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SAN FRANCISCO JUST TOOK A HUGE STEP TOWARD INTERNET UTOPIA

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Last week, San Francisco became the first major city in America to pledge to connect all of its homes and businesses to a fiber optic network.

I urge you to read that sentence again. It’s a ray of light. In an era of short-term, deeply partisan do-nothing-ism, the city’s straightforward, deeply practical determination shines. Americans, it turns out, are capable of great things—even if only at the city level these days.

You might think: Big deal, San Francisco is our tech capital, the last place that needs this. But for years, San Francisco has had a major problem. True, it’s the tech capital of the country and a progressive leader among US cities, but before last week it had no plan to ensure that it had world-class data connectivity for its residents at a reasonable price. Techies frequently bemoan this fact, showing one another screenshots of spinning wheels. San Francisco’s dilemma is a compact form of the crisis in communications facing the rest of the country: Although fiber is the necessary infrastructure for every policy goal we have—advanced healthcare, the emergence of new forms of industries, a chance for every child to get an education, managed use of energy, and on and on—the private sector, left to its own devices, has no particular incentive to ensure a widespread upgrade to fiber optic connections.

Comcast dominates access in the city, but has no plans to replace its cable lines—great at downloads, not so great at uploads, no opportunity to scale to the capacity of fiber thanks to the laws of physics, and expensive to subscribe to—with fiber. And its planned enhancements to its cable lines have, in other cities, resulted in a product costing $150 per month. AT&T will say it’s upgrading to fiber in San Francisco, but so far its work in many other US cities has been incremental, confined to areas where it has existing business customers to serve or where it already has fiber in place. Other, smaller providers similarly have no plans to do a city-wide upgrade, leaving San Francisco with a deeply uneven patchwork of connectivity.

Just as in the rest of the country, poorer and less-well-educated San Franciscans tend not to subscribe to a wire at home, but instead rely wholly on smartphone data plans—no substitutes, given their expense and throttled capacity, for what’s possible using a wired connection.

It’s taken San Francisco a number of tries to get to the point of suggesting a city-controlled utility fiber network that private-sector retail operators can use as a neutral platform. Like Bill Murray’s Phil Connors in Groundhog Day, the city has been steadily learning. 10 years ago, the failure of a much-hyped city partnershipwith Google and Earthlink for a city-wide wifi network was caused by inexperience on all sides: No one was up to the job of accounting for the number of hotspots and the amount of backhaul that would be necessary for a wifi network to serve San Francisco’s data-hungry citizens in their homes and businesses. Eight years ago, a city-commissioned report recommended a fiber network, but plans didn’t proceed because of lack of leadership and the absence of a concrete plan.

The city has finally gathered both sufficient expertise and the political will to move ahead. Last week, Mayor Ed Lee and Supervisor Mark Farrell released a substantial reportfrom expert consultant CTC Technology & Energy that essentially provides a detailed, thorough blueprint for a fiber network connecting every home and business in the city. (Disclosure: I’m the co-chair, with Supervisor Farrell, of the unpaid advisory committee he convened to look at the issue. I have no clients or consulting arrangements, and receive no income or other compensation, direct or indirect, from any telecom-related company.)

This CTC document isn’t just another report. It is a pioneering and carefully nuanced study that marches deliberately through a range of public-private options for network construction, and suggests that the city separate “dark” from “lit” fiber planning. The “dark” fiber would be passive, public-works-like construction of basic fiber infrastructure, and would include no retail customer-service relationship. The “lit” fiber would be retail data-flow internet access service to customers.

The most interesting and simplest version of a public-private partnership suggested by CTC is found on page 93, deep in the report: The city would issue a franchise to a private company to build a dark fiber network reaching every home and business (adding to the 170-plus miles of dark fiber already owned by the city), and then would turn around and have a publicly controlled entity lease that fiber to private operators. Private operators, in turn, would install the electronics that “light” the network and would connect up customers to the internet.

The city would not be in the business of competing with existing providers in this model, but would, instead, be providing basic infrastructure that any company could use—the connectivity equivalent of a city street grid. The cost to the public of borrowing the money to build this basic network—estimated at about $1.5 billion by CTC—would be significantly lowered by leasing revenue from advance arrangements with operators. The city would subsidize low-income residents wishing to subscribe for fiber services from those private operators. CTC sets forth a detailed timeline for getting all of this done.

