Test Your Geography

Quiz for testing the geography of Mexico.

Airwaves auction winners named

By JOHN DUNBAR, Associated Press Writer Fri Mar 21, 7:23 AM ET

WASHINGTON - The two largest cell phone companies dominated bidding in a record-setting government airwaves auction.

AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless combined to account for $16 billion of the $19.6 billion bid in the auction, an Associated Press analysis of Federal Communications Commission data released Thursday shows. Verizon Wireless bid $9.4 billion and AT&T $6.6 billion.

The results raised concern that the auction failed to attract any significant new competitors to the cellular telephone market to challenge the dominant companies. For example, Google Inc. was not among the winners, meaning the search engine giant will not be entering the wireless business.

One new entrant, Frontier Wireless LLC, owned by direct broadcast satellite television company EchoStar Corp., won nearly enough licenses to create a nationwide footprint. Frontier bid $712 million, according to FCC data.

The spectrum was made available thanks to the nationwide transition to digital broadcasting. The hope is that consumers will benefit from more advanced wireless services such as high-speed Internet access. The money raised will be used to help public safety programs and offset the federal budget deficit.

Despite the dominance in the auction by the major cell providers, the FCC chairman was upbeat about the auction results.

"A bidder other than a nationwide incumbent won a license in every market," Kevin Martin said. As a result, there is the potential for a "wireless third-pipe" competitor to emerge in every market across the nation.

Broadband access is dominated by the major telecommunications and cable companies. Martin wants wireless to emerge as a third platform, creating competition.

But Ben Scott, policy director of Free Press, an advocacy group that supports greater access to communications services, said the auction failed in that regard because Verizon Communications Inc. already is a dominant provider of Internet access.

"The prospect of a genuine third pipe competitor in the wireless world is now slim to none," he said.

Until Thursday, the names of the bidders were kept anonymous in an effort to discourage collusion during the auction.

Verizon Wireless, a joint venture between Verizon Communications Inc. and British telecom giant Vodafone Group PLC, won nearly every license in the consumer-friendly "C block."

The frequencies, which encompass about one-third of the spectrum at auction, are subject to "open access" provisions pushed by Martin. That means people on the network that is built can use whatever phones or software they wish.

Google posted a bid for the C block licenses early in the auction, assuring that the open-access provision would be put in place, but the offer was not enough.

Verizon Wireless won enough of the C-block licenses to cover every state but Alaska. The company said it was very pleased with the results, which will allow it to "continue to grow our business and data revenues."

AT&T said it will have "quality spectrum available for new services covering 95 percent of the U.S. population," according to Ralph de la Vega, president and chief executive of the company's wireless unit.

The third leading bidder was Qualcomm Inc., which pledged $1.03 billion. Included in that total is $472 million the company pledged toward the block designated for the creation of an emergency communications network. The bid was well under the FCC-required minimum of $1.3 billion, so Qualcomm's winning total comes to $558 million.

The agency agreed to separate this D block from the rest of the auction so the winners could be announced. Not including that block, winning bids totaled $19.1 billion.

Also Thursday, Martin said he had ordered an investigation by the FCC internal watchdog into the circumstances surrounding the failure of the block to attract a winning bid.

Public interest groups asked the agency on Wednesday to investigate allegations about a meeting between Frontline Wireless LLC and its financial backers and a company called Cyren Call, created by Nextel Corp. co-founder Morgan O'Brien.

Frontline was widely expected to bid on the public safety spectrum block. But the company dropped out before the auction began after failing to meet a minimum required payment.

Cyren Call was acting as the agent for a nonprofit public safety trust that would share the network with the winning bidder.

The Greatest Blogging Skill

The following guest post was submitted by Easton Ellsworth from Visionary Blogging.

What is the greatest blogging skill?

It’s not the ability to produce excellent blog content.

It’s not the ability to build a strong blog community.

It’s not the ability to monetize every page view, click and pixel.

It’s not even the ability to improve your content or your community or your monetization or anything else.

The greatest blogging skill is:

Meta-improvement.

Meta-improvement is the improvement of improvement.

It’s not just self-improvement. It’s self-self-improvement-improvement.

In other words: Becoming a better blogger faster and faster.

Why Meta-Improvement?

Picture 3 runners in a race. All start at the same speed.

