Santa Cruz becomes the place Silicon Valley wants to be

31 December 2013 by Steve Blum
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Sticking out like a surfboard in a cubicle farm, Santa Cruz has risen to the top of Silicon Valley’s hot spots for 2014. It’s a top 5 tech mecca for the coming year, according to Silicon Valley Business Journal, and the only one of the bunch with local culture that rises above strip malls, fast food and bad haircuts.

According to author Lauren Hepler

Hippie beach enclave no more? A gaggle of politicians, entrepreneurs and deep-pocketed investors want to diversify from Santa Cruz County’s $500-million-a-year reliance on summer tourism.

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Watsonville growing economy and cash with muni dark fiber

“We want to be able to service other business”, said Bob Berry, public works project manager for the City of Watsonville. “We think we want to turn this into an enterprise fund”.

The city is installing dark fiber between key public buildings and, incidentally, through core business areas of Watsonville. The project was launched after Charter Communications raised the price it was charging for similar connections from free to $150,000 a year, a move made possible by its shift from local to statewide cable franchising.… More

Layers of regulation: CPUC maintains grip on telecoms infrastructure

29 December 2013 by Steve Blum
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Kicking down barriers to competition, progressively.

There’s always a danger of reading too much into a single, seemingly routine decision by the California Public Utilities Commission, but I’ll risk it. Earlier this month, the CPUC granted a certificate of public convenience and necessity to Schat Communications LLC, which is a sister company of Schat.net, an Internet service provider in eastern California. In doing so, the commission determined that Schat is a “telephone corporation” under Californian law and can be regulated as such.… More

The state of the Internet in California is mediocre, according to Akamai

28 December 2013 by Steve Blum
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California is only middle of the pack when it comes to high speed broadband adoption, at least as measured by Akamai in its most recent State of the Internet report, for the second quarter of 2013. Of the broadband connections made to Akamai’s content delivery network from IP addresses in California, 23.2% were at speeds of 10 Mbps or better, ranking our state 20th in the country.

Top of the chart was Massachusetts at 41.9%; Arkansas came last at 4.1%.… More

Bell Labs goes looking for lost mojo

27 December 2013 by Steve Blum
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First we’ll invent Unix, then we’ll figure out what to do with it.

When Silicon Valley was just pear orchards and a junior university, and a google was an obscure bit of math trivia, the wellspring of geek creativity was a continent away. Bell Labs sprawled across several campuses in northern New Jersey, filled with scientists and engineers who were paid to come up with interesting ideas and novel technology. Not necessarily marketable products, although it was correctly assumed that profits would follow somehow.… More

Mobile payment innovators will benefit as banks run scared

26 December 2013 by Steve Blum
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Actually, it was invented in Russia.

Top of my list for the most influential people of 2013 in technology are the cyber thieves who stole the details of 40 million credit and debit cards from the Target chain of stores. Thanks to them, mobile payment and near field communications technology – e.g. chips in credit cards – might finally take off in the U.S. as fossilised payment processing companies are jolted into embracing entrepreneurial creativity. As I wrote last year

“Mobile payments is like waiting for Godot,” said Omar Javaid, managing director of BBO Global, speaking at a recent What’s Hot (and What’s Not) in Mobility 2012 forum in Mountain View.

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Cyber security needs a breath of fresh thinking from pulp fiction

25 December 2013 by Steve Blum
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Don’t take a space axe to a Q-beam fight.

“The bad guys are very good”, said Dan Schulman, a group president with American Express, as he talked about the biggest problem he faces in maintaining security for a global credit card company. He was speaking at the MobileCon tradeshow in San Jose earlier this year, but his words could have been lifted from the pages of vintage science fiction.

Edward E. Smith – Doc Smith – started writing what would become the Lensman series of novels in 1934.… More

Happy holidays

24 December 2013 by Steve Blum

A year full of blogging.

I set up this blog five years ago, after spending a long Saturday at the first Freelance Camp in Santa Cruz, in August 2008. Last year I decided it was time to get serious about it or move on to something else. To find out which, I set a goal of one post a day for the month of December 2012, figuring it would either burn me out on blogging or make it routine part of my business.… More

CPUC finds a legal way to treat ISPs as regulated phone companies


CPUC sends a Schat across incumbents’ bow.

Buried in last week’s California Public Utilities Commission consent agenda was a resolution granting a certificate of public convenience and necessity (CPCN) to Schat Communications, an independent Internet servicer provider based in Bishop, on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada. Schat applied for the CPCN in order to qualify for California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) grants for two proposed last mile projects in Mono and Inyo Counties.… More

CPUC pushes open access to subsidised middle mile fiber

22 December 2013 by Steve Blum
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Access only by fiber or snowmobile.

Once again, the California Public Utilities Commission has set an expectation that publicly subsidised middle mile fiber should be available on a wholesale basis. To gain approval for a $1.8 million subsidy for a fiber to the home system in a remote area of Madera County, Ponderosa Telephone Company agreed to sell access to the fiber backhaul line that will feed it. According to a CPUC staff presentation to commissioners

Ponderosa has affirmed that wholesale access to the network will be provided in the project area.

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