Background: Today, USTelecom welcomes Kathleen Abernathy, chief legal officer and executive vice president of Frontier Communications, as its newest member of the Board of Directors.
The following statement is from Steven C. Oldham, President and Chief Executive Officer of SureWest Communications, and Chairman of the Board of Directors of USTelecom:
“We are delighted to welcome Kathleen Abernathy to our board as Frontier’s representative. Kathleen’s global expertise in communications law, including her distinguished service at the FCC and most recent work as partner at Wilkinson Barker Knauer, brings a wealth of experience to our team of top industry leaders. As one of the nation’s largest rural local exchange carriers, Frontier is a prominent voice in advancing U.S. broadband policy. With Kathleen’s addition, the board will be well-positioned to chart the direction for the industry and the association.”
From online businesses and blogs to the social media sphere, women today have a powerful online presence that is blowing the doors wide open on new entrepreneurial opportunities. Consider for a moment how social technologies have helped level the playing field. Using online tools, women can market their abilities to a global audience, gain unprecedented access to key decision-makers, and tap new avenues to raise capital. Blogs, webinars, and social tools have become excellent forums for demonstrating personal expertise. And ingenuity — combined with the Internet’s broad reach — has proven to be a powerful combination for online entrepreneurs, with women often leading today’s innovative online offerings.
Consider some of these success stories highlighting how women are seizing broadband’s big opportunities:
Huffington Post—A nationally syndicated columnist and author of twelve books, Arianna Huffington founded the Huffington Post, which has become the top-ranked blog in the world, according to Technorati. She has been named to Time Magazine’s world’s most influential people list.
Blurb—Interested in making, producing and selling a book? Eileen Gittens, the co-founder and CEO of Blurb, offers an online print-on-demand publishing service, printing everything from novels to cook books. In just two years, the company’s revenue grew from $1 million to $30 million.
Flickr—The image and video sharing site was started by Caterina Fake, an American businesswoman who harnessed Web 2.0 technology to create the service–which ultimately sold to Yahoo for a high eight-figure deal.
Ning—Creating a personal social network is easy with Ning, which hosts more than one million social networks on its platform, and adds nearly 4,000 new social networks each day. The site is the inspiration of co-founder and CEO Gina Bianchini.
PopSugar—What Lisa Sugar translated a passion for following celebrity news and trends into a network of blogs that ultimately attracted high-end advertisers and funding from Sequoia (the same company that funded Google and YouTube).
MyYearBook.com—And, apparently, you’re never too young to start an online business. When she was just 15, Catherine Cook founded MyYearBook.com, a site featuring innovative social games that has grown to 3 million members and produces annual, seven-figure sales.
Interested in learning more about women leveraging broadband-powered opportunities? Click here to see coverage of the Blogalicious D.C. event hosted by NextGenWeb.
As online news sources and mobile apps proliferate across the Internet, consumers are tuning into online media sources in greater numbers than ever before. According to a new study conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, online news consumption is now surpassing the popularity of newspapers and radio stations as news platforms, and falls just behind television.
Here are a few interesting highlights from the study showing how Americans get their news, and the areas of interest driving their consumption:
Multi-Platform Viewing. Today, a staggering 92% of Americans take in the news via multiple platforms, including national and local TV, the Internet, the radio, and local and national newspapers. 46% say they get news from four to six media platforms on an average day, while only 7% consume news from a single media platform.
Portable & Personalized. News on-the-go via mobile phones is now a trend among 33% of cell phone owners, and 28% of Internet users have customized their home page to include news sources and topics of personal interest.
Participatory. 37% of Internet users have contributed to creating the news, have commented on it, or have disseminated it via postings on social media sites.
Why Tune In? 72% of news-following adults say they tune in because they enjoy talking about current events with friends and family. 69% watch due to a social or civic obligation to stay informed. 61% say the news provides valuable information that can help improve their lives. And 44% say the news is an entertaining diversion.
Given the tremendous shift toward online news, more newspapers are beginning to charge their online readers to adapt to what is clearly a growing broadband news trend. With so many news platforms and sources available, free speech and consumer participation in this democratic process is clearly alive and well.
How do televised events like the Oscars draw both a broader and younger audience? This year, in addition to doubling the number of best picture-nominated films, the 82nd Annual Academy Awards launched a social media campaign replete with smartphone apps, a trivia competition, and live Twitter feeds from the award ceremony.
