Google, You Can Drive My Car
Posted on | November 8, 2012 | No Comments
One of Steve Jobs’ unfulfilled dreams was to design and market the iCar. Although the details of his vision have not been released, we can be sure it would be sleek, expensive, and innovative. It’s a shame we no longer have his energy, intelligence, and promotional charisma because transportation in America and around the world is experiencing many economic and public safety issues that make it ripe for a radical transformation in the next few decades.
Apple is working with a few major car companies to integrate Siri as part of its “Eyes Free” program. The strategy is to integrate Siri into the car so it allows drivers to access it for directions and other search functions. Most likely, it will work with basic touch controls embedded into steering wheels, while natural language processing will provide a more extensive user interface. Unfortunately for Apple, its mobile advertising platform, iAd, has performed poorly and its Apple Maps even more so, causing heads to roll at one of the world’s most heavily capitalized companies.
It is Google that is currently leading this “automatrix” transition with its work on the driverless car, drawing on Google Maps and integrating them into their highly successful advertising programs. Adding cars to this already $40 billion business model lends itself to a potentially central role in the new transportation system and gives a new definition to the term “mobile.” It’s not that Google is likely to become the new “GM,” but that it’s looking to that other “mobile” for its new revenues.
I’ve written before about Google’s vision of monetizing the road and the importance they put on the driverless car. More than anyone, they seem to realize that the information superhighway may, in fact, be the highway. Driving itself creates a data stream of personal consumption habits, route preferences, and roadside memorabilia. As I previously wrote, “Google, who wants to organize the world’s information, clearly sees your car as a major generator of that data and the car occupants as major traffic generators – the good kind of traffic – on the web, not the road.” The bet is that the allure of driving your car is second to jacking into your informational and social networks and that the vectors of data-rich trails can be monetized. Less driving means more surfing and more searching.[1]
The current trend toward more mobile phoning and texting raises the issue of driving safety.[2] It seems like every day I see more and more people talking on the phone or even keying into their smartphone while driving. A recent recommendation by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) calls for a ban on cellphone and texting while driving. Add driving while under the influence of alcohol and other drugs, putting on makeup, road rage, eating, and other distractions, and it’s clear that human driving is becoming a major public health issue. While this may not be a new issue, having an alternative is new, and tests show that they might be safer than your human driver.
Sure, the driverless car sounds like a fanciful scenario, but there are technological and personal signals that suggest such a change might be coming. I’ve mentioned some of the technological developments above as well as the increasing concern over safety with texting and other distractions. On the personal side, I would point to what economists call opportunity costs. What are people giving up by having to drive? Do people feel that they would rather spend their time in the car doing other things? How much productivity or even “downtime” do people give up while driving their vehicles?
On the other hand, are people willing to give up the control that comes with driving? Would they trust the Automatrix to deliver them safely, accurately, and on time? Moreover, what are the other psychological factors that would keep people glued to their steering wheels?
Notes
[1] For a history of the driverless car by Sebastian Thrun and Chris Urmson.
[2] Statistics on driving while distracted.
[3] Introductory video on solar painting.
[4] The Economist had an interesting article on the trajectory and implications of the driverless car.
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Anthony J. Pennings, PhD is Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Technology and Society, State University of New York, Korea. Before joining SUNY, he taught at Hannam University in South Korea and from 2002-2012 was on the faculty of New York University. Previously, he taught at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas, Marist College in New York, and Victoria University in New Zealand. He has also spent time as a Fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Tags: Automatrix > distracted driving > driverless car > Google > iCar > natural language processing > NTSB > Siri
Barry Obama and the Hawaii’s Multi-Ethnic Economic Transformation
Posted on | November 4, 2012 | No Comments
I use President Barack Obama’s high school name, “Barry,” to mark the specific time period I want to refer to in this post. He returned from Indonesia in 1971 and lived in Honolulu 
until he graduated from Punahou High School in 1979. During that time, he would have been exposed to an extraordinary political transformation in the 50th state, the election of the first Asian-American to the position of a US Governor, and the socio-economic elevation of several ethnic groups from migrant workers to middle class.
