Flux
Pioneer Bucket To Go: Those valuable Pioneer's Preferences doled out by the FCC aren't so tough to get after all: The Wall Street Journal recently reported that four wireless service providers got the market-making licenses without so much as a visit from FCC staffers. And that's not all: in a letter to the FCC general counsel, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair John Dingell claims FCC rules were "egregiously and repeatedly violated" in the award of the free spectrum licenses. (Pioneer Preferences are handed out to cut through red tape and urge the "development of cutting-edge technologies.") Of the 51 companies vying for the honor, the four winners are Mobile Telecommunication Technologies, Cox Enterprises Inc., Omnipoint Corp. and American Personal Communications. Not surprisingly, the awards are being challenged in DC federal appeals court by the losers.
Interactive Snooze: Twentieth Century Fox grandly announced its new interactive division this summer, but like most hype-filled studio announcements, it all boils down to movie-based Nintendo, Sega, and CD-ROM game titles. When is someone going to take a risk in this business?
Check Those Chat Rooms: America Online will pass the one million subscriber mark around the time you read these words, an AOL press release trumpeted recently. At the same time, another press release heralded AOL's expanding television content. One word, folks: Mosaic.
Patents Redux: Patent Commissioner Bruce Lehman y is definitely getting a clue: in late May he ordered the review of a broad software patent, the second such review in the last few months. The target this time is Software Advertising Corp. of La Costa, California, which has a patent on the idea of incorporating advertising into software. The review was prompted in part by Software Advertising's demands for royalties from a screen-saver featuring the Energizer Bunny. Earlier this year, Lehman's revivified Patent office reviewed and reversed the Compton's patent on "multimedia." Let's hope this case comes to a similar end.
More Interactive Numbers: A recent study published in Broadcasting & Cable found that 54 percent of US cable subscribers want interactive services, but 40 percent of those would drop a portion of their current services to pay for them. You do the math.
We Hinted at It, But Never Thought They'd Do It: The Ziff family has decided to sell its PC publishing empire. Price: $2 billion-$3 billion. One thing to be said for the Ziffs: they always know when a market has plateaued. What's really interesting is the fact that they put Interchange, y touted as the future of the Ziff publishing empire, on the block as well. Maybe they looked at dial-up model of Net service and it came up a bit...er...short.
Speaking of Exit Strategies: The Mead Corp. also knows when to bail out of a good thing; its Mead Data Central Lexis/Nexis database is on the block. They probably should have sold last year, since by now most everyone knows the legal and newspaper information it sells is vastly overpriced. New CD-ROM- and Internet-based services are eating its customer base for lunch. A kind-hearted philanthropist would do the world a lot of good by buying the biz and simply hooking it into the Net hive-mind.
Digital Cash: Look for a full exposition of the issues in these pages soon, but we thought we'd tip you off to DigiCash, a Net-based (unlike Mondex, see page 29) software product that, using public key cryptography, "has the privacy of paper cash, while achieving the high security required for electronic network environments." For more information, contact DigiCash at info@digicash.nl, tel +31 20 665 2611.
GatesWatch: We Couldn't Resist: Bill Gates, quoted in Playboy: "Right now I don't want to be huger. I'm huger than I want to be. I'd like to shrink a little." Really.
Hey Bubba, Rein Those Bastards In: According to the WSJ, federal eavesdropping increased by one third during the Clinton administration's first year. And we thought we were getting a more open-minded set of bureaucrats there in DC. C'mon, get off your butts and send him e-mail about it: president@whitehouse.gov.
More Fed Fun: The FBI has finally lined up congressional support for its controversial Digital Telephony Bill. The bill makes it easier for the FBI – or your local sheriff – to wiretap your phone. Congressional sources told Wired that the bill is a pared-down version of the FBI's original plan, which languished for two years without a sponsor. Political winds have changed, sources said, with privacy and civil-liberties groups now willing to support a compromise bill. (Oh, really?) Swing factor: Pending retirement of Rep. Don Edwards (D-California), who is a staunch privacy advocate. Those groups didn't want to risk the possibility of a more intrusive bill gaining support in the absence of Edwards's watchful eye. This new bill eliminates "transaction tracing" capabilities, scales back the power of the Justice Department to shut down telephone networks for y noncompliance, and provides continued funding for telephone companies that must make changes to comply with the bill. The compromise bill has the support of Edwards, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), and Sen. Joe Biden (D-Delaware), who chairs the Judiciary Committee. This could well be a stealth bill, ushered through while all of us are yelping about Clipper and not watching our rears. Check eff.org, cpsr.org, or here at wired.com.
Like It'll Matter: The folks who run the massive Comdex trade show (you know, the one where thousands of horny computer salesmen descend on Las Vegas) announced this summer that demos of explicit sexual software will no longer be allowed on the show floor. No word on whether this applies to the bikini-clad women many vendors sprinkle about their booths.