To kick off Oscar’s social media makeover, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences streamed the nominations announcement live on Facebook – encouraging fans to watch and share their reactions with friends. The free Oscar smartphone app, downloaded approximately 25,000 times, shared trailers of nominated films and encouraged users to make their own winner predictions. And Oscar.com captured viewer data for its marketing efforts by encouraging consumers to register to receive mobile alerts, participate in the site’s “Live Challenge” trivia game, and receive email updates and other communications.
Social media even helped catapult a relatively unknown film to “Best Animated Feature” status. With a limited budget, the company promoting “The Secret of Kells” chose to market the movie via social media. The filmmaker’s blog, which chronicled the movie’s production since 2005, helped promote “The Secret of Kells” Edinburgh Film Festival win. Screenings were scheduled at animation schools, and a viral word-of-mouth campaign on Facebook and Twitter propelled the fan base from there. Animator and “super-fan” Jamie Bolio served as a citizen publicist, promoting the film and sharing DVDs of the production with the Los Angeles cartooning industry. While the film didn’t take the top award on Oscar night– it’s widely agreed the picture would never have been in contention without this creative online effort.
For those who find the red carpet more fascinating than the awards, ABC streamed its live red carpet show at Oscar.com for two hours prior to the show, and attached it to a Facebook discussion engine. There was even a designated spot on the red carpet for celebrities to answer fan questions posted on the Academy’s Facebook page. And if you missed acceptance speeches or want to see the extended, backstage version, Oscar.com has all of these clips and more ready to view at a click of a button. Now that’s entertainment your way brought to you by broadband.
Background: Today the Federal Communications Commission outlined some of the details in its National Broadband Plan concerning reforming intercarrier compensation and the current Universal Service Fund.
The following statement is from USTelecom President & CEO Walter B. McCormick Jr.:
“We are pleased to see that the National Broadband Plan recognizes that the soundness and integrity of intercarrier compensation and universal service are fundamental to the financial foundation of broadband deployment. The FCC’s plan to make long-needed changes to the regulatory framework for payments between carriers and to the Universal Service Fund is an important step forward. There is broad consensus that reform is sorely needed in these areas and can make a significant contribution to building and upgrading our country’s broadband networks. We must get the details right in such a critical matter, and we are committed to working with the Commission and other stakeholders to resolve these issues as quickly as possible.”
Today, as the FCC discusses imposing greater government regulation of the Internet, debate is raging over the necessity of such policies. After all, the rapid rise of broadband and its innovations has emerged from a relatively unfettered Internet ecosystem driven by vigorous investment and competition. Now, a study from the American Consumer Institute finds that greater Internet regulation will stifle private investment and impede the innovation consumers enjoy and count on nationwide.
According to the study:
Both historically and across the marketplace today, infrastructure investment, innovation and improvement of the Internet is robust.
Broadband providers’ core innovations have enabled and stimulated next-generation innovations that would otherwise not exist.
No data or analysis exists to support claims that proposed net neutrality rules would promote innovation in the Internet ecosystem.
Imposing new net neutrality regulations would diminish network provider’s incentives and opportunities to continue historic trends of innovation and investment.
These findings are consistent with another recent ACI study focusing on the adverse impacts of proposed FCC policies on U.S. employment. The study cites historical data demonstrating that for every $1 billion in revenue, network companies provided 2,329 jobs, while non-network companies generated approximately half that number of jobs. ACI suggests that FCC regulations, if imposed, would favor non-network companies, as opposed to the IT sector – ultimately leading to less investment and employment.
To read more about what experts are saying about net neutrality and the ACI study; review this blog over at NextGenWeb.
Today, lawmakers across the political spectrum agree that stimulating jobs and our economy are key to revitalizing our nation. As policymakers work to generate new economic opportunities, broadband continues to bring positive growth and well-paying jobs enriching the communities and livelihoods of American citizens.
In the latest USTelecom vidcast, USTelecom President and CEO Walter B. McCormick Jr. discusses the positive contributions broadband is already making to our economy, as well as what lies ahead for broadband and IT-related industries. Here are some featured highlights:
Job Growth. Studies show the broadband and IT sectors created nearly half of all new American jobs in 2008. And this growth trajectory gives no indication of slowing down. To the contrary, Broadband Information, Communications, and Technology-enabled occupations are projected to be the fastest-growing U.S. professions over the next decade.
Well-Paying Positions. In addition to the rapid growth of telecom positions, studies show that the average hourly earnings for these positions are 42% higher than those in the manufacturing sector.