Often overlooked in discussions about the President, his operational temperament, and his political agenda are the news and current events that occurred during Obama’s time in Hawaii, particularly the rise of the Democratic Party and how it empowered several ethnic groups to elevate their socio-economic standing.
Barry Obama would have come to political consciousness during the admininstration of George Ariyoshi, who 
served from 1974 to 1986 as the third Governor of Hawaii. Ariyoshi’s “Quiet but Effective” campaign theme hit the appropriate passive-aggressive tone needed to work the complex ethnic coalitions that characterized Hawaii’s political sphere. Obama would have witnessed a social revolution where Asian-Americans, most of whom came from families of immigrants who worked the pineapple and sugar plantations, strove to improve their class status and well-being through hard work, personal savings, and education.[1]
I wouldn’t presume to provide a comprehensive account of the President’s worldview and what motivates his actions; I can, however, speak to some of his environmental influences, having lived in 
Hawaii during his senior year and a block away from his high school and within walking distance to his grandmother’s house. I also got my PhD through the same scholarship program at the East-West Center as his mother, although it was some 15 years after her. I even developed my distaste for a particular brand of ice cream at the store where Barry worked scooping out cones and cups.
In 1962, the Democratic Party in Hawaii took power from the Republicans, whose political lineage traces back to overthrowing the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893. Territorial Governor William F. Quinn won the first election after the Hawaiian Islands achieved US statehood on March 12, 1959. But by 1964, the Democrats had two Japanese-American Senators in Washington DC and obtained solid control over the political machinations of Hawaii under the direction of policeman-turned-politician Gov. John A. Burns.
Initially more focused on Hawaiian affairs, the Democratic Party turned its attention towards the Asian populations, particularly courting the affections of the Japanese-American World War 
II veterans, including the late Senator Masayuki “Spark” Matsunaga and the recently deceased Senator Daniel Inouye. Both had been injured in the European theater fighting with the highly decorated 442nd Regiment of the US Army and both later received the Medal of Honor for bravery in the battlefield. Asian-Americans were initially blocked from many of the corporate jobs occupied mainly by Caucasians, so Japanese-Americans in particular, began to move into government positions, especially education.
The Hawaiian economy grew rapidly with the escalation of the Vietnam War, the transpacific telegraph and telephone cables, communication satellites, and the use of jet aircraft for transportation and tourism. Tourism fueled construction as hotels sprung up on all the major islands. It also meant a lot of small businesses to cater to tourists. As the economic pie expanded, it opened up new opportunities throughout the state economy for the second and third generations of the workers who had previously tilled the plantation farms.[2]
Hawaii’s Democratic party developed a fairly conservative approach to politics, characterized by respect for education and government. It wasn’t afraid to use bureaucracy to achieve its goals but it recognized the importance of fiscal restraint, in part to mimic the Asian strategy of development that was working so effectively in places like Japan and Singapore. Also, because it was a “fragile” and geographically isolated set of islands with a rapidly growing population.
While I can only conjecture about the connections and decisions he made, by the time he graduated from high school in the late 1970s, Barack Obama would have witnessed an extraordinarily American social movement. It advanced a coalition of Chinese, Hawaiian, Filipino, Korean, and Japanese-Americans into a multi-ethnic power structure that propelled itself into middle-class legitimacy through political action.[3]
Notes
[1] Political scientist Michael Haas has edited Barack Obama, The Aloha Zen President: How a Son of the 50th State May … and written Mr. Calm and Effective: Evaluating the Presidency of Barack Obama.
[2] The Economic History of Hawai‘i: A Short Introduction by Sumner LaCroix.
[3] The Democratic Party kept its hold on the reigns of Hawaii’s governorship until Linda Lingle, a Jewish-American woman from Maui won election in 2002.
