Roy Mark

T-Mobile USA charged into the smart electrical grid business April 23, announcing an alliance with Echelon to provide Echelon with a first-of-its-kind embedded SIM within a cellular radio module. Echelon smart meters with the embedded SIM will send power usage and other electrical data back to a utility over the smart grid, and T-Mobile will […]

What the president wants, the president gets, and Barack Obama wants to be the first smartphone-packing president in U.S history. Obama, who had to give up his beloved BlackBerry after his January inauguration for security reasons, is about to get a new, secured BlackBerry. According to the Washington Times, Obama will be given a BlackBerry […]

The launch for NASA’s latest mission to the Hubble Space Telescope may be moved up by a day, NASA officials said April 23. Instead of the scheduled May 12 launch, the trip to the Hubble is likely to go off on May 11 to avoid a conflicting military launch at Cape Canaveral.The earlier date gives […]

In an Earth Day nod, the U.S. House of Representatives April 22 approved legislation for grant programs to reduce the volume of discarded electronic products as well as for education and training in clean energy and high-performance building design.The Electronic Device Recycling Research and Development Act (H.R. 1580) requires the Environmental Protection Agency to award […]

In what has become an annual rite of Congress, lawmakers plan yet another investigation of peer-to-peer services. Since the original Napster exploded onto the scene in 1999, Congress has held numerous hearings over issues related to file-sharing networks, ranging from wholesale copyright violations to pornography to colleges’ seeming inability to curb piracy. This time around, […]

Red flags keep being raised over Time Warner’s controversial metered and tiered broadband pricing plans. Although Time Warner has pulled back on its proposed pricing trials in the face of public complaints, Free Press April 22 asked Congress to investigate why Time Warner and other broadband providers are considering charging more for less.Time Warner had […]

There’s a good reason why AT&T is anxious to renew its deal with Apple to be exclusive U.S. carrier of the iPhone: it’s a difference maker for the telecommunications giant as AT&T’s first quarter results show. Hammered again by declining landline subscribers, AT&T’s overall first-quarter profit dropped 9.7 percent from a year ago, but the […]

With President Obama’s review of U.S. cyber-security due this week, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that unknown hackers have infiltrated the Pentagon’s most expensive weapons program. The incident follows reports that computer spies have also hit the U.S. power grid and the Air Force’s air traffic control system.The latest hack involves the Pentagon’s $300 […]

Chip maker Broadcom launched an unsolicited takeover bid April 21 to acquire Emulex, a developer of converged network solutions for data centers. Broadcom offered Emulex $9.25 per share in an offer valued at $764 million. The offer represents a 40 percent premium over Emulex’s April 20 closing price of $6.61.Broadcom claimed the offer was not […]

Having made a smashing debut in the commercial markets, Apple’s iPod Touch and iPhone are quickly making inroads into the hardware stock of the U.S. military. Soldiers in Iraq are using military-issued iPod Touches and iPhones for a wide variety of tasks, including translation and mapping. According to Newsweek, the Pentagon is breaking with tradition […]

President Obama again turned to the Virginia technology pipeline April 18 to name Aneesh Chopra as the nation’s first CTO. Chopra, currently serving as Virginia’s secretary of technology, follows the appointment of Vivek Kundra by Obama as the new administration’s CIO after serving as Virginia’s assistant secretary of commerce and technology and the District of […]

Unlike IBM’s proposed bid to buy Sun Microsystems, Oracle’s April 20 acquisition of Sun is likely to raise few, if any, antitrust concerns for the government. Since Oracle has far fewer overlapping services with Sun than does IBM, the $7.4 billion Oracle-Sun deal should cause little stir among government regulators. “I don’t think there are […]