Roy Mark

Shure, the country’s dominant wireless microphone maker, said Sept. 4 the Federal Communications Commission’s recent proposal to ban all wireless mics from the 700MHz spectrum band comes as no surprise to the company. “We’ve seen this coming for some time,” said Mark Brunner, Shure’s senior director of public and industry relations. “In fact, we have […]

The U.S. House of Representatives is investigating what it calls the technical failure and mismanagement of one of the government’s top counterterrorism programs. Dubbed “Railhead,” the program was intended to upgrade the U.S. terrorist watch list and improve the integration of U.S. terrorist intelligence from the nation’s 16 separate intelligence agencies. Located at the NCTC […]

So much for the wireless microphone industry’s complaints about possible interference from white spaces devices: the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) is considering kicking all wireless microphones from the 700 MHz spectrum. Turns out, many of the wireless microphones are illegally operating in the spectrum in the first place. Throughout the summer the wireless mic industry, […]

Hurricane Gustav forced Barack Obama to drop his Sept. 1 message to labor groups that he wants to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, a controversial position that Obama pushed early in his campaign for the Democratic nomination but virtually ignored in his Aug. 28 acceptance speech. According to an internal Obama campaign memo […]

As vice president and chief technology officer at Qwest, Pieter Poll faces the challenge of moving the carrier with a 14-state footprint into the competitive fray with much larger rivals such as AT&T and Verizon. A veteran of AT&T’s Bell Labs, where he helped develop the network evolution plans for the AT&T long-distance network, Poll […]

Note to Barack Obama and attendees at the Democratic National Convention this week in Denver: be careful – very careful – what you do in Denver this week. Unlike, say, Las Vegas, what you say and do in Denver will not stay in the Mile High city. More likely, what you say or do will […]

The three-year-old gag order imposed on Advanced Micro Devices’ antitrust lawsuit against Intel should be lifted, according to an Aug. 21 court filing by media outlets the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and Computer & Communications Industry Association. AMD originally filed the antitrust case against Intel in 2005, claiming Intel operates a microprocessor […]

Verizon CTO Richard Lynch told the Progress & Freedom Foundation’s annual Aspen Summit Aug. 19, “We need to guard against turning technical and business decisions into political decisions.” He was, of course, referring to the Aug. 1 FCC (Federal Communications Commission) decision that Comcast broke the agency’s network neutrality principles when it throttled peer-to-peer traffic […]

The United States, along with Japan and Taiwan, are asking the World Trade Organization to establish a dispute settlement panel to review whether the European Union has failed to accord duty-free treatment to some technology products covered by the WTO Information Technology Agreement. According to the U.S. complaint, the ITA products include flat-panel computer monitors […]

Rogers Communications plans to introduce the new 3G BlackBerry Bold Aug. 21 in Canada. Already the dominant maker of smart phones for the enterprise, Research in Motion has loaded the new BlackBerry with a number of consumer attractions, including a 2-megapixel camera with video recording capability, a music player, GPS and Wi-Fi. Pricing for the […]

The Securities and Exchange Commission debuted its successor to the agency’s EDGAR database Aug. 19 with Chairman Christopher Cox proclaiming the new interactive database to be faster, more accurate and more meaningful than the 1980s-era EDGAR. Called IDEA (Interactive Data Electronic Applications), the database is based on a completely new architecture being built from the […]

Almost a thousand incoming freshmen at ACU (Abilene Christian University) received an Apple iPhone 3G or iPod Touch Aug. 16 as part of their first day in college. The deployment marks the first time that a university has introduced the Apple mobile devices as learning tools on such a large scale. According to ACU, students […]