What’s great about this suggestion is that it removes any political argument that the city is somehow undermining the private market for internet access services. At the same time, a dark fiber public-private partnership would dramatically lower the cost for the private market to do what it does best: directly serve customers in a competitive environment that, on its own, produces low costs and innovation. There are undoubtedly well-funded private entities out there that will gather themselves to lease the city’s fiber; indeed, CTC strongly recommends that the city start seeking out those lessees right away. Public comment on all of this will also be essential.

Fiber is, or should be, a utility available to all Americans. All of our advanced-wireless dreams, all the Internet of Things amazingness, depends on having a solid, dependable, ubiquitous fiber infrastructure reaching everyone at a reasonable cost. San Francisco, after years of study, has finally gotten to the point of readiness to take this step. Bravo to Mayor Lee and Supervisor Farrell for their commitment to the future of their beloved city. Here’s hoping that other US cities follow suit.

Source:-wired.

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Tech Update

Georgia Tech’s working Tennessee, and this cut to set up a touchdown is just vicious

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Image result for Georgia Tech’s working Tennessee, and this cut to set up a touchdown is just vicious

It didn’t lead to a score, but it’s an incredible feat of athleticism by Georgia Tech quarterback TaQuon Marshall. The Yellow Jackets have been handing it to No. 25 Tennessee, dominating possession with their flexbone offense and running up a 21-7 lead in the third quarter. That Marshall run went for 28 yards, and he carried for a one-yard touchdown a couple of plays later. He’s been electrifying.

When Marshall scored, Tech had controlled possession for 26:58 to Tennessee’s 8:43. It’s been an utterly dominant flexbone performance, with Marshall (at the time of that touchdown) only throwing four times. He completed two for 59 yards, and Tech’s been marching along methodically for five yards per carry — over and over and over.

Tennessee had an entire offseason to prepare to stop Paul Johnson’s triple option. It doesn’t appear that the Vols did a great job of it. Marshall’s already well over 100 yards rushing.

Source:-.sbnation

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Blogging

Blogging taken up more than just hobby, professionals use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest to push content

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Blogs, Blogging, Blogging as hobby, blogging a hobby, Social Media, blog posts on social media, blog posts on twitter, blog posts on facebook, blog posts on instagram

In the pursuit to stand out, many bloggers have begun to publish their content on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. It’s very crucial to drive traffic from these channels
to the core site, they say.

Ananaya Banerjee

“Naked Cricket’s timing just happened, almost like a streaker on a cricket field… there’s no explaining it really,” says Gaurav Sethi about his first blog. New Delhi-based Sethi, who shut his advertising agency in the capital in 2005, started Naked Cricket (a blog on cricket, with articles, songs, cartoons, etc, on the game) the same year. At that time, blogging was a relatively new phenomenon in India, but that didn’t deter him. Three years later, after warming up to the online space, 50-something Sethi, with some friends, started his second blog, Bored Cricket Crazy Indians (BCC!), which features other bloggers apart from Sethi and their commentaries on cricket. As early as a decade ago, the idea of blogging was very simple: most people considered it just a hobby and got around to it only on weekends. It was bloggers like Sethi who gave it a twist by pursuing it professionally. The appeal, of course, is manifold. As a profession, blogging offers a mix of subjects—fashion, food, travel, tech and much more—to write on, the opportunity to work on one’s own terms, as well as make a living out of it. For some like 30-year-old Harsh Agarwal, it was a ticket to live a “boss-free” life. New Delhi-based Agarwal, a professional blogger and entrepreneur, quit his job at Accenture in the national capital within the first five months of launching his blog ShoutMeLoud, which offers solutions to aspiring bloggers and enables them to build their own blogs, in 2008 and has never looked back since.

“I never thought blogging could be pursued professionally until I discovered Google AdSense,” he says. Google AdSense, like other ad programmes, is designed to display targeted advertisements on website pages through which website publishers generate revenue, depending on the number of visitors or clicks on the site. “I was amazed to discover that all I needed to do was write what I liked, get traffic and the money would just come in,” Agarwal says. Today, Agarwal has eight blogs—ShoutMeLoud is the most popular, he says, followed by ShoutMeTech, which offers tech solutions, and Wpfreesetup, which helps users navigate WordPress. Ads, undoubtedly, play a very important role in the life of a blogger.

