If you’re dreaming of summer fun, planning your vacation is as easy as going online. From travel websites to trip reviews, websites like “HolidayIQ” and “TripAdvisor” can help you choose your best adventure and provide a reality check on what to expect. Whether purchasing e-tickets or making hotel reservations online, the convenience of the Internet to coordinate plans is now a foregone conclusion for a growing number of Americans. And, for those looking to take their broadband gadgets on-the-go, today’s smartphones can do everything from offer directions to recommend restaurants. Consider these devices your virtual concierge.
For many of us, laptops are a must-have vacation accessory. In fact, 1 in 5 Americans bring their computers when they go away. From checking email to keeping up on news to posting pictures on Facebook, the desire to stay connected is increasingly prominent as broadband resources and opportunities abound.
Want to know more about how broadband is fueling vacation fun? Click on the video to hear more, or check out our Independence Day video wall to learn about the freedom and savings broadband brings.
If you think Nintendo Wii is purely fun and games, think again. According to a recent report featured in Live Science, Wii’s broadband-powered gaming system offers more than simple entertainment. It may actually enhance surgical skills by improving medical residents’ fine motor skills and performance. When surgical trainees played Wii for an hour prior to performing virtual laparoscopic surgery, Wii-playing residents scored 48 percent higher than those who did not warm-up with the Wii. The games were found to actually enhance residents’ speed and accuracy – qualities that are invaluable in patient surgeries.
Offering an inexpensive solution to on-the-job training or costly surgical simulators, Wii games designed to enhance surgical training are a tremendous asset. Not only will this technology allow residents to train at home, there’s also significant potential to tailor games to emerging specialties, such as robotic surgery. It may sound like a science fiction tale, but surgeons are increasingly using robots to assist with procedures or to help patients who live in remote areas. Wii games tailored to this evolving area of medicine can help build the knowledge and skills to implement this revolutionary technology.
Patients, too, are benefiting from Wii. Occupational therapists are tapping into the technology to exercise patients with Parkinson’s disease, and doctors at Weill Cornell Medical Center are engaging in “Wii-habilitation” to ease the physical and mental challenges facing burn-injury patients. Doctors at New York-Presbyterian Hospital have even found a way to use the Wii to expedite administrative tasks, such as scanning the high-volume of patient X-rays and MRI images.
Everywhere you look, broadband is speeding incredible advances across America – and the medical community is no exception. From innovative applications of existing technologies, such as Wii, to next-generation advances, broadband has limitless potential to revolutionize medicine and patient care as we know it.
Tired of repeatedly changing radio stations as you drive from one region to another? This summer, web radio can transform your listening experience behind the wheel, offering an expansive play list for free, or at a nominal cost.
Here’s how it works: Simply use your latest Internet-connected smartphone from Blackberry or iPhone to stream Web radio through your car speakers using an inexpensive adapter. Online music services from Pandora.com to Slacker.com offer extensive libraries of music to choose from—which can either be enjoyed for free with occasional advertisements, or for a small annual fee without the ads. Pandora custom-designs a radio station based on a song or artist of your choosing, and allows you to express your opinions on its selections by voting thumbs up, down, or skipping the song entirely. Slacker offers a similar, personalized web-radio option, or you can tune into one of the website’s existing 128 stations. With Slacker’s 2 million or more songs, and Pandora’s 600,000-song catalog, hours of interesting and diverse music are at your fingertips.
As you may imagine, free or low-cost web music has sparked controversy between the recording industry and webcasters regarding royalties. But thanks to dedicated discussions, it looks like a truce may soon be reached in which web radio sites pay a portion of their revenue to the recording industry interests. A compromise that will ensure web radio continues to blossom and converge with sophisticated broadband-powered technologies that bring hours of listening pleasure to consumers.
Here and at NextGenWeb, we’ve often discussed the powerful role broadband plays in U.S. digital democracy—from electing our President to giving the world access to his speeches. Now, micro-blogging is playing a pivotal role in the news and opinions swirling around Iran’s election. According to a recent Wall Street Journal story, even as the Iranian government has stopped or limited the use of social networking sites, Twitter has remained an invaluable resource for protesters and reporters to communicate post-election conflicts.
In fact, the U.S. State Department recently requested that Twitter postpone a scheduled maintenance to ensure the technology was available to protesters, activists, and journalists on the ground in Tehran. Reports out this week make clear that the technology is still under siege, with spammers attacking the micro-blogging site to send false information. But despite these attempts, CNN and other news outlets continue to tap Twitter to report news from Iran. Even though information via Twitter is not necessarily confirmed, the micro-blogging site may still be the most reliable and up-to-the-minute communications resource available.
Twitter is sparking a communications revolution and proving this technology has far more depth and breadth than many of us ever considered. It’s another positive statement underscoring the crucial relationship between Internet technology and free speech around the world.
Today Representatives John Lewis (D-Ga.), Dean Heller (R-Nev.), Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) and Glenn “GT” Thompson (R-Penn.) introduced the Telephone Excise Tax Repeal Act of 2009 (H.R. 3011) to repeal the federal excise tax on communications services. In 2006, after several federal court defeats, the IRS stopped enforcing the toll portion of the tax. However the remaining portion of the tax still applies to customers who subscribe solely to local phone service.