Vigorous Investment. Companies nationwide invested $455 billion in the Internet, Communications, and Technology sector in 2008 – amounting to more than 1 in every 5 dollars invested in the entire U.S. economy. Not only does this establish the U.S. as the world leader in broadband investment, economists also estimate that at least one-third of our country’s productivity growth derives from these broadband-fueled sectors.
Interested in learning more? To hear USTelecom’s overview of how broadband is aiding the economy, click on the video.
It’s hard to miss the meteoric rise of Facebook, which according to the company has now expanded to 400 million active members. And consider this sign of its growth: the website added 225 million users — or more than half of its members — in the past 12 months alone.
A new study from Nielsen also shows that U.S. Internet users are spending an unprecedented amount of time on the site. In fact, American consumers committed more time to Facebook than Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, YouTube, Amazon and Wikipedia combined.
According to the study, in just six months the average amount of time spent on Facebook jumped from roughly 4 to 7 hours per month. Based on the growth charted through January 2010, American Facebook users spent an average of 14 minutes per day, as compared to these relatively meager daily time stats: Yahoo (2:09), Microsoft/Bing (1:35), Google (1:23), YouTube (1:02), Amazon (0.22), and Wikipedia (0:15).
With this increase comes another interesting trend. Given Facebook users’ tendency to share Web links with friends and family, the site is becoming a force to be reckoned with in terms of driving Internet traffic. In fact, according to Compete Inc., Facebook has surpassed Google as the leading source of traffic to major portals, such as MSN, Yahoo, and AOL. The company found that 13 percent of traffic to these sites came from Facebook, as opposed to 7.61 percent from eBay, and 7 percent from Google.
With more people turning to a friend’s recommendation as opposed to conducting their own independent online searches, the new social media trend, coined “friend-casting,” has taken off. What does this mean for marketers? Social-media optimization, in addition to search engine optimization, will become a key part of many companies’ strategies to connect with consumers. A prime example is Intuit’s current TurboTax campaign using Facebook. Since half of TurboTax’s 20 million users are on Facebook and each have an average of 150 friends, friend-casting connections can play a significant role in building buzz and driving sales.
More than ever before, much of our day to day communications is taking place with wireless devices. From smartphones, netbooks, and tablet devices like the new iPad, more and more people are consuming voice, Internet and video content over wireless networks.
However we must not forget that an important piece of the wireless delivery ecosystem is a facilities-based “wired” backhaul network that transports this content out to the wireless access edges. On Thursday February 25th, Kevin Morgan from ADTRAN provided an informative webinar for our audience, taking a comprehensive look at the rapidly growing demand for wireless broadband services and how mobile backhaul service over IP networks is growing to meet that demand. Morgan provided a comparison of backhaul networks in North America with respect to the rest of the world and covered the various network architectures and technologies that can be deployed to provide mobile backhaul services.
The archived version of this webinar will be available on-demand. Or check out other USTelecom webinars on demand:
Today, broadband’s rich reading resources — from online newspapers and magazines to blogs — help feed our knowledge of the world, and let us easily share articles and ideas with little more than a click of a button. But what kinds of stories are we compelled to share online, and why? That subject is now an area of focus among researchers – and you may be surprised by the findings.
Recently, a University of Pennsylvania study analyzed The New York Times list of most emailed articles over a period of six months. The researchers examined the content and other factors such as placement in the newspaper and online. Contrary to the frequent media perception that sensationalism and negativity sells, they found the majority of readers e-mailed articles with positive themes. Stories that were “awe-inspiring” and long articles on “intellectually challenging” subjects were the most popular fodder for forwarding. And although 20 percent of the most emailed articles were featured on the Times home page — 30 percent were in-depth science articles with headlines such as “The Promise and Power of RNA.”
Another key driver of Internet sharing is social media. According to Facebook, 5 billion pieces of content are shared on the site every week, including links, photos, and videos. Based on statistics from Gigya – a company that powers sharing widgets on more than 5,000 content sites – Facebook and Twitter are dominating about three quarters of all items shared via social media channels. Facebook leads the pack with 44%; Twitter comes in second with 29%; Yahoo accounts for 18%; and MySpace makes up 9%. As you can see, many of us prefer to broadcast links, rather than sharing them via email.
Thanks to the dynamism of the Internet, a vibrant online community is sharing inspiring and uplifting stories that give us a common bond regardless of any physical distance.
