I hate to be blogging about Apple again, but it has been quite ubiquitous of late and given that I own an iPhone, an Apple TV, a Mac Mini and a MacBook Pro, I cannot help caring.

From a PR standpoint, the last few months have been mixed at best for Apple (more on that later), and yet from a financial standpoint it has been pretty much blowing right through this recession, announcing just last month the best non-holiday quarter in the company’s history. What’s going on here?

I grew up very much a PC guy. My first computer, in 1994, was a 75MHz Pentium I with 8 megs of ram and a 500 MB hard drive running Dos and Windows 3.11. I was 14, it was by far the coolest thing I’d ever owned, and the internet was just getting started. Sometimes when I’d go visit a school buddy of mine, I’d take a peek at his dad’s Apple PowerPC which, he liked to remind me, was much more expensive and cooler than my PC. It also wasn’t compatible with mine. It never would be. Apple actually cultivated that difference, it thrived on it: remember ‘think different?’

From that point until about a year and a half ago, I discarded Macs as over-priced, over-engineered rounded cubes without a delete key or a right-click button, designed by and for intellectual snobs.

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It’s been a quiet week in etility news, probably because most of the world is either talking about the iPhone 3GS or Michael Jackson. The relevant news mostly revolved around Google’s various services and its attempt to complete its takeover of the digital world.

Google Voice can change your phone number for you

Phone number from an area code where you no longer are? Google Voice can help: for $10 you can change your phone number without any activation delay, and Google even throws in three months of continued service to your old phone.

Google is trying to attract news publishers to YouTube

Google wants more content from reputable, legitimate sources on YouTube, not just videos of your neighbor’s cat falling off a couch. It is obviously in Google’s best interest to take all of the content available on Cable TV and bring it to the web, as it increases viewership and therefore ad revenue. And so once you’ve registered your source with them (and there seems to be a review process before you’re approved), you get perks like featured premium placement, viewership analysis and even revenue sharing from Google’s ads. YouTube already has a pretty big group of sources, since it’s starting with all 25,000 registered organizations from Google News.

Google antitrust investigations heating up

We hardly need to point out that not only is Google already huge, but it also keeps on growing and growing, slowly penetrating all etility and online markets to the point where it is becoming ubiquitous. It is not surprising then that it is increasingly receiving pressure from various judicial bodies to answer antitrust charges, as is the case with its Google Book service which would establish a monopoly on orphaned books (copyrighted texts without an identifiable copyright holder).

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The Senate is apparently looking into shady practices of companies like Webloyalty or Vertrue. The complaint is that when consumers visit common sites such as Orbitz, Petco, Priceline and others, pop-up links offering “cash-back” often lure them into $9-$12 monthly fees without their explicit knowledge.  The Better Business Bureau has been receiving large amounts of complaints about these companies and their practices. As a response, Congress has increased pressure on the the offenders and demanded that they come explain themselves to Jay Rockefeller’s (D-WV) Senate Commerce Committee.  We applaud Congress’ effort to bring transparency to these practices.
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An Oregon Senator has escalated the rhetoric about net-neturality rules and specifically the lack of clarity about them as the internet continues to grow.  The culprit, according to Senator Ron Wyden, is the Federal Communications Commission and its complete lack of focus on the issue.  Comcast (Etilities Forum) and other providers have had issues with the FCC’s rulings and authority to enforce poorly defined rules in the past.  As the pressure steps up, we hope that the FCC will provide providers and consumers alike additional clarity on net-neutrality concepts, rules and enforcement authority.

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Ars Technica reported two excellent stories about Time Warner Cable and bandwidth caps this past week.  After several complaints and a few senators’ involvement, TWC finally abandoned the use of explicit bandwidth caps last week.  Though the move was applauded by many including consumers, Senator Chuck Schumer and the the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, some users still face issues.  Though the cap was removed, the company still maintains its “Acceptable Use Policy” which has led to frustrated user Ryan Howard seeing his internet connectivity shut down.  In this case, Ryan was explained that he download 44Gb of data in one week which apparently causes a trigger within TWC’s systems.  Though the full story goes into further details but we certainly feel that ghost caps that consumers are penalized for certainly is a turn for the wrong direction.  Though we will keep following bandwidth cap issues here, a blog recently started about that very topic should you wish to learn more about that specific issue, check out StoptheCap.com.

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President Obama relied upon it heavily during his campaign, in fact some say that he revolutionized its use. He reached millions using it and promised to make it available to all. Just as information technology (IT) has changed the way we work and think, the way we communicate and interact, it also changed the world of politics. It is therefore no surprise that IT would find its way into the stimulus package.

Though ever changing in negotiations between Democrats and Republicans, the House and the Senate, the White House and Congress, we went through the bill to dissect the IT components and the potential impact that it could have on you and technology in general. So far, we’ve counted a little over $10 billion in the bill allocated in four broad categories: improving citizens’ access to broadband, improving healthcare through IT, improving education through IT and improving government through IT.

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It seems that Comcast (Etilities Forum)’s troubles with the FCC over net neutrality are not over. Although the matter of its network management practices has been settled, there is now an ongoing debate on whether Comcast favors its own VOIP offering over similar services provided by companies like Skype (Etilities Forum) and Vonage (Etilities Forum).

The issue here is that VOIP communications typically goes over your internet pipe just like any other IP-based traffic. Therefore, when the network is very congested, your calls may sound choppy. If you have Comcast as a VOIP provider, however, network congestion will not necessarily result in a problem with your calls since they operate on a different pipe, dedicated to voice.

The FCC argues that given that both pipes are IP-based, this consitutes preferential treatment by the provider for its own VOIP service over others. Comcast refutes this by saying that they are two seperate services, one being only for its own VOIP and the other being for the rest of the internet world. Comcast justifies this in part by saying that you can sign up for their voice service without signing up for their internet service and that they are therefore indeed seperate pipes.

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