Category Archives: Digital Tech Consulting

Your 2025 Smartphone

With apologies to Zager and Evans (look ’em up), in 2025, I will surely be supremely embarrassed. Someone—maybe even me—will dig up this column, read my fearless predictions of what smartphones will look like and how they will function in that year, … Continue reading

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Can/Should the Internet Be Regulated?

Trolling. Phishing. Online scams. Dark web. Identity theft. Click bait. Ransomware. Spyware. Adware. Malware. Cyber attacks. Zero day attacks. Trojan horses. User data tracking, collection and selling. Algorithm amplification and manipulation. Election hacking. Deep fakes. Anonymity. The growing misuse and … Continue reading

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Bridging the Digital Divide with National Broadband Policy

Nothing has shone a bright a light on the U.S. digital divide like the Coronavirus. The lack of broadband infrastructure and access for certain swaths of the population—particularly for rural and low-income communities—has risen to the fore once again. Solutions … Continue reading

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Should There be a Broadband New Deal?

On a make-shift stage before 50,000 people in rural Barnesville, Georgia, the President of the United States stressed the importance of universal connectivity. He insisted that the lack of access to connectivity created “an economic unbalance in the nation as … Continue reading

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Redefining Social Media Could Destroy It

Platform/bulletin board or publisher? That is the social media industry legal question at the heart of the recent dust-up between Twitter and President Trump. A desire by the Administration to reclassify social media companies as publishers responsible for content could … Continue reading

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5G’s Historically Bizarre Rollout

Technology rollouts are often messy. Multiple vendors propose competing (and often incompatible) variations in the hope of capturing the golden ticket to new market dominance. Entrenched interests campaign, lobby against or even legally threaten their eventual replacement. Technology misunderstanding or … Continue reading

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Our Video Chatting New Normal

Odds are, over the last two months or so, you’ve Zoomed, Skyped, FaceTimed, Webexed, Housepartied or Hangout-ed—likely more times than your combined lifetime total of video chatting. And when you aren’t video chatting, you’re watching someone else video chatting on … Continue reading

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Home Virtual Reality’s Problem: It’s the Headset, Stupid

A few weeks ago, I piloted an F18 Hornet fighter jet off the flight deck of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. John C. Stennis. I gently cruised above the coast of the Dubai, dipping down as low as 5,000 feet to … Continue reading

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New Viable Video Codecs on the Way? Maybe

Dissatisfaction with video codec royalty rates, lack of licensor transparency and complicated licensing terms have been perpetual complaints of many commercial video content purveyors. Not surprisingly, some would like to see a shake-up in the current system of how intellectual … Continue reading

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‘Game of Thrones’ Exposes HDR, Video Compression Issues

“The night is dark and full of terrors” was never truer than in the Game of Thrones installment Season 8, Episode 3, “The Long Night” (aka “The Battle of Winterfell”). While viewers rapturously recapped and reviewed the episode’s heroes and villains, … Continue reading

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