But more than being just a source of income, ad contributions help bloggers deliver better content on time by providing an incentive, offers 30-year-old Srinivas Tamada, the brain behind the blog, 9lessons. US-based Tamada started his blog in 2009 as a way to offer unique solutions to complicated Web programming problems. Later, Tamada transformed his blog into a money-spinning venture when he built a commercial social network software, Wall Script 8, which aims to enable people to understand and build their own social networks. The software is currently available in two versions for purchase on the Wall Script 8 website priced at $89 and $109, respectively, and has been downloaded over 5,000 times till date, with several ad-on upgrades on sale with it. Clearly, bloggers like Tamada didn’t take long to catch up to speed with the lucrative side of the profession that opened up because of the Internet boom.

A recent inductee into the club is 33-year-old Charu Tripathi, who, after spending four years in the e-commerce industry, quit her job as a brand and marketing consultant in Mumbai in 2015 and started Le Hedonist, a luxury-fashion blog, the same year. “Seeing the whole magic of building brands from the ground up had me itching to create something of my own,” says Mumbai-based Tripathi. It was her friend Neha Dwivedi, a graduate in luxury brand management from ESSEC Business School in Paris, who pitched the idea to collaborate for a blog to Tripathi. “I believed this was a truer application of all that I had learned,” says 33-year-old Dwivedi. The two girls started Le Hedonist with the aim to educate Indian consumers about fashion and luxury, they say.

Then there is 43-year-old Kalyan Karmakar. The food columnist and author relocated to Mumbai around 15 years ago after spending his early life in Iran and the UK, where he worked as a market research consultant. Interestingly, it was his wife Kainaz, who works with an advertising agency, who nudged him in the direction of blogging, observing his passion for food over the years. Karmakar’s blog, Finely Chopped, started eight years back and has been instrumental in fulfilling his “life’s mission to give men the confidence to cook, so that they don’t have to depend on anyone else to eat well.” Karmakar’s blog has him trying out recipes he saw his mother whip up or those that catch his fancy every now and then. He posts videos of himself cooking, along with pictures of places he has travelled to just to eat something famous, tasty or special.

Finely Chopped has not only won awards from the Food Bloggers Association, India, every year since its inception in 2013, it has also spread to other social media platforms such as YouTube, where Karmakar conducts personalised food walks in Mumbai to introduce viewers to his favourite food haunts throughout the city. Interestingly, Karmakar isn’t the only one branching out to alternative media. In the pursuit to stand out, many other bloggers, too, have begun to publish their content on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. “It’s very crucial to drive traffic from these channels to the core site,” say Tripathi and Dwivedi.

Sethi of BCC! agrees. Bloggers need to use social media to reach out to the right people, he says. His advice to nascent bloggers? “(There is) no use writing in isolation. So be prepared to use social media tricks if you are starting a blog,” he offers. But in spite of its mass reach, social media has a flip side as well: the problem of plenty. With so many self-made experts in all fields, blogging is getting a tad bit saturated, admits Tripathi. The challenge that, hence, presents itself to bloggers, old and new, is how to be heard or seen over the clamour? Tripathi says it helps to give a thought to who one serves instead of just replicating the same content everywhere. “Bring a spin to your original idea,” the co-founder of Le Hedonist advises.

The other challenge is that of credibility. Agarwal of ShoutMeLoud ensures that the content published on his website goes through a basic checklist, verifying if it’s going to help someone programme their blog better. “I only publish it if the answer is yes,” he says. Similarly, cricket blogs like BCC! came up at a time when fearless comments in cricket journalism in the country were not aplenty, says Sethi. When he started BCC! in 2008 with a few blogger friends, they constituted pretty much all the Indian cricket bloggers back then. Soon, they added a Pakistani, a Bangladeshi and a Sri Lankan as guest bloggers. BCC! struck a chord with enthusiasts of the sport and even went on to win the BlogAdda Cricket Blogger Award three years back. “It has been one helluva ride,” says Sethi.

[“Source-financialexpress”]

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