Runner #1 never changes speed. Flat line. No improvement.

Runner #2 speeds up at a constant rate. Upward slope. Improvement.

Runner #3 speeds up at a constantly increasing rate. Upward curve. Meta-improvement.

Guess who wins?

3 Keys to Blogger Meta-Improvement

Self-Awareness. (See Metacognition.) Consider your personal efforts to improve your blogging skills. What’s your routine? Do you madly surf the intertubes for tasty blogging tips on how to boost any skill about which you’re momentarily feeling insecure? Or is there more of a method to your madness? Begin now to think about how you think about how to improve.

Focus. This meta stuff can be overwhelming. Take it one step at a time. Each week or month, consider your blogging skills one by one: content creation, design, community building, monetization, email ninja-ness, etc. Pick the one that you need to improve most urgently in order to meet your blogging goals. And keep that sucker in your sights until it’s licked.

Relentlessness. Never give up trying to become a faster improver. Lather, rinse, repeat. How quickly do you apply the blogging wisdom that you discover? How easily do you let your skills relapse?

The Blogger Meta-Improvement Motto

“I will do my best to improve more today than I improved yesterday.”

Meta-improvement is hard. It’s much harder than improvement alone. But it’s also worth the struggle. Your struggle is its oxygen.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Dive beneath the surface and you’ll find a never-ending series of layers: meta-meta-improvement, meta-meta-meta-improvement, etc.

Your mind can probably only wrap itself around that first submarine layer. But take the dive; it’s well worth it.

May this help you begin to see yourself in a new way and become a better blogger - faster.

 

View Original Article

Explore the Universe with Google Sky [Launch]

Star gazers rejoice! The newly launched Google Sky maps the universe from your browser. If you already loved Google Earth's addition of Sky, now you can enjoy the same eyes-on-the-sky mapping on the web. Like Google Maps but pointed in the other direction, you can navigate the planets and constellations or check out other great educational overlays, like the podcast overlay. We could already head to the moon and Mars with the previously launched Google Moon and Google Mars, but yay for the sky! The internet's looking like a great place for the amateur astronomer.

Canada Lessons

Canadian Culture


Lifestyles in the Day Activities


Seven Years War

FCC auction nears conclusion, so what's next?

As bidding on the 700MHz spectrum auction starts to wind down, a group of business school students predicts it will be long time before consumers see any of the promised new services resulting from the auction.

The 700MHz auction, which is reissuing spectrum originally allocated for analog TV, has been touted as one of the most important spectrum auctions the Federal Communications Commission has ever conducted. Not only was it expected to raise a great deal of money for the government, but as the last bit of prime wireless spectrum that will be made available for a long time, many people believed it would pave the way to a brave new world of wireless broadband.

The hope going into the auction was that it would open up the airwaves to at least one new nontraditional player, such as Google, which would help transform the wireless market and introduce more open services.

Now, the auction, which has already raised a whopping $19.59 billion since it began in January, will likely end in the next few days, according to the Reuters news service. Under the FCC's rules, the auction will continue until the bidding stops.

So what's likely to change for consumers after the auction concludes? According to a competitive intelligence war game initiated by market research firm Fuld & Company, not much, at least for the next few years. Carriers aren't expected to even have the new infrastructure built within the next two to three years.

Students from four top business schools--University of Chicago, Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, Harvard Business School, and MIT's Sloan School of Management--took on identities of four companies with a stake in the auction outcome--Google, Intel, AT&T Mobility and Vulcan Capital. The students then predicted the strategies of the companies post auction. Results of the game were published on Thursday.

Here's a look at some of the other predictions. The Google team, made up of students from University of Chicago, predicted that the search engine giant will partner with a leading wireless service provider, possibly AT&T. And the group believes that it will share 20 percent of its advertising revenue with whoever owns the licenses. Separate from the auction, the group also predicts that Google's new Android handset software will run into resistance among chipmakers and handset manufacturers, who have different business interests than Google.

The Northwestern group, which took on the identity of Intel, believes the chipmaker will attack the wireless broadband market through its WiMax initiative. The company will likely work with PC makers to embed WiMax chips and help them shrink their devices to compete directly with smartphones, the students said.

The teams also said that adult content was likely to be the killer application that will drive wireless broadband adoption.