USTelecom CEO Walter B. McCormick Jr. applauded the bill’s release:
“We applaud Congressmen Lewis, Heller, Connolly and Thompson for introducing this important bill to completely repeal the federal excise tax on communications services. While the courts have found much of the tax to be unenforceable, consumers who subscribe to standalone telephone service – most often lower income or elderly customers – are still penalized by this regressive, outdated tax. There is strong bipartisan support for repealing the federal excise tax on communications and we will work closely with Congress to end the tax this year.”
From tennis to fantasy football, sports fans have a vast array of broadband-powered options to catch the latest game or network online. This week’s Wimbledon event is a prime example of the new sports culture in our digital age. Thanks to ESPN, tennis fans can now enjoy unprecedented, free access to live broadband and mobile coverage of the Wimbledon tournament via ESPN360.com and ESPN Mobile.
Covering all courts live from the early rounds through the semi-finals, ESPN will offer nearly 650 hours of Wimbledon coverage, on top of the 275 hours of French Open coverage that ESPN ran recently. For fans who are hungry for even more, smart phone applications provide the latest Wimbledon news, live scores, and video highlights. And for social networking sports enthusiasts, FanZone combines the best Wimbledon quotes and bits from the blogosphere from Twitter, Facebook, and more.
Not a tennis fan? No problem. Today’s broadband landscape offers social networking sites and applications for every kind of sport. From fantasy football draft tracking to baseball scores and PGA schedules, these real-time updates offer everything from statistics to ski and surf conditions. And, perhaps the best news of all, many of these tools and resources are free.
So whether you plan to watch Wimbledon on your mobile device for that grand slam match point, or tune into other sports news and updates, broadband is speeding unlimited entertainment options to sports enthusiasts everywhere.
I spoke at the Pike & Fischer Broadband Policy Summt yesterday on a panel focused on broadband buildout. There was general agreement among providers – both fixed and mobile – that private investment is the key driver to more and better broadband. For instance, Tim Regan of Corning traced the ramp-up of fiber deployment to the FCC’s decision not to require unbundling of fiber lines. Fiber provides the most capacity and highest broadband speeds.
At yesterday’s keynote luncheon, Acting FCC Chairman Michael Copps spoke on the importance of developing a broadband plan and the need for that plan to be pragmatic and not to get enmeshed in and sidetracked by longstanding issues that don’t contribute to more broadband deployment and adoption. Carriers alone are investing about $60 billion a year in broadband. Given that the Stimulus Act funding for broadband deployment is on the order of $3 billion a year, keeping broadband providers investing at the current rate, or, better yet, increasing that investment has to be a key focus of our broadband policy.
Over 50 years ago, the first video phone prototype was developed and subsequently demonstrated at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Since that time, the concept has witnessed tremendous advances in technology, but not quite the same advances with user adoption.
Today, USTelecom and Cisco held a webinar titled “Desktop Video Conferencing: Will It Take Hold This Time?” With the Internet offering global connectivity and high speed broadband service becoming more accessible, Cisco showed us how video conferencing is now moving from the board room to the desktop, and is poised for much greater acceptance in the marketplace. Mike Sonnier, Distinguished Systems Engineer from Cisco, pointed out that the widely deployed Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) along with advances in broadband network technologies are paving the way for video conferencing to reach not only more businesses, but eventually into our homes.
In the second part of our series devoted to online safety month, this edition of Broadband Now shares insights on keeping kids safe as they explore the broadband universe. And just as parents are concerned with their children’s activities online, the nation’s broadband providers are also focusing on keeping connected kids safe.
Here are some highlights:
Verizon. The Verizon Family Center offers a wealth of educational materials and tools to help parents manage their children’s online activities, and in the past two weeks alone, Verizon and its partner i-SAFE reached 75,000 kids through in-school safety events.
AT&T. Smart Limits, an AT&T resource, allows parents to set their own rules that control access to specific services. AT&T, in partnership with iKeepSafe, also recently launched an online safety educational program expected to reach more than 5 million children.
USTelecom. In addition to representing the broadband industry on the government’s online safety working group, USTelecom is heavily involved in the safety efforts of its member companies.
Wondering what you can do to keep your kids safe online? Click on the video to hear helpful hints.
Today’s publishing conferences are becoming increasingly dominated by predictions of a paperless future. Just this week, in fact, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said traditional books have had a “great five hundred year run…but it’s time to change.” This, of course, is coming from the man representing Amazon’s Internet-enabled Kindle, the e-reading sensation that has sold an estimated 400,000 Kindles since its launch in November 2007. Similarly, Sony’s E-Book Readers have sold more than 300,000 units and three million e-books worldwide since the product was released in October 2006. But what does the rest of the publishing world think? At the recent BookExpo America conference in New York, the prevailing opinion reverberating throughout the panels was that publishers must start going digital or else get left behind.
While this may seem like extreme statement, the publishing industry is taking notice. Last Friday, Simon & Schuster announced its plans to release digital editions of approximately 5,000 titles for purchase on Scribd.com, including books from best-selling authors, such as Stephen King, Dan Brown and Mary Higgins Clark. Meanwhile, consumer digital book downloads have hit new highs, comprising 35% of Amazon’s total book sales. And in the publishing world, where word-of-mouth publicity has always been prized, social networking sites from Twitter to Facebook are being used heavily to promote the latest publications.
Just as music and video have transformed into exciting new digital applications, books are now finding a new home in the broadband-powered world. While conventional books will surely remain a fixture in our lives, e-books have the potential to bring new convenience and entertainment that consumers will enjoy.
