question is whether the concept is a solid one. InformationWeek reports that two recent proposals, one at the state level and one in the Senate, seek to make it possible for a carrier to […]

Mobile Development Trends for 2014 Certain inconveniences are so engrained in our day-to-day existences that we hardly recognize how annoying they are until they disappear. Using cables to charge mobile devices is done by rote. It seems so normal to us that forgotten and lost cords and the rat’s nest of orphan cords sitting in […]

Five Reasons Wi-Fi Will Overtake Traditional Telecoms The headlines of the week are more bad weather (nothing more to say on that) and the proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable by Comcast, which I discussed yesterday. Besides that, I’ve found the usual array of news and commentary; all important, albeit not as dramatic. Here are […]

Five Predictions for the Connected Enterprise in 2014 Whether or not an individual has a bright or dim view of the acquisition of Time Warner Cable by Comcast, the deal will crystallize the issue underlying net neutrality: Under what circumstances, if any, can an ISP monkey with the attributes of a connection that it is […]

What Can Augmented Reality Do? Here is a bit of discordant news: While projections say that smart homes are the wave of the future, Verizon Communications has pulled back on its service. GreenTechGrid cited news reports from October that the carrier’s Home Monitoring and Control service was no longer available (though existing customers still would […]

Five Reasons Wi-Fi Will Overtake Traditional Telecoms One of the overriding concerns of mobile carriers is running out of cellular capacity. They are taking many steps to confront that challenge. A key tactic is to off-load as much traffic as possible onto Wi-Fi networks. That’s a well-known and growing procedure which, in addition to stretching […]

Mobile Development Trends for 2014 Mobile developers write for a number of different platforms, so assessing surveys of their desires and lists of which platforms they are using is a bit tricky. It is not as if they must choose one. It is clear, however, that HTML5 is growing in popularity. The great selling point […]

Mobile Development Trends for 2014 The big winner this week was the National Football League, despite a Super Bowl that only was competitive for about a quarter. The league’s big fear was that the weather would be bad and all sorts of chaos and confusion would ensue. That didn’t happen, of course, and the game […]

Five Reasons Wi-Fi Will Overtake Traditional Telecoms Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOm offers a long and very interesting piece about broadband speeds that speaks, though indirectly, to the bigger picture of the impact of net neutrality (and the apparent death of net neutrality) on the broadband universe. The first few paragraphs of the story lay out […]

SDN in 2014: More Adoption and More Money for Vendors A big step toward what may be the future of networking was taken this week when the Linux Foundation’s OpenDaylight Foundation introduced Hydrogen, the first take on an open standards, open source approach to software-defined networks (SDNs). It’s little surprise that the details are extraordinarily […]

Wearable Computing: Creativity from Head to Toe The idea of cars that communicate with each other to enhance safety and that drive themselves is counterintuitive. Airplanes, of course, have had autopilot functions for years. But Boeing 757s don’t have to pull into a parking space at Kmart or ease into traffic on the highway. The […]