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Anthony J. Pennings, PhD is Professor at the Department of Technology and Society, State University of New York, Korea. Before joining SUNY, he taught at Hannam University in South Korea and from 2002-2012 was on the faculty of New York University. Previously, he taught at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas, Marist College in New York, and Victoria University in New Zealand. He has also spent time as a Fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Tags: 442nd Regiment > Daniel Inouye > Governor William F. Quinn > Japanese-American Senators > John A. Burns > Punahou High School
Diffusion and the Five Characteristics of Innovation Adoption
Posted on | October 23, 2012 | No Comments
I recently supervised a Master of Science thesis at New York University that dealt with the adoption of social media technologies in the B2B sector.[1] I recommended the student start with the theories of Everett Rogers, whose work on the “diffusion of innovations” has been increasingly applied to the marketing of technological innovations, including digital media.
In particular, Rogers was concerned that for individuals to adopt an innovation, they must make a conscious decision that overcomes their uncertainty about the product or process. He wrote that the innovation was not in itself enough to convert people. They may need to be convinced through a communication process that provides some evidence of future value that ensures them that the innovation fits their value system and that it does so without severely disrupting their established habits and practices.
I’ve followed Rogers since my undergraduate internship at the East-West Center’s Communication Institute in Hawaii. He spent a lot of time there with Wilbur Schramm and other founders of the Communication Studies area.[2] Later, Amy Shuen’s (2008) Web 2.0 reminded me of the relevance of Rogers’ identification of five characteristics of an innovation and how they may influence whether someone adopts a product or service:
- relative advantage;
- compatibility;
- complexity;
- trialability;
- and; observability.
Relative advantage is an observation of the advantages and benefits of adopting a specific innovation. An innovation is by definition an improvement over something already existing, so Rogers points out that the potential adopter must first calculate its relative strengths. What is the advantage of the iPad over a MacBook? What improvements does it hold? What other benefits in terms of mobility, ease-of-use, additional software packages, etc. does the innovation present? If someone finds an advantage in this new technology, the individual will be more likely to adopt it.
Another issue is compatibility. How well does the innovation fit into a person’s needs, usage patterns and/or current value system? Adoption may have more to do with potential adopter than the characteristics of the innovation. An innovation that is more compatible with a person’s lifestyle and cognitive characteristics is more likely to be assimilated into an individual’s life.
A third characteristic is complexity and refers to the level of difficulty that the potential adopters encounter with the innovation. It is likely that the more complex or the more difficult an innovation is to understand, the less likely it will be adopted, and its diffusion will occur more slowly.
Trialability is another characteristic that determines the rate of diffusion. Being able to test an innovation or try it out will facilitate the rate of adoption. If it can be experimented with or taken out for a ‘test drive,” it is more likely to be utilized.
Observability completes our list of important characteristics identified by Rogers. An innovation will likely spread through the target population faster if the benefits are visible. “The Demo” by Douglas C. Engelbart was a 90-minute live demonstration of the interface technologies that highly influenced the trajectory of computer design that ultimately came out in the Apple Macintosh, including the first use of a mouse. The easier it is to see the advantages of an innovation, the faster it will diffuse throughout society.
Rogers was influenced by an experience during his childhood when his father did not utilize a new drought-resistant hybrid grain while their neighbor did. When a drought hit, his father’s crops withered and died while the neighbor’s crops persevered.
Rogers’ scholarly work originated in the study of rural sociology and focused on how innovations were adopted in areas such as agriculture and public health. He initiated an approach to the diffusion of innovation that utilized a scientific and meaningful way that emphasized the communicative and psychological aspects of adoption. He defined diffusion as the communication process by which innovations are accepted by individuals and their benefits spread to others.
Notes
[1] Mariandrea Rodriguez graduated this summer after completing her thesis on LATE ADOPTERS OF SOCIAL MEDIA: BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS COMPANIES IN THE FOOD AND BEVERAGE INDUSTRY.