For the most part, the predictions were not earth-shattering. I've been saying for a long time that Google would be better served if it worked with a carrier rather than build its own network. Intel has also been pretty open about its strategy for putting WiMax chips into PCs. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that porn sells. In fact, the adult content industry has been at the forefront of most new developments in technology, from the VCR to the explosion in Internet use. So it's hardly surprising that faster wireless broadband would spur people to get their kicks on the mobile Web. In fact, lots of people all over the world are already doing that even on slower-speed wireless networks.

It's still somewhat unclear how much longer the auction will last. Bidding has slowed over the past several days. But some experts have said that it could be over as early as next week. Neither the FCC nor any of the companies bidding in the auction have commented on when it will end. The identity of bidders has been a secret throughout the auction. But the FCC is expected to reveal the names of spectrum license winners within days of the auction's conclusion.

Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology

Check out this link for interactive lessons.

Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology

Make your own warrior

Check out this activity to make your own warrior. Follow the link.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/romans/launch_gms_gladiator.shtml

Metal Gear Solid 4 Sneaks onto PS3 on June 12

The long wait for an official release date is over. Barring no sudden delays, Solid Snake fans will be able to play MGS4 on June 12, and PS3 sales could get a nice lift as a result.

Posted by James Brightman on Thursday, February 28, 2008

It's one of the most anticipated games of 2008 and may be the "killer app" for Sony's PlayStation 3. After initially providing a vague release date of Q2 2008, today Konami officially locked in a launch date of June 12 for Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. Konami likened the release to that of a blockbuster Hollywood film – a strategy that certainly has worked nicely for the Halo franchise.

"Blockbuster events and premieres are a tradition of the summer," said Kazumi Kitaue, Konami Digital Entertainment Inc. Chairman and CEO. "We anticipate that Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots fits that bill perfectly, and consumers will be waiting in line to get their copy of the game just like it's a hit Hollywood movie."

In addition, Konami said that starting in April 2008 gamers will be able to pre-order the game and receive the Metal Gear Saga 2.0 DVD, which features a Prologue recapping the entire Metal Gear franchise, a 20th Anniversary retrospective, character bios for Big Boss, Liquid Snake, Solidus Snake, and Solid Snake, and a collection of international trailers for Metal Gear Solid 4. The pre-order bonus also comes with an insert with a download code and special instructions for accessing the Metal Gear Online beta test – currently set to go live in late April.

SCEA earlier this week announced a special PS3 bundle, which includes MGS4, an 80GB PS3, and a DualShock 3 controller for $499. The company said it would launch in conjunction with MGS4, so presumably the hardware bundle will go on sale on June 12 as well. We're checking with SCEA for confirmation.

Wii Owners Will Look to Purchase PS3, says iSuppli

Research firm iSuppli, who forecast earlier this month that Sony's PlayStation 3 would eek out a victory in the console war by 2011, has told Reuters that 2008 will be a "turning year" for the PS3. "Sony is offering a better forthcoming software pipeline with blockbuster titles like Gran Turismo 5, which will boost PS3 sales this year," said iSuppli analyst Pamela Tufegdzic.

Importantly, Tufegdzic is looking at Nintendo's Wii audience as a driver of PS3 sales. She believes Sony will drop the price on its console enticing Wii owners to finally get a second, more powerful system. "We anticipate Sony will have another price slash on the PS3 this year, and come Christmas, consumers who originally bought the Wii will likely purchase the PS3," Tufegdzic said. "The battle over consoles ultimately boils down to price."

Another strong point for the PS3 of course will be its Blu-ray victory over HD DVD. As more consumers upgrade to HDTV and HD movies, there's a good chance they could look to the PS3 as their first Blu-ray player. "People may buy the PS3 not only for their gaming needs, but for video as well, which gives the PS3 a unique competitive edge over the Wii and Xbox 360 well into the longer term," Tufegdzic noted.

With the highly anticipated Metal Gear Solid 4 launching on June 12, along with a new hardware bundle including the game and a DualShock 3 controller, the PS3 could have a strong summer. Konami Digital Entertainment CEO Kazumi Kitaue likened the release of MGS4 to a Hollywood summer blockbuster, and you can bet that Sony has high hopes that Solid Snake will do for PS3 what Master Chief and Halo have done for Microsoft's Xbox 360.