Mediaboss Marketing

So Sean "You know what's cool? A billion dollars" Parker just declared the Internet boring! Then Brian Lam said non monsieur, you're the one who is boring.

Attention conservation notice: If you're not asleep or clicking over to Buzzfeed already, the boring one is you.

Parker just launched the last thing anyone should expend resources on given the limited time we have left on this dying planet: a Chatroulette clone called Airtime. Like its predecessor, it's about to fill up with people's genitals, because apparently its genitalia-detection algorithm doesn't work.

About the only thing of value to come out of this bonfire of investor cash is the inevitable pile-on that will follow Parker's comment. So, is the Internet boring? I say yes.

The Internet is both a utility and a medium. Only one of these things is exciting.

I have the luxury of writing for geeks whose job it is to get excited about complicated systems like the Internet, but let's face it, the more mainstream it becomes, the more the best part of the web, "geek culture," will be divorced from the web itself. In ways large and small, it's already happening. TMZ is the traffic monster, not Slashdot.

As a generator of profoundly new ideas, the web is dead. Reading Techcrunch these days is an exercise in postmodernism. (A startup that gamifies the job search gets $21 million in funding. Really?) All the innovation is in mobile, which is why Facebook is boring but Instagram is cool and therefore worth almost as much as a company that puts robots on top of thousands of pounds of high explosives and successfully flies them to the International Space Station.

As a medium, the web just kind of replaced all the other stuff that came before. If you were excited about magazines in the 90's, well, they still exist! Yeah, they're kind of different, and people who write for them have to put up with trolls in the comments, but otherwise, it's not as different as all the navel-gazing media writers would have you believe.

On the other hand, as a utility, there's hardly been a more exciting time to be on the web. It's the universal glue that binds everything else together, and mastery over its increasingly arcane ways is the ticket to participating in whatever remains of the middle class after we're done socializing all the costs of our Internet-speed financial system. But like I said, this utility function of the Internet is increasingly irrelevant to the ever large swath of humanity that relies on it. It's like asking people to get excited about civic infrastructure. (Which is awesome! This book changed my life.)

So, Internet = boring? Yes, absolutely. Now that the novelty has worn off, all we've really got is each other, saying the same ridiculous and mundane things we've always said. It remains the case thathell is other people.

The rest is here:
How the Internet Became Boring

Cisco's ASR 5500 mobile packet core will help make networks more intelligent and allow operators to charge differently for various types of content.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- By 2015, more people will access the Internet from mobile devices than from conventional PCs. A year later, in 2016, 19 billion devices and gizmos will be connected to the mobile Internet -- not just your smartphone and tablet, but your washing machine, cars and clothes will be connected too.

That's a giant problem for wireless carriers, which are already struggling to keep up with surging data demand. Trying to innovate their way out of the crunch, the industry is using new tools and tricks to optimize every bit of infrastructure.

Cisco (CSCO, Fortune 500) added a key piece to the puzzle on Tuesday, releasing a new tool that will let carriers sift through and prioritize the traffic flooding their networks.

It sounds pretty geeky -- "mobile packet core" product launches don't inspire iPhone-like frenzies -- but this back-end upgrade has some significant implications for everyday users.

The problem: Everyone has experienced the frustrating effects of wireless network congestion. Your video buffers forever, a website takes minutes to launch, or you can't get Google Maps to load when you're late to a meeting and don't know where to go.

Much of that pain comes from the way that today's networks give more or less the same priority to all kinds of traffic. Ads running on Angry Birds are treated the same as a Netflix (NFLX) video -- not a good thing, if a bunch of ads on other people's phones are causing your movie to stall.

The user experience would be noticeably better if the network were able to speed up streaming video at the expense of a slightly slower load time on an ad in a game. The typical wireless network doesn't know how to do that.

The solution: Cisco thinks it has a fix with its new ASR 5500 mobile packet core. It's a kind of gateway between the mobile network and the larger Internet that gives networks the intelligence to handle different traffic differently.

Verizon, for instance, could set different priorities for video services, phone calls and apps -- particularly during peak download hours -- to ensure that all services run as smoothly as possible. That way, Netflix or YouTube videos might not get interrupted if Verizon makes websites take a second longer to load.

Read the original post:
Cisco's new, smarter network for the Internet of things

Google's Internet evangelist, responsible for the address shortage on today's Internet, is anxious for IPv6 improvements. Also: his views on U.N. regulation, censorship, bandwidth caps, and .google.

Vint Cerf, a father of the Internet and Google's chief Internet evangelist

"Predicting is hard, especially about the future," quips Vint Cerf -- and he should know.

That's because about 30 years ago, when the now-famous engineer was helping to design the technology that powers the Internet, Cerf decided just how many devices could connect to the network. His answer -- 2 to the 32nd power, or 4.3 billion -- looked awfully big at the time. A few decades later, we now know it's far short.

Accordingly, Google's chief Internet evangelist and one of the few people at the company who looks natural in a suit and tie, is eager for tomorrow's high-profile World IPv6 Launch. The event will usher in a vastly larger Internet as many major powers move permanently to the next-generation Internet Protocol version 6 technology. IPv6 is big enough to give a network address to 340 undecillion devices -- that's 2 to the 128th power, or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 if you're keeping score.

The change actually began years ago: IPv6 was finished in 1996, IPv6 networks could be constructed since 1999, and any personal computer bought in the last few years can handle IPv6 if configured properly. But because IPv4 was spacious enough for a long time, moving to IPv6 was a potentially expensive hassle that didn't have much immediate payoff. It was only last year, when the pipeline of unused IPv4 addresses started emptying out, that a sense of real urgency gripped the computing industry.

The IPv6 transition will take years as Internet plumbing gradually is updated with the ability transfer packets of IPv6 data from point A to point B. That transfer uses technology that Cerf and colleague Bob Kahn invented in the 1970s. It's called TCP/IP, and it's what wires together the Net's nervous system.

When you download that cat photo from a server, it's the job of the Internet Protocol (IP) to deliver it, broken down into a collection of individual data packets, to your computer. Countless network devices in between examine the IP address of each packet to send them hop by hop toward to your machine so IP can reassembles them into the photo.

Closely paired is Transmission Control Protocol, which takes care of ensuring the packets are successfully delivered over this packet-switching network, requesting missing packets be retransmitted if necessary, and reassembling them into the proper order to reconstitute the original photo. Curious people can read the original paper, A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication (PDF), written before TCP and IP were split into separate technology layers.

Cerf is a somewhat unusual figure in today's Internet development realm. Hotshot young programmers are pushing the limits of Web programming and other novelties, but Cerf, born in 1943, has a much longer history watching the cutting edge advance. He witnessed the arrival of e-mail, e-commerce, and emoticons.

View original post here:
Internet co-creator Vint Cerf welcomes IPv6 elbow room (Q&A)

Break out the champagne and put on your party hats: A software heavyweight just struck a major blow for the concept of Privacy by Design.

Microsoft has elected to release Internet Explorer 10.0 with Do Not Track as the default setting. Microsoft Chief Privacy Officer Brendon Lynch blogged about the decision here. He said, in part:

We believe that consumers should have more control over how information about their online behavior is tracked, shared and used. Online advertising is an important part of the economy supporting publishers and content owners and helping businesses of all shapes and sizes to go to market. There is also value for consumers in personalized experiences and receiving advertising that is relevant to them.

Of course, we hope that many consumers will see this value and make a conscious choice to share information in order to receive more personalized ad content. For us, that is the key distinction. Consumers should be empowered to make an informed choice and, for these reasons, we believe that for IE10 in Windows 8, a privacy-by-default state for online behavioral advertising is the right approach.

While both Chrome and Firefox have Do Not Track capabilities built in, theyre turned off by default. Microsoft is making its mark by turning that setting on. Safari also blocks tracking cookies by default, but who outside of the Mac universe uses Safari?

The online advertising industry reacted about the way youd expect -- by implying that if we dont all let advertisers follow us around the Web jotting down every site we visit and what we do there, the free Internet will shrivel up and die.

The Digital Advertising Alliance, a consortium of online ad networks and data gatherers that has been pushing for self-regulation of Web tracking for the past several years (and was apparently blindsided by Microsofts announcement), issued a vigorous response. Heres the money quote:

The DAA is very concerned that this unilateral decision by one browser maker - made without consultation within the self-regulatory process - may ultimately narrow the scope of consumer choices, undercut thriving business models, and reduce the availability and diversity of the Internet products and services that millions of American consumers currently enjoy at no charge.

DAA spokeshuman Stu Ingis went on to tell the Wall Street Journals Julia Angwin that online advertisers support consumer choice, not a choice made by one browser or technology vendor. Essentially hes saying that by making IE 10 private by default Microsoft is taking the choice out of users hands.

Which is, of course, utter horse manure. Microsoft is in fact giving users a choice a choice to use a browser where privacy is the default setting. Its the advertising industry thats make the decision for consumers about whether they will be tracked by making that the default setting for the vast majority of Web surfers.

More:
Microsoft Just Made the Internet a Little More Private for Everyone

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Jefferies today announced the hiring of Brian J. Pitz and Brian P. Fitzgerald as Managing Directors and Senior Equity Research Analysts covering Internet and Interactive Entertainment companies. Both will be based in Jefferies New York office.

Steven R. Black, Global Head of Equity Research at Jefferies, commented, We are pleased to welcome these senior analysts to Jefferies as they are valuable additions to our global TMT equity research practice, which is a focus area for our firm and an important and critical segment of the global economy. Their significant experience and client relationships will further extend our leading TMT research franchise and add immediate value to our global equity offering to our institutional client base.

Mr. Pitz brings to Jefferies over 14 years of Equity Research experience and joins the firm from UBS, where he was an Executive Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst covering the Internet and Interactive Entertainment industry on an Institutional Investor-ranked team. Previously, he was a Principal and Senior Equity Research Analyst at Bank of America covering the Internet industry. Prior to that, he was a Vice President at Morgan Stanley covering the Internet, PC Software and Interactive Entertainment industries as a member of the top-ranked Internet equity research team in both the annual Institutional Investor poll and Greenwich Associates Survey, and previously was part of the #1-ranked Broadcasting research team in Institutional Investor poll from 1998 - 2001. He received a BS from Villanova University.

Mr. Fitzgerald brings 15 years of Research experience to Jefferies, and joins the firm from UBS, where he was a Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst covering the Internet and Interactive Entertainment industry on an Institutional Investor-ranked team. Previously, he was a Principal and Senior Equity Research Analyst at Bank of America covering the Internet industry. Prior to that, he was a Vice President at Morgan Stanley covering the Internet, PC Software and Interactive Entertainment industries as a member of the top-ranked Internet equity research team in the annual Institutional Investor poll and Greenwich Associates Survey. He received an MBA from New York University and a BS from the United States Military Academy.

About Jefferies

Jefferies Group, Inc. (JEF), the global investment banking firm focused on serving clients for 50 years, is a leader in providing insight, expertise and execution to investors, companies and governments. The firm provides a full range of investment banking, sales, trading, research and strategy across the spectrum of equities, fixed income, foreign exchange, futures and commodities, and also select asset and wealth management strategies, in the Americas, Europe and Asia.

Read more:
Jefferies Hires Two Senior Analysts to Cover Internet and Interactive Entertainment