[2]The East West Center had a multiplier or diffusion effect on Roger’ ideas. It helped spread the topic by bringing in scholars from around the world to research and discuss this area. Although the Communications Institute was replaced by the Institute of Culture and Communications and later disbanded, relevant research such as that on the communication of climate change information continues at the East-West Center.
Citation APA (7th Edition)
Pennings, A.J. (2012, Oct 23). Diffusion and the Five Characteristics of Innovation Adoption. apennings.com https://apennings.com/characteristics-of-digital-media/diffusion-and-the-five-characteristics-of-innovation-adoption/
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Anthony J. Pennings, PhD is a Professor at the Department of Technology and Society, State University of New York, Korea teaching broadband policy and ICT for sustainable development. From 2002-2012 he was on the faculty of New York University where he taught digital economics and information systems management. He also taught in the Digital Media Mgt at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas, where he lives when not in South Korea.
Tags: Anthony Pennings > diffusion of innovation > diffusion theory > Everett Rogers > innovation theory
TOP SOCIAL MEDIA AND FORUM SITES IN THE US
Posted on | October 18, 2012 | No Comments
Here is a list of the top social media websites for October 2012 as compiled by eBizMBA [1]. Next to their name is an estimate of Unique Monthly Visitors (EUMVs).
I have added links in case you are not familiar with the individual sites but I also highly recommend that you visit the eBizMBA site for their extraordinary lists and articles such as the Top 15 Most Popular File Sharing Websites and the Top 15 Most Popular Music Websites.[2]
1. Facebook – 750,000,000 EUMVs
2. Twitter – 250,000,000
3. LinkedIn – 110,000,000
4. MySpace – 70,500,000
5. Google Plus+ – 65,000,000
6. DeviantArt – 25,500,000
7. LiveJournal – 20,500,000
8. Tagged – 19,500,000
9. Orkut – 17,500,000
10. Pinterest – 15,500,000
11. CafeMom – 12,500,000
12. Ning – 12,000,000
13. Meetup – 7,500,000
14. myLife – 5,400,000
15. Badoo – 2,500,000
I’m not quite sure why Youtube is not on this list. I do see it on their top video websites with 450,000,000 EUMVs which would put it second on this list. Likewise Wikipedia with 350,000,000 Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors would rank very high as well. It is listed under Top 15 Most Popular Reference Websites.
I like this infographic by Fred Cavazza for providing a taxonomy of social media sites.[3]
Notes
[1] eBizMBA Rank gathers information from Alexa Global Traffic Rank, and U.S. Traffic Rank to compile an average for each website.
[2] Statistics from Compete and Quantcast.
[3] Fred lives in Paris but also keeps a blog for Forbes called Welcome to the 21st Century.
Anthony J. Pennings, PhD recently joined the Digital Media Management program at St. Edwards University in Austin TX, after ten years on the faculty of New York University. © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
WSJ in the Ether about Inventing the Internet
Posted on | July 31, 2012 | No Comments
The privatization and commercialization of Cold War technology, a central part of the Reagan Revolution, entered the limelight during the 2012 presidential election with the attention given to the role of government in the economy.
Controversy emerged recently with Gordon Crovitz’s opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Who Really Invented the Internet?” Crovitz’s article is part of the backlash to President Obama’s somewhat poorly phrased, but nonetheless accurate assertion, “The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all companies could make money off the Internet.”
Crovitz covers a number of points about the Internet but manages to avoid Al Gore’s “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet” CNN quote from the Vice-President.
Instead his major focus is on Xerox and the creation of Ethernet networking technologies at their research and development facilities in Silicon Valley. The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was made famous when its technology was picked over by Steve Jobs for the Macintosh computer. Crovitz’s focus on the importance of Ethernet is an interesting contribution to the study of the evolving Internet but a more in-depth look at this technology does more to illuminate the government’s startup role in the Internet rather than its disprove its participation.
PARC was sent up by Xerox in 1970 to establish leadership in the “architecture of information”, a sufficiently vague but enticing term coined by Xerox CEO Peter McColough. To do that, Xerox itself picked over the expertise and technology created and funded by the government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). ARPA was created by President Eisenhower in reaction to the USSR’s Sputnik satellite success. One of its major accomplishments was that it literally created the computer science field by funding departments throughout the US university system. It also guided the development of the ARPANET, the first implementation of packet-switched data communications technology, and generally considered the original precursor to the Internet.
Drawing on Xerox’s great wealth surplus, harvested during the 1960s, in part from the Great Society’s new bureaucracies; PARC recruited the brightest of ARPA’s brain trust. Starting with Robert Taylor, the director of ARPA’s main computer division, PARC recruited some of the best people in the emerging computer science field including those with expertise in personal computing and timesharing. Taylor had worked under the famous J.C.R Licklider, the first director of information processing at ARPA and had funded many seminal projects including Doug Engelbart’s NLS project which had invented the mouse. He even hired Larry Roberts who coordinated the ARPANET project and went on to create the ITU’s X.25 protocols that allowed government telcos around the world to offer packet-switching networks for banking and other commercial organizations.
By recruiting some of computer science’s top researchers, Xerox developed the Alto and the Star, two of the first personal computers with a GUI interface, hypertext, and the mouse. But it didn’t have a way of networking them.
So Xerox PARC hired Robert Metcalfe, a Harvard PhD who worked closely with the ARPANET, to develop networking technology to connect its personal computers. Harvard had initially rejected Metcalfe’s proposal to write his dissertation on the ARPANET, so he left to spend some time at the University of Hawaii with the ALOHANET project so he could study their innovative work on data networking. The ALOHANET was a government funded project that experimented with using radio broadcasts between Hawaiian islands to transfer data. There Metcalfe picked up crucial ideas on packet-switching and collision detection from Engineering Professor Norm Abramson that would provide the basis of his Ph.D. dissertation and later for networking innovations at PARC.
Robert X. Cringely interviews Abramson and Metcalfe on how Ethernet was created as part of this hour-long documentary.
Concepts emerging from the ALOHA project led to Xerox’s Ethernet local area networking products. While the ARPANET had solved certain issues related to long distance data communications, Ethernet tackled short-range communications needed in an office or campus environment. It is now not only widely used in wired local area networks but is prevalent in the IEEE 802 series wireless “WiFi” technology used today as well as emergent 4G mobile services used for smartphones and tablets such as the iPad.
Anyone examining the state of modern computer and web technologies has to marvel at the role of human ingenuity, capital markets, and the organizational capabilities. Start-ups and the modern corporation have done an amazing job refining the basic technologies developed by the military and government-funded contractors into the modern Internet. Unfortunately,trying to rewrite government’s role out of its history is not only misleading, but obfuscates important components of the national system of innovation. World War II, the Cold War, and the Space Race were all crucial for the development of the satellites, computers, and microprocessors that help make up the global Internet. Capital markets and enterprise are crucial for important refinements in energy, health, and further developments in information technology and media, but it would foolish to ignore the basic research and practical that emanate from public monies.
PARC was an important intermediary that helped transform years of government investment into workable products. It was part of the inventive complex that captured the imagination of consumers and showed companies how to become more productive. It spawned people like Bob Metcalfe, who went on to start the 3Com company (now part of HP). Several other researchers from PARC such as Charles Simonyi went over to Microsoft to help create Windows and the suite of Office products based on the ARPA/PARC/Apple graphical user interface (GUI). And, of course, Apple is currently the world’s most pivotal economic engine.
Metcalfe, Jobs, along with Bill Gates and Larry Ellison are a few of the main “supply-siders” who drew on the technological and scientific legacy of the Cold War and the associated “Space Race“, as well as other government investments; to create the products and services that propel the global economy and create our modern digital world. The term “Reagan Revolution” has been applied to an extraordinary transfer of wealth from the “public” sector to the private sector, but one that paid off substantially as microprocessors, satellites, and data networks among many other innovations developed by the government were refined for economic consumption and utilization.
Full Disclosure: I took a Satellite Communications class with Norm Abramson at the University of Hawaii when I was working on my PhD with the East-West Center. If one follows on Crovitz’s contention that the Ethernet was the seminal technology creating the Internet, I guess I would have argue that Abramson and the University of Hawaii invented the Internet. 🙂
Citation APA (7th Edition)
Pennings, A.J. (2012, July 21). WSJ in the Ether about Inventing the Internet. apennings.com https://apennings.com/how-it-came-to-rule-the-world/wsj-in-the-ether-about-the-internet/
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Anthony J. Pennings, PhD is the Professor the State University of New York (SUNY), Korea. Previously, he taught at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas and was on the faculty of New York University from 2002-2012. He also taught at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand and was a Fellow at the East-West Center in Hawaii in the 1990s.
Tags: Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) > Aloha System > ALOHANET > Commercialization of Cold War technology > Ethernet > Norm Abramson > Reagan Revolution > Robert Metcalfe > Space Race > WiFi > Xerox > Xerox CEO Peter McColough > Xerox PARC
Arthur C. Clarke’s Three Laws of Innovation
Posted on | July 1, 2012 | No Comments
During World War II, Arther C. Clarke was an electronics engineer in a top-secret radar installation outside London. It was a scary time when German V-1 and V-2 rockets were reigning terror on England. The experience did give him some time to experiment with radio waves and think about the future of technological innovation. This, of course, is the same Arther C. Clarke who went on to become a famous science fiction writer and author of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Clarke made his mark first in non-fiction when he published a seminal article on the possibilities of satellites in the 1945 edition of a British journal, Wireless World[1]. He conceived the idea of putting satellites, what he initially called “rocket stations,” in orbit around the world to act as radio relays providing global communications. He proposed that three satellites placed an orbit high enough above the earth could blanket the Earth with radio broadcasts. He reasoned that a satellite circling the Earth at about 6,870 miles per hour and placed 22,300 miles above the equator would maintain pace with the revolving earth below and provide a stationary target for bouncing radio waves back to the earth. This “geostationary orbit,” often known as the Clarke Belt,” provided the basic science and rationale for the future of communications satellites.
As Clarke became famous, he reflected on the processes of predicting change and prophesying the future. In the early 1960s, he proposed some ideas about thinking about innovation with his three laws (not to be confused with Asimov’s three laws of robotics).
In an essay entitled “Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination”, he proposed his first law:
1) When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
(OK, he didn’t get gender equality back then. but he his noted for his quote, “I don’t believe in God, but I’m interested in her” quote).
With encouragement from colleagues and readers he soon developed a second law which he had hinted at in his essay:
2) The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
One of his ideas was the space elevator that would replace rocketing stuff into space. This idea is being actively researched, and the science has been largely developed.
And surrendering to the notion of three laws such as Isaac Newton’s laws of motion, he suggested his most famous:
3) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Could one even imagine the possibility of a satellite communications, say during the Civil War, about a 100 years before Clarke’s vision was achieved?
Notes
[1] Arthur C. Clarke, October 1945 “Extraterrestial Relays,” Wireless World.
[2] Clarke’s Law, later Clarke’s First Law, can be found in the essay
“Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination”, in the collection
Profiles of the Future, 1962, revised 1973, Harper & Row.
Anthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global e-commerce. © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
The Meaning Makers: Omnicom Group
Posted on | June 27, 2012 | No Comments
Update: On July 28, 2013 it was announced that Publicis Groupe and Omnicom Group were merging to form Publicis Omnicom Group.
Meaning-making in our media-saturated world through advertising and public relations has traditionally has been dominated by several major holding companies that each in turn owns a large number of individual of advertising, design, public relations and media companies. These include the Omnicom Group and Interpublic both headquartered in New York as well as WPP in London and Publicis of Paris. Here I’m going to first talk about Omnicom.
The Omnicom Group consists of three major advertising “brands”, BBDO Worldwide, DDB Worldwide, and TBWA\Worldwide; three major public relations firms, Fleishman-Hillard, Ketchum, and Porter Novelli. Marketing services are coordinated through Diversified Agency Services (DAS), a division of Omnicom Group Inc with more than 190 companies operating internationally and locally. This includes customer relationship management (CRM) and B2B advertising services, public relations, as well as specialty communications operating fields such as financial, healthcare, recruitment, multicultural marketing. The Omnicom Group also includes media services companies such as OMD, PHD, and Prometheus. Specialized services include Icon International, a leading asset barter company, Novus, OMG Outdoor Media Group, and Resolution Media.
Omnicom’s use of IBM Cognos Business Analytics is discussed in this video. The IBM system is being used to coordinate their global network of holding companies.
Omnicon is involved in PR for nations, such as Ketchum’s work with Russia to develop briefing points for interviews; press releases, fact sheets, etc. Omnicom companies have also promoted their oil companies and facilitated meetings between representatives of Russia’s government officials and international “experts’ who are often interviewed in the media. Of particular interest to the Russian government has guidance for their acceptance into the World Trade Organization (WTO), a mission accomplished in December of 2011.
Anthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global e-commerce. He is currently a visiting professor at Hannam University in South Korea.
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Tags: Interpublic > OMD > Omnicom Group > PHD > Prometheus > Publicis
Four Generations of Wireless Tech
Posted on | April 30, 2012 | No Comments
The ubiquity, ease and sophistication of mobile services has proven to be an extraordinarily popular addition to modern social and productive life. The term 
“generations” has been applied to wireless technology classifications as a way to refer to the major disruptions and innovations in the state of mobile technology and associated services. These innovations include the move to data and the Internet protocols associated with convergence of multiple forms of communications media (cable, mobile, wireline) and the wide array of services that are becoming increasingly available on portable devices. We are now on the cusp of the 4th generation rollout of wireless services with intriguing implications for enterprise mobility, “m-commerce”, and a wide array of new entertainment and personal productivity services.
By 1982, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had recognized the importance of the wireless communications market and began to define Cellular Market Areas (CMA) and assigning area based radio licenses. It split the 40 MHz of radio spectrum it had allocated to cellular to two market segments, half would go to the local telephone companies in each geographical area and the other to interested non-telephone companies by lottery. Although AT&T’s Bell labs had effectively began the cellular market, it had estimated the 2000 market to be slightly less than a million subscribers and consequently abandoned it during its divestiture of the regional phone companies. Meanwhile financier Michael Milken began a process of helping the McCaw family buy up the other licenses, making them multibillionaires when they sold out to AT&T in the mid-1990s.
The first generation (1G) of wireless phones were large analog voice machines and their data transmission capability was virtually nonexistent. This initial generation was developed in the 1980s through a combination of lotteries and the rollout of cellular sites and integrated networks. It used multiple base stations with each providing service to small adjoining cell areas. Its most popular phone was the Motorola DynaTAC known sometimes as “the brick”, now immortalized by financier Gordon Gecko’s early morning beach stroll in Wall Street (1986). 1G was hampered by a multitude of standards such as AMPS, TACs, and NMT that competed for acceptance. The Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS) was the first standardized cellular service in the world and used mainly in the US.
The second generation (2G) of wireless technology was the first to provide data services of any significance. By the early 1990s, GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) 
was introduced first in Europe and in the U.S. by T-Mobile and then other countries around the world. GSM standards were developed in 1982 by the Groupe Spécial Mobile committee. An offshoot of the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT), it was the standard that would allow national telecoms around the world to provide services. Although voice services improved significantly, the top data speed was only 14.4 Kbps. AT&T utilized Time-Division Multiple Access techniques (TDMA)-based systems, while Bell Atlantic Mobile introduced CDMA in 1996. This second generation digital technology reduced power consumption and carried more traffic while voice quality did improve, and security became more adept. The Motorola StarTac phone was originally developed for AMPS but was sold for both TDMA and CDMA systems.
New innovations sparked the development of the 2.5G standards that provided faster data speeds. The additional half a generation referred to the use of data packets. Known as the General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), the new standards could provide 56-171 Kbps of service. It has been used for Short Message Service (SMS) and MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) services, WAP (Wireless Application Protocol), as well as Internet access. An advanced form of GPRS called EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for Global Evolution) was used for the first Apple mobile phone, considered the first version using 3G technology.
Third generation (3G) network technology was introduced by Japan’s NTT DoCoMo in 1998 but was adopted slowly in other countries, mainly because of the difficulties of obtaining additional electromagnetic spectrum needed for the new towers and services. 3G 
technologies provided a range of new services, including better voice quality and faster speeds. Multimedia services like Internet access, mobile TV, and video calls became available. Telecom and application services such as file downloads and file sharing, made it easy to retrieve, install and share apps. 3G radio standards have been largely specified by the the International Mobile Telecommunications-2000 (IMT-2000) of the International Telecommunication Union but the major carriers continued to evolve their own systems such as Sprint and Verizon’s CDMA 2000 and AT&T and T-Mobile’s Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), an upgrade of GSM based on the ITU’s IMT-2000 standard set, but an expensive one as it required new base stations and frequency allocations.
A 3.5 generation became available with the introduction of High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) with promises of 14.4Mbps although 3.5-7.2 were more likely.
Fourth generation wireless technology is still a work in progress but seeks to provide mobile all-IP communications and high speed Internet access to 
laptops with USB wireless modems, smartphones, and to other mobile devices. Sprint released the first 4G phone in March of 2010 at the communication industry’s annual CTIA event in Las Vegas. With a 4.3 inch screen, two cameras, and Android 2.1 OS the new phone was able to tap into the new IP environment Fourth generation (4G) technology is being rolled out in various forms with a dedication to broadband data and Internet protocols with services such as VoIP, IPTV, live video streams, online gaming, and multimedia applications for mobile users.
While 3G was based on two parallel infrastructures using both circuit switched and packet switched networking, 4G will be rely on packet switching protocols only. 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution) refers to wireless broadband IP technology developed by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). “Long Term Evolution” meant the progression from 2G GSM, to 3G UMTS, and into the future with LTE. The 3GPP, an industry trade group, designed the technology with the potential for 100 Mbps downstream and 30 Mbps upstream. Always subject to various environmental influences, data rates could reach 1 Gbps speeds in the next ten years.[2]
4G phones are also being developed to access WiMax (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) using the IEEE Standard 802.16 with a range of some 30 miles and transmission speeds of 75 Mbps to 200Mbps. 4G WiMax provides data rates similar to 802.11 Wi-Fi standards with the range and quality of cellular networks. What has made the difference in technology has been the softer handoffs between base stations that allow for more effective mobility over longer distances. Going to IP will allow mobile technology to integrate into the all-IP next-generation network (NGN) that is forming to offer services across broadband, cable and satellite communication mediums.
Notes
[1] For a history of wireless communications.
[2] This is a great review of the 4 generations of wireless technologies.
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Anthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global e-commerce.
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Professor at State University of New York (SUNY) Korea since 2016. Moved to Austin, Texas in August 2012 to join the Digital Media Management program at St. Edwards University. Spent the previous decade on the faculty at New York University teaching and researching information systems, digital economics, and strategic